To define a field site or even a topic, scholars draw lines between selves and others, but some lines dissolve as social involvement stretches over time. We cannot put the entire world inside a lab or on a stage. Over the course of what anthropologists call events of participant observation, obligations arise and play out into friendships, rivalries, and other kinds of bonds. Even gifts change functions over time; what might originate in hopes for help surviving or material return can transform into promises to reunite, evoking different feelings than they once did; expectations of a return gift matter less than looking forward to coming together again. Memories of past aid or cheer attach fiercely to some gifted objects, and collecting gifts to give becomes part of the pleasure in planning a visit. Theories that emphasize the socially strategic functions of the gift may require revision to account for exchanges over periods longer than most rounds of fieldwork.
For example, from a longer perspective, we see that some gifts involve more than a single, dyadic axis of giver-receiver. One spring day in Michigan a box arrived at my house containing an Indiana Jones mask. Was this sent to harass me, perhaps by a disgruntled student of anthropology? I am not even an archaeologist, so, offended, I punched the thing before remembering that Moscow friends had ordered a toy online for their son. I forwarded it with a letter making fun of my forgetful reaction. A month later in Moscow, a small boy jumped out from behind the front door wearing this rubber face, after which for a good hour none of us could walk from laughing. Now he is taller than we are. And now we more often say “we.” We have hosted each other many times, a month here, two weeks there, have traveled together in other lands. The sense of being a foreign guest recedes not only when we channel gifts, but also whenever we arrange a table together to welcome still other guests, to my house or theirs. We have even mediated each others’ social networks: I introduced friends who later created a godparent relationship. Other friends introduced me to someone who ended up married to an in-law of mine in Nebraska. Such bonds and intimacies are not unique; similar stories enfold many scholars of Russia not born there, and some marry there. In the twenty-first century, bilingual families line up at the gates for flights to Moscow from Detroit, Atlanta, or New York. While our politicians and media work to define us as opponents, our communications continue through many types of relationships and collaborations. We are shaken each time our states sharpen conflict, but we do not let go.
The facts of such crossings and exchanges, however, do not often lead to depictions that include them as conditions for knowledge. Many beautiful, detailed representations of Russian life made both by Americans (diplomats, journalists, tourists, and scholars) and by émigrés to the United States mark out their topic by excluding such connections. When possible, This book aims to show how contacts influence research; for example, it was a Russian friend’s who urged me to study the reality show Battle of the Psychics. I could choose to absorb her questions, such as: “Battle always tests psychics in a tragic situation, but is there anything funny about being a psychic?”18 “Can psychics marry each other?” Doing so would negate the opportunity to compare and contrast perspectives. Instead I try, where I can, puzzle through ways we converge and diverge. The result, I hope, is a book that incorporates layers of conditions for contact into discussion of intuitions about contact. To convey and theorize these layers, the book chapters each shift screens and spaces in order to light up spirals of contrast-making, following Gregory Bateson’s (1936) insights about this reflexive process of differentiation, which he called shizmogenic.
ETHNOGRAPHY AS CONTACT
This book posits two additional, historically emergent, material and social conditions of the field. First, divisions of labor, even artistic and semiotic labors, are carved out not only within institutions but also across them—and across the territories that claim to encircle them. Second, while communication runs along habitual paths, channels, conduits, and infrastructures that enable contact, communicative engagements can hop such structures, sometimes violating familiar ways to conceptualize communication. To capture both possibilities, this book juxtaposes situations, genres, and venues that are usually analyzed as if they were separate, not just to set telepaths alongside film directors or to compare auditions to prison walls, but to be alert to moments when people jump lanes.
Comparing conditions for contact can be revealing. Making ethnographic contact during early fieldwork in Russia went more slowly than it did later, for instance, at one of the central sites this book draws upon, the Russian State Theatrical Academy. I conducted that fieldwork in the early to mid-1990s with Roma who were going through the regime changes alongside everyone else. I started in places such as the Moscow Romani Theater, where weekly rehearsals were just public enough that people might decide to ignore me or not, to invite me home or not, to introduce me to others or not. Those rehearsals were sporadic, however. The Theatrical Academy was quite a different site; it demanded full, daily immersion (only years later did students command chunks of time and space for home-style hospitality). We all spent all our waking hours there, from 9:00 A.M. to nearly midnight. Conversations begun in the courtyard continued on the metro and into the dormitory. Students both extolled these conditions and, especially in the first year, mourned being cut off from other relations for quite a long period, longer than any boot camp.
This mourning of lost contacts, by the way, made it into the stage work that built cohort collectives. Each fall at midterm, students in many Russian schools stage a kapustnik (“cabbage festival”), a satirical variety show. Village collectives stage them as amateur talent parties; urban working theaters stage them as internal festivities. At the academy, cohorts introduce themselves to each other with kapustnik skits that parody theatrical education; the second-year directing cohort sent up the concept of “internal dialogue” with an actor confused by his own voice booming over the loud speakers, commenting absurdly on his every encounter with stage props: “There is that chair, again.” Our younger cohort crafted a sketch with cameos by all of us non-native Russian speakers, singing in Arabic, Korean, French, Ukrainian, Daghestani, and English while an actor standing to the side pretended to translate. My snippet of “Downhome Blues” was translated into a Russian verse about the free kasha offered free at the academy until 11:00 A.M., while a Kuwaiti student’s round in Arabic on the Ud became a verse about sleeping four hours a night and missing home.
Officially, the academy prefers to stress its function as a node for new contacts, bringing people into communication from far-flung places. Funded by the Ministry of Culture, this elite school is tasked with nurturing a national theatrical tradition and competes with the Moscow Art Theater (MKhAT) for international fame: to learn here, with students of students of Stanislavsky or of Vsevolod Meyerhold, is to drink at the fount of modern stagecraft. For more than a century, people have come from all over the world, to observe or to enroll for weeks, months, or years. I was easily admitted as an observer; the road had already been paved by a century of institutional procedures for including and recruiting observers from other places.
Students were not always so ready to animate such channels or maintain all foreign contacts; while I was there, an entire delegation of American drama students who spoke no Russian joined our cohort for two weeks in the spring. A few students complained later that they had crowded the rooms and slowed them all down, to which the instructors chided, “They are not ‘ballast’! No! How do you think we pay for these light bulbs!” Still, American cultural and social capital earned a lower exchange rate at the academy than it did in other contexts. Contra allegations of Russian inferiority complexes