Practicing Culture

Craig Calhoun, Richard Sennett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415412513
• eBook ISBN: 9781134126101
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Practicing Culture seeks to revitalize the field of cultural sociology with an emphasis not on abstract theoretical debates but on showing how to put theoretical sources to work in empirical research. Culture is not just products and representations but practices. It is made and remade in countless small ways and occasional bursts of innovation. It is something people do – and do in rich variety and distinctive contexts as engaging case studies from the book reveal. For example:

• in Russia's most Western city, Kaliningrad, residents dig for artifacts symbolizing a German past – even though their parents only migrated to what was once Konigsberg after WWII
• in the USA, fans of professional wrestling pride themselves on being smart enough to know how much is trickery and how the tricks work yet still believe in the contest.

Practicing Culture will reshape and invigorate the sociology of culture, not only through internal development, but through enhanced connections to the interdisciplinary social theory and to related fields like the sociology of knowledge and ethnography. It will prove an essential tool for students and researchers of cultural theory, contemporary social theory and cultural sociology.

1 “We have never been German”

The economy of digging in Russian Kaliningrad

Olga Sezneva¹

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun.

Under my window a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade,
Just like his old man.

My grandfather could cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, digging down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

– Seamus Heaney, “Digging”²

He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. This determines the tone and bearing of genuine reminiscences. They must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. For the matter itself is merely a deposit, a stratum, which yields only to the most meticulous examination what constitutes the real treasure hidden within the earth: the images, severed from all earlier associations, that stand – like precious fragments or torsos in a collector’s gallery – in the prosaic rooms of our later insights. True, for successful excavations a plan is needed. Yet no less indispensable is the cautious probing of the spade in the dark loam, and it is to cheat oneself of the richest prize to preserve as a record merely an inventory of one’s discoveries, and not this dark joy of the place of the finding, as well. Fruitless searching is as much a part of this as succeeding, and consequently remembrance must not proceed in the manner of a narrative or still less of that of a report, but must, in the strictest epic and rhapsodic manner, assay its spade in ever-new places, and in the old ones delve to ever-deeper layers.

– Walter Benjamin, “Berlin Chronicle”

On things, persons, and places

I am going to write about digging; real digging, into the soil, with a spade. What could bring us closer to the root than that? Excavating; reaching deeper but not too deep!; and with the lumps of soil bringing out small things, buried objects. I will treat digging as a dirty practice, in a literal sense, and later, as hard labor, to arrive at an understanding of how this practice and its object relate to the production of persons and their everyday worlds.

It took me more than one trip to Kaliningrad, an urban center of an isolated Russian region on the Baltic shore also known as Königsberg, and many lengthy conversations to recognize the special status of small excavated objects from the German past. A city of cold Baltic light and solemn beauty, Königsberg was home to the philosopher Immanuel Kant, and he never left his city in his life, nor after his death; there lie the remains of the great philosopher. There, in the same place, had begun another biography, that of Hannah Arendt. She came to her ancestral city Königsberg from Hanover at the age of four, leaving it in 1924 for good to become a student of Karl Jaspers in Marburg. At the end of World War II, in 1945, the city was stormed by the Soviet army and soon after it was annexed from Germany, renamed “Kaliningrad,” the Germans expelled and replaced with Russians, Ukrainians, and other nationals of the Soviet Union. Forty-five years later, with the demise of the Soviet state in 1991, the region lost its contiguity with Russia, and with the recent acceptance of new members of the European Union became an alien body of one million Russians surrounded by foreign states.

The changing life in the city, the ambiguous status of the region in international relations and transnational commercial networks, correlates with a cultural change – a rise in the public interest concerning the prewar, “European” history of the city. The post-socialist decade produced inventory lists containing over one thousand historical landmarks, i.e. German-period architecture, as compared to twelve when the inventory was started in 1969. Translated histories and historical accounts by local specialists of Königsberg became commercially profitable, and television documentary series about the Teutons, the Hanseatic trade, the architecture and artistic personalities appropriated prime airtime. The apparently headlong rush to convey Kaliningraders’ part in the foreign history conceived as their own could have raised concerns about certain cultural doom, the confusion of roots and origins, and the imminent identity crisis, but nothing of this kind happened. Far from being merely an instrument for exploring the German past, a new mnemonic culture unfolds as a reciprocal movement between the place and its resi-dents, between geography and history, between conventional symbols and unconventional practices, between the restructured sense of the collective whole and the subjective interest and forming personhood. The mnemonic culture – a system of images, narratives and objects related to the past and supported by the commemorative practices of historical celebrations and memorial days – has made plain that Kant, the Hansa, Moses Mendelssohn, and the Teutons are appropriated as important cultural gifts, together with the excavated debris of Königsberg’s quotidian, Russian military heroes, and selected figures of the Romanov dynasty. While its semi-kin – the museum treasures and archaeological items stolen during the war – holds the attention of corporately organized and internationally funded groups, junk – the bric-à-brac from Königsberg which appears in the city’s flea markets – deserves the attention of a sociologist.

