Forum 15 Eng Fin

№ 15 2019
Body and Technology

ISSN 1815-8927
mass media registration certificate PI No. FS77-35818
© Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology

and Ethnography (Kunstkamera), Russian
Academy of Sciences, 2019
© European University at St Petersburg, 2019
© University of Oxford, 2019
Forum for Anthropology and Culture
(annual English version of Antropologicheskij forum
(in Russian, quarterly))
General Editor
Albert Baiburin (Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography
(Kunstkamera), Russian Academy of Sciences /
European University at St Petersburg, St Petersburg, Russia)
Deputy General Editor
Nikolai Vakhtin (European University at St Petersburg, St Petersburg, Russia)
Editor, English language edition
Catriona Kelly (New College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK)
Associate Editors
Yuri Berezkin (Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography
(Kunstkamera), Russian Academy of Sciences / European University
at St Petersburg, St Petersburg, Russia)
Yury Chistov (Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology
and Ethnography (Kunstkamera), Russian Academy of Sciences,
St Petersburg, Russia)
Boris Firsov (European University at St Petersburg, St Petersburg, Russia)
Sheila Fitzpatrick (Sidney University, Sidney, Australia)
Andrei Golovnev (Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology
and Ethnography (Kunstkamera), Russian Academy of Sciences,
Caroline Humphrey (University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK)
Konstantin Pozdniakov (INALCO, Paris, France)
David Ransel (Indiana University, Bloomington, USA)
Sergei Shtyrkov (Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology
and Ethnography (Kunstkamera), Russian Academy of Sciences /
European University at St Petersburg, St Petersburg, Russia)
Steve Smith (University of Essex , Colchester, UK)
Sergei Sokolovskiy (Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology,
Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia)
Valentin Vydrin (INALCO / CNRS, Paris, France)
Faith Wigzell (University College, London, UK)
Secretary of Editorial Board, Copy Editor
Olga Boitsova (Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography
(Kunstkamera), Russian Academy of Sciences, St Petersburg, Russia)
Copy Editor, Website Editor

Alexandra Piir (Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography
(Kunstkamera), Russian Academy of Sciences / European University
at St Petersburg, St Petersburg, Russia)
Сopy Editor, Proofreader

Daria Mishchenko (Institute for Linguistic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences /
Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera),
Russian Academy of Sciences, St Petersburg, Russia)
Translator, Copy Editor

Alexandra Kasatkina (Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology
and Ethnography (Kunstkamera), Russian Academy of Sciences /
National Research University Higher School of Economics,
Reviews Editor
Maria Pirogovskaya (European University at St Petersburg, St Petersburg, Russia)
Founders and Publishers

Russian Academy of Sciences, St Petersburg, Russia
European University at St Petersburg, St Petersburg, Russia
5 C O N T E N T S
Forum for Anthropology and Culture. 2019. No 15
From the Editors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Forum 38: Body and Technology

Editors’ Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Elena Gudova, Asya Karaseva, Magdalena Kozhevnikova,
Victor Krutkin, Aleksandra Kurlenkova, Anna Malyar,
Dmitriy Mikhel, Igor Morozov, Michel Rivkin-Fish,
Irina Sirotkina, Elena Sokolova, Liliia Zemnukhova . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Sergei Sokolovskiy. Anthropology of the Living and the Dead:
The Case of the Human Body and Technics
(an Afterword to the Discussion). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
The Human in Techno-Media:

New Topics in Anthropological Research
Sergei Sokolovskiy. Bodies and Technologies
through the Prism of Techno-Anthropology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
Elena Sokolova. The Smartphone as Witness:
Technological Mediation of Bodily Sensory Experience. . . . . . . . 116
Evgenia Nim. Self-tracking as a Practice
of Quantifying the Body: Conceptual Outlines. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
Articles
Stanislav Petriashin. Socialist Realism and Ethnography:
The Study and Representation of Soviet Contemporaneity
in Ethnographic Museums in the 1930s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
Dmitriy Timoshkin, Konstantin Grigorichev. ‘Non-Place’
outside Time: Indeterminacy as the Specificity of the Existence
of Localities in a Post-Soviet City (The Case of Irkutsk) . . . . . . . . 183
Reviews
Alexandra Kasatkina. Translations at the End of the World:
A Review of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Grib na krayu sveta:
o vozmozhnosti zhizni na ruinakh kapitalizma.
Moscow: Ad Marginem Press, 2017, 376 pp.
(Russian transl. of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom
at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life
in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2015, 352 pp.). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205
FORUM FOR ANT H R OP O LO G Y A N D C U LT U R E 2019 No 15 6
Ivan Kirpichnikov. A Review of Jan Hennings, Russia and Courtly

