259 Caroline Humphrey Is a Truly Remarkable Per- Son, and A

259 REVIEWS Rossii... New Subjects, Social Transformations: Caroline Humphrey. Post-sovetskie transformatsii v aziatskoi chasti Rossii: Antropologicheskii ocherk [Post-Soviet Transformations in Asiatic Russia. Anthropological Studies]. Moscow: Natalis, 2010. 382 p. Caroline Humphrey is a truly remarkable per- son, and a remarkable scholar. She belongs to a very select group of Western researchers who in the Brezhnev era managed to carry out genuine anthropological field research in the USSR, and not in Moscow or Leningrad, but far away from these more or less socially advanced centres — in Buryatia, deep in the countryside. It is hard to say how she managed to do this (Humphrey herself speaks about this issue briefly in the foreword of the book reviewed here). A possible contributing factor was the short-lived international lessening of political tension (‘dйtente’) — the alleviation of the Cold War at the end of the 1960’s and beginning of the 1970’s, or the fact that Humphrey’s parents were connected, albeit in the past, to the Sergei Abashin. A Review of The Remaking Russia in Asia: Caroline Humphrey. Post-sovetskie transformatsii v aziatskoi chasti Communist movement. But in any case this research resulted in the voluminous book that was published in English in 1983, Karl Marx Collective: Economy, Society and Religion in a Siberian Collective Farm [Humphrey 1983], which is almost the only anthropological work written about the USSR and the ‘era of de- veloped socialism’ by a foreign (‘bourgeois’!) author on the basis of field-research materials Sergei Abashin collected by the author herself. Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the The collapse of the USSR in 1991 opened the Russian Academy of Sciences, doors of the former Soviet Union for Western Moscow anthropologists, and Humphrey’s book instantly [email protected] No 7 FORUM FOR ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURE 260 went from being a work on hard-to-find Soviet ‘exoticism’ to being a popular and important starting point, even a unique point of reference, for understanding how Soviet society was organised on a local, micro-social level, and what subsequently began to happen to these institutes, relations and notions once the Soviet ideology had ceased to be their straitjacket. Caroline Humphrey herself, incidentally, wrote a follow-up to her book about the ‘Karl Marx Collective’ and gave her work, which was republished in 1998, the resounding title Marx Went Away — but Karl Stayed Behind [Humphrey 1998]. The collection of articles which is the subject of this review, the first by Humphrey to be published in Russian, is a development and an expansion (thematically, geographically and conceptually) of the issues that were initially posed in the first book about the Soviet- Buryatia collective farm and which were then examined more deeply in the second aforementioned monograph. Anthropological (or ethnographic, in this case it is not important) studies of (post) socialism encountered a number of significant dilemmas.1 After 1991 it very quickly transpired that post-communist societies do not develop in accordance with the ‘Western’ (liberal) trajectory, but instead follow some completely unexpected and not always comprehensible or predictable zigzags. The temptation arose to explain this as ‘socialist heritage’ which was formed in the Soviet era and which now determines the specifics of ‘post-Soviet transformations’. This was an attractive stance as it allowed one to criticise such universalistic (or Europe-centric) concepts as ‘transition’, ‘modernisation’, ‘development’, and the deterministic historical scenarios that had been written using them. Socialism/Marxism, which itself was invented as an ‘alternative’ universalistic (and even Europe-centric) concept, always was, and has remained, a powerful weapon in the struggle against European liberal-modernist univer- salism.2 Writing an ‘anthropology of (post-)socialism’ also allowed one to criticise the essentialist concept of ‘national (ethnic) culture’, pointing out that national peculiarities take shape under the influence of certain social and political conditions. However, from such an anthropological point of view, ‘socialism’ itself turned into a particular ‘culture’ with specific practices and identities. And such an interpretation looked, on the one hand, like a continuation of an apparently dead or dying Sovietological tradition (which reduced all explanations of society to the strict structural 1 Incidentally, Humphrey herself formulated these dilemmas in one small note [Humphrey 2002]. 2 It is not by accident that the anthropologist Katherine Verdery, one of the most consistent advocates of the study of ‘(post-)socialism’ as a separate ‘ﬁ eld’, tries to ﬁ nd overlaps with the concept of ‘post- colonialism’ (see [Chari, Verdery 2009]). 