Culture, Ethnicity and Migration After Communism

The Pontic Greeks

Anton Popov

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317155799
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

This book addresses the issue of emerging transnationalism in the conditions of post-socialism through focusing on migrants' identity as a social construction resulting from their experience of the 'transnational circuit of culture' as well as from post-Soviet shifts in political and economic conditions in their home regions.

Anton Popov draws upon ethnographic research conducted among Greek transnational migrants living on the Black Sea coast and in the North Caucasus regions of Russia who have become involved in extensive cross-border migration between the former Soviet Union (the Russian Federation, Kazakhstan and Georgia) and Greece (as well as Cyprus). It is estimated that more than 150,000 former Soviet citizens of Greek origin have resettled in Greece since the late 1980s. Yet, many of those who emigrate do not cut their connections with the home communities in Russia but instead establish their own transnational circuit of travel between Greece and Russia.

This study demonstrates how migrants employ their ethnicity as symbolic capital available for investment in transnational migration. Simultaneously they rework their practices of family networking, property relations and political participation in a way which strengthens their attachment to the local territory. The findings presented in the book imply that the social identities, economic strategies, political practices and cultural representation of the Russia's Pontic Greeks are all deeply embedded in the shifting social and cultural landscape of post-Soviet Russia and extensively influenced by the global movement of ideas, goods and people.

1
The Cultural Production of ‘Transnational Locals’ in Theory and (of) Practice

Introduction

The group whose cultural, economic, political practices and identities constitute the content of this book are the Greek villagers who continue to live in their ‘home’ communities in southern Russia, whilst nevertheless being engaged in transnational movement to Greece and Cyprus. The oxymoronic expression ‘transnational locals’, in my opinion, gives a very accurate description of these people’s living dispositions. It is these transnational characteristics of the group under study that bring to my research its concern with ‘globalisation’, or the ‘global ecumene’, which Ulf Hannerz describes as ‘the interconnectedness of the world, by way of interactions, exchanges and related developments, affecting not least the organisation of culture’ (1996, p. 7). These ‘global cultural flows’ challenge the notion of an homogenised and spatially bounded culture which in the past was established within the discourse of (ethno-) nationalism (Appadurai, 1996).

Embedding the oxymoron into the title of this chapter is deliberate. It highlights one of the main theoretical concerns of my research: the issue of the articulation between the local and the global. This book addresses the question of how transnationalism as a key globalising process affects the cultural production of meanings in a given society in a particular geographical and historical context.

Cultural Processes and Identity

Visualising Culture: The ‘Transnational Circuit of Culture’

Beginning with the writings of Raymond Williams (1958; 1961), interest in the study of culture in the social sciences and humanities has grown dramatically. This is sometimes called the ‘cultural turn’ and is characterised by an emphasis on ‘the importance of meaning to the definition of culture’ (Hall, 1997, p. 2). Defining ‘culture’, one of the most prominent figures in contemporary Cultural Studies, Stuart Hall, writes that ‘culture is not so much a set of things… as a process, a set of practices’ (Hall, 1997, p. 2, emphasis as in original). Thus, culture is the production and exchange of meanings through practices such as ‘representation’, ‘identity’, ‘production’, ‘consumption’ and ‘regulation’. As Hall argues, these practices constitute key ‘moments’ in the ‘circuit of culture’, which suggests that ‘meanings are produced at several different sites and circulated through several different processes and practices’ (Hall, 1997, p. 3).

The ‘cultural turn’ may also be seen as a critical intervention in a subject area which, for a long time, was reserved for anthropology. This corresponds with a growing dissatisfaction among socio-cultural anthropologists with the traditional definition of culture as ‘a highly patterned and consistent set of representations (or beliefs) that constitute a people’s perception of reality and that get reproduced relatively intact across generations through enculturation’ (Fox and King, 2002, p. 1).

The understanding of culture as a process for the production and circulation of meanings brings into focus a cognitive aspect of cultural processes. Social researchers are especially concerned about the discursive formation of cultural processes as ‘ways of referring to and constructing knowledge about a particular topic of practice’ (Hall, 1997, p. 6). In socio-cultural anthropology, the discursive construction of cultural practices has been acknowledged in the extensive critical writing on the challenges posed by post-colonialism, modernity and globalisation to the traditional understanding of, and approaches to, culture within the discipline (see for example Appadurai, 1996; Clifford, 1988; 1997; Gupta and Ferguson, 1992; 1997; Hannerz, 1996; Marcus, 1995; 1997; Marcus and Fischer, 1986; Staring et al., 1997).

