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Click on titles for abstracts of articles
Robert Barnett & Hildegard Diemberger
Caroline Humphrey
Abstract
The paper explores the politics of language of the Soviet Communist Party bureaucracy. It argues against the recent conceptualisation of late socialist discourse as basically ‘performative’, i.e. as a vehicle for action that was virtually independent of its propositional dimension. Contrary to this, it is suggested that if the analysis is broadened to include the process of producing texts (drafts, censored passages, oral discussions, etc.) we see marked concern, and, indeed, conflict over the ideological meaning of the content. The argument is made through detailed analysis of the memoirs of one Party official, Georgii Lukich Smirnov. This case also shows that Party cadres were far from ‘faceless’ or without feelings. The ideological battles throughout the late Soviet period, which scarred Smirnov, were what led to perestroika (reconstruction) and glasnost’ (transparency) under Gorbachev.
Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov
Abstract
This article critically revisits the Foucauldian perspective on modernity by exploring the constitutive importance of limits of transparency in relations of power and knowledge. It differentiates between Foucault’s Panopticon as a model formodernity, which posits a total visibility of subject under modern gaze, and what I call cybernetic ways of knowing that posit the ‘black box’ of the inner self that is blocked from visibility. The case in point is a comparative study of two anthropologies – two groups of anthropological cadres – the American anthropologists who in the 1940s were involved in emerging Soviet studies, and Soviet anthropologists of the 1920s and 1930s who took part in Soviet reforms. The article draws attention to similarities in their perspective of images and notions of the enemy: the ‘enemy of the people’ within Soviet society and the Soviet society as the West’s Cold War enemy. In doing so, the aim of this article is to develop an ethnographic perspective on state socialism that does not depend on a foundational dualist distinction between ‘Soviet’ and ‘Western’ or ‘socialist’ and ‘capitalist’ modernity as a starting point.
Gulnar Kendirbai
Abstract
The paper brings into focus the mediating role of Kazak leaders in sustaining a feasible balance between the workings of Russian imperial and Kazak native structures. By placing the analysis in the pre-Soviet colonial context and involving the native perspective, the paper challenges the vision of colonialism as viewed from the coloniser’s perspective. It argues that not imperial policies but the vicissitudes of everyday colonial practice had finally reshaped the relationship between the Russian coloniser and the Kazak colonised. As the paper shows, this framework enabled the latter to renegotiate the terms under which they could continue to make use of their tribal networks. Ultimately, these networks came to operate as a middle ground and a buffer zone that facilitated Kazak participation in imperial Russian and Soviet structures and, at the same time, proved instrumental in alleviating the devastating effects of central decision making.
Uradyn E. Bulag
Abstract
Nation is as much a sentimental community as an imagined community. This paper is an attempt to study the role of sentiment as a motor of ethnopolitics in China. Using as a heuristic device the recent Mongolian cadres’ protest at ‘Mongol Doctor’ – a Chinese ethnic slur against the Mongols, the paper examines the formation of the Mongol sentimental community vis-à-vis the Chinese sentimental community historically and especially in the twentieth century.
Michael Schoenhals
Abstract
Political action and political thinking (‘ideology’) provide the twin sets of data on which most conventional analyses of the Chinese Communist Party’s transformation are made to rest. The twenty-first century’s unprecedented concern with information and communication technologies has underscored, however, the need for analysts to upgrade the relevance of political language to any actionable appreciation of an untidy present and forecasting of a potentially turbulent future. A study that focuses on how language and state officialdom intersect in the areas of propaganda and nationalities/ethnic affairs is reported here. Its findings show how in China in the reform-era of the 1980s and 90s, language control and strategic management of political discourse exercised by cadres in the party propaganda apparatus helped forestall a development along Soviet lines ending with the sudden collapse of the socialist state. The findings indicate that the post reform future – which in parts of the country has, in fact, already arrived – is likely to see the contested disappearance of the traditional symbols and rhetoric of socialism ‘as we know it’, but that this transformation of discourse must be distinguished from the demise of socialism per se.
