My last highlight of the #ASEEES2017 convention was the presentation of Alexandra Simonova. The was talking about Crimea as a zone of exception where different regimes of exceptionality are present; and I thought about Crimea becoming a Crimea-wide borderline, the peninsula-wide border, differently porous. The same space differently passable for different groups of people depending on their ethnicity, also differently constructed. I was made to think about it not only by the today's presentation (on the panel The City: Collective Memory and Soviet Legacy), but by the conversation with Sasha the day prior that was a fascinating episode in its own right she mentioned she spent several days in Sevastopol. first she had been trying to see what are the ways to legally access the Crimean city from the Ukrainian side, and saw that there were not many, and at any rate none accessible to her. then she resorted to arriving there from the Russian side, of which there were no immediate problem. (one would assume there were no border patrol from the Russian side, yet there is a check point) she described how she went for an exploration of an empty, dusty vacationing city, where unannounced siesta blurred every line, and suddenly after the next corner she stumbled upon a marching band with a drum, briskly advancing along the empty street. they were children, and everyone wore familiar insignia. it was as if a picture from the surreal future where the USSR never collapsed; an alternative universe unfolding right in 2017 in Crimea. #anthropology #appliedanthropology #ethnography #simonova