Crisis

This is a chart of the exchange rate between U.S. dollars and Russian rubles.  The vertical axis is a measure of how many rubles are worth one dollar on a given day.  You'll note that the rate has gone from just over 23 rubles per dollar to 32 rubles per dollar over the course of this graph.  That means that the dollar is worth 40% more in rubles at the right end of the chart than it was at the left end of the chart.  And how much time is represented by the horizontal axis?  Six months.

B.S.

I study a kind of music that is variously labeled "authorial song", "bard(ic) song", and/or "guitar poetry depending on the context and the person doing the labeling.  Usually I just call it "бардовская песня (bardovskaya pesnya)" because that combination of words seems to generate the least confusion in conversations with people about the music in which I'm interested.  Somehow I never once considered abbreviating any of these names for the topic of my research.

An acquaintance here in Moscow recently gave me a book that describes itself as a "Russian-English Cultural Dictionary."  She thought that perhaps this handy guide would help me acculturate.  I thanked her, flipped open the cover, and was immediately confronted by a one-paragraph definition of authorial song on page 17:

АВТОРСКАЯ ПЕСНЯ ж (бардовская песня) bard song.  A special musical-poetic genre that appeared in the USSR in the 1950s and has developed ever since.  B.s. is a socio-cultural phenomenon especially typical of the Soviet period...

B. s.?  Wait a second... what are you calling b.s.?

B. s. has its own 'sacred places': the Vostok Club in St. Petersberg (founded in 1961) and the Grushin Festival in Samara (since 1968). Their purpose has been to popularize b.s. in the best traditions.

This certainly isn't the first time I've worried that I might be writing my dissertation about b.s..  I just wasn't expecting a reference book to say so.

Blending

Merry Christmas to me.  I'm told that these shoes make me look more Russian...

Get Real

It's been a few weeks since I posted anything to this blog, and for my own sake as much as yours, gentle reader, I should summarize what's been happening since my last entry.

I should mention, by the way, that I haven't been avoiding my blogging responsibilities by choice. Things were going just wonderfully here, and I was all set to write a big blog entry about how I had somehow dodged all the small pitfalls that other anthropologists complain of when they begin their fieldwork.  What luck! 

But then, a little over a week ago, without any warning whatsoever, my brand new laptop died. Remember that laptop that I was sent by a certain company as a replacement for the machine that they lost failed to repair over the course of a month? Yeah. I'm not kidding either. This company's flagship machine--loaded with their state-of-the-art technology--, this beautiful baby computer suffered the microelectronic equivalent of SIDS after just one month.

To be clear, we're not talking about some minor inconvenience like, say, a hard drive failure, or a screen that stops working. This is more like a bad motherboard. I've talked with the company's tech support staff via e-mail and long-distance/Skype/conference-call, and after describing the computer's symptoms they replied that it sounded like a serious hardware failure and asked if I could please send it in for repair... from Russia... at my expense.

Grand.

So there I was, an academic in Moscow without a computer (which for 21st century scholars is kind of like being a drug addict without a fix). But I realized that most anthropologists don't have the luxury of computers and gadgets in their fieldsites, so why was I complaining? Who was I to wimper about a stupid computer when I've got the things that really matter: a roof over my head, a great research project, and my health?

And of course, as soon as I felt thankful for these things, I saw them each crumple before my eyes. The apartment in which I'm living suffered a minor flood when the upstairs neighbors left the water running in their bathroom tub, filling the air with vapour that smells suspiciously like the twelve inches or so of late Soviet-era flooring, insulation, dirt, dust, and mold that you might find between two levels of an apartment building in Moscow.  No big deal, I thought.  I mean, after all, the same sort of thing happened to me in my apartment not long ago in the states.  This stuff happens. And then a couple of days later, I started to feel as though a sheet of fabric softener had somehow been stuffed down my windpipe without my notice. At first I didn't think much about it, but after about 24 hours I was coughing violently and feeling as if my sinuses were attempting to escape their captivity behind my face through my eye sockets. Naturally, my optimism about my research began to take a tumble at this point as well.

