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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 March 2022
This article is building on the analysis of affective responses to precarious conditions to argue that one such response can be described as “cheerful nonchalance.” The village of Anosovo emerged in 1961 after the construction of the Bratsk dam on the Angara River. Many villagers were certain Anosovo was a temporary settlement from the beginning. Yet more than half a century later, Anosovo is still there, even as its population diminishes. When not only the state gives up on a place, but people also adopt a kind of blasé attitude to the risks of daily life, the affect of cheerful nonchalance comes to life to help with the living. Various affective attitudes toward precarity and uncertainty in post-Soviet realities and beyond have been described as nostalgia, “patriotism of despair,” and “cruel optimism” in post-Soviet realities and beyond. Nonchalance has been overlooked, even though it is doing the work of making life possible in a place enduring socio-economic disenfranchisement. With the use of ethnographic methods, this article shows how mundane events—such as the implementation of a polygraph test by a timber harvesting firm or a refusal to abide by safety measures like wearing seat belts—are the expressions of the affect of nonchalance.
I am thankful to my interlocutors for their time. Many thanks to Serguei Alex. Oushakine, Craig A. Campbell, Rick W.G. Smith, and Manuel G. Galaviz for commenting on earlier versions of this work. Thanks to the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the University of Texas at Austin for supporting my project. Thanks to my anonymous reviewers and Slavic Review editor Harriet L. Murav.
1 Valerii, interview, Anosovo, October 5, 2018.
2 Names are changed; in sensitive cases, people are anonymized.
3 “‘Thick’ [description] presumes that as ethnographers—our bodies as tools, our words as cultural translations of what these tools have collected—we can know more than we should.” Ashanté Reese, “Refusal as Care,” Anthropology News website, June 4, 2019 https://www.anthropology-news.org/articles/refusal-as-care/ (accessed November 5, 2021).
4 Affect is a bunch of “proto-political. . .intensities of feeling” that transgress the personal and the collective. Massumi, Brian, Politics of Affect (Cambridge, Eng., 2015), ix, xGoogle Scholar. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis, 1987)Google Scholar. While affect circulates between individuals, it is not limited to the feelings of an individual but rather exists “objectively” and circulates in narratives and gestures. Feelings and emotions arise on the surface of affect. Lauren Berlant describes it: “[Cruel] optimism. . .at any moment. . .might feel like anything, including nothing: dread, anxiety, hunger, curiosity.” Cruel Optimism (Durham, 2011), 2. Similarly, I argue that cheerful nonchalance is an underlying structure on the surface of which feelings arise.
5 Boym, Svetlana, The Future of Nostalgia (New York, 2008)Google Scholar; Nadkarni, Maya, and Olga Shevchenko, “The Politics of Nostalgia: A Case for Comparative Analysis of Post-Socialist Practices,” Ab Imperio 2 (2004): 487–519; Boele, Otto, Noordenbos, Boris, and Robbe, Ksenia, eds., Post-Soviet Nostalgia: Confronting the Empire’s Legacies (Abingdon, Oxon, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jamie Rann, “Beauty and the East: Allure and Exploitation in Post-Soviet Ruin Photography,” The Calvert Journal, July 31, 2014, at https://www.calvertjournal.com/features/show/2950/russian-ruins-photography (accessed November 5, 2021); Mah, Alice, Industrial Ruination, Community, and Place: Landscapes and Legacies of Urban Decline (Toronto, 2012)Google Scholar; Alex Oushakine, Serguei, The Patriotism of Despair: Nation, War, and Loss in Russia (Ithaca, 2010)Google Scholar.
6 Hansen, Thomas Blom, Melancholia of Freedom: Social Life in an Indian Township in South Africa (Princeton, 2012), 16Google Scholar.
7 Allison, Anne, Precarious Japan (Durham, 2013), 13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 “Slow ethnography” is offered by Kathleen Stewart, “In the World that Affect Proposed,” Cultural Anthropology 32, no. 2 (May 2017): 192–98.
9 Oushakine, Patriotism of Despair; Lauren Gail Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, 2011).
10 Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-way Place (Princeton, 1993)Google Scholar; Stewart, Kathleen, A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an “Other” America (Princeton, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brown, Kate, Dispatches From Dystopia: Histories of Places Not Yet Forgotten (Chicago, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Das, Veena and Poole, Deborah, “State and its Margins: Comparative Ethnographies,” in their Anthropology in the Margins of the State (Santa Fe, 2004), 3–33Google Scholar.
