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- Convenors:
-
Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov
Serguei Oushakine (Princeton University)
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- Chair:
-
Ed Pulford
(University of Manchester)
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Peter Froggatt Centre (PFC), 0G/007
- Sessions:
- Thursday 28 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel aims at rethinking (post)socialism through the lens of the sociocultural invention, and des-invention, of the Euroamerican category of the 'social' in its Marxist version in former Soviet-type societies and global socialisms.
Long Abstract:
Post-social is often understood as an analysis that admits human beings 'by nature be social animals' but asserts that sociality have been increasingly colonised by 'massive expansion of object-rich environments' (Knorr Cetina 2017). The social is reassembled as 'socius', Latin for 'associate' (Latour 2004) that can take a form of object or thing. But what if 'the social', like 'society', is not analytical but indigenous Euroamerican category (Strathern 1988) and, similarly to 'society', has its own history of invention and des-invention (cf. Rabinow 1989; Joyce 2002)? This panel takes Marxist vernacular (Kruglova 2017; Ssorin-Chaikov 2017) as a case in point of such a reading, and aims at rethinking (post)socialism through its own categories of the social — including ironically its own temporal dynamic of human- and object-centred sociality. Labour time was, for Marx, not not just a way to see through 'relations between things' of market commodity exchange to uncover 'social relations between men' it but also historically change the former into the latter: capitalism into social(ism). Recent historiography and anthropology of state socialism demonstrated that despite its calls 'agains the cult of things' and 'imagine no possessions', it has been a desiring machine of object-rich environments (Oushakine; Kiaer; Goulubev). The panel asks what temporal endpoints this socialist 'social' assumed, and what cultural biographies it had What reformulations of the political, the ethical, the spatial, and the material has it afforded? What kind of work of (un)communing the commons, in academia and elsewhere, does it imply?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 28 July, 2022, -Hyun-Gwi Park (Kyung Hee University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper looks at North Korea through the lens of post-socialism. So far North Korea was not under purview of post-socialism, considered as an exception for everything in terms of social and political system including (post-)socialism. This proposed paper asks what entails such exceptions.
Paper long abstract:
This paper attempts at the question of comparison in understanding North Korea. In North Korean scholarship, anthropological approach tries to understand the temporality of North Korea in its continuation against the backdrop of collapse which marked the end of the Soviet socialism. As Hoon Song (2013) noted in his appraisal of works by Sonia Ryang and Heonik Kwon, the social relationship by kinship has been the key aspect in understanding North Korean temporality. However, these two prominent anthropolgists' work in almost opposite direction implicated a certain tacit comparison: two individual Koreas in Kwon's and dividual Korea in Ryang. Despite the importance of post-colonial critique on post-socialism, I would argue, current scholarship on North Korea has some difficulty in locating North Korea in that direction towards the crossroad between post-colonialism and post-socialism. My inroad for that direction is going to be another nation in former Soviet Union. In my earlier work, the sociality was central to understanding Russian Koreans' lives in (post-)socialism. By comparing this sociality with the political meaning of the social in North Korea, I would try to explores what constitutes the social in anti-colonial socialism.
Soledad Jiménez Tovar (Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas)
Paper short abstract:
This paper delves upon commodification of ethnic identities in the post-socialist milieu. I take the case of an ethnic minority in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and the People's Republic of China is order to compare the way of dealing with a complex identity such as the one owned by Sinophone Muslims.
Paper long abstract:
The main aim of this paper is to think about how ethnic minorities (narodnosti) experienced socialism. I take ethnicity as a commodity (Commaroff & Commaroff 2009) and explore the post-socialist way of dealing with cultural diversity in the Soviet and the Chinese versions. I argue that taking ethnicity and nationalism in the post-socialist realm with the same analytical tools used to analyze other cases in which the population had no influence of socialist culture is a mistake. The case I am going to pay attention to are Dungan people, as Sinophone Muslims are known in the former Soviet Central Asia. The case I want to elaborate is the one of those identities that somehow became "Stateless" after the disintegration of the USSR. Statelessness can be explained by the fact that Soviet ethnic design did not pay attention to Nation-States that existed at that moment (1920-30's) but ethnographic materials that were collected while designing Soviet censuses. Nevertheless, what looks more interesting to me in the debate I carry out is not what happened in Soviet times but the effect that it has in the current situation. At the same time, Dungan case is closely related to the way in which ethnicity at the PRC has been managed since 1949. Thus, this paper is the experiment of discussing from a historico-anthropological perspective post-socialist ethnicity.
Francisco Martínez (Tampere University)
Paper short abstract:
Remains of the recent past are rapidly disappearing, turning the study of postsocialism into an exercise of accelerated archaeology. By examining the things left behind in vacated apartments as well as items placed aside in Estonian basements we learn about the complex endings of the Soviet social
Paper long abstract:
This paper has a two-fold contribution:
First, it observes the domestic and architectural materiality that has been frozen during the last decades (time capsule like) as a way to comprehend the different practices of discard applied as well as the complex endings of the Soviet social
Second, it elaborates the concepts of ‘architectural taxidermy’ and ‘wasted legacies’ to explain how post-Soviet changes led to a radical reconfiguration of the socio-material conditions in Eastern Estonia, resulting at the discard of socialist material culture – not permitted to simply remain because of being part of a wider process of disqualification.
Postsocialist studies are not a happy genre (Kideckel 2008) and tend to focus on tracing the unmaking of socialist life (Humphrey 2002). The experience itself was underlined by a strange combination of euphoria and loss (Martínez 2018). Based on this, the paper reflects on the heuristic importance of haunting postsocialist traces to not only understand what Communism has done to us (as the usual accounts claim), but also what we have done to the Soviet social and what such leftovers still do to us in the present.
The paper also reflects on the temporality and materiality of postsocialism as a field of study, discussing how the disappearance and abandonment of Soviet material culture is making difficult to understand the transition experience beyond the success story. This leads us to question whether what is actually vanishing is the possibility of learning from the past, since it is the physicality of things that allows future generations to engage with remains.
Ed Pulford (University of Manchester)
Paper short abstract:
Given state-socialism's powerful progressivism, the USSR's material collapse generated senses of regression as shared material life fragmented in east Russia. Yet since then this region has spearheaded a global shift into a shared Chinese age with its own vernacular Marxist object-mediated futurism.
Paper long abstract:
For people trained to recognise improving material conditions as signs of temporal ‘progress’, the disintegration of physical surroundings conjures up converse feelings of regression. While positivist views of humanity’s advancement were prevalent in both the Cold War’s ‘camps’, state-socialism saw Marxian visions of the march towards communism linked particularly closely to materially-indexed historical stages. In smaller settlements of the eastern USSR where the basic viability of shared material existence was reliant on state-distributed goods, everything from the built environment to clothing and tools were thus expressions of the state’s hold on a certain place in time. This paper draws on ethnographic and historical work in the now-Russian Far East – particularly Khasanskii raion on the Chinese and North Korean borders – to explore the temporal and material shifts which characterise what many call the postsocialist era. From reconfigured relations between local people and the state to reflections on living in an “anti-utopia” amid the ruins of a Soviet ‘settlement of an urban type’, the end of Soviet history may appear largely a time of rupture and reversal. But even amid perceived regression, life has stumbled on as Russian Far Easterners navigate another material-temporal shift: a profusion of Chinese goods entering their world across the nearby border. While eastern Russia may appear uniquely impeded by Soviet ruins therefore, since the 1990s its residents have in fact represented a kind of vanguard for the entire world’s entry into a new Chinese age, an object-mediated commons propelled by its own atmosphere of futurity.