From March 26th until March 28th, the EUSP’s Department of Anthropology hosted the fourth annual conference “Anthropology, Folkloristics, Sociolinguistics”.
This year three days conference was conceived as a platform of young, mostly Russian-speaking talent: anthropologists and researchers in related disciplines that the Department of Anthropology hopes to see among its students next year. The conference allows students to interact with each other as well as with “senior” colleagues who have already received their honors and degrees, and also facilitates their enrollment into the department.
Four of the Department of Anthropology’s current students took this path: Pavel Zlobin, studying religion, childhood researcher Ania Kozlova, sociolinguist Elena Larionova and Alena Babkina, who studies Soviet entrepreneurship.
This year’s conference received around 140 applications (slightly more than last year). A total of 33 presenters were invited to speak, and three additional lectures were given by the department professors. Despite the conference’s broad research spectrum, all the presented topics concentrated on several areas that reflected scientific interest in the department community:
• Urban studies; • Migration; • Modern ritualism; • Language policy; • Verbal communication; • Subcultures and self-identification; • Cross-cultural contact; • Approaches to the study of folklore.
Several reports were especially notable not for their scientific validity, but for their surprising results.
In Maksim Yakubskii’s (Saint-Petersburg) report, we learned that in amateur poetry by Kaliningrad residents, the city’s history ends in the Gothic era, and that only two characters live there: the philosopher Immanuel Kant and the rain. Meanwhile, in real-life Kaliningrad there are no Gothic buildings other than the cathedral next to which Kant is buried.
Azat Shakurov (Kazan’) illustrated the sharp decline of the Tatar language in post-Soviet Tatarstan: the everyday communication there is going on increasingly in Russian.
Sofia Iampol’skaia, a EUSP alumna, rejected once more the view that ancient Hebrew was “dead” before its modern reinvention. Not only the former was used in correspondence, but it also took on the characteristics of surrounding languages. One example is a third person form indicating politeness that did not exist in “true” biblical Hebrew, but did exist in German and Polish.
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Kira Onipko (Saint-Petersburg) analyzed the obituary as a genre. As it turns out, the obituary’s traditional address corresponds to a congratulatory one and consists of the same parts, including a list of merits. One and the same text (after small modifications) is suitable for both occasions.
Ekaterina Antonova, Marina Kustova, Viktoriia Pekarskaia and Liybov Polianskaia, a group of researchers from Moscow, came to the conclusion that women are more likely than men to pronounce “Homer” and “Marilyn Monroe” with the hard Russia “э” rather than the more commonly used soft “е.” They believe that the reason is to mark, as in the case of wearing colorful clothing gender inequality. Perhaps more interesting is the fact that many people of older generations don’t know who Homer is, while others know two Homers—one Greek, the other Simpson.
Ksenia Kurochkina (Tokyo) spoke about the Japanese youth trend of private farming as an opposition to the traditional model of lifetime work in a corporation. These farmers are not eco-activists but creative individuals, and farming is seen not as an escape from civilization but rather as a liberation of time for putting civilization’s achievements into practice.
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From Polina Koshkareva’s (Tomsk) research we can conclude that “young contemporary Cossacks” don’t come from families of “adult Cossacks,” and the latter, in turn, did not grow out of the “young.” There are two different closed circles of interest; one for adults, and the other for young people.
Zhanna Surkova (Moscow) analyzed the history of translating Russian fairytales in Great Britain. Until the late 19th century the only widely known Russian fairytale protagonist in GB was Emelya the Fool, with whom the Russian peasant was associated. The early 20th century saw not so much an increase in the translation of Russian fairytales as the creation of original children’s stories based on them. Thus it’s not surprising that modern English children may believe that Russian tsars kept a magical saucer at home upon which sat a magical apple.
Margarita Zolotareva (SPB) examined the everyday life and folklore of modern seminarians—the least studied of closed male subcultures. Analogues such as the army and penitentiary subculture have been studied in some detail. According to Margarita’s informants, the attitude toward a seminarian that has strongly violated codes of conduct depends on whether or not he was caught red handed (from the point of view of his peers). If not, he’s a superhero, and if so, he’s a whipping boy.
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As part of this conference, Department of Anthropology professors gave lectures addressing current trends and specific studies in anthropology.
Nikolai Vakhtin. Arctic Social Sciences
Arctic Studies researchers are primarily interested in the people living the Arctic regions and in Siberia, no matter how they dress, whether they live in tents or five-storey buildings, or whether they pasture reindeer or pump oil. The 21st century understanding of the North is comprehensive—it doesn’t consider “modern development” and the “life of natives” separately. This viewpoint is anthropological in the sense that its reference points are the people living in the region.