Both Heaney and Benjamin treat digging as a metaphor, as a wealth of images and meaning about self, kin and cultural continuity. Both relate personal memory and collective tradition to the mundane and physical practice of digging. For Heaney, digging potatoes stands in for the entire cosmology of Irish culture: his call is to join in, to dig into the matter of things, let it be with a pen – the vocation of sons may change but the ethos of culture should pass from generation to generation. Repetition, the physical automated skill, is what matters; this is what guarantees the continuity. For Benjamin, digging is something different. It is a Freudian practice of reflexivity: the unconscious is the underground in which truth is buried. Doing one’s own rubbing of history against the grain is hardly an easy task, but one that is required in the reflexive constitution of self. Layers of recent understanding affect the architectonics of representation, and the digger needs to sharpen his tools, his perception, against the voices telling him the story over and over again, to subdue his skeptical attention. Benjamin’s digging is individualistic; it constitutes a subject.³

The analysis of modalities of production, use and exchange is undertaken here in order to highlight the production of persons, social wholes, and social divisions. A set of specific characteristics of the Königsberg’s bric-à-brac denote that which is inscribed in persons, and vice versa, and the act of bringing it out and up is an act of deploying this inscription, longing for this particular exchange between humans and things. Practice, labor, exchange, and trade evoke specific and different categories of identity. Manipulation of time and space, and their interrelatedness (“historicity of a territory and territorialization of a history”) is at the core of this production (Poulantzas 2000: 114). If Benjamin’s pessimistic view of the present and the future of cultural reproduction and collective life due to the reification of time begins with the dissolution of the spatial matrix (as illustrated, for example, in his piece on the Storyteller: communities are dispersed, their sheer number is immensely greater, not to mention the disappearance of the enchanted places that are “far away” – Benjamin 1969b: 83–110), then my Kaliningrad story opens with a suggestion of the closing of spatial proximity between the real place, Kaliningrad, and one to be imagined or remembered, Königsberg. The bric-à-brac, but also the act of digging, forms the cementing substance which reverses the erosion of space through time. The farther we are away in history from Königsberg, the less influence it should have; but this is not how things appear in today’s Kaliningrad. Therefore the third and final dimension of this investigation will be discerning a variety of “intentional value” derived from “conventional value” (Sahlins 2004: 69). What we should not lose sight of, however, is that although engaged in and drawing on a collective project of place-making, each individual intention may be different, and given particular contextual meaning, the bric-à-brac always, and also, serves a particular actor’s interest. While the semantic (but also economic, as we will later see) value of Königsberg jetsam is determined by its differential relation to other objects (Soviet products, for instance), as well as to concepts (as can be Königsberg – an image, a symbol), these objects and concepts constitute a general and abstract social sense. This may be a complicated way of describing a simple idea: that the modes of obtaining, relating, and evaluating objects, and the meanings that are constituted around and with them, correlate with individual positions and forms of ownership. The mode of engagement with things and the willingness to give them a concrete value, however, is a reciprocal movement which opens up a flow of ontologies not only from people to things but also the other way around.

Things from the past

Once, interviewing the owner of a small but fashionable restaurant in Kaliningrad, we talked about the ambiance of his place, filled with objects that predated Soviet life. The dining tables were made of the standing legs of Singer sewing machines, some of them propped up with wedges. Shelves running along the walls were crowded with empty colored glass bottles, and their unusual shapes and blistered surfaces evoked remote times and extinct places. Chipped white porcelain cups, one with a missing handle and another with a half-visible golden logotype stood between the bottles. Watercolors and miniatures hanging on the walls portrayed, respectively, a merchant fleet arriving at the docks with the all-too-familiar spire of the evangelical cathedral in the background, a profile of Immanuel Kant, and a grandiose castle recognizable from other photographs or miniatures of this kind. Street signs, scorched, cracked, and rusted, pointed the wrong way to Hufen-Allee and Hansaring, and a few other streets and places whose German names had become familiar to Kaliningraders in the last decade of post-socialism.