Anthropological research has been primarily concerned with the everyday practices of people in whom cognition is often understood to be inseparable from the actions of individuals in the society. Thus, Katherine Verdery defines culture as ‘worlds of meanings’ which, in her opinion, are ‘beliefs and ideas materialised in action’ (1999, p. 34). Verdery provides a highly explicit definition of what she means by a ‘world of meaning’ when she writes:

‘World’ … seeks to capture a combination of ‘worldview’ and associated action-in-the-world, people’s sense of a meaningful universe in which they also act. Their ideas and their action constantly influence one another in a dynamic way.

(Verdery, 1999, p. 34)

Thus, by using the expression ‘cultural processes’ in this book, I want to indicate my understanding of ‘culture’ as a process of producing and reproducing meanings through and within people’s actions. This implies that discourses and practices intersect and affect each other in many different ways: in a world full of meanings, people act in accordance with their understanding of this world. At the same time, the meanings of people’s actions are produced, changed, exchanged and reproduced in the course of their interactions, in other words, through the ‘circuit of culture’.

A theoretical framework of this book thus develops from a synthesis of key approaches to culture in Cultural Studies and socio-cultural anthropology. I am drawing together Cultural Studies’ concern with the cognitive aspect, or meaning-making properties, of the circuit of culture and the anthropological notion of practice as the ideas and beliefs enacted in everyday life. I also argue that involvement in transnational migration directly and indirectly affects the practices and meanings of ‘everydayness’ among the Russian Greeks in their home communities. The ‘transnational circuit of culture’ is proposed as a concept explaining the social and cultural processes among the group in question. This ‘transnational circuit of culture’ is characterised by agents’ involvement in the geographically distant and culturally different locales in which they operate through their participation in the global circulation of people, ideas, goods and capital.

The conception of the ‘transnational circuit of culture’ provides a model for an analysis of cultural and social practices in the community in question. It also permits an analysis of the cultural production of identity as part of a broader social process. Identity is already present in the ‘circuit of culture’ as one of its key elements. Being a part of the meaning-making process, identity is both a product of the circulation of meanings and a process of the production and exchange of meanings between members of a society. In the book, I focus on the meanings of Pontic Greek identities in relation to, and in the context of, the diverse practices through and within which these meanings are generated and reproduced. These practices include some which relate to the regulation, production, consumption and representation of meanings. To a certain extent, the notion of the ‘circuit of culture’ constitutes the meta-structure of this book, and the chapters which follow demonstrate how the social and cultural identities of Russian Greeks are produced, regulated, consumed and represented within the transnational circuit. At the same time, the concept of a ‘transnational circuit of culture’ is employed as a very broad model for the theory which explains the social and cultural processes under consideration, while, as has been explained in the book’s Introduction, a more inductive approach is applied in interpreting the ethnographic data. This allows theoretical generalisations about the cultural production of identity to be grounded in the context of the particular practices of the social actors considered.

The focus on practices as driving moments of cultural production implies the importance of an individual’s actions for cultural processes. As a result, more attention needs to be paid to the role of social agency in the ‘circuit of culture’.

Theory of Practice: Structure, Agency and the Cultural Production of Identity

The recent interest of social researchers in agency may be partly explained by a general trend in the social science disciplines to overcome their earlier emphasis on structure, system and social determinism (Hannerz, 1996, p. 22). For instance, in the anthropological tradition, where the sociocentric understanding of culture as a domain of social structure was developed on the assumption that territory, culture and people are closely related (see below), little interest was paid in analyses to the role of agency in the production of culture (Hannerz, 1996, p. 22).

Several theoretical attempts have been made to redirect the focus of the social sciences towards an individual’s actions by challenging the opposition of structure and agency. Giddens’ (1984) theory of structuration, for example, suggests that the nature of the social system may be understood by investigating the production, reproduction and transformation of structures across time and space by knowledgeable actors who are drawing on rules and resources contained within the system. Hannerz (1996, p. 22), for his part, proposes the notion of ‘habitats of meaning’ as a useful device for cultural analysis, expanding the theoretical understanding of culture as ‘worlds of meaning’ by adapting Bauman’s idea that agency should combine, not with system, but with a flexible sense of habitat in which ‘agency operates and which it also produces’. Many such theoretical attempts ‘to bring human beings back in’ to social research reflect the thought-provoking concept of habitus which has been developed in Bourdieu’s theory of practice (Fowler, 2001, p. 321).