11 Alexander Victorovich, interview, Anosovo, August 15, 2016.
12 Galina, interview, Anosovo, 8.7.2016.
13 Alexei Yurchak, Everything was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, 2013); Dale Pesmen, Russia and Soul: An Exploration (Ithaca, 2018).
14 Oushakine, Patriotism of Despair, 2, 4.
15 Ibid., 4–15.
16 Ibid., 6–7.
17 Ibid., 12–21.
18 Ibid., 98.
19 In Russian Talk: Culture and Conversation During Perestroika (Ithaca, 1997), Nancy Ries analyzes the “litanies and laments” (83–125) as genres that emerged and circulated as acknowledgment of the loss, uncertainties, and the “dissolution of local worlds” (7) in the late 1980s–1990s. Such litanies, sometimes rising to the nearly-religious or at least spiritually charged, elevated speeches, were moral judgments and pleas to no one (“This motherland of ours is so unfortunate, so unfortunate,” 85).
20 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 27, 51.
21 Ibid., 1.
22 Ibid., 27.
23 An earlier theorizations of sunk cost effect can be found in Hal R. Arkes and Catherine Blumer, “The Psychology of Sunk Cost,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 35, no. 1 (1985): 124–40. The “sunk cost” fallacy as a concept grew out of the influential article analyzing the “decision making under risk” in which Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky find that actors are prone “to risk aversion in choices involving sure gains and to risk seeking in choices involving sure losses.”
24 See Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 2.
25 I have described this and other fantastic projects of the locals: Vasilina Orlova, “Malfunctioning Affective Infrastructures: How the “Broken” Road Becomes a Site of Belonging in Postindustrial Eastern Siberia,” Sibirica no. 1 (2021): 45.
26 In post-socialist Mongolia, Morten Axel Pedersen found among the dispossessed youth a will to live or want of adventure similarly outweighing the surroundings-induced feeling of despair and the practical realization of the fruitlessness of effort. See Pedersen, “A Day in the Cadillac: The Work of Hope in Urban Mongolia,” Social Analysis 56 no. 2 (June 2012): 136–151 (137).
27 Psychologists conceptualize nonchalance as one of the responses to bullying (Marina Camodeca and Frits A. Goossens, “Children’s Opinions on Effective Strategies to Cope with Bullying: The Importance of Bullying Role and Perspective” Educational Research 47, no. 1 (2005): 93–105. An old study concluded that nonchalance is a response that diminishes bullying, and therefore it is an adequate retort to achieving its objective, see Christina Salmivalli, Jarkko Karhunen, and Kirsti M.J. Lagerspetz, “How Do the Victims Respond to Bullying?” Aggressive Behavior: Official Journal of the International Society for Research on Aggression 22, no. 2 (January 1996): 99–109.
28 Care Buckley, “Panicked Evacuations Mix with Nonchalance in Hurricane Sandy’s Path,” New York Times, Oct. 28, 2012, at www.nytimes.com/2012/10/29/nyregion/panicked-evacuations-mix-with-nonchalance-in-hurricane-sandys-path.html (accessed November 5, 2021). According to Buckley, some people hoped the disaster would turn out less significant, others felt that this was an adventure and even excitedly anticipated family time with TV and snacks, and for some, it was more “painful to evacuate than stay.”
29 Sheila Croucher, “The Nonchalant Migrants: Americans Living North of the 49th Parallel,” Journal of International Migration and Integration 12, no. 2 (2011): 113–31 (121).
30 Ibid., 127, 123.
31 Anne Allison, Precarious Japan (Durham, 2013), 12.
32 Valerii, interview, Anosovo, October 5, 2018.
33 Gradoobrazuiushchee predpriiatie, the enterprise that usually provided livelihood for a settlement, a widely replicated notion of Soviet times, see Stephen J. Collier, Post-Soviet Social: Neoliberalism, Social Modernity, Biopolitics (Princeton, 2011), 4.
34 Jeremy Morris, Everyday Post-Socialism: Working-Class Communities in the Russian Margins (London, 2016); Jennifer Patico, Consumption and Social Change in a Post-Soviet Middle Class (Stanford, 2008), especially the “Femininity and the Word and Leisure of Consumption” chapter (140–68).
