Weird Mirrors

Vasilina Orlova / Василина Орлова

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Anthro Notes / Pro-Abortion

If a woman sets her mind on now wanting, for whatever reason, to carry a pregnancy to term, she will have an abortion because women happen to have access to their bodies 24/7. The only question is whether she will have access to safe medical abortion or not. Forbidding safe medical abortion in an attempt to force women to carry unwanted pregnancies to term equals the criminalization of women's bodies and opens up the space to prosecute for miscarriages.

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Anthro Notes Cultural Relativism (Comment on a Student Writing Raising Solid Question)

Understanding cultural relativism does not as much demand us to suspend all our value judgments (that would not be possible). Rather, cultural relativism means we know our value judgments are not the end of the conversation, that other people in different cultures do it differently, and their ways are not necessarily inferior or less developed once. The irony is of course that the idea of cultural relativism is also cultural and also that adopting a position of an observer we become outsiders who "know better." Even if this is a "know better not to judge," it is still an all-knowing, impartial, objective outsider position. There is definitely an ouroboric paradox here.

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Anthro Notes / Comment on the writing of a plagiarizing student

Thank you for your response. The Turnitin report shows me that 40% of this text was lifted from at least four various sources. Canvas has it embedded, not that I would check. Think about it, what a gigantic work it is to google four separate sources to use them in your writing. It is actually more work than to concentrate on your own entirely and write those 100 words about each text. Especially for you, since you have already shown yourself as a shrewd thinker during the lectures (or one lecture).

On the other hand, if you do use sources, you do need to quote them (i.e. place quotation marks and references). It's paramount in our practice. Failure to do so is not too good for a reputation of a scholar.

I also do not mind reading this text that you created using your method, but 40% of the credit goes to people I do not actually know, and I am not sure why I should read them... While I am sure they are great writers, they are not entitled to my time the way you are, by virtue of being a student in this course. You weave these quotations masterfully into the fabric of your text, so why do you even need them? I'd appreciate your own prose much more, as this is the point of the assignment (showing engagement with the primary, not secondary, sources).

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Anthro Notes / Excerpts from Emails

Me: I was fascinated by what Baldwin did in “Stranger in the Village,” effectively becoming a Black ethnographer of a white village. I am sure the irony is not lost on readers, considering that we saw the opposite situation in First Contact, Reflections on the Fieldwork in Morocco, Stranger and Friend, and so many other anthropological accounts where white people would arrive to the settlements of the racialized other. I've read Baldwin before, as I am sure most colleagues did, but not these particular essays. I am struck anew by his prose, the description of the difficult relationship with his father, injustices, a black shirt a girl irons for him to attend a funeral, and so on. KA: ...you are absolutely right about the ethnography of this white village, the return of the gaze. If you do not mind and allow, perhaps I will use this in my lecture on Wednesday. ~ Loved this comment of “return the gaze.” Other notes I am going to preserve. Me:  ...it did not occur to me that part of the impact of Margaret Mead's works was that she presented the Western Anglophone reader and viewer with the world where sexual morals were not, in essence, puritan. This observation makes one think of the potential impact anthropology can make even today. Me: ... I think the primary needs of our body and how differently they are organized in different cultures is really a fascinating and a serious subject. I have planned initially in my own work to give two stories on toilet visitation: I heard in the fields that an old man from the village was refusing to defecate in the apartment of his son in a city. He simply could not bring himself to do it. His son had to lead him to a deserted place so that he could alleviate the needs of his body. Conversely and similarly, I have also heard the story of a boy from a city who was downright afraid to go to the village toilet where there was little but a hole in the ground (in wood). That tells one how meticulously we bring to discipline our bodies, and how rigorously we in fact have them trained without sometimes as much as suspecting it. ... Me: ...You mentioned the interest, reverence, and denial that used to surround the Soviet Union - one more anecdote from that time that I heard in the Russian Far East (Marrytime territory, close to Japan) in the 2000s - people would tell me that they seriously argued when they were students - and these men, telling me that, were in their 50s and 60s - they seriously argued whether Lenin was capable of defecating or not. Therefore, they were essentially arguing whether Lenin indeed possessed a body of a human. It is kind of how we observed it in First Contact...how natives wondering if the white man has excreta that also emit the smell, and then figuring out that there is indeed some sort of human "universality" to our experiences, at least as far as body and perspiration go.

(I have been hoping to jot down this Lenin story and possibly give more of a “thick description” to it in the future).

