Paper short abstract:

This paper will investigate how energy corporations use cultural policy to craft the fabric of the state through their corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on seven years of ethnographic research and participation in dozens of community­based projects, this paper will explore the sociopolitical nature of cultural heritage protection in post­-Soviet Russia. By deconstructing the historically imbued epistemologies and new power relations structuring the politics of the past in Putin's Russia, an updated understanding of heritage governance in a context defined by multinational corporations and multilateral organizations will be furthered. Heritage practice will be explored as a neoliberal statecraft tool, a cultural technology of rule strategically marshaled by both conventional and non­conventional heritage producers to shape the institutional landscapes and cultural imaginations defining the state. The central case study in this paper will trace the impact of the strategic funding of cultural initiatives by the multinational Gazprom in the Altai Republic (subject of the Russian Federation). Through funding archaeological museums and forcing Russian archaeologists to repatriate indigenous remains back to the Altai Republic, Gazprom has not only become part of the fabric of the Altaian sociopolitical field, it has also acquired a 'license to operate' from indigenous groups and bureaucrats to construct a strategic pipeline to China. Our assessment will not be limited to studying the impact of energy corporations. As the region became of interest to Gazprom, a suite of NGO's, multilateral heritage organizations (i.e. UNESCO) and (international) cultural resource institutions entered the cultural policy field. Consequently, this paper will also study how this broader 'resource complex' drastically reformulated local regimes of truth and institutional structures.