Europe: Ritual and the Culture of Diplomacy, 1648–1725.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016, XII+297 pp.
(New Studies in European History) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 216
Sergei Shtyrkov. The Catechon as a Category of Orthodox
Consciousness: Outlines of Russian Political Eschatology:
A Review of Victor Shnirelman, Koleno Danovo:
eskhatologiya i antisemitizm v sovremennoy Rossii
[The Tribe of Dan: Eschatology and Anti-Semitism
in Modern Russia]. Moscow: St Andrew’s Biblical Theological
Institute Press, 2017, XIV+617 pp. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221
7 F rom the E ditors
From the Editors

It is now exactly fifteen years since the first issue
of our parent journal, Antropologicheskij forum,
was published. Issue no. 1, which also initiated
Forum for Anthropology and Culture, opened
with a broad discussion, ‘Cultural Anthropology:
The State of the Field’, which asked participants
to address questions such as the reasons behind
the declining interest in the traditional culture of
the Russian countryside. The decade and a half
since then has seen a large number of changes,
some of them (for instance, the geopolitical
situation) definitely for the worse. However, that
relatively short period of time has also witnessed
the reintegration of Russian scholarship —
to a significant if not universal degree — into
global discussions of key social and cultural
problems. Younger scholars now without
hesitation apply theoretical texts and cultural
criticism in languages other than Russian to the
analysis of contemporary phenom ena, and
indeed to the examination of historical reality.
The ‘Forum’ with which this issue opens, on
technology and the body, is a striking illustration
of the shift in approach. A Soviet scholar of the
1980s (indeed a scholar from more or less
anywhere) would have found the collision of
these two topics, whatever their legitimate
separate existence in the academic world, more
than a little perplexing. However, Russia is now
one of the world’s most e-aware societies, while
the huge transformation of physical self-
awareness and of bodily existence as ‘image’ and
‘performance’ (exemplified by the large number
of businesses offering cosmetic procedures
in any and all urban centres) is obvious even
FORUM FOR ANT H R OP O LO G Y A N D C U LT U R E 2019 No 15 8
to the most superficial observer. Here the object, though, is not so

much to address the glamour industry that has already had quite
a lot of discussion (in a recent multi-handed book edited by Helena
Goscilo and Vlad Strukov), as to foster an interdisciplinary dis
cussion of topics such as biotechnology, biopolitics and power,
robotics, and the entire boundary between ‘the natural’ and ‘the
artificial’ in circumstances of radically altered possibilities for man-
made objects and states. The ‘Forum’ is followed by an article cluster
examining these themes at greater length and with relation to
extended treatments of empirical material.
A second topic examined in the issue is the (re)imagination of the
past. An article by Stanislav Petriashin examines the relationship
between the ideological stereotypes of Socialist Realism familiar from
painting, cinema, and literature, and the world of the Soviet museum
at the same period. Meanwhile, Dmitriy Timoshkin and Konstantin
Grigorichev provide a fascinating exploration of an ‘in between’ site
in the historic city of Irkutsk, somewhere that cuts across different
layers of city identity and proves unclassifiable in terms of the
governing ideological imaginary.
The issue concludes with three reviews taken from across the
journal’s range of interests. Alexandra Kasatkina’s review of Anna
Lowenhaupt Tsing’s celebrated study, The Mushroom at the End of
the World, suggests both the reach of anthropological work and the
pitfalls of trying to convey cultural analysis across the language
divide (a number of significant misunderstandings in the Russian
translation are identified). Sergei Shtyrkov’s respectful, but exacting
review of Victor Shnirelman’s enormous survey of Russian
eschatology, The Tribe of Dan, continues the discussion of religious
practice set out in our previous issue, while also picking up on
themes of significance here. Finally, Ivan Kirpichnikov assesses Jan
Hennings’s study of Russian diplomacy and its international
resonance in the early modern period, a book profoundly absorbed
in the language of gesture and bodily enactment, so echoing once
more the questions that are intensively discussed in the ‘Forum’.
Once more, we express our thanks to the authors, for their willing
ness to participate in the English number, to the participants in the
‘Forum’, and especially to Sergei Sokolovskiy, whose work as editor
of the ‘Forum’ and article cluster was essential to the coordination
of this issue and the Russian publications on which it is based. Our
gratitude also goes to Ralph Cleminson, the translator of all the
materials originally written in Russian, and to the issue’s copy-
editors, Alexandra Kasatkina and Daria Mishchenko.
Albert Baiburin
Catriona Kelly
Forum
FORUM FOR ANT H R O P O LO G Y A N D C U LT U R E 2019 No 15 10
Participants in Forum 38:

