WAR AND THE FIELD

Abstract

In the spring of 1999, while NATO forces were bombing Serbia, I was doing fieldwork in Western Siberia. Russia was clearly on Serbia’s side in this conflict, and countless patriotic and anti-war actions were taking place throughout the country. Both the war and these patriotic actions were given great publicity in the media, and state propaganda successfully monopolised the local discourse on it. Given the situation, former relations between the anthropologist-fieldworker and the locals were reassessed. My relationship with the field changed. It was not me who felt in danger, but I was worried about my family living close to the Croatian border, influenced by Russian propaganda and isolation from my home. This changed my perception of reality, and I found myself experiencing “existential shock.” My previous intimate relationships were shaken by the propaganda-fuelled paranoia brought about by the war. The wartime hegemony had raised the possibility of a negative interpretation of me in addition to the former positive ones – in short, it had occurred to people that I might actually be an enemy or source of danger. During this period of my fieldwork, I was suspected of being a hostile spy. To understand this situation, the question of researcher neutrality had to be raised. War is closely connected to group identity and, consequentially, shapes personal identities, reinforces previous ones, creates new ones and spurs individuals with multiple identities to choose between them. The bombing of Serbia exerted a potent effect on the mechanisms of Russian identity: it reinforced the Rossijanin (“Russian citizen”) identity, the basis for the Russian state identity that reigned following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The strengthening of this identity also had an elemental effect on the local Indigenous people, drawing them towards a “pan-Slavic” identity and reinforcing the role of the former Soviet identity. News of a Russian-Ukrainian war escalating in 2022 came as a serious shock to me, an anthropologist engaged in field research in Russia. On the one hand, it was a significant detriment to my identity as a researcher, as the field station I had been intending to visit seemed likely to become closed off to the world. Secondly, the Russian invasion curtailed any opportunity of communicating with my various Siberian acquaintances. However, the job of the anthropologist offers no exemption from reporting on war and violent conflict. Where the necessity arises, methods, concepts and theories must be found that permit the development of a viable approach. In solving – or in the current situation, attempting to solve – the predicament outlined above, the only possible point of departure I had were my field studies conducted in 1999.