According to Pierre Bourdieu (1992), habitus is the system of the durable, transposable dispositions of actors. Habitus is also an ‘objective relation between practices and situation that produces meaning through categories of perception and appreciation that are themselves social products’ (cited from Bottomley, 1992, p. 13). Structure itself is the structure of the consequences of human practices. In this respect, the relationship between structure and agency is mutually congruent and dialectic: social structures are reproduced only within and through actors’ everyday practices, while, at the same time, these practices are strategic actions orientated towards a goal which is determined by the structural dispositions and positions of actors. Hence, social structures are embodied and encoded in the actor’s habitus (Bourdieu, 1992, pp. 52–6).

Describing the structural resources which are used, accumulated and reproduced by actors in their actions ‘objectively oriented towards a goal’ (cited from Wodak et al., 1999, p. 32), Bourdieu uses the economic metaphor of ‘capital’ (economic, cultural, social, symbolic ‘capital’). Social space is structured by the ways in which the various forms of ‘capital’ are distributed, which are capable of conferring strength, power and consequently profit on their holder (cited from Skeggs, 1997, p. 8).

The notion of habitus allows us to introduce everyday practices as the strategic actions of social agents into the focus of our analysis of cultural processes. On the one hand, this explains how structural elements of culture are reproduced and changed by agents and, on the other, it shows that agents’ behaviour, emotional attitudes and cognition become dynamic moments in social structures.

The theory of practice has been reflected in studies of identity, notably in works which examine the reproduction of ethnic and national identity through collective and individual practices as an interplay between structure and agency (Karakasidou, 2000; Papadakis, 1998; Wodak et al., 1999). Nations (as well as ethnic groups) act both as dominant value systems and as practices. Hence, the appropriation of national identity by individuals indicates their sense of habitus (Karakasidou, 2000, p. 423). The identities of individual actors are manifested in their practices (including their discursive practices of representation), while they act strategically in order to achieve particular practical outcomes (Wodak et al., 1999, pp. 29–32).

I apply the theory of practice as a conceptual framework to explain how the social and cultural identities of Greeks are produced through the practices of individual actors as they deal with such structural elements of the social process as the state, market, regional citizenship regimes, the local community network, family and kinship structures, and so on. Such an approach makes it possible to show the influence which structure has on agency, since social practices are shaped and constrained by agents’ dispositions; however, it also illustrates the reality of individual strategies through which identities are represented, manifested and reproduced.

Thus, from the vantage point of the theory of practice, the production of identity is seen as a dialectic process of internalising and reproducing social structures through individual actions. This makes identity the site of an interplay between structure and agency, discourse and practices, ideology and subjectivity and also brings a dynamic aspect to the view of identity as a process of identification.

Identification: The Discursive Construction of Identity and the ‘Other’

Being a part of the meaning-making process, identity itself is conceived as a process of identification, because, as a process, social identification implies both structure, which involves the dispositions and positions of social agents, and the agents themselves who ‘do the identifying’. Since agents act strategically in a given situation and their habitus, identification is also situational and contextual. Thus, some scholars see the concept of ‘identification’ as a way to escape the ‘reifying connotations’ suggested by the term ‘identity’ (Brubaker and Cooper, 2000, p. 14). The process of identification takes place in broader historical, political and cultural contexts, suggesting that individual identity is affected by practices and discourses which are external to the individual and which change over time. Therefore, identities are also subject to change and negotiation.

Since culture involves the production of meanings which are expressed, represented and exchanged through and within language and other discursive practices (Hall, 1997, p. 4), identification is a process of the discursive construction of meanings of the ‘self’. This also suggests the notion of identification as a psychological process of the construction of ‘self’ which involves the conscious and unconscious experiences of the subject’s position (in relation to sexuality, gender, race and ethnicity) (Elliott, 2001, p. 9). For Hall (2000, pp. 5–6), this interface between the psychological ‘inside’ and the discursive ‘outside’ constitutes the central idea of identity. Hall also argues that the process of identification is never absolutely stable but articulated through the relationship with the ‘other’. Identities are primarily not the product of something deep inside individuals, but come about in consequence of the ways in which others have recognised them (Hall, 1996b, p. 345).

