Paper short abstract:

My paper explores political hermeneutics of Ukrainian parliamentary reporters in order to argue for a renewed, comparative attention to issues of political representation.

Paper long abstract:

Since speech is crucial for parliamentary politics, it is unsurprising that local assumptions about language, agency and representation inform political action and its interpretations. When an MPs speak in the Ukrainian parliament, few take their words at face value: what is suspicious is not only rhetoric, but the very origins of speech. My paper explores how journalists in Kiev interpret MPs' speech in a cultural context where political representation (both in the sense of depiction and delegation) is often seen as manipulative and manipulated.

Building on an ethnography of parliamentary reporters at work, I demonstrate how journalists approach opaque political speech through questioning and detecting its authorship. Political speech, here, is akin to ventriloquism: not only are words insincere, but speakers might be unwitting vessels for agency of hidden/distant actors, e.g. oligarchs and the president. This has consequences both for reporting and politics. While uncertainties around who is represented are inherent to parliamentary government, these journalists resolve them through vernacular notions of power and agency which lead them to postulate coherent accounts of a political order where most politicians are but unfree objects of external manipulation.

This leads me to suggest that questions of representation (e.g. how, and to what effect, someone/something comes to stand for someone/something else) should be central to comparative political anthropology. I suggest that for such comparison we need a notion of political representation that accommodates vernacular conceptions of agency and mediation, complicating the dialectic of depiction and delegation.