Xiaolin Guo
Abstract
This paper deals with ‘development’ – a state discourse formulated initially to transform the ethnic minority societies in China’s southwest upon the founding of the People’s Republic (PRC) – and how this state discourse has inadvertently served the interests of the ethnic elites in the course of China’s current economic reforms. Half a century on, socialism on China’s periphery has transformed from being an alien concept to acquiring its present catchphrase-status, underscoring a complex learning process on the part of ethnic minority cadres. Going beyond the conventional static view of binaries (typically, as often seen in English writings, Han versus non-Han and state versus society), this study explores the interaction of a wide range of forces within the political system that shape the dynamics of ethnicity and ethnic relations in China. It shows, as much as ethnic cadres are subject to certain restrictions of the local offices in which they serve, their manoeuvring and creative manipulation of the official language exerts equal constraints on the central state, especially in the context of economic development and nationalities policy. Such a mode of interaction generates, and at the same time mitigates the tension within the bureaucratic system. In this light, the ‘embrace’ of socialism by the ethnic cadres may indeed be seen as an adaptation through which they justify their relationship with the state. The magic of socialism is, therefore, not the ideology itself, but the policy implementation in its name. In a multiethnic region like southwest China, where ethnic identities remain fluid and local nationalism largely reflects inter-community relations vis-à-vis the state, socialism serves a unique conflict management function. This particular mechanism perhaps offers an explanation for the marked contrast between the former Soviet Union and PRC: in the former, socialism collapsed as a political system but not as a set of values, whereas, in the latter, socialism may have lost its appeal to the majority of the population as a set of values, but has not collapsed as a system.
Hildegard Diemberger
Abstract
This paper looks at the Samding Dorje Phagmo as an example of a minority nationality cadre who has been appointed to high positions in the Chinese administration in the name of her ethnicity, religious role and gender. Like most cadres who were co-opted from traditional elites she is unique because of her historical profile and role, but she embodies practices that are widespread among Tibetan cadres. Historically the Samding Dorje Phagmo was an important religious institution, established in the fifteenth century as the reincarnation of the tantric goddess Vajravārāhī. In the1950s the 12th Dorje Phagmo was included among the members of the local religious elite by the newly-established Chinese rule. She is currently the Vice-president of the National People’s Congress of the Tibet Autonomous Region and a member of the National People’s Political Consultative Conference. She is therefore one of the more senior Tibetan cadres and one whose career has been most long-lived. Her political practice shows that the contemporary Sino-Tibetan relationship is not always a clear-cut one of domination and resistance, or secular communist suppression of Buddhist beliefs and practices, but full of paradoxes.
Robert Barnett
Abstract
The paper looks at changes over time in the ways that leading nationality cadres use formalistic language conventions within a communist society to convey apparently heterodox opinions. It notes in particular how those changes are related to economic and developmental conditions. These produce shifts in meanings as a side-effect of changes in the relationships that nationality or religious leaders have with the state, so that what might look to outsiders like expressions of dissent may be, more precisely, reminders by those who once had significant stakes in the ‘old society’ of their original promissory or contractual relations with the Communist Party. In contrast to views of formalistic texts as moribund, official texts in the Tibetan case can be seen in terms of their ‘liveliness’, a result of reading practices which are highly attuned to the local effects of power and to ethnicity, with frequent interpretational tensions over questions of compliance and disloyalty. Detailed examples are given of writing conventions found in major texts produced by leading Chinese and Tibetan cadres in Tibet in the 1960s and after 1980. Particular attention is given to block writing and the use of standard formulations. A brief historical overview is given of the rise of such cases among leading Tibetan cadres in the late 1980s, and their subsequent decline as the economy surged and the first generation of nationality leaders anointed by the CCP aged and became less active, giving way to the current group of largely marginalised public intellectuals.
David Sneath
Dikey Drokar
Abstract
This paper provides an introduction to A-lce lha-mo, also called ‘Tibetan Opera’, an ancient form of performing art as currently practised in Tibet. It explores the strategies used to reconstruct this tradition in different contexts and looks at various structures of patronage through the example of three troupes currently performing in Tibet.
