Acculturation is a combat sport

A quick update: the last couple of days have been mighty encouraging.

After another round of e-mails between the director of the museum and myself, I decided to go visit the museum in person yesterday to drop off a form and to repeat, politely, that I would be leaving soon, and therefore I would like to start my research sooner rather than later. I decided to bring along a fellow student from my class as linguistic back-up. He's a young guy from the States who decided to spend a year learning Russian in Moscow and living with a Russian host family before returning to the U.S. and entering college. He arrived here last year without knowledge of a single Russian word, but he's a fast student. I probably read and write better than he does, but his conversational skills tower above mine.

To make a long story short, the museum director met me and quickly agreed to give me a research permit and to let me start working in their archives in two weeks. Woohoo! My fellow student and I spent the next hour touring the museum, during which time my ethnographic dreams came true and I had a chance to observe an argument between a Russian museum visitor and a museum guide about the cultural value of one of the people featured in the photographs on display.

Better still, this morning I received some confirmation that I'm conducting research on the right subject and in the right institution. The young student who came along with me told me that his host mother, who had previously thought of him as someone with no interest in Russian culture, was shocked to learn that he had visited this particular museum. "I never would have expected YOU to go there? What could YOU know about that music?" she asked him. Her mood then changed, and she began to invite him to listen to old recordings and watch movies about this genre with her. Right on.

One other bit of encouragement I've received has been less pleasant: I'm beginning to feel comfortable enough to argue about Russia and Russians in Russian. Allow me to explain:

A rather, shall we say, stubbornly nationalist foreign student has joined my class. 'G' has lived in Moscow for several years with her husband and children since immigrating from her native country, but has been a wee bit resistant to learn the Russian language, read Russian literature, or accept what she thinks of as Russian culture. When I first met her, she seemed friendly, eager to talk with English speakers and compare experiences of Moscow, and a little insecure about being a non-Russian speaking resident of Moscow for so long.

After a few days, though, I began to notice that at some point in each class, she made a point of criticizing Russians in general. On the first day it was a benign comment about how Moscow is a particularly dusty city. During our next class, she mentioned how dangerous it is that a driver's license can be 'purchased' if one has enough money, rather than earned. The following day, she mentioned that Russians seemed a rather cold people to her.

Fine. Whatever. Then the comments became more pointed. When our teacher was reflecting on how life in Moscow has changed, G somewhat angrily remarked: "Why do you talk about your childhood during Soviet times as if it was good?" My teacher, puzzled, asked what G meant. G explained, "It was terrible! Communism! Socialism! Bread lines! No choice!" At this point, I began to feel like G was crossing a line between forgivable national pride and crude chauvinism. We talked a bit about how the Soviet era, though certainly worthy of criticism, shouldn't be judged solely on the basis of its Cold War-era representations in America and Western Europe. She agreed, grudgingly, and moved on.

Today she bulldozed through the limits of my tolerance. Out of nowhere, she explained that Russians don't like non-Russians, that Russians don't or can't speak other languages, that they certainly don't speak English, that they lack any curiosity about the rest of the world, and that the grammar of their language is deviously designed to express complex ideas in as few words as possible so as to deter people from having nice long conversations and getting to know one another. I don't even remember consciously deciding to argue with her, and I certainly didn't plan to give her a mini-lecture on linguistic ideology and nationalism. Nor did I plan to tell her that perhaps the reason Russians seemed cold and terse with her was because she was meeting Russians exclusively in commercial contexts. It just sort of happened. Within seconds the conversation transformed into a heated, three-person debate among my teacher, G, and myself, about the history of censorship, public and private discursive practices during the Soviet period, economic transformations, and the effect of social life on "the Russian soul". In what felt like a matter of seconds, the next hour of class flew past me at supersonic speeds.

It seems somewhat perverse to feel good about fighting with someone... but in this case, I can't help but feel more than a little proud.