Paper short abstract:

We should readdress the Cold War implications in ethnographic studies, the analytical silences or induced political manipulation, in order to understand how particular imaginaries and practices in the Soviet (metaphoric) borderland settings became to prevail with reverberations to this day.

Paper long abstract:

The recent re-polarization of the world in more ways than one should re-kindle our analytical interest to readdress the Cold War conditions and implications in the field of ethnographic studies with a fresh eye, taking particularly under examination the Cold War oppositional frameworks on the ground. These investigations could help us to understand better how particular imaginaries and practices became to prevail with possible reverberations to this day. The proposed presentation will take a closer look at how the bipolar division of the Soviet and the US political superpowers impacted the disciplines of ethnology and folklore studies in the Soviet borderland regions, especially in the 1950s and 1960s.

Social engineering agendas and the Iron Curtain circumscribed the practice of knowledge production or consumption, for that matter, while implicit and explicit ideological restrictions limited what ethnographic information could be collected and analyzed. Such circumstance generated consequently particular ethnographic and analytical silences, or induced political manipulation of disciplinary knowledge.

In a similar vein, the term borderland may appear epistemologically productive in the Cold War setting: borderlands may be both geographical and structural, including likewise academic positioning. At the same time, borderland provides a grey zone for alternatives and counter-culture: imaginaries defined by the past and possibilities for substitute identities. Thus this presentation sheds light also on the emergent reactions to the delimitng socio-political conditions and the emanating contested positions.