Paper Short Abstract:

This presentation will use the concept of a 'crisis common' to describe managed mistrust as a result of collective efforts to ensure security, both by myself and my research participants, during wartime fieldwork in the northeastern margins of Russia.

Paper Abstract:

Violent conflicts reshape pre-existing principles of social organization, fostering an 'affective atmosphere' (Anderson 2009) marked by suspicion and mistrust, even in areas not directly impacted by the conflict. While ethnographers have analyzed mistrust as a stable characteristic of a 'low-trust' context (e.g., Carey 2017, Højer 2019) or as a characteristic of a dynamic conflict context (e.g., Glasius et al. 2018; Macaspac 2019; Malmström 2019; Peinhopf 2022), their focus has predominantly been on its effects rather than the process of managing and negotiating the trust/mistrust boundary.

In this presentation, I will use the concept of a 'crisis common' to describe mutually managed mistrust as a result of collective efforts to ensure security by myself and my research participants in the northeastern margins of Russia. During November and December 2022, amid Russia's full-scale military invasion of Ukraine, I conducted fieldwork in the Magadan region of Russia, an area distant from the frontlines. Nevertheless, the war significantly influenced the public mood, leading my research participants to become suspicious of strangers and fearful of espionage.

As a 'halfie' anthropologist, I shared this mistrust, harboring concerns about potential interrogation by the state security service. I will delve into how my research participants and I navigated this dilemma by engaging with significant others and relying on collective sense-making. By highlighting the idea of managed mistrust, I aim to argue for its emergence as a 'crisis common,' enabling daily life in wartime.