Red Ties and Residential Schools. Alexia Bloch
even in the brief pilot survey has proven useful, however, particularly regarding subsistence practices among Turintsy, and in Chapter 2 I have drawn upon it.
In general, Turintsy welcomed me by inviting me to their homes for meals, taking me out on fishing trips, and introducing me to relatives. Many people eagerly assisted me in my research by introducing me to elderly relatives, loaning me books, sharing photographs, and locating copies of old newspaper clippings. There were some, however, who took umbrage with my project or were at least ambivalent about my presence in the community. For instance, one woman who rented me an apartment for several months—and whose child I tutored in English—quite vehemently announced to me over tea one day that Russia had no need for charity from the United States. This opinion was widely found throughout Russia in the 1990s. Older people especially begrudged the fact that the United States, so recently an official enemy, was now providing what they viewed as charity. This sentiment intensified when spoiled U.S. goods such as sour butter and moldy “Bush’s legs” (drumsticks) appeared on the market in 1992–93.6
My project met the most resistance from an older generation of both Evenki and Russians who had much to lose in the radical transformations related to the emerging market economy. While the Association of Peoples of the North, a newly established, local indigenous rights organization, had approved my project and invited me to focus my research on residential schooling and youth culture, not everyone was in agreement that I should be present in the town. At several points during my research, old guard Communists accused me of being a CIA agent, despite the fact that from the very outset I described my work as an ethnography project under the aegis of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The presence of an American, who only three years before would not have received a visa to visit the nearest large city, let alone the town of Tura, was both incredible and a direct challenge to local Communists’ authority.7
These old guard Party members had followed the political and economic changes initiated in Moscow. But, unlike those more powerful urban Communists who had something to gain (for example, positions as CEOs in companies) by quickly acquiescing to the shifting power and opportunities of capitalist mechanisms and appropriating state capital for personal investment, the local Communists were largely isolated from the potential personal benefits of a shift to capitalism. My presence brought them no concrete benefits and merely reminded them of their loss of authority over national policy and cultural production. For instance, in the Soviet period these old guard Communists had wielded considerable authority over deciding what was printed in the newspaper, broadcast over the radio, or advertised in a public space. During my research these spheres became increasingly open and even included notices for previously illegal religious gatherings. The radio and newspaper continued to be government controlled and therefore subject to new restrictions that were no longer defined by local Communist Party leaders.
As has been described for regions of Eastern Europe like Romania, the concept of “centralized accumulation” that operated in the Soviet period allowed a select Communist guard to control the allocation of resources (Kideckel 1993). Through control over everything from access to vacations to housing to freedom of worship, an elaborate hierarchy of Communist Party members and affiliates ensured compliance with cultural norms set by the Central Committee. These “nested hierarchies” of power, as Caroline Humphrey calls them in her examination of former socialist Mongolia (1994b), implicated all levels of society. In the mid-1990s, and especially in 1993 when the Communist Party was briefly outlawed, members of the old Communist guard were acutely aware of their waning authority.
Gendered States
Other segments of the population also felt a loss of power with the shift from state socialism. For instance, women in the former Soviet Union had disproportionately less access than men had to spheres of influence and power. Lapidus (1993) argues that during the Soviet period women were concentrated in the lower levels of organizational and pay hierarchy, and they thus now have less access to the spheres of government being privatized. While across Siberia seventy percent of women were reported to be unemployed in 1994 (Statistika 1994: 1), in Tura there were also large numbers of unemployed male oil-exploration workers.8 Thus the numbers of unemployed men and women were more equal than elsewhere in Russia. Women in Tura were hard hit by the slashing of government funds supporting the public sector—schooling, medicine, and government stores—in which they formed a majority of those employed. In Tura this trend was evident in the levels and types of unemployment. While all those formerly employed in state organizations and agricultural cooperatives (sovkhozy) were in danger of losing their jobs as reorganizations took place, women generally fared worse than men. Men’s labor was in demand as the construction of private buildings and housing grew in Tura, while women’s labor was widely devalued. Some women with financial resources had the option of seeking additional training as bookkeepers, an emerging sphere of employment as the new federal tax inspection office (nalogovaia inspektsiia) began requiring each business or organization to keep careful accounts. The most marginal women resorted to low-paid extra-domestic work of washing floors in town organizations and businesses.
This aspect of restructuring, along with my own gender identity, certainly had implications for my research. First, I became aware of the ways women in particular were often suffering from the shift in political and economic systems, and this led me to focus my research on women’s lives, as I discuss further in Chapters 3 and 4. Second, I became acutely conscious of gendered aspects of my interaction with Turintsy. As a number of scholars have suggested (Linnekin 1998; Turner 1996; Back 1993), generational subjectivities and related life course patterns significantly affect research.9 As I was carrying out my research, there was a striking contrast between my relative lack of responsibility for family and household (or reproductive labor) and the heavy load carried by nearly all young women over sixteen or seventeen years old in Tura. Women were overwhelmingly responsible for childcare, caring for the sick, hauling household water, and shopping for food. The divergence in life courses was not missed by even young girls, who upon first meeting me would invariably ask why I was not married and why I did not have any children.
Like Jean Briggs, who found herself in a daughter role in her fieldwork among the Inuit (1970), as a young woman I was expected by older men and women to conduct myself with what they viewed as proper comportment. The idea of “proper” included both a “feminine” physical appearance—that is, dresses or skirts and make-up—and behaving in culturally appropriate gendered ways, including graciously accepting when men opened doors or insisted on carrying parcels. Moreover, as a young woman with little status from a gendered perspective, my interactions with high status segments of the population, both Evenki and Russians, were less than comfortable because they sometimes demanded what seemed to me to be inordinate amounts of deference. This certainly influenced my decision to interact more with middle and lower status people. In this way practice and theory merged in influencing the direction of my research.
In sharp contrast to the suspicion I sometimes encountered from Communists with firm convictions, most Turintsy welcomed me and were eager to assist me in carrying out my project. As a foreigner I was also assisted by a range of kind Turintsy who worried about my welfare and especially food supplies. I was rarely left without fresh fish or reindeer meat and was regularly invited to social functions. People thoughtfully invited me to their homes for meals and for bathing in their saunas. These occasions were invariably followed by tea with varen’e, jam made from local berries, and lively conversation. I was also asked to teach English courses for several hours a week at the residential school. By the end of my fieldwork, I could comfortably shift between interviewing and visiting bureaucrats to interviewing and visiting with the relatively marginalized segments of the population. While this type of role juggling was not always easy, once I established my identity as an ethnographer, someone interested in learning about everyday life, I was able to shift between being the “American representative”—when my presence was requested at official events such as the banquet dinner celebrating the 63rd anniversary of the founding of the Evenk District—and being a less marked member of the community, as when I would join in the residential school outings or help a neighbor pick berries.