"The Patriotism of Despair: Symbolic Economies, National Memory, and Communities of Loss in Russia" by Serguei Alex Oushakine

Serguei Alex Oushakine

Deposited 2005

Abstract
Based on materials that collected in 2001--2003 in Barnaul (Altai, Siberia), the dissertation explores how people in a remote province reposition themselves vis-à-vis a constantly changing state and a not-quite-yet established nation. As the dissertation demonstrates, a lack of post-Soviet institutions, coupled with a collapse of the previous system of social support and interaction, often results in networks of relations and symbolic practices that are inward-looking, xenophobic or extremist.

In different cultural and social settings the dissertation traces how "the work of the negative" was utilized for creating communities of loss. The sharing of actually experienced suffering among the Mothers whose sons were killed during the wars in Chechnya (1994--...) and Afghanistan (1979--1989), the unceasing circulation of traumatic memories of war among veterans, the academic production of intellectualized narratives about the Russian tragedy, and the persistent popular search for a "hidden" source of imaginary or real danger were used to re-imagine, re-configure, and re-focus people's relations with the state and the nation.

The patriotism of despair, as I call it, emerged as an emotionally charged set of symbolic practices called upon to mediate relations between individuals, nation and state, and thus to provide communities of loss with socially meaningful collective and/or individual subject positions. I showed that identities, which were produced in the process of this triangulation, were often framed in naturalized and naturalizing metaphors. By drawing external boundaries, these naturalized links of relatedness shaped and strengthened communities of loss. At the same time, they repeatedly pointed to the untranslatability of the shared substance that brought these communities together. As a result, the traumatic bonding not only incited a striving for exclusion but it also became an inspiration for claims to group and national exceptionality.