Their crossings motivate this book’s attention to competing rays of semiotic effort, launched from diverse points: theater schools, university courses, self-help courses, television programs, scientific demonstrations, bureaucratic encounters, film sets, and prison barracks. Through them I track filaments of longing and worry about making and breaking contact, the possibilities for and obstacles to communicative intuition. The book follows modes of tuning and testing channels that escape original fields of activity, and we see techniques to project feeling through theatrical prosceniums intertwine with those developed in lab tests of long-distance thought transfer. We see playwrights do ethnography, literary scholars interview psychics on talk shows, psychologists read Constantine Stanislavsky, and actors study Ekman.
This book moves from starting point to end point not along a single, straight line, but by working through series of circles of expertise and circuits for influence. I begin inside a theatrical academy in Moscow and end on a film set in the Urals, both points at which the nature of contact is under scrutiny and given shape.
Neither my America nor my Russia is the same as yours. Since 1988 I have lived in Russia for approximately five years and in Eastern Europe for a year and a half. Both durable structures and sudden contingencies opened and closed my paths, some affording me unusual perspectives on encounters across multiple national and social borders. For one thing, long-term research and contact with Romani communities in Russia and Eastern Europe forced me to attend to the rise of right-wing nationalism and to ways American and British encouragement of local nationalism to counter socialism was not innocent in that rise. I learned to heed colleagues from both Russia and the other formerly socialist states, who knew that while histories of socialism in their countries were linked, they were diverse, never in lockstep. Indeed, people like Roma experienced post-socialist reforms in Russia very differently than those who faced reforms in the Czech Republic or Hungary, because different socialist-era legal systems and labor practices had built differing social and legal environments for Roma to act upon.
Although I started my fieldwork during the very last days of state socialism, it is not the end of socialism that motivates this book, but a broader and more persistent set of concerns about how categories of intuition are shaped by understandings of communication that in turn have been torqued through both material channels and politically charged ideologies that either allow or constrain contacts. In the early 1990s I spent much time on film shoots and at stage rehearsals, where Russian directors told Roma to “turn up the emotional volume” in order to “be more real, more Gypsy” so that they would “touch” the audience. (Roma would rarely communicate their distaste for these directives in the moment, saving bitter complaints and arch hilarity for later, “among ourselves.”) I met a few Russians who claimed to know everything that matters about Gypsies by intuition, triggered by tiny sense data, a “look in the eye” that told them that “Gypsies are criminals.” Similar profiling judgments flourish in the United States; whence such confidence in intuitions about certain others? These processes have as much to do with regulations of contacts and channels as they do with stereotypes, and they have long histories.
I reach then for a historical theorization of the ways people check, maintain, or break contact, semiotic acts also known as phatic. Such acts manifest not only in words but also in cleared throats and pauses, in the ways people move or juxtapose media materials or arrange bodies in various kinds of situations, for example, on the stage, at passport control, and in the kitchen.
People learn to communicate with others within particular situations. Moreover, they do so as they also learn how situations contrast. To claim to discern a criminal mind by the luster of an eye will rest on some scaffolding—such as the socialized recognition of policing as a mobile and invasive discursive situation, one that can be imposed over others, with its own interpretive experts. Attention itself is socially weighted as we learn each situation, taught how and where to aim our eyes and ears (at the teacher) or urged not to stare or not to eavesdrop (on the bus). Attention centers the directives embedded in moral judgments about proper channels and contacts: “Why do you even watch that show?” “Talking to those people is a waste of time.” “Look at the blackboard, not at your friends.” We learn about social distinctions every time we witness another being invited to look, or when bodies angle to shoulder us out of a conversation. These discursive divisions of labor are also sensory, even when they go unremarked. They shape social possibilities unless we purposely—and at cost—override pressure to stay inside our circles.
My specialization in Russian studies and anthropology was incomprehensible, even unethical, to some of the people who grew up on my street; a few prickled aggressively at the idea that I would study “that communist language,” would actually make contact with those people. Paranoia about espionage, however, is only one among many material and social conditions that hold knowledge of other countries out of reach in the United States. Never mind Russia; New York City was a fantasy place to most of us kids in Nebraska. Few people traveled even across state lines; tickets cost money, even on Greyhound, and where would one crash if one did not have kin? It still shocks me how few academics and professionals know about these limits on many, perhaps most, Americans’ possibilities for travel.
I would not have come to study Russian or travel to Moscow if not for luck, hitting upon a channel opened by the generation before. The post–World War II G.I. Bill allowed my adoptive father to enroll in college and then graduate school after his military service during the Korean War. The army had taught him Russian and sent him to Alaska to monitor radio transmissions. After obtaining his graduate degree, he copublished the first English translations of the Russian formalist literary critics, most notably Shklovsky’s theory of art as estrangement. Raised during the Great Depression of the 1930s in a union town on the edge of St. Louis, he feared socialism; as a kid working after school while other college-bound kids studied, I did not. We argued fiercely about the means to economic and social justice, and perhaps that conflict inspired me to study Russian and to go see for myself.
There was another condition that situated my perceptions of Russia: our house, while stocked with novels, was draughty and our clothes were secondhand (cultural capital does not transform into economic capital when one academic salary supports two families of children). Accounts of Moscow that compared it implicitly with, say, suburban Massachusetts (not even with Manhattan) made no sense to me at all; I have yet to find comparisons that presuppose readers who live in a Florida trailer park, as some of my relatives do. Americans without means—many of us—rarely travel by air, much less abroad, much less to Russia, and rarely for more than a few weeks, young scholars on fellowships and young journalists being among the exceptions. On my first trip to Russia, a study tour in 1988, my observations never synced with those of most of my tripmates, children of lawyers and doctors and ambassadors. Beyond our relatively successful little nuclear pod, our adult kin work as infantry soldiers, sailors, assembly line workers, paramedics, meat cutters, harvest laborers, seamstresses, cashiers, mortuary workers, construction workers, one pool shark, and one painter. When I first visited Russia, my points of reference for gauging living conditions included our house, a tiny, grim Manhattan dorm room with speedy little roaches, decrepit student rentals with sagging porches in Madison and Chicago, a trailer set on concrete blocks in the northern Alabama mountains, and occasional glimpses of the domestic paradises in which a few beloved schoolmates lived, where I learned about concepts like “cable television,” and “finished basement.” Skills and chores learned from maternal kin helped me more in Russia than did academic hints: my girl cousin showed me how to weave beads; my aunt spent sweaty days canning. Boy cousins showed us how to track deer and to play chess, a game learned in the army. Our grandparents taught everybody to sing harmony.
While many Americans on that trip reported bleak impressions of a grey, crumbling Russia—how much better is our country, they would agree on the tour bus—my impressions never lined up with theirs. First encounters with Soviet objects stirred sentiments not of American superiority, but of comfort and delight in discovery, admiration for humans who had