That was about a week ago.  Things are a bit better now: I've got a new computer (thanks to ridiculously generous support from two readers of this blog who will go unnamed); I was able to get all my notes off of the old machine's hard drive; I'll be sending my old computer back home with an American I met recently; my health is improving thanks to lots of Russian soup; and as for my research, well, it's at least interesting.

After all, how can you NOT find this interesting?

This is a spot on the Old Arbat, a fairly famous Moscow street and tourist destination.  It's not insignificant as cultural real estate.  The Arbat is a great place to take a stroll.  There are some lovely buildings, there are no cars, you'll find artists and musicians and performers everywhere... And here we have, on the right, a statue dedicated to Bulat Okudzhava, one of the pioneers (if you'll excuse the term) of Russian bardic song.  And on the left, standing only a few feet from the revered Mr. Okudzhava, is a large cow.  Not just any cow, actually: this is the mascot (or the mas-cow?... the Mos-cow?...) for a chain of restaurants called "Mu-Mu".

I can't quite explain how well this image represents my impression of contemporary Moscow.  It's not just that the ridiculous and sublime live side by side -- that could be said about the world in general.  Nor is it just that the artifacts of the Soviet past and the post-Soviet present stand side by side.   It's something more about how the past and present don't seem to be able to take one another seriously, despite genuine efforts to the contrary.  This goes beyond nostalgia or irony.  This is... this is...

This is a statue of a cow standing next to a statue of Bulat Okudzhava.  

I feel like at this point, a real ethnographer would know how to read such an image. I don't.  But I'm hoping that since I'm experiencing some of the problems that real ethnographers encounter, perhaps soon I'll begin to think like one as well.

One Week

One week.  I've been here one week.  Since I've managed to accomplish more or less all I could have hoped to accomplish in my first seven days, I suppose that this bodes well for the next fifty one weeks of real honest-to-goodness ethnographci field research to come.  On the other hand, every day I am reminded that my Russian is nowhere near adequate to the task of capturing a shred of nuance about anything, and that I am playing the socioculturally equivalent role of a character from some bad sci-fi about an interdimensional traveler who has just made the jump from life with only three physical dimensions to live with five dimensions within the same universe.  This is a long and confusing way of saying that this time in Moscow, I'm haunted by the strange feeling that everything is the same and yet everything is different.

The same: my favorite foods and places are still here; my everyday survival Russian is slowly coming back to me and seems to be serving me well enough that I don't get too many weird looks when I ask people for directions or talk to store clerks; and Moscow is still a wonderfully busy, strangely beautiful and intimidating place.

Different: I've arrived at a time when one cannot turn on a radio, open a newspaper, or walk five paces without encountering the word "кризис (crisis)"; the sky is grey grey grey all the time; and for some reason people seem to understand the theme of my research even though I feel more detached from my project than ever.  

There's a lot that could be said about all of this... but I've got work to do.  

More to come...

Maybe things aren't so bad...

Huh.  OK, maybe I don't need to freak out about the transition from Chicago to Moscow just yet...

Хоyли Крап!!!

After months of haggling with the agency that will be funding my researcher, the broker who is managing my visa, and the Russian university that will vouch for my status as a student during the next year, I woke up this morning to find one of these in the mail:

Technically, this is good news. This means I'm going to Russia to do my dissertation fieldwork. Why, in that case, am I feeling so terrified?

Victory!

Yeah, I know, it's not May 9th. But I'm celebrating a few victories of sorts right now, so let's call this a personal Victory Day.

