Russian talk-2
Mirroring:
people make sense of themselves through multiple forms:
is to show themselves to themselves
by telling themselves stories,
by dramatizing claims in rituals and other collective enactments;
by rendering visible actual and desired truths about themselves
and the significance of their existence in imaginative and performative productions”
(Myerhoff 1986: 261).
Significance of hoarding:
Hoarding is integrated into the litanies.
Oral transmissions
Telling about the misery
Creation of stories (babushka)
Prop and structure of folk tales
Continuity
Polnaia razrukha as a folkloric genre:
 particular structure (litany),
 particular approach to the subject (portentous),
 focus on certain subjects (the gorier and more horrible, the better),
 move towards a desired response (alarmed astonishment).
 fabrication of a sense of shared experience and destiny.
“the Russia tale”
 reverberations in art, poetry, and literature,
 accretive folkloric (oral) transmissions –
 valued genre of both life and language
fascinating, appalling, amusing, astonishing, aesthetic elements.
Key scenarios” (Ortner 1973: 1341 )
which encapsulates in narrative form “clear-cut modes of action appropriate to correct
and successful living in the culture”
Continuity through revolution, modernization, urbanization
Mischief tales
identity and nature of the Russian male
modestly destructive mischievousness was as a key emblem of Russian
maleness
Female power
 gossip, nagging, scolding, advising
 occupation of key posts of social control (as bureaucrats, teachers,
doctors, etc.)
Two clusters of social value emerge from all these stories and can be viewed in
relation to each other thus:
Order
Endurance
Mischief
Resistance
Generosity
Envy
Litany/Lament
other/fate blaming
fatalistic, stress on hopelessness
theme: loss/lack
feminine or female-dominated
past-oriented
sorrowful
pessimistic
Heroism
Roguery
Cant
self/nation/Russia praising
utopian, stress on powerfulness
theme: gain/talents
masculine or male-dominated
future-centered
enthusiastic
optimistic
Litany - lack or loss of power, disempowerment (e.g. bureaucrats)
Lamenting (women) / joking or ironic lamenting ( men)
Subjects - women: daily life, shortages men: politics, war, economy
General themes: past, present future (loss, turbulence, uncertainty)
Self identity and litany: world vision, representation of self
Types of litanies: anti-Soviet, pro-Soviet, populist, Russophile
Perestroika
Transition, upheaval, revolution, restructuring, reform, crisis, collapse:
Perestroika as a ritualistic activity
transformative and the paradoxical effects of that period’s practices
Rites of passage (Arnold Van Gennep)
“A movement from one cosmic or social world to
another”.
Passage from
– Status
– Place
– Situation
– Time
Rite of passage



Rites of separation
Rites of transition
Rites of incorporation/reintegration
Liminality (betwixt and between)
is part of every rite of passage and involves the temporary suspension and even
reversal of everyday social distinctions.
Communitas
is a kind of group liminality, characterized by enhanced feelings of social
solidarity and minimized distinctions.
Victor Turner (Van Gennep)
Rites of passage.
 breach or separation,
 liminality,
 consummation
Is ritual only discrete, localized, and cyclically repeated ceremonies and rites of
passage typical of small-scale societies?
inversion ( “anti-structure”),
the intensification of performative content and play,
a heightened experience of unity or communitas
among certain participants
the symbolic presentation of social values,
conflicts and cleavages
core of rites of passage:
 time out of time and out of structure
 conditions of uncertainty and indeterminacy
 performance of sacred ideologies and invertion, paradoxes and conflictc
(e.g. gender, social status, power relations, etc.)
 is ritual a resolution?
 Liminality ► communitas - brotherhood of egalitarianism, a symbolic
leveling of status -
consummation or closure of the perestroika period was rapid, distinct, the official
state versus the narod
The narod seemingly wins over the Soviet state and its institutions (political,
military, and security).
End!!
“New,” anti-Soviet identity:
The pre-evolutionary Russian world.
Orthodox Christian affiliation and practice
Religious identity as an object of commodification,
Ethnic nationalism
Universalism and multinationalism versus national identities,
Anti-Semitism
Racism
Archaic gender identities
Segregation of the workplace
“Sexual glasnost”
Litanies of “total collapse”
Ineffective cultural mechanisms.
Bourdieu “hysteresis of habitus...
the structural lag between opportunities and the dispositions to grasp them which
is the cause of missed opportunities and, in particular, of the frequently observed
incapacity to think historical crises in categories of perception and thought other
than those of the past, albeit a revolutionary past (1977: 83; emphasis Rice).