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Anthro Notes / My Father’s Journey

Why did my father come to the “bankrupt place” in Siberia? I asked him this question, but he did not really give me a satisfying response. Likely, he was simply feeling out of place in Moscow by this time in his career. After his submariner and a Naval officer career, he had a military journalist career. After that, he was working in a series of organizations closely intertwined with the state institutions, such as something called the Collective Security Treaty Organization, one of the post-Soviet structures aiming at preserving a sort of union in place between Russia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Belarus, a number of former Soviet Republics to preserve some bases on each other's territories. The organization was led by one of the officials, NB, a stately, tall man well versed in intrigues and connections of the "corridors of power" under Putin. My father's coworkers were 70-year-old men with diplomatic careers under their belts. One of them told a story that when he served in Italy, he left a weapon and gold somewhere in a hidden place, for his successor to use. Apparently, he was something of a spy. The peak of my father's career was that he delivered an address to a big international gathering in Vienna. This is I who thinks that was the peak; I am not sure if this is how he'd see it. Anosovo happened after my father left the Organization. I don't know to which degree I am "allowed" to elaborate on it in my work - there is a certain sense of sadness to this story. I feel like it was a sort of self-exile. He banished himself to those places seeing that his expertise and experience were underappreciated in Moscow. But he also had illusions that his intervention will help to rebuild Anosovo - spoiler alert, that did not happen, at least not to a degree he hoped, but his health suffered from Anosovian conditions. Mom implored me to deliver him back to Moscow as he started having heart problems there. I want of course to do justice to this material.

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Anthro Notes / New Times

Academics freak out about recording of their lectures. That is not a concern familiar to me. I'd record and publish my lectures. Not because I am well-spoken at all times or never said anything I'd be embarrassed about, sometimes even in the moment of saying it. But because recording nowadays is equivalent to the oral speech. It's not a document for ages, it's a fleeting imprint of a fleeting state. One can add disclaimers and clarifications or offer a backtrack later. We'll embrace it the way we embraced bubbling about in writing on the web. Once upon a time it was also unthinkable for many serious writers, I'm sure. Text generally requires more thought and more editing than what it is now given at least as far as social media are concerned.

[vasilinaorlova]

Photographs by My Father

My father was born in the village of Yandy in 1955. In 1960-1961, prior to the flood of the Bratsk dam, the village of Yandy was relocated and became part of the village of Anosovo - a bigger...

Some of you will like these, it seems to me. I know these photographs would be better viewed if I posted them on Facebook, but I also wanted to preserve the images somewhere out there, easily accessible. These are the photographs my father Alexander Orlov took in the village of Anosovo, Eastern Siberia, and around it, in 2015-2016, and I think that these photographs are remarkable. I am happy to finally grow into this realization because I did not fully comprehend it until today / Фотографии, которые мой отец Александр Васильевич Орлов сделал в Аносово, Иркутская область, Усть-Удинский район, в 2015-2016 гг.

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Anthro Notes / From an Email to Advisor

“I want to bring into the manuscript of my dissertation a Russian anthropologist, like you did in Agitating Images. The name I heard in the field most often was Lyudmila Saburova - not the Irkutsk contemporary scientist but the one who was studying the Russians in Priangarie in the 1960s, before and after the flood. I began researching her. The anthropology she did, correct me if I am wrong, was in a lot of ways descriptive, like, I think, much of the Russians ethnography at the time. I do not know if she has any grand theory in any of her works (for me, that would be a gift, but I don't think that this should be the case here).

In her obituary, written by a colleague, I read that she lived in a passage room (if this is the correct English expression; проходная комната) with her adult son because "she did not think she was deserving" of improving her living conditions all the while being a party official who could afford to demand a better apartment. I wonder if this is a female or a Soviet-intelligentsia modesty, or both (or neither). The obituary also states that she believed till the end in the high ideals and in humanity. The obituary begins with the statement though that she did not communicate with any one of her former colleagues on any regular basis in the last ten years of her life. So there is a little bit of contradiction between the statement that she believed in ideals until the end and the information that she had not, apparently, disclose her beliefs to anyone in the last years of her life. Fascinating. Even if she will not make a path into this rendition of my work (I still hope that I can at least mention her), I found myself wanting to know more about Saburova.”

(Keeping the excerpt here to find easily what little I have written about Saburova.)