The EUSP Arctic Social Sciences Program’s main task is to avoid, on the one hand, the extremes by which the North and Siberia are defined in terms of economic geography not paying much attention to anything that isn’t related to industrial development and the geopolitical importance of these areas. On the other hand, not to follow traditional approaches that view the Arctic and Siberia exclusively as areas populated by “indigenous peoples” with traditional cultures, thus ignoring 86.5% of the population and the existence of industrial culture—universities, factories and power stations.
The 21st century is marked by a tendency toward becoming the Arctic century. If the melting of Arctic ice and significant warming continue over the next 7-10 years, the region can claim to be the “modern Mediterranean.” With this in mind, all countries in the region are developing their own “Arctic strategies,” which take into account the possibility of a manifold increase in trade through the Northern Sea Route, intensive development of natural resources, and a significant increase in the communication flows. There is already a so-called “business boom” occurring in Arctic regions. This has resulted in a symbolic battle for the Arctic and is based on the question of distribution of economic resources. Experts in the social processes going on in the Arctic may be helpful to private companies and government administrations in understanding the needs of the local population, which includes both indigenous peoples and other categories that are still underrepresented in modern science. Developing scientific research of all local groups in the Arctic carries weight not just as a facet of social knowledge, but such expert knowledge helps to avoid conflict between the economic interests of many parties.
Arctic Studies is a comprehensive scientific discipline tied not so much to specific issues as to a certain area. This area is defined conditionally, since an attempt to find a single criterion explaining the similarities between what we intuitively find in Karelia and Iakutia, Arkhangelsk Oblast and Chukotka is futile (as well as an attempt to draw the “southern boundary of the Arctic”). The Arctic and Siberia can only be defined by what we do not know. The field of Russian Arctic Studies comprises a list of administrative units that are most socially and economically linked to the processes going on in the Arctic region. This is namely all of Asian Russia, Nenets, Arkhangelsk, Murmansk Oblast, the Kola Peninsula, the Komi Republic, and the Republic of Karelia.
The results of the program’s first collective work became the project titled “Deti 1990 godov v sovremennoi Arktike: otsenka nastoiashchego i zhelaemoe budushchee [Children of the 1990s in the Modern Arctic: Assessing the Present and the Desired Future].” The project began with the phenomenon of an outflow of population taking place against a backdrop of booming business, economic growth and developing infrastructure. Anthropologists were confronted with a question: why did people belonging to the same segments of the population and living in the same conditions respond differently to changes taking place in the Arctic? Researchers identified a wide spectrum of expectations among the youth, the extremes of which are economic hopes and awareness of environmental risk. The study’s next objective is to define the individual strategies of the representatives of the 1990s generation according to their expectations.
Ilya Utekhin. How a Dialogue is Built.
Interactional micro-sociolinguistics contests the view, originating from the founder of structural linguistics Ferdinand de Saussure, that speech, unlike language, is chaotic and haphazard. It is true that a written transcript of verbal speech shows a greater quantity of “personal” elements that complicate our visual perception of the text—pauses, hesitations, and repetition. However, contemporary trends in the study of verbal (spontaneous) speech find it to be ordered in its own way. Professor Utekhin demonstrated this fact with a video clip of street traffic in Bombay. There, despite the absence of our usual regulatory systems, movement takes place in accordance with certain conventions between drivers and pedestrians that make this type of social interaction safe. This convention, or system of implicit rules, which determines the success (in this case, safety) of an interaction is externally expressed as a system of signals used by participants to express their intentions. Essentially, this forms the foundation for creating order in a dialogue that stops us from talking at the same time and determines the order of speaking without us having to think about it. This is an important type of social knowledge required of every member of a given culture, and, accordingly, its contents may vary from culture to culture. It also explains why in dialogue with representatives of another language we often feel that we are not allowed to speak or, on the contrary, why our interlocutors create the impression that we are constantly interrupting their replies.
Thus, successful interaction involves not only the mastering of a common linguistic code but also several systems of signals that exist only in the process of dialogue (comparable to the movement of a dance by one person and the movement of two dance partners: despite the uniformity, in the second case the hard-to-define “something else” is present). Only human communication systems and systems for sampling the world are coupled, so people can agree without sharing a language, but through internalizing common units of interaction that don’t belong to the language codes of either side. A speaker’s main goal is to make their intentions clear.
