Connecticut College Digital Commons @ Connecticut College Slavic Studies Honors Papers Slavic Studies Department 2016 Navigating Narratives: A Meta-Ethnography of the Russian Ethnographic Museum Kamal Kariem Connecticut College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.conncoll.edu/slavichp Part of the Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies Commons Recommended Citation Kariem, Kamal, "Navigating Narratives: A Meta-Ethnography of the Russian Ethnographic Museum" (2016). Slavic Studies Honors Papers. 4. http://digitalcommons.conncoll.edu/slavichp/4 This Honors Paper is brought to you for free and open access by the Slavic Studies Department at Digital Commons @ Connecticut College. It has been accepted for inclusion in Slavic Studies Honors Papers by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Connecticut College. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The views expressed in this paper are solely those of the author. Navigating Narratives: A Meta-Ethnography of the Russian Ethnographic Museum Kamal Kariem 2016 Honor’s Thesis Slavic Studies Department Connecticut College Thesis Adviser: Petko Ivanov Second Reader: Christopher Steiner Third Reader: Eileen Kane 1 Table of Contents Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………………4 Acknowledgments ………………………………………………………………………………...5 Note on Transliteration, Names, and Citations……………………………………………………7 Chapter 1: Introduction……………………………………………………………………………8 Research Questions and Background Knowledge………………………………………...8 Research Setting: Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation………………………………….9 Methods…………………………………………………………………………………..12 My Experience with Ethnography……………………………………………………….14 Chapter 2: Theoretical Grounding……………………………………………………………….18 Nationalism Studies…………………………………………………………………...…20 Memory and Nostalgia Studies…………………………………………………………..25 The Everyday, Byt, Ethnography, and Etnografiia………………………………………30 Semiotics as a Lens………………………………………………………………………34 Chapter 3 : A Walkthrough of the Museum………………………………………………………39 The Russian Ethnographic Museum: My Field Site……………………………...……...39 The Brochure…………………………………………………………………………….47 A Walkthrough of the Exhibition “The Museum and Its Collectors”…………………...53 A Walkthrough of the Exhibition “Russians”……………………………………………62 Chapter 4: Ethnographic Accounts………………………………………………………………80 Ethnography in the Framework of History and Progress………………………………...81 A(n) (En)cultured Childhood…………………………………………………………….88 “Actual Stuff”……………………………………………………………………………96 2 Authenticity and Citizenship: Rossiskii’s Russkii Undertones………………………...102 Chapter 5: Conclusions…………………………………………………………………………109 Appendix A – Basic Interviewee Information and Core Interview Questions…………………116 Appendix B – Select Interviewee Information and Excepts from Interviews………….………120 Appendix C – Museum Statistics……………………………………………………………….164 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………………….175 3 Abstract The Rossiskii Etnograficheskii Muzei (Russian Ethnographic Museum), in Petersburg, Russia, portrays narratives of Russia to Russians. However, there are two main yet distinct Russian identities: rossiiskii, the Russian word to denote citizenship and state identities within Russia, and russkii, the Russian word to denote the Russian ethnic identity. This study investigates opposing narratives that embed ethnic Russianness in and separate it from the Russian state. I investigate how both the museum and Russian citizens engage with ethnically Russo-centric imaginations in the space of this museum. This study is the product of almost three months of fieldwork at the Russian Ethnographic Museum, including photo-documentation of the museum and interviews with curators and visitors. I demonstrate that the displays within the museum and the ways in which visitors negotiate the established narratives make claims about ritual citizenship through narratives of progress and objects. 4 Acknowledgements I would like to give my sincerest thanks to each of my interviewees. In your own ways, each of you opened your world to me through your discourses on the museum and its relationship to any and everything. Your time, frankness, and openness were invaluable. Without your insight this study would not have been possible. I would also like to give a special thanks to Misha, Alessa, and Ksenia who visited the museum at my request and took time from their winter vacation to conduct interviews with me. I am grateful to the Toor Cummings Center for International Studies and the Liberal Arts and the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship for funding both my trips to St. Petersburg and for providing guidance and contacts in St. Petersburg when I had none. I am also thankful to the Anthropology Department at the European University