Through the process of identification, people are positioned and position themselves in relation to the ‘other’. Since culture is a process of constant change and of the (re-)production of social structures through agents’ practices, identity is produced and changed in the course of these discursive practices. Hence, identity is a discursive construction which emerges in the dialogic relationship with ‘others’ through representation of the differences between the ‘self’ and the ‘other’.

The idea that the relationship of the ‘other’ is important for the construction of the ‘self’ is also central to a psychoanalytic conception of identity and was particularly developed in the work of Jacques Lacan. According to Lacanian psychoanalysis, identity starts developing at ‘the mirror phase’ when the infant recognises him / herself through the image of the mother which acts as the ‘other’ (Lacan, 2000, p. 45). Lacan followed classic Freudian theory in his emphasis on the child-mother dyad. At the same time, he introduced the notion of the ‘symbolic order’ or language, which is also ‘the domain of human law and culture’ (Barker and Galasinski, 2001, p. 32), as a site of the ‘cultural mediation’ of libidinal normalisation. This suggests that it is language that imposes the structure of the subject position which forms the basis for making the articulation of identity possible (Lacan, 2000, p. 48). In Lacan’s account, identity is developed through and within language, or discourse as a symbolic reflection of the relationship with the ‘other’.

This ‘Lacanian discovery’ of the critical role which the ‘other’ plays in the discursive construction of the subject was further elaborated in Louis Althusser’s writings on ideology (Althusser, 1993b, p. 161). Althusser argues that ideology, which is a discourse, recruits its subjects through the practice of ‘interpellation’ – that is, their recognition by ideology and within ideology (Althusser, 1993a, pp. 49–53). Therefore, the process of interpellation is critical for the existence of ideology, since it ensures the functioning and reproduction of ideology through the subjects of that ideology. The individual is an abstract concept until he / she is recognised by others who function both in accordance with a certain ideology and as an ideology. So the individual becomes the subject, because he / she is recognised as a subject by the ‘other’. Thus, according to Althusser’s theory of interpellation, ideology, or discourse, acts as the ‘other’ in the process of identifying the individual. Or, in other words, identification is a transformative process of ‘an interchange between self and structure’ (Rutherford, 1990, p. 14).

This idea of the construction of the subject by and within the discourses of power receives further development in Michel Foucault’s (2000) study of the genealogy of ‘techniques of the self’. According to Foucault, the individual is formed by regulatory power in the way in which he or she establishes relations to the rule of conduct (or discourses of power) and sees him / herself as obliged to put this rule into practice (Foucault, 2000, p. 366). Hence, discourses are internalised by individuals as a regulatory and normative means of self-formation. Following Foucault’s argument, Judith Butler (1993) suggests that identities operate through the discursive ‘production of “outside”’ (cited from Hall, 2000, p. 15). Thus, the ‘other’ is outside as well as inside the ‘self’, because the individual can identify him / herself only through his / her own perception of difference from the ‘other’. This knowledge of differences is a product of the regulatory power which shapes the identity of the individual as a historically and culturally determined subject and which is reproduced through agents’ practices.

The theoretical framework for the study of identity as a cultural phenomenon is complex. As one of the key moments of the circuit of culture, identity is both a product of the circulation of meanings and a process of producing and exchanging meanings. Identity is also seen as a site where the process of the internalisation and reproduction of social structures through individual actions takes place. In the course of the agents’ discursive practices, social identities are constructed which represent ‘self’ through differences from the ‘other’. This dialogic relationship with the ‘other’ constitutes the core of the identification process. Thus, paraphrasin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Maps, Tables and Plates
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Transliteration
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Ethnography of Transnational Migrants at Home
• 1 The Cultural Production of ‘Transnational Locals’ in Theory and (of) Practice
• 2 Ethnicity and Migration After Communism
• 3 History and the Politics of Representation: Greek Ethnicity in Southern Russia
• 4 Making Sense of Home and Homeland: Motivations and Strategies for a Transnational Migrant Circuit
• 5 Transnationalisation, Materialisation and Commoditisation of Ethnicity
• 6 The Transnational Family: Re-shaping Kinship and Genealogy
• 7 A Place Called ‘Home’: Property Ownership, Legitimacy and Local Identification of Migrants in Home Communities
• 8 Becoming Pontic Greeks
• 9 The Pontic Greek Cultural Revival: A Global Network and Local Concerns
• Conclusion: Local Lives of Transnational Migrants
• Bibliography
• Index