Children between 8-16 months old demonstrate communicative competence based on their mastery of indication and control over someone else’s gaze. Elucidating how these skills work in people’s informative communication has allowed for studies on the verbal interaction of people with disabilities in this area. Some examples are Charles Goodwin’s work on communication among people with aphasia (Co-Constructing Meaning in Conversation with and Aphasic Man, 1995 and Gesture, Aphasia and Interaction, 2000), an analysis of the English physicist Stephen Hawking’s interactions with the surrounding world (Stephen Hawking and the Anthropology of the Knowing Subject, 2012), and Utekhin’s own work analyzing communication among people with speech disorders (‘Mychanie’ i zhesty sredi resursov dlya sovmestnogo konstruirovaniya smysla v dialoge [Mumbling’ and Gestures Among Resources for the Co-Construction of Meaning in Dialogue], 2014). These studies help to reveal what is less explicitly represented in any dialogue, such as repetition and additional statements to an interlocutor that demonstrates the listener’s interest and involvement. Moreover, these examples clearly demonstrate that the production of statements is done by both parties involved in verbal interaction. If the communicative capabilities of one part are limited, then the partner takes on more work. In any case, a dialogue is not the sum of two actions, but rather the coordinated actions of all partners, similar to rowing a boat. The important moment here is in monitoring the partner’s understanding and sending a signal as to whether the intention expressed by a speech code was properly understood. In dialogue, a statement’s clarity is always the result of teamwork, and every subsequent reply expresses previous understanding. Hence the “mismatch effect” in online chat communication, a format where participants may be unclear as to which cue their partner is responding to.
Evgenii Golovko. The Ecology of Language, Language Death, Etc.: On Biological Metaphors in Sociolinguistics.
The use of biological metaphors has been a steady tradition. With the establishment of the concept of evolution in both biology and linguistics, the adoption of such biological concepts as “evolution” and “spontaneous development” in language, language “families” and “reconstruction” (of a parent language), “family tree” and “morphology” have become common ground for linguists. The prominent 19th century German linguist August Schleicher compared the life of a language to the life of any other living organism, saying that languages emerge and develop as independent organic systems based on their own internal laws, without the participation of human will.
20th century sociolinguistics has also been influenced by the tendency of scholars to use biological metaphors. The most famous and frequent of these has been the “language shift,” which is quite productive if we remember that it is a metaphor, and remember that language is currently understood not as a biological object, but as a form of social behavior.
Nonetheless, in contemporary scientific and popular science discourse there exist such concepts as “language blight” and the “degradation of language.” Since the early 1970s when the work of Einar Haugen appeared (with the basic thesis that languages can be found in conditions of equilibrium/competition with each other), such trends as “the ecology of language” (a term coined by Haugen) and “ecolinguistics” became popular. If the latter term doesn’t have a clearly defined object of study and is largely tendentious, then the “ecology of language” is actually quite a productive analytical model that allows us to examine the interaction between languages in order to preserve linguistic diversity. A literal understanding of biographical metaphors—the “death of a language,” “degradation of language”— involves an incorrect understanding of social and linguistic processes. Thus, from a sociolinguistic point of view, the presence of a large number of borrowed words into Russian language is not a sign of decline or contamination, but rather the opposite—a sign of stable development. When “old” words that have lost relevance to social reality give way to the new, the language easily assimilates a new lexicon. A much more alarming situation is the reverse, when a language (most often that of a small group), is incapable to “digest” new concepts and thus gives way to another more “flexible”, more prestigious language. In this instance it’s entirely pertinent to talk about the ecology of languages.
Indeed, the number of languages—as language systems—is constantly decreasing in the modern world, what is an essential feature of contemporary processes of globalization. Professor Golovko gave the example of just four of the languages that have disappeared (whose last speakers he was personally acquainted with): the Sirenik Eskimo language (Chukotka), an Aleutian dialect from Attu Island, the Eyak language (northwestern Alaska), and the Kerek language (northern Kamchatka and southern Chukotka). It’s apparent that the languages spoken by small groups of so-called “indigenous populations” around the world are the most vulnerable. These groups make up 4% of the Earth’s population and speak 60% of its known languages—thus the loss of these languages would signify significant damage to the linguistic diversity of humanity. In Golovko’s assessment, scholarly attention to this problem as well as the opening up of new groups speaking a previously unrecognized idiom represents a positive dynamic. Statistical data on the growth index of language diversity pertains not to growth in the number of languages as a system, but rather to an increasing number of people who are mastering other idioms or verbal genres and styles due to the same global processes.
It is a scientific fact that the number of languages as systems is rapidly shrinking. If a group of native speakers is less than 100,000 people, then a language is considered endangered. As a result, language documentation is a burgeoning area of 21st century linguistic study. Since the beginning of the anthropology as a science, documenting the language of “natives” has been an integral part of research. The ethnographic theory of language originated with Bronislaw Malinowski, and since then anthropological and linguistic studies have been represented by different experts. Field anthropology lies at the forefront of contemporary sociolinguistic research. This is an important shift: instead of linguistic profiling and searching for informants with knowledge of “ancient” legends, stories, fairytales and myths, documenting the language of a group entails recording everything. Best of all is the spontaneous speech of various people of various social groups and positions, because even if their language won’t soon disappear its pragmatics are constantly changing, and without this information it is impossible to reconstruct the everyday speech of past generations. In this regard, the task of maintaining linguistic diversity depends fully on the powers of experts in anthropology and sociolinguistics.
Olena Babkina