I saw these objects in the homes of my friends and interlocutors. The unpredictable and erratic combination of things has always been a feature of their collections. The restaurant owner claimed that he had spent hundreds of dollars on these items, and thousands of rubles on vodka securing cooperation from the diggers who excavate them. He spent four years going to a specialized market on weekends in the early 1990s, until he realized that the most valuable items would never make it to his collection. So he found a way to “infiltrate,” as he called it, a network of diggers. Now he “commissions” what he needs, and although his commissions have a high rate of success he nevertheless visits the market on Sundays “because there are always accidental players in the market who may stumble across unexpected things.” Occasionally he sells unwanted items and other times auctions rarer pieces from his collection. Bargaining is common (M, 07/2001).

Figure 1.1 Examples from a collection of Königsberg bric-à-brac. Parts of the same whole, these are vivid illustrations of the random character of such collections. Photo D. Vyshemirsky

German objects have been part of Russian migrant lives for over half a century.⁴ Their use in the beginning, however, was wholly practical – nothing better was offered by the socialist economies. As long as these objects were subordinated within the sphere of domesticity, their meaning was primarily utilitarian. Beds were slept in, plates dined on, and if a street sign was found, its metal body would be used to patch a hole in the leaking roof or wall. In some ways, the excavated things make their return into the household’s daily life today as well – tin containers with minimal touch of rust store sugar or tea, and pharmaceutical equipment becomes soap dishes and dispensers. Those items which cannot “do” anything practical for their owner are still valued, but as collectibles.

Here is the reconstructed tale of a typical object excavated from the Kaliningrad underground – a green-glass beer bottle with the engraving “Koenigsberg.” It sells for two dollars, the cost of ten bus rides or basic telephone service for one month in 2001. Once upon a time the beer was drunk and the empty bottle was thrown away in the city dumpster. One would have predicted a short life for the bottle based on its status as a “secondary commodity” – a container for something more valuable, beer. All this took place when the city was German, and this moment of disposal was an intended end in the life cycle of the bottle. The value of the bottle was not only close to zero, but perhaps even negative.

Figure 1.2 A set of green-glass beer bottles with the engraving “Koenigsberg.” Such bottles are popular objects among the market buyers, as they are affordable and reusable. Photo D. Vyshemirsky

After the “death,” the hypothetic life of the bottle would continue as follows: In the late 1960s, the bottle would be found in the ground, most likely during some construction, and preserved as a souvenir in a home collection, shown under the veil of secrecy to trusted visitors. (The Soviet state imposed political silence on the prewar history of the annexed city.) Accumulated and stored in basements, mixed with other findings like plate fragments, keys, statuettes with lost parts, street signs, and the like, the bottle would emerge at the end of perestroika from many basements as a good of a different kind. Rising demand, the nature of which will be examined later, will put it into a consumption cycle. The emergence of a market for German bottles (among other items) as commodities created a cottage industry of diggers and collectors, composed mostly of teams of unemployed men who scoured fields, abandoned estates, and closed city dumpsters. This market transformed the transient object of initially low to zero value into a homogeneous class of durable extraordinary commodities.

The peculiarity of the phenomenon as a local take on a more general phenomenon of urban memorabilia should not overshadow for us its broader cultural significance. In some sense it is that – a “folk” archaeology of one’s own “home,” but it also has its own political economy unfolding within the economic and social transformations of the Russian society. A few observations can be made in this regard. First, the value of Königsberg bric-à-brac is very particular. Its circulation is geographically restricted. A plate’s fragment stamped with a manufacture’s trademark will be of zero value if it leaves the region or appears in an outsider’s hands. As a commodity, the jetsam’s value is the place effect, and is also constituted by the cultural competence of the trading parties. It is not marketed for outsiders and rarely circulates...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 “We have never been German”
• 2 Practicing poetry
• 3 Hot glass
• 4 State power as field work
• 5 New and improved nations
• 6 Facts in the city
• 7 Managing doubt
• 8 Beauty at the gallery
• 9 The erotic life of electric hair clippers
• 10 Practicing authorship