Tara Sinclair
Abstract
The anti-religious campaigns of the Soviet Union in the 1930s eradicated Kalmyk Buddhism from the public sphere. Following perestroika the Kalmyks retain a sense of being an essentially Buddhist people. Accordingly, the new Kalmyk government is reviving the religion with the building of temples and the attempted training of Kalmyk monks, yet monasticism is proving too alien for young post-soviets. According to traditional Kalmyk Gelug Buddhism authoritative Buddhist teachers must be monks, so monastic Tibetans from India have been invited to the republic to help revive Buddhism. The subsequent labelling by these monks of ‘surviving’ Kalmyk Buddhist practices as superstitious, mistaken or corrupt is an initial step in the purification of alternate views, leading to religious reform. This appraisal of historical practices is encouraged by younger Kalmyks who do not find sense in surviving Buddhism but are enthused with the philosophical approach taught by visiting Buddhist teachers at Dharma centres. By discussing this post-Soviet shift in local notions of religious efficacy, I show how the social movements of both reform and revival arise as collusion between contemporary Tibetan and Kalmyk views on the nature of true Buddhism.
David Gullette
Abstract
This article analyses former President AskarAkaev’s use of ethnogenesis, a theoretical approach concerned with demonstrating continuous social groups and group identity, in his nation-building campaign. In particular, it examines the president’s sympathy for the work of Lev Gumilev, a prominent ethnogenetic theorist, and the ways he combined this with people’s understandings of their ancestors. Akaev promoted the image of ancestors through Gumilev’s concept of passionate energy. This is demonstrated through two commemorative ceremonies to ancestors. A further comparison between Gumilev’s concept of ‘passion’ and charisma reveals other characteristics in the Kyrgyz nation building campaign and how it attempts to influence people’s everyday lives.
Svetlana Jacquesson
Abstract
Identity has been approached in a number of ways but the analyses have usually been centred on the interactions among the living. In this paper I address the question: Does identity play a role when the living pay their respects to the deceased? I argue that the answer is ‘yes’ in the Kyrgyz case. The paper explores the past and present debates on Kyrgyz funerary practices and focuses more particularly on what could be called, following Herzfeld (1997), the ‘sore zones’ of identity and the challenge they represent to the modern state.
Guliatir Hojaqizi
Abstract
This paper looks at two modes of ‘belonging’ in Uzbekistan: the first as a full citizen and the second as an ‘illegal’ resident of the place, these being two different ways of perceiving oneself as an Uzbek citizen. It is of crucial importance to consider the direct effect of existing internal registration regulations (propiska) on the self-perception of being a citizen and an Uzbek. I argue that this local policy, together with the failure of citizenship, has led to other kinds of memberships within non state institutions. The overarching Uzbek national identity has become a formal cover and an instrument for political discourse only at a higher level. At the lower level, as local discourses indicate, ‘ethnic’ or regional networks and identities have been strengthened and regained their importance in the everyday lives of people in Uzbekistan. I will make use of contemporary approaches to the studies of citizenship that focus on the experiences of citizens and social construction of citizenship from below. The data used in the article was collected as part of fieldwork of thirteen months conducted in Uzbekistan.
Natalia Ryzhova
Abstract
The article evaluates economic interactions between people in the adjacent border cities of Blagoveshensk (Russia) and Heihe (China). The article reveals the conflict between the development of translocality around the border of the two countries and recent Russian policy to strengthen the position of the nation-state.
Grégory Delaplace, Christopher Kaplonski & David Sneath
Abstract
On 1 July, 2008, rioters set fire to the headquarters building of the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party (MPRP) following allegations of electoral fraud. The MPRP have held the majority of seats in the Ih Hural (Parliament) for most of the post-socialist period, and early returns gave them a majority in the Parliamentary elections on 29 June. In the riot, five people died and Mongolia’s first state of emergency since the collapse of socialism in 1990 was declared.
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