First and foremost: I've finally cleared the hurdles that kept me from getting a 1-year Russian visa. Doing so required me to enroll as a student in a Moscow university, which is not especially cheap. This in turn required me to request additional funds from the organization that's given me a grant for my research. Much to my surprise, the additional funds were approved, and I'm now making final preparations before leaving for Russia. If my current run of luck continues, I'll find housing in Moscow and get final approval from my university to begin carrying out my formal dissertation research in the next few weeks. (I never thought I would be quite so alarmed to see myself weeks away from fieldwork rather than months, years, or an indefinite wait.)

Meanwhile, I'm also celebrating victory over the customer service department of a computer manufacturer that shall go unnamed. To protect myself and this company, I'll skip most of the details and just share that I've been trying to get a stuck key on my laptop repaired since April. I was finally able to send the computer to this company for repair in mid September, and after another month of waiting I was then told that they weren't sure when they would start repairs, nor why they had not already started repairs, nor when I would see my computer again, and by the way, they couldn't do anything at all at the moment because they'd been experiencing some computer problems of their own with their customer service database.

It was at this point, more than five months since this stupid key became stuck, that I began to talk about going to the Better Business Bureau or to the local TV stations' consumer affairs reporters or to a lawyer in my family. Within a week, I received a call asking me if I would be satisfied if they just replaced my old computer with a new top-of-the-line notebook. I asked about the computer's specs, and was told it would have...

• a dual-core, Intel Placation Class Processor, with a unique Class-Action-Lawsuit-Preventing subprocessor
• a 14 inch anti-glare widescreen display, with a state-of-the-art coating that prevents the user from seeing red
• 4 gigabytes of ultra-fast memory, capable of remembering just about anything except for bad customer service experiences
• an innovative CYA graphics card
• and much much more!

I'm not entirely sure that it was worth this much trouble, but I'm certainly overjoyed that this company is saving me the cost of upgrading my three-year old computer, and that I'll be going to the field with a brand new machine. Let's hear it for customer service!

Perils of The Information Age

Far Away, So Close...

The good news: I have funding for a year of ethnographic research in Moscow. Woohoo!
The bad news: Russia's visa policies have made it ridiculously difficult to stay in
Russia for more than 3-months out of every 6-months.

Vova poked you. Do you want to return Vova's poke?

I'm seriously considering joining the Russian Facebook clone, ВКонтакте.ру . The only thing keeping me back at this point is the fear that this would mean that I'd be procrastinating in two languages.

Music Monday: Politkovskaya and Vysotsky

About a year ago I was in Vienna at a conference concerning the history of self-published texts (samizdat) in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. My paper addressed the legacy of a particular genre of music that circumvented Soviet censorship by circulating on illegally copied audiotapes (magnitizdat). The genre goes by many names, but the singers are usually known as "bards." I argued in my paper that there's a lot to learn about the way Russians think of the history of Soviet to post-Soviet political history by examining the way they talk about the bards and their music. For instance, if you want to get a Russian of a certain age to tell you about what life used to be like and how it's changed in the last half century, all you need to do is mention that you've heard of Vladimir Vysotsky, the most famous of the Soviet-era bards.

Anyway, the conference ended with a discussion about the state of "free speech" in Eastern Europe. One of the panelists was a Russian journalist named Anna Politkovskaya. I remember very little of her talk, except that she seemed to me to be a remarkably thoughtful and powerful speaker. To be honest, though, I was fatigued from a week of papers, round-tables, and hobnobbing with strange academics, and I was far more concerned with heading back to my hotel than I was with listening to the dreary and dubious subject at hand.

Less than one month later, on October 7, 2006, Anna Politkovskaya was shot and killed in the elevator of her Moscow apartment complex. Reports of her murder described her coverage of Chechnya, her work as a human rights activist... and how mourners had left CDs of Vysotsky's music at a makeshift memorial for her at newspaper's offices. But that was all: no elaboration, to remarks about how Russians might find a connection between Vysotsky and Politkovskaya, no reflection... as though CDs spoke for themselves.

