Forum 12: City Culture, Urban Culture Vladimir Abashev (Perm State University) Mikhail Alekseevsky (State Republican Centre of Russian Folklore, Moscow) Maria Akhmetova (Zhivaya starina journal, Moscow) Stephen V. Bittner (Sonoma State University) Anatoly Breslavsky (Institute of Mongol, Buddhist, and Tibetan Studies, Siberian Department of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Ulan-Ude) Benjamin Cope (European University of the Humanities, Vilnius / Galerija Zachęta, Warsaw) Heather Dehaan (Binghamton University, USA) Megan Dixon (College of Idaho) Dmitry Gromov (State Republican Centre of Russian Folklore, Moscow / Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow) Natalya Kosmarskaya (Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow) Mikhail Lurye (European University at St Petersburg) Kirill Maslinsky (St Petersburg State University) Mikhail Matlin (Ulyanovsk State Pedagogical University) György P teri (Norwegian University of Science & Technology) Vladimir Poddubikov (Kemerovo State University) Robert Pyrah (St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford) Irina Razumova (Centre of Humanitarian Problems, Barents Region, Kola Peninsula Scientifi c Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Apatity) 9 FORUM Tanya Richardson (Wilfrid Laurier University) Monica Rüthers (University of Hamburg) Alexander Sadovoi (Sochi Research Centre, Russian Academy of Science) City Culture, Urban Culture Mikhail Stroganov (Tver State University) No 7 FORUM FOR ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURE 10 City Culture, Urban Culture In the present ‘Forum’, we did not circulate a detailed questionnaire, but instead asked participants to comment on the state of urban studies in their 1 particular discipline, and to identify what they saw as the most pressing 2 issues for further study. The comments that resulted appear below. 11 FORUM City Culture, Urban Culture VLADIMIR ABASHEV The Intangible Body of the City: Working with Meaning Any historical city is effectively a memory storage device; it accumulates memory of a per- sonal, historical, literary, mythological nature. The city is memory, the city is meaning. I will be talking specifically about this aspect of the city and the cultural practices associated with working with the memory of the city, with the semantic structures of memory. In the context of any discussion of the current methods of working with urban space (public art, flashmobs, and so on), what I am going to talk about will perhaps seem banal, especially as I will begin by pondering the city guided tour. I think that for most people the term ‘guided tour’ automatically reminds them of their school days; something instructive and boring. ‘Boys and girls, we are now looking at a typical urban detached house of the first third of the nineteenth century, built in the style of classicism by the architect I. I. Sviyazev’, or something like that. Nevertheless, we will take the risk of reflecting on this traditional, almost museum-like, and retrospection-oriented, cultural practice, on the technique of familiarising oneself with urban Vladimir Abashev Perm State University space, and not so much in general terms but [email protected] specifically in respect of Perm. No 7 FORUM FOR ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURE 12 I was pushed in the direction of this subject by my personal, albeit brief, experience as a tour guide. On several occasions in 2008 I ended up having to show Perm to the most diverse groups of guests who were visiting from some of Russia’s other cities, and also people from Great Britain, Switzerland, Holland, and even Brazil. And it was then that, for the first time, I encountered in practice a problem with which, until then, I had only been familiar from a theoretical point of view. What should I show them? Whilst attempting to answer this question I propose we go on a brief excursion into the history and symbolism of our city. Somewhere on the banks of the Kama, on the site of the Motovilikha factories, a grandiose artefact, a monument of the era of industrialism, lies hiding underground. It is a truncated cast-iron pyramid, 4 m in height and with a 5x5 m base. 630 tonnes of black cast iron weigh down on a base made of slabs of stone. The foundation, like a mighty pillar, descends to a depth of 12 metres, stretching down far beneath the level of the nearby river. This underground cast-iron pyramid resting on a stone pillar is an anvil block, or the block of a steam hammer. This gigantic hammer, with a force of 150 tonnes, was made for forging steel bars for large-calibre cannon barrels. At one stage it was the most powerful one of its kind in the world. It was designed and built by the mining engineer Nikolai Vorontsov, the first director of Perm’s cannon factories. At the turn of the twentieth century, everyone who came to Perm from afar