Three Senses of Belonging on the Khantaika
Abstract THE MOST CONSPICUOUS result of the reforms to Soviet state socialism has been the eruption of claims to self-determination and territorial autonomy, and in the end, the crumbling of the union altogether. The strength of social movements organized around nationality in this former socialist...
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| Format: | Book Part |
| Language: | unknown |
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Oxford University PressOxford
2000
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| Online Access: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198233855.003.0009 https://academic.oup.com/book/chapter-pdf/52585906/isbn-9780198233855-book-part-9.pdf |
| Summary: | Abstract THE MOST CONSPICUOUS result of the reforms to Soviet state socialism has been the eruption of claims to self-determination and territorial autonomy, and in the end, the crumbling of the union altogether. The strength of social movements organized around nationality in this former socialist state are paradoxical along several dimensions. First, such groundswells of political activity contradicted with resounding emphasis the reigning models of state and society which portrayed the Soviet Union as a seamless, although atomized, whole. Second, the success of national identity as a political discourse directly contradicted official communist ideology which proclaimed the unity of peoples along class dimensions and not dimensions of nationality. Third, although modernist theories predict nationalism in societies organized by strong states promoting standard literacy through a mass media, they cannot account for the development of multiple national identities within a single modern state let alone within specific local segments of a state. This ethnography of belonging to a nationality, a territory, and a kollektiv) in a relatively isolated Arctic state farm allows us to understand the diverging tendencies within Soviet state-building which continue to contribute to its unravelling. |
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