You cannot just live and work in a Chechen village, even if you are not a journalist or a human rights activist but just have an in-demand skill and hospitable hosts. I learned this the hard way last summer, when I arrived at the Dai village intending to study the Chechen language among native speakers and work as an English teacher in a rural school.
On the third day of my stay, a district police officer, сhecked by ethnicity, came and told me that I had two days to leave the village.
When my host Seda found out about it, it made her furious. She said that as long as I was her guest, no state functionary had the right to kick me out. This is her house, and the district police officer has no authority here, she argued.
I left anyway, I was scared. However, this situation allowed me to see a new configuration on the one hand of such a traditional anthropological subject as hospitality and on the other — of politics and ethics of loyalty toward Kadyrov’s regime.
This experience fuelled my interests in the intersection of anthropology of power and the anthropology of ethics. I hope that the MPhil Social Anthropology at University of Cambridge will introduce me the theories I need to carry out further research in the silence, ordinary ethics and neo-colonial relationships in Chechnya based on participant observation in a Chechen household.
As an ordinary ethics grounded in practices and tacit agreements rather than explicit rules, I hope to benefit from my background in linguistics and literary studies and focus on manifestation of the relationship between ethics and power through the categories and functions of language and ways of speaking, for which I started to learn the Chechen language this summer.
In their explicit manifestation hegemonic discourses associated with neo-colonialism and Kadyrov's regime can be observed in the practice of memorializing the deportation of Chechens, the Great Patriotic War and the death of the first President of Chechnya, Akhmat Kadyrov. By order of Ramzan Kadyrov, all these dates are commemorated on May 9 and 10. On February 23, the day of the beginning of the deportation of Chechens, which used to be the Day of Mourning, there are now a celebration of Defender of the Fatherland Day all over Chechnya, because Ramzan Kadyrov ordered that all Russian holidays were celebrated in the same way as in other regions of the country. The memory of deportation is stigmatized, replacing family memory with a hegemonic discourse about the death of Akhmat Kadyrov and the great victory of a united Russia.
About the Russian-Chechen wars one cannot talk in public space at all.
In my research I want to observe this relationships of power and levels of silence they produce through ordinary life. I hope to discuss the various ways in which my Chechen interlocutors relate their practice of silence to Chechen ethics, religious-nationalism and discourses of Kadyrov's power and of Russian neo-colonial presence.
I already focused my research on the interconnection between silence, self-censorship and negotiation of agency during my research on the transformation of professional ethics among journalists of Russian state-backed media Russia Today.
Due to the pressure of censorship and the need to exercise propaganda functions, journalists of Russia Today constantly face the impossibility of perform the norms of the professional community, which is based on the liberal concept of journalistic ethics with truth and objectivity as core values. In order to avoid experiencing a decrease in agency and feeling unethical in these conditions, they have developed a new professional ethics that corresponds to the actual practices of their work. The core value of this professional ethics turns out to be loyalty. This is loyalty to interviewees who control information resources and loyalty to the state that controls everything else. The choice of these objects of loyalty is due to the fact that in the situation of modern Russia, journalists are connected by reciprocal relations only with the state and interviewees, while the audience has no influence on them and is not considered a subject.
Within this new ethical paradigm, self-censorship becomes not an external compulsion, but a technology of self in the Foucauldian sense. Practicing self-censorship, journalists construct theirselves as an ethical subject in a paradigm where “truth” is not important at all, and an “honest person” is not a person who speaks the truth, but a loyal person, a person who does not commit betrayal. Due to this transformation they avoid experiencing a detraction to their agency, overcome the state of being demoralized — both in terms of the absence of morale and in terms of the absence of morals, and gain functional professional ethics, inherent to their actual working practices.
I learned during my research at Russia Today and short experience in Chechnya that I lacked the theoretical toolset to make sense of the relations and the convictions I witnessed and practical skills of field research. My undergraduate was in Russian literature, though delving into ethnography through the program of social anthropology minor developed by Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov, I realized that I wanted to be an anthropologist. The program of the minor course was structured around the same subjects Cambridge Mphil course focuses on and I look forward to go deeper into the grounding theories along with having the opportunity to study such relatively new areas as anthropology of morality.
Of particular interest to me are the courses Anthropology of Politics and Borders and Boundaries: Ethnographic Approaches, which would provide me with a more profound understanding of the specificity of ideology and hegemony in the situation of contested sovereignties. I especially look forward to the chance of working with Professor Hans Steinmüller, whose book Communities of complicity provided me many insights about the influence of coexisting moral regimes on everyday ethics of a community.