35 Abandoning machines could seem to be a wasteful practice of the Soviet past or, in early post-Soviet times, as something done on purpose, which it no doubt sometimes was. “Managers alienated or ruined the assets of their firms—letting tractors rust and selling off entire pieces of machinery as scrap metal—in hopes of privatizing them on the cheap,” writes Katherine Verdery of Romania in the 1990s in The Vanishing Hectare: Property and Value in Postsocialist Transylvania (Ithaca, 2003), 12. In the taiga, the once-prominent assumption that a capitalist owner would treat property differently turned out to be far-fetched. It often remains more practical for firms to abandon tractors and trucks in the forest rather than take pains to transport them for costly repair, the chief of Oblcommunenergosbyt, Borovikov, attested in conversation with me. (Oblcommunenergosbyt: “District communal energy supply,” is the Irkutsk division of the Russian state enterprise, formerly a part of Oblcommunenergo, electric energy seller.)
36 Misha, interview, Anosovo, August 26, 2016.
37 “Truth-telling machine” is Geoff Bunn’s formula, see his “Constructing the Suspect: A Brief History of the Lie Detector,” Border/Lines 40 (1997), 5–9; “truth-generating” is my addition.
38 Natalia, interview, Anosovo, June 17, 2018.
39 Leonid, interview, Anosovo, June 17, 2018.
40 Elena, Facebook survey, September 9, 2020.
41 Ekaterina, Facebook survey, September 9, 2020.
42 Igor, Facebook survey, September 9, 2020.
43 Clarissa, Facebook survey, September 9, 2020.
44 Daria, Facebook survey, September 9, 2020.
45 Jeremy Morris writes about the post-Soviet “view of men as infantile and feminized.” See Morris, “Automobile Masculinities and Neoliberal Production Regimes among Russian Blue-Collar Men,” in Carlie Walker, Steven Roberts eds., Masculinity, Labour, and Neoliberalism: Working-Class Men in the International Perspective (Cham, Switzerland, 2018), 171–93 (173). A shared sense of sociality here has “a festive, cheery character” (172, 181).
46 Unnamed interlocutor, interview, Anosovo, September 11, 2018.
47 Petr, interview, the town of Ust Uda, Irkutsk District, June 17, 2018.
48 Valentin, interview, Bratsk, July 20, 2018.
49 “Mentality”—Russian, mentalnost΄ is an ethos of an ethnos, ethnicity, or even social strata, widely theorized. For instance, see Vladimir V. Kolesov, Russkaia mental΄nost΄ v iazyke i tekste (Russian Ethos in Language and Text) (St. Petersburg, 2007).
50 Sergei, interview, Anosovo, October 2, 2018.
51 Ibid.
52 Ibid.
53 Ibid.
54 Oushakine, Patriotism of Despair, 26.
55 Dale Pesmen, Russia and Soul: An Exploration (Ithaca, 2018), 43.
56 Jennifer Patico, Consumption and Social Change in a Post-Soviet Middle Class (Stanford, 2008), 6.
57 Sergei, interview, Anosovo, October 2, 2018. A popular hypothesis suggests that mat is a command language or even a “code system” circulating in the Russian military, with its own corresponding functions (Vadim Mikhailin, “Russian Army Mat as a Code System Controlling Behavior in the Russian Army,” The Journal of Power Institutions in Post-Soviet Societies 1 (2004), 1–15); see also Wilhelm Von Timroth and Nortrud Gupta, Russian and Soviet Sociolinguistics and Taboo Varieties of the Russian Language: (Argot, Jargon, Slang and “Mat”) (Munich, 1986).
58 Dale Pesmen aptly defines azart as “gambling daring,” Russia and Soul: An Exploration, 148.
59 Dmitrii, interview, Anosovo, September 21, 2018.
60 Ibid.
61 Mariia, interview, September 21, 2018.
62 Ann Laura Stoler has argued that affect is instrumental in practices of colonization, see her “Affective States,” in David Nugent and Joan Vincent, eds., A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics (Malden, Mass., 2004), 4–20. Nigel Thrift argued that affect is playing an important role in the construction of urban space, see his Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect (Abingdon, Oxon, UK, 2007).