Linux, Russia, Africa

Hello again, Gentle Reader. Please forgive the last month or so of radio silence. I've just come back a fantastic vacation in South Africa and Botswana -- places which, I thought, would be wonderfully restful since they have absolutely nothing to do with my project or Russia in general. And with few exceptions, I was right. I saw a lot of people in southern Africa sporting trendy "Soviet" brand bags, and the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg touches on how the anti-apartheid movement was branded as a Soviet front of sorts... but for the most part, I've enjoyed almost no sense of continuity among my everyday experiences of travel in Russia, southern Africa, and Chicago over the last month or so.

That said, I've become increasingly aware of and interested by cultural images of Africa and Africa-ness in Russia and America. For example, on one warm spring day in Moscow I encountered a group of musicians at Chistye Prudy, dressed as crocodiles, lions, and bears, performing for a crowd of children and parents. They were singing this popular children's song, which is, from what I can gather, a kind of Russian Jabberwocky:

Маленькие дети! Ни за что на свете Не ходите в Африку, В Африку гулять! В Африке акулы, В Африке гориллы, В Африке большие Злые крокодилы Будут вас кусать, Бить и обижать,- Не ходите, дети, В Африку гулять. В Африке разбойник, В Африке злодей, В Африке ужасный Бар-ма-лей! Он бегает по Африке И кушает детей - Гадкий, нехороший, жадный Бармалей!

Little children! Don't, for any reason under the sun, Don't go to Africa, Go walking to Africa! In Africa there are sharks, In Africa there are gorillas, In Africa there are big, Evil crocodiles. They'll bite you, Beat and insult you -- Do not, children, Go walking to Africa. In Africa there's a bandit, In Africa there's a villain, In Africa there's a terrible Bar-ma-lei! He runs around Africa And eats children -- Nasty, no-good, greedy Barmalei!

Fortunately for me, the Barmalei must have deemed me too old to make for a tasty snack, because he never menaced me during my walks in Africa. Nor did the sharks and crocodiles. I did meet a few gorillas, though, but they were quite friendly and even agreed to pose for a family photo.

When I returned to the U.S., I decided it would be nice to spend some time doing something totally unrelated to my research and to my visit to Africa. I eventually settled on what seemed to be the furthest possible thing from my travels: installing Linux on an old laptop.

(I'll wait for you to stop chuckling before I continue. Yes, I know. Linux. The supremely nerdy but cost-free operating system. I try very hard to hide it, but at heart I really am an ultratechnogeek.)

It turns out, though, that I was wrong. While searching for which "flavor" of Linux would best suit my aging Hewlett-Packard, I came across a popular version called Ubuntu. What does Ubuntu mean? Here's what the makers of this version of Linux have to say:

Ubuntu is an African concept of 'humanity towards others'. It is 'the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity'. The same ideas are central to the way the Ubuntu community collaborates. Members of the Ubuntu community need to work together effectively, and this code of conduct lays down the "ground rules" for our cooperation.

Where to begin, huh? I mean, there's nothing terribly extraordinary about the cultural image of Africa -- not a country, nor a nation, nor even really an actual continent, but an ideal of Africanness -- used in the service of marketing a product, even in the case of computer software. Rhetoric by non-Africans about African knowledge, rituals, legends and proverbs has a long and rather distasteful history. Suffice it to say that whenever I hear someone talk about "African concepts", I'm immediately reminded of Calgon's "Ancient Chinese Secret."

And maybe this is just more of the same, with these Linux programmers and users casting themselves as more than mere nerds but ethical and socially conscious nerds undertaking a revival of the Ancient Chinese Secret... excuse me... the African Concept of fairness, sharing, and humanity that is Ubuntu. But I must admit that even after installing Ubuntu on my computer, I was not prepared to discover that the system came preloaded with a video file about the relationship between Ubuntu the software and Ubuntu the concept... featuring Nelson Mandela!!!

OK, really, what gives?