considered it their duty to go to Motovilikha and see the celebrated hammer. There was nothing else to see. Generally speaking one can consider the construction of the hammer (it was put into operation in 1875) as a turning point in the city’s history — a turning point both historically and symbolically. Under the blows of this wondrous hammer, the quiet, dozing provincial centre, almost devoid of any industry, and, unlike Yekaterinburg, having only administrative significance, started to turn into an industrial city, and, bit by bit, acquired the character and appearance that it currently possesses. In a certain sense Perm had already turned into Molotov by then, and the fact that it was officially renamed in 1940 does not appear random from a symbolic point of view. What was more random was the fact that a certain V. M. Molotov turned up just at the right moment, as a reason for its new name.1 And here’s something else that is important. In the fragile environ- ment of the Perm community, which consisted of officials and members of the meshchanstvo,2 this hammer forged a social activist 1 Molot is the Russian for ‘hammer’, from which the surname Molotov (real name Vyacheslav Skryabin) was derived. [Editor]. 2 i.e. the free, urban lower classes. The point is that the inhabitants of Perm were divided into two dis- tinct social estates, the other being the service gentry. [Editor]. 13 FORUM group — the Motovilikha workers. In 1905 they were building barricades, and in 1917 they started building a new world. Inciden- tally, they took this hammer of theirs with them into this new world. In 1920 the Motovilikhites erected a monument on Gora Vyshka in honour of the fighters of the revolution. The monument reproduced the outlines of the famous hammer; that is to say it essentially became City Culture, Urban Culture a copy of it. The people who built it buried in the body of the hammer an artillery shell with the remains of Stepan Zvonaryov, a participant of the uprising of 1905. Right up until 1975 they buried the partici- pants of the Motovilikha uprising, as these passed away one after the other, by the foot of the monument. This memorial, with the cast of a hammer at its centre, became a sacral place in Soviet Perm. On its site, schoolchildren were ceremonially received into the Pioneers and the Komsomol and ceremonial mass meetings on days of significance took place. In 1969, the outlines of the hammer were put on the coat of arms of Soviet Perm. Thus, the Motovilikha hammer became the main, potent symbol of the city in its Soviet incarnation. Meanwhile the original hammer had been dismantled back at the start of the 1920s, having been replaced by the replica — the monument on Gora Vyshka. The only original part — the cast-iron anvil block on the stone pillar — remained underground (due to the fact that it was too heavy to extract). One can imagine this incredible product of structural engineering slowly, by one centimetre per year, sinking into the bowls of the earth — a spell-binding picture. I dare say that the underground cast-iron pyramid is one of the main sights Perm has to offer. A monument of the industrial era, with its pull towards mechanical cyclopism, and its peaks like the Eiffel tower and the grandiose Golden Gate Bridge. But the peculiarity of the Perm monument lies in the fact that no one has ever seen it. As an artefact it exists, but one cannot show it to people. In just the same way, one cannot show anyone the Permian period or even the Perm animal style.1 The visual side of things is not nearly as rich as its meaning. In a word, the situation with the pyramid can be seen as typical for Perm: a faintness of expression at variance with a wealth of content and meaning. When you end up having to play the role of tour guide you immediately come up against the question of what to show, and it transpires that there is nothing really that can be shown. In Perm, for example, there is not a single architectural structure or ensemble that could speak for itself, whose visuality would be self-sufficient and self-evidently expressive — look and be amazed. It is as if all the 1 The Perm Animal Style refers to a manner of ornamentation used in the Bronze Age and early Iron Age for items such as combs, pins, etc.; the metalworkers who created these objects are thought to have been women, because smelting items have been found in women’s graves. The animal decorations resemble those of the more famous Scythian metalworkers, a notable infl uence on them. [Editor]. No 7 FORUM FOR ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURE 14 architectural styles are represented, but as faded, secondary, and almost depersonalised replicas. You have classicism, you have eclec- ti cism, you have the modernist style, there is constructivism, but all of this is presented (how can I put this?) in a very economical and reductive manner.