261 REVIEWS peculiarities of totalitarianism), and on the other like a unique essentialisation of ‘Sovietness’, a conversion of the ‘(post-)Soviet/ Rossii... (post-)Socialist’ into a cultural ‘other’ (in relation to the ‘West’), and the amalgamation under this term of very different historical and biographical destinies. In this way both approaches have their limitations, and neither is satisfactory from a methodological point of view. This dilemma is one of the inner narratives, at first not very noticeable, which I found it interesting to observe when reading Humphrey’s book. In the text we do not see an entire, systematically expounded and logically constructed concept of ‘(post-) socialism’. The British researcher knows only too well the dangers of such a generalisation and therefore, avoiding categorical judgements, she writes an em- pirical ethnography of individual subjects and issues. However, the fact that the collection has been divided into sections encompassing the subjects of social order, the economy, infrastructure and spiritual life leaves one with the feeling of a claim precisely to a voluminous analysis of ‘(post-)socialism’. The dangers that I mentioned do not disappear even if they are cloaked in empiricism; they inevitably remain, and in many respects they determine the reader’s understanding of the text. The first section, which is entitled ‘Sotsialnoe ustroistvo’ [Social Order],1 includes two articles. In one of these articles, ‘Sudby tradi- tsionnykh sotsialnykh ierarkhii v kommunisticheskikh Rossii i Kitae’ [The Fate of Traditional Social Hierarchies in Communist Russia and China], Humphrey carries out a comparative analysis of what became of the traditional social hierarchies of the Buryats, the ‘i’ people, and the Chinese Mongols during the transformations in the USSR and the PRC. Humphrey tries to show that the changes were influenced by both the nature of the hierarchy itself that the society had before this, and the nature of the reforms that were carried out. The scholar thinks that in the case of the Buryats the former, quite Sergei Abashin. A Review of The Remaking Russia in Asia: Caroline Humphrey. Post-sovetskie transformatsii v aziatskoi chasti amorphous social hierarchies could not resist the repressive policy of the destruction of the elite and the forceful interspersion of social groups. Sovietisation and Russification, in Humphrey’s opinion, had a very profound effect: they tore down the social barriers instead of conserving them as in the case of the Chinese reforms which just recoded the former social statuses into new hierarchies. In the second article, ‘Neravenstvo i isklyuchennost: emotsionalnyi komponent rossiiskoi politicheskoi kultury’ [Inequality and Ex- clusion: the Emotional Component of Russian Political Culture], the question is asked why some forms of inequality are not noticed 1 Here and below, we have back-translated from the Russian, since the ways in which the original titles have been interpreted is of analytical interest. [Editor]. No 7 FORUM FOR ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURE 262 and become a problem for people while others, conversely, are loaded with a lot of emotion. Humphrey positions herself against the domination of the economic and rational interpretation of inequality, switching her attention to a subjective interpretation of the latter which is formed, for example, through political culture. In Soviet Russia there arose, in her opinion, a notion of ‘unity’, sup- ported by the dichotomy of ‘we’ and ‘they’ and at the same time by the constant exclusion of various people and groups from this ‘unity’ (‘collective’). In the post-Soviet era economic inequality became rampant, but people kept the previous Soviet notions of ‘inequality’, the former practices of excluding ‘foreigners’, and the ways of creating the discursive space of inequality (access to some or other symbolic blessings, a symbolic shared ‘body’). The second section, ‘Preobrazovaniya v ekonomike’ [Transformations in the Economy], consists of three articles. The first article, ‘Tor- govlya, “besporyadok” i “rezhimy grazhdanstva” v rossiiskoi pro- vintsii 1990-kh gg.’ [Trade, ‘Disorder’ and ‘Modes of Citizenship’ in the Russian Provinces of the 1990s], starts with a rejection of the liberal-modernist theory of ‘transition’ and the Marxist ‘stadial’ theory for explaining the phenomenon of post-Soviet trade. Instead of this Humphrey separates and analyses individually the various categories of traders (businessmen, brokers, dealers, shuttle traders,1 entrepreneurs, merchants, the ‘trading minorities’ — people from the Caucasus, middle-Asia and China). She describes trade as relationships of trust in which all types of personal connections are activated.

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