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Anthro Notes / A Moment of Fulfillment

This is the day, now, when I cut this phrase from my dissertation manuscript:

“She also told me a much more heartbreaking story, and I only recorded it in Russian. I feel like I need to have more time and also power in me to translate it. I do not want to fail to do it justice. We will see as we go along.“

Because, I finally had the power, after two years after hearing of the story, to record it, to put it in there, to include it in my work. This is a supreme moment of satisfaction and an ultimate reward available to a writer, and I am celebrating it right now.

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Anthro Notes / In Connection to the Meeting "Anti-Blackness: Readings on Violence, Resistance, and Repair" 6/17/2020

That was inspiring to be reminded that anthropology can be "an abolitionist practice," as Dr. Deborah Thomas put it. I have seen anthropology as a colonial tool even when it talks about anti-colonialism, and I have seen anthropology of white boredom, but I know little about how anthropology can be an abolitionist practice. I believe that anthropology has tools to account for violence that other disciplines cannot account for, because of the lack of statistical data or because of the insidious workings of violence that are difficult to measure in general, which has been one of the arguments of Dr. Christen Smith (that the “body count” of violence is not limited to the number of people directly dead from the inflicted violence but also members of their families, people who loved them, and even though who spectated, in reality or via videos; see her book Afro-Paradise: Blackness, Violence, and Performance in Brazil for more detailed explication of this). To account for this less-visible forms of violence, I am deeply convinced, ethnographic practices come to be handy. However, in my own practice I have felt too many times how anthropology as a tool actively resisting being used as anti-colonial. Anthropology resists being used as an anti-colonial tool because it is a colonial discipline, of which Dr. Thomas also reminded. Colonial legacies and colonial affinities are written in the foundation of anthropology. For example, because anthropology is a study "of the other" as long as this "other" can explain us something about “us” (essentially, can be useful for "us" (see Malinowski’s Argonauts)), anthropology already has a lot of trouble when "the other" is not as "other" as the anthropology would like to conceive of them. In this case, anthropology near loses its authority for too many anthropologists. As a native anthropologist, and a native anthropologist practicing--and actively institutionally being pushed to practice--autoethnography, I meet this challenge every day. Therefore I say, that in my personal modest practice, anthropology has been resisting being used as an anti-colonial tool.

The problem deeper still here is language. This is beyond anthropology. I already stated earlier that this is my belief that there can be no anti-imperial and anti-colonial practice that uses the English language as its language. To say so has a lot of implications that I am not willing to embrace. One implication of this is that the argument has been made and is being made every day that English, in fact, allows people speaking different languages to understand each other.  Another implication of the consideration with which I started this paragraph--that no anti-imperial or anti-colonial practice effectively can use English and remain such--is that to say so effectively means dismissal of any work that is being done in the English language, which, of course, cannot be permitted. What about peoples whose language was stolen and who do not possess the ability or fluency of their own language--does it mean that their struggle of liberation and work is going to be dismissed? No, not at all. I am thinking about this with the knowledge of the implications, and I am writing about it, myself, in English, while my native language is Russian--which, by the way, is another colonial language--and while my mother tongue, in which I do not possess fluency, is Ukrainian--which can be said to be a language of the colonized. I am saying this therefore aware of these complications and regardless of them as an illustration of my thesis, which is: many things that are in the foundation of the very possibility to do this work resist and preclude this kind of work from being done. In case this is obscure, I will further explicate: the very possibility of anti-colonial work in anthropology, that requires, for being done, the use of anthropology as a discipline, and the use of language - any language that can be understood -- is always already compromised by the conditions of accomplishing it. There is, however, an optimism that I am feeling of the possibility of this work, especially seeing people who have done this work for years. I get a feeling that this work is possible, very possible, despite all the impossibilities in which it is already entrenched even at the stage of being just thought or dreamed about.

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Anthro Notes / Protests

Some of the demands of the protest (May 2020):

1. Racial justice and adequate punishment for racially motivated violence of the police and self-appointed militia. 2. Defund the police and direct resources to the community. 3. Relief during the pandemic. 4. Benefits for essential workers. 5. Suspend rent. 6. Revoke prison sentences for dubious offenses like smoking weed. 7. Adequate taxes for corporations and billionaires.

(I quote myself, May 30 https://mastodon.social/@orlova/104260655852621620).

Since then, I have realized that the endgoal of the protest is abolition. Follow me on Twitter; I am unable to maintain many streams of writings on social media these days. https://twitter.com/vasilina_orlova. To be crystal clear, I fully and passionately support the protests and the methods that the protesters used. I greet the scope and depth of the protest, its celebratory promise, its power, its depth, and its beauty. The future for the world emerges now.

