Letter to the Editor - Blackwell Publishing [PDF]

LETTER TO THE EDITOR To the Editor: Thanks to Michel de Certeau’s illuminating article, “Reading as Poaching” (1984), I was able to draw some connections between Serguei Alex. Oushakine’s review of Coming of Age in Post-Soviet Russia (Russian Review, Vol. 60, No. 2) and the book that I wrote. Otherwise, in his disregard of the research questions that inform the book and distortion of its contents, Oushakine’s review can only be construed as an irresponsible misrepresentation of the text. Rather than speculate on what drove Oushakine to write such a review, I would like to clarify the contentious points that he raised. I went to Russia in 1995 to find out what it is like to experience adolescence during a time when one’s country is undergoing radical changes. To this end, I met with teenagers in varied educational settings, talked with them and their teachers throughout the day, attended 11th grade classes, conducted life history interviews with 123 young people, and visited about a dozen in their homes. I arrived with the expectation that Russian teenagers would describe their lives through a grand narrative of disruption. But they did not. Instead, “unlike the adults besides and beyond them, teenagers who lived their entire lives during the transitions of their country witnessed and experienced these changes rather as a knobby fabric of constancy—which became their cultural ballast of stability and coherence” (Coming of Age, 4). By describing everyday practices in Russian schools and analyzing teenagers’ reflections on their life experiences, my book aims to illuminate this paradox. In his review, however, Oushakine refused to hear the teenagers’ stories and diagnosed them as suffering from “narrative myopia.” Then he criticized me for not correcting this ailment. This irresponsible diagnosis of “narrative myopia” followed Oushakine’s faulty opening statement. Here he alerted readers that Coming of Age in Post-Soviet Russia is based on an analysis of 103 interviews. Since I made it clear in the book that the interviews (103 with teenagers in a variety of educational settings in Russia plus 10 with students at Moscow’s Russo-Georgian School, and 10 from the Jewish National School) were part of a wider methodological package that included several forms of conversations and observations, I can only wonder why the reviewer chose only to delineate the 103 interviews. Oushakine continues to construct a fallacious argument with the book’s methodology by making an issue of a decontextualized sentence. Specifically, he notes that I asked teenagers, “What about organized activity?” and adds that this question derives from the nefarious motive of steering them toward the “right” direction. This attribution of motive is both irresponsible and incorrect. I asked the teenagers about organized activities for two reasons. First, since they hardly mentioned Pioneer activities in their memories of the Soviet era, I wanted to be absolutely certain that this was because they did not participate, rather than because participation was so routine. Second, I wanted to make sure that in 1995 not only was there “no Pioneers, no Komsomol,” but also no analogous youth groups. Oushakine continues his criticism in like vein by faulting me for failing to link the teenagers’ words with their practices and for “deliberately neglecting the noninstitutionalized part of the teenagers’ lives.” However, by choosing not to report on the practices I discussed throughout chapters 5 and 6, and the lengthy discussion of out-of-school leisure that comprises part of chapter 7, it is Oushakine who deliberately neglected the “noninstitutionalized part of teenagers’ lives” and thereby misrepresented the text.

178

The Russian Review

Oushakine’s irresponsible critique culminates in his proclamation that Coming of Age in Post-Soviet Russia makes it impossible to “understand supposedly profound changes in sexual behavior of the post-Soviet teenagers.” This statement speaks reams to the refusal (or is it inability?) of the reviewer to grasp the major point of the book—that teenagers experienced everyday life and narrated their life histories along the themes of consonance and continuity, despite the changes that rocked their country. Let’s look at sex. In the late 1980s and early 1990s many sensationalist articles appeared describing young people’s preoccupation with sex in its most lurid forms. My observations and teenagers’ reports led me to write a sober response to this sensationalism. The data I cited from Russian sociological studies support my hunch that it is not post-Soviet youth’s sexual activity that has undergone “profound changes” but rather the public discourse about sex and sexuality. Despite Pioneer ties and Komsomol blazers, many Soviet-era teenagers were sexually active, and despite sensationalist rhetoric to the contrary, many post-Soviet teens do not become sexually active until the last years of adolescence. I cannot help but wonder why Serguei Alex. Oushakine overlooked the research questions that informed Coming of Age in Post-Soviet Russia. Why did he distort the book’s methodology, misrepresent its contents, and mock its conclusions? Could it be that Oushakine cannot fathom why “the world of unpaid salaries, of barter exchange, of freezing pipes and radiators” would not resonate for teenagers as it does for him because he, like so many Russian adults, finds the aftermath of Soviet dis-union to be heart-breaking as well as chaotic? Fran Markowitz, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Dr. Oushakine responds: In his Believing and Making People Believe, Michel de Certeau outlines a technique that allows a (socialist) political party to sustain a pretense of the belief that it has political support despite the obvious absence of any actual political involvement of its “members.” De Certeau writes, “All that is required is that the surveys ask not about what directly attaches [the party’s] ‘members’ to the party, but about what does not attract them elsewherenot about the energy of convictions, but their inertia: ‘If it is false that you believe in something else, then it must be true that you are still on our side’” (1984:177). Both in her book and in her response to my “irresponsible” review, Fran Markowitz exhibits a similar rhetorical strategy: if the teenagers do not frame social changes in the language of discontinuity and disruption, it is because these changes are “their cultural ballast of stability and coherence” (p. 4). To what extent it makes sense to ask about changes people who have not lived through a period of stability remains beyond Markowitz’s anthropological scope. Stability, I guess, is stability. Nor, as her letter demonstrates, does Markowitz address the ethnographic presumptions of her field-work that I questioned in my review. Suffice it to look again at sex or, rather, at Fran Markowitz’s ethnography of teenagers’ leisure practices that I supposedly distorted. Described in the chapter on leisure, this is an ethnographic encounter that happened in one of Moscow’s schools: “During the last ten minutes of class I talked with these sixteen-year-olds about their current activities and plans for the future. All but one boy expressed their desire to continue studying at a VUZ. Everyone’s plans for the next ten years were fuzzy at best; what was important was to live now. Then how do they live? What do they do after school? ‘Buy beer, sit with friends, listen to music,’ said a tall, leather-

The Russian Review

179

jacketed youth. ‘What about organized activity? Anything like that?’ I asked. The same fellow looked around at his classmates and then told me, with a snicker and shrug of the shoulders, ‘Net Pionerov, net Komsomolov, net nichego...’” (p. 123). It is not only the tenminute classroom ethnography of nameless (and uncounted) sixteen-year-olds during which Markowitz managed to inquire about teenagers’ “current activities,” their “plans for the future,” as well as their views on “organized activities,” that I find disturbing and superficial; more important, it is a striking lack of attention and reflection on the research methods through which Markowitz shapes teenagers’ “reports” to her questions in order to support her own picture of post-Soviet teenagers in Russia—a lack that Markowitz does not notice. Or, perhaps, does not see. Serguei Alex. Oushakine, Columbia University / Altai State Technical University, Barnaul