Spitting on the Streets of Grosny. Culturedness and Social Distinction in a Multinational Soviet City
Walter Sperling (Bonn/Berlin)
- Beginning:
- Thursday, 17 October 2024 14:15
On 17 October 2024 we will welcome Walter Sperling to our Regensburg Research Colloquium. He will give a lecture on "Spitting on the Streets of Grosny. Culturedness and Social Distinction in a Multinational Soviet City". The lecture will be held in English.
Abstract:
In my case study of multiethnicity in Grosny, an oil city in the North Caucasus, I propose to use nationality as a social category in a way that does not eliminate its ethnic aspects but avoids essentializing it. Analyzing contemporary sources, oral history interviews, ego-documents, and photo albums, I argue that in everyday life a certain habitus, corresponding to the Soviet concept of "culturedness" (kul'turnost'), was often more important than nationality in distinguishing peoples, although the latter remained a category promoted by the Soviet party-state. By making visible the reinterpretations and hybridizations of hegemonic concepts and categories, my paper sheds light on processes of acculturation as well as social conflicts within late Soviet society at its multiethnic periphery. It suggests that acculturation, as well as the conflicts amplified by the growing economic crisis, preconfigured the dynamics of politicization in the perestroika period and its violent outcome in the 1990s in the Caucasus.
Walter Sperling:
https://mwsosteuropa.hypotheses.org/dr-walter-sperling-2
Cooperation:
Leibniz ScienceCampus Europe and America in the Modern World, Professur für Slavische Literatur- und Kultuwissenschaft
Venue:
GS OSESUR, Landshuter Straße 4, 93047 Regensburg, room 319 (3rd floor)