A Chto Sluchilos'?: Ethnographies of Holding It Together

This essay by sociocultural anthropologists of Russia working in the North American academy considers rupture in three ways. First, we review rupture as a theoretical concept that ethnographers have both used and contested in making sense of the end of the Soviet Union, to inform our reading of the present moment. Second, we think about what political and social relationships the war has made speakable and for whom, at a time when the possibilities of free expression in Russia carry novel risks. Anthropologists working with indigenous and ethnic minorities in Russia have long insisted on the country’s internal plurality. Drawing on this scholarship, we discuss the ways in which plurality has been freshly repoliticized in the context of the war in Ukraine, while carrying forward some of the legacies of its Soviet orchestration. Third, we observe that the 2022 invasion of Ukraine marks a rupture for ethnographers in the way we do fieldwork in and of Russia. In response, we call for a scholarly praxis of suturing together multiple scales of analysis, digital and geographic locations and incommensurable perspectives.