at St. Petersburg and the Russian Ethnographic Museum. I am indebted to Mikhail Lurye, Head of the Anthropology Department at the European University, for advising me on interviewing, helping me to develop the interviewing skills required to complete my work during my time in St. Petersburg, and introducing me to Dmitri Baranov. I am also indebted to Dmitri Baranov, Head of the Russian Department at the Russian Ethnographic Museum, for opening the museum as an institution to me, sharing discourses on the museum, its history, and its displays, and treating me as a colleague from our first meeting. I would like to extend my sincerest and deepest thanks to Petko Ivanov. As my thesis adviser and mentor, Petko pushed me to grow as a student, scholar, and human being. Your council on my course of study, intellectual stimulation through courses, interrogation of my ideas, and support of my scholarship over the years has benefitted me more than words on paper can adequately express. I would also like to genuinely thank Jeffrey Cole. As a mentor and 5 adviser, Jeffrey introduced me to anthropological theory, which fostered my love of theory and its relation to the everyday. Your support of my work, guidance, and reminders to take moments to breathe helped me to remain sane and to continue diligently working. Kaitlin Cunningham, Dana Sorkin, Lisette Ocampo, and Glindys Luciano deserve special thanks for listening to presentations of my thesis work in various forms for the entirety of a semester in our Slavic Studies senior seminar during which time they asked questions and provided insights into my project that eluded me. Olga Nikolaeva also deserves my gratitude for transcribing the bulk of my interviews that were conducting in Russian. Without your work, my writing process could not have continued at the rates that it did. Christopher Colbath work tirelessly to help edit this work and make suggestions for improving my arguments through word choice and grammar. Without your advising, this thesis would be more difficult to read and less effectively argued. I am also grateful for the support of Christopher Steiner and Eileen Kane, who in numerous ways fanned the flames of my passion and helped to develop my thoughts and research interests and who graciously agreed to be readers of my thesis. To Miranda Young, Leela Riez, and Kevin Zevallos, for starting the path of academia with me. To my college friends, especially those that lived in Branford, for helping me stay sane. To my mom and Aunt Brie for laughing off my overthinking over the years. 6 Note on Transliteration, Names, and Citations My transliteration of Russian Cyrillic uses the Library of Congress system, except for Russian names that have established English transliterations. My research complies with the Human Subjects Review Board, and I have changed the names of all individuals that did not explicitly give me permission to use their names in my work. I intentionally do not cite the specific interview when citing my interviewees, but I do clearly state their names so that the reader may utilize the appendices to understand the context from which specific quotations were selected. Information about my interviewees can be found in Appendix A, and selected sections of interviews can be found in Appendix B. 7 Chapter 1 Introduction: Research Questions and Background Knowledge During the Soviet Union, the government attempted to create not only a classless society but also a homogenized Soviet society and identity that was more important ethnicity or nationality: a large task when considering the multi-ethnic and largely non-industrial nation that the Bolsheviks acquired in 1917. The idea was to bring together all of the peoples from the constituent parts the region acquired by the Soviet Union into one proletariat, one Soviet people (Hosking 1992: 98). Since its inception, the Soviet Union attempted to address the issues that arose in relation to nationalities and attempted to guide them toward unity, at least in official discourses (Terry 1999: 538). To achieve this unity, the Soviets did not look at nationality as an identity to be destroyed in order to create this Soviet identity, as was once thought. Rather, they temporarily encouraged national identities to spread the revolution, socialist ideas, and support of the new state to the former subjects of the Russian monarchy (Hirsch 2005: 5). Thus, Soviet citizens had complex identities that fluctuated between Soviet and national identities. Today in the Russian Federation, nationality and ethnicity are tangible still. The first time that I travelled to Russia was in late January of 2015. I flew to Vladivostok to study and live for four months. I was surrounded by Russians for the first time in my life and a fair number of other foreign students,