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Anthro Notes / Glittering Texas World

Car walk in Texas. Billboards (not verbatim, but close): "Together, we can prevent suicide: safely store guns." "Substance abuse kills 130 people every day." "If you are tired of being followed online, we can help." And "without civility, we are a divided nation." A full picture of a world, a bit frightening, but other than that ok: not only inhabitable but densely populated. I am interested in the idea that suicide from guns does not happen to gun owners but those who hold hands on their arms. Whereas in reality gun owners have access to guns, and those who don't have access to guns have access to other means of suicide. (2+2=?.) I would also like to know who follows an average Texan online. I suppose, aliens, wife, and government, but perhaps also Russians and maybe Democrats, who knows. We will need polls to find out. As I already wrote, conspiracy theories allow things to make sense. Conspiracy theories also position a theorist in a position of a knowledgeable subject who has access to layers of reality inaccessible to others. These are certainly appealing perks in a world where in truth you do not matter to your wife, aliens, government, or Russians.

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The latest Tweets from Vasilina ∀. Orlova (Василина Орлова) (@vasilina_orlova). Anthropologist. Wenner-Gren Foundation Fellow. К.филос.н. (Lomonosov Moscow State University). https://t.co/loDX35uGa5. limbo

While I am here, follow me on Twitter.

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Anthro Notes / Moving Youth Threshold

As young people, we usually do not realize that youth is a tremendous social capital until we begin losing it. I heard the WHO (who now?) extended the "young age" until 44. That's generous but considering the life expectancy in some counties, not that generous. I wonder how much of it is social constraint given that the people who are now 44 and around usually are far from the positions, professionally, socially, and familially that their parents occupied in their age. They are not where they were "supposed to be" according to those (now outdated) standards. They don't therefore feel like they are adults. Rather, they feel that they are young, but also that they're failing to accomplish those things they were hoping to accomplish by the age but didn't have socio-economic opportunities to. They are in a constant chase of a moving goalpost of maturity, seeking to step on to a moving youth threshold while their hairline is receding. I shall wear my trousers rolled, lol, as T.S. Eliot famously proclaimed. Boys and girls in short pants, sent to sit at a table with kids.

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Anthro Notes / Creatures

When I was under anesthesia, I've seen that I am being surrounded by friendly beings that cared about me and worked on me. These were probably the doctor and two nurses who assisted him, but these creatures had rainbow stripes and stood so close to each other that there were no gaps in space between them. They had multiple tentacle-like, or perhaps wing-like members. When I came out of anesthesia, I asked doctor if patients often have mystical experience. He said, "People do report." He asked what exactly I saw. I said that I had no words to describe it. The image was vivid. That by far was not the only one of my many mystical experiences and visions. I had plenty of those. It's easy for me to break through the thin cover of reality as we ought to perceive it. It's not always easy to walk back, but so far I was fortunate.

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Anthro Notes / Immigration

I can't begin to describe how angry these last Trump's initiatives make me. 60 days of suspension of skilled immigration specifically, with the possibility of extending the suspension later, in the attempt to give American mediocrity the places that talented foreigners took because of their damn UNIQUE capabilities and drives: how "AmErIcAn" is that? Tf American whites do with their idiotic votes? They massively support Trump yet again. I despise these dummies from the bottom of my heart. You can take my position, but you're not about to have my capabilities.

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Anthro Notes / To the Theory of Conspiracy Theories

Conspiracy theories arise when we're trying to wrap our mind around something that refuses being understood. Conspiracy theories are meaning-making machines. They allow difficult phenomena to be easily comprehended. Conspiracy theories, furthermore, are perfectly scalable and transportable, and have a predictive power. Their scalability, as well as predictive and explanatory power are why they're so compelling.

There is, nonetheless, a lack of coherency in conspiracy theories. Why? As it appears, when we are fantasizing and brainstorming, we can get away with any rationales for the things that are happening. Why then would we not tie the disparate elements together in a tight, accurate framework? This is because a big component of conspiracy theories is a figure of silence. The final puzzle is never given, but is rather hinted at in an evasive, ambiguous manner. Conspiracy theories presuppose two circles of knowledge consumers: extraneous and intrinsic, profane and arcane. We, belonging to the knowledgeable, are in a position of knowledge/power. We do not have to directly state what we know because the ground of this knowledge is in it being shared between us already. Moreover, sharing it means expanding the circle and thus losing a privileged position. Therefore, it is in our interests to exchange winks and hints rather than stating directly who is behind everything, and why exactly this is happening.