Can I see your ID? Personhood and paperwork in and after the Soviet Union

Description

On-line registration is now closed.

Conveners

 

Dr Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov (University of Cambridge)
Dr Madeleine Reeves (University of Manchester)

How do papers enter the lives of those who hold them? What kinds of affective and social relations do they elicit?  What notions of person do they constitute, and, conversely, in which culturally and historically specific understandings of personhood does the ‘documented self’ come to acquire meaning? How do these documents affect and constitute geographical movement of people across the vast post-Soviet terrain and what Soviet legacies of territorial residency they reveal? And, more generally, what does the proliferation of identification documents – the fact that we are not fully a person without papers, and that that these papers are not merely texts but also certain kinds of material objects – do for contemporary theoretical debates about subjects and objects, persons and things, the blurring of the social and the material?

The conference will engage these questions by examining the intertwining of documents and persons in and after the Soviet Union. Its aims are threefold: firstly, to advance our empirical understanding of the distinct relationship that emerged within the Soviet Union between papers, broadly conceived, and the (post)Soviet subject – how the distinct (and distinctly complex) regimes for documenting mobility, temporary and permanent residence and labour that existed in and after the Soviet Union created, and continue to create, a particular kind of ‘documented subject’: how documents mediate the texture of daily life for ordinary men and women, and how attention to the materiality of documents and the intense emotions with which they become invested might enrich our understanding of Soviet and post-Soviet personhood.  Secondly, it asks what we might learn from this particular case about the modern rise of the ‘documented subject’.  Rather than taking the Soviet case as an ‘exception’ or outlier, we consider it as an exemplary instance of high modernity, one that can usefully inform debates out surveillance and identification that have tended to focus predominantly on western, ‘liberal’ societies.  Thirdly, the conference aims to bring together scholars working in different disciplines — notably, history, anthropology, geography, sociology and political science.

Relationships between persons and things, and the blurring of the social and the material, have attracted scholarly attention across disciplines, but often tended to develop in parallel rather than in inter-disciplinary conversation. Approaching these issues in an inter-disciplinary fashion and yet through a common set of regional materials will enable a discussion at once broad and focused. In turn, such an interdisciplinary forum will generate new theoretical perspectives and innovative research in Russian and Eurasian studies.

To elaborate: Influenced by the Foucauldian move to study ‘regimes of governing’ in liberal states, recent historical scholarship on the Soviet Union has sought to bring the insights of governmentality theory to bear on the study of this region: the way in which, in Kotkin’s evocative formulation, Soviet subjects learned to “speak Bolshevik”.  It has been also observed that this performative mastery continues to underscore post-socialist political and business practices and cultural identities (cf. for instance, Ledeneva, 2007 and Yurchak, 2006). However, this literature has paid relatively little attention to the material aspects of subject formation – to the way in which persons come to be constituted, not only through particular discursive practices, but through mundane, habitual interactions with the state’s concrete manifestations – with the materiality of built forms, systems of provisioning, technical infrastructure, and, particularly, documentary regimes. In exploring these interactions, our goal is not merely to incorporate recent critiques of Foucaudian perspectives that draw on Deleuze- and Latour-inspired approaches to objects and non-human agents, but also critique this critique by exploring the agency of documents and paperwork as material extensions of persons. The conference invites contributions that seek to address these theoretical debates through innovative empirical explorations of the social life and agency of paperwork in the construction and maintenance of the documented self.

We plan to organise the workshop around different aspects of interaction of person and papers, making selves and documents, and agency of paperwork. We shall start from the theme of physiognomy and interpolation — the interaction of personal appearance and forms of ID. The reverse of ‘surface’ (face and ID) is mask and pretence; thus, from appearance and passport we shall turn to the documentation of ‘depth’ — hidden self, unmasking, file and archive. Then we explore the notions of person that are created after the fact, through documenting traces of action and behaviour — tracks, fingerprints and other remnants. Finally, we shall consider what kind of paperwork and material objects are generated by persons as they actively use governance and documentary regimes. This panel will focus on complains, denunciations and gifts to state leaders and other figures of authority.

 

 

 

Accommodation for non-paper giving delegates

Conference delegates can find information about accommodation in Cambridge via:

Visit Cambridge or  Cambridge Rooms.

NB. CRASSH is not able to help with the booking of delegate accommodation.

 

Sponsors

The conference convenor would like to gratefully acknowledge the support of the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), Sidney Sussex College and the CEELBAS Network.

       

 

Administrative assistance: Anna Malinowska (Conference Programme Manager, CRASSH)