Body and Technology:
Elena Gudova (National Research University Higher School

of Economics, Moscow, Russia)
Asya Karaseva (European University at St Petersburg, St Petersburg /
Tyumen State University, Tyumen, Russia)
Magdalena Kozhevnikova (Institute of Philosophy, Russian Academy
of Sciences, Moscow, Russia)
Victor Krutkin (Udmurt State University, Izhevsk, Russia)
Aleksandra Kurlenkova (N. N. Miklukho-Maklai Institute
of Ethnology and Anthropology, Russian Academy of Sciences,
Moscow, Russia)
Anna Malyar (Novokuznetsk Branch Kemerovo State University,
Novokuznetsk, Russia)
Dmitriy Mikhel (Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy
and Public Administration, Moscow, Russia)
Igor Morozov (N. N. Miklukho-Maklai Institute of Ethnology
and Anthropology, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia)
Michele Rivkin-Fish (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA)
Irina Sirotkina (S. I. Vavilov Institute for the History of Science
and Technology, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia)
Elena Sokolova (N. N. Miklukho-Maklai Institute of Ethnology
Sergei Sokolovskiy (N. N. Miklukho-Maklai Institute of Ethnology
Liliia Zemnukhova (European University at St Petersburg,
11 F orum
Forum 38: Body and Technology

The issues of techniques and the body, corporeality and technology — whether in interaction with each other or treated
as separate fields — have preoccupied scholars back to the origins of anthropology as a discipline. But bodies and
techniques are less often addressed together. The aim of this issue of ‘Forum’ is to stimulate among anthropologists and
cultural historians a discussion about precisely this ‘knowledge gap’, and to foster critiques of the interrelationship
of corporeal and technological realities, including such areas as the mechanics of technology and its instrumentalisation
of the body. This might include topics such as robotisation and ‘cyborgisation’, the expansion of human capacities with
the aid of new technologies, the competition between human intelligence and IT, the technological dimensions of
biopolitics and biopower, new cognitive techniques such as neurohacking, and the emergence of transhuman studies.
Keywords: new technologies, techniques, body, corporeality, anthropology.
EDITORS’ QUESTIONS
The issues of techniques and the body,
corporeality and technology — whether
interacting together in some way, or as separate
research fields — have preoccupied scholars
back to the origins of anthropology as a dis
cipline. But bodies and techniques are less often
addressed together (as in the classical discussions
of the concept of ‘bodily techniques’ to be found
in the work of Marcel Mauss and André Leroi-
Gourhan). So what is the reason for the con
centrated attention to this topic in contemporary
anthropology? And in what ways is the dis
cussion developing?
Until recently, medical anthropology, with its
focus on the cultural construction of health
management and illness, maintained a largely
separate existence from the anthropology of
bodily techniques and technologies, and it was
only radical changes in contemporary bio
medical practices that brought about the shared
interest of those working in the different
subdisciplines in striving for some kind
of synthesis of the different disciplines. Along
side this comes the fact that our bodies have for
long been imbricated in the functioning
of sophisticated systems of techniques that
ensure the survival of individuals and humanity
generally. However, recently the pace of develop
ment of technological culture has begun
substantially to overtake analysis of this process
by the practitioners of the humanities and social
sciences, anthropologists included. In turn,
the gap between the pace of development of knowledge and
of technoreality is not only intellectually regrettable but may prove
catastrophic.
Among the aims of the current ‘Forum’ is to stimulate discussion
among anthropologists and cultural historians of precisely this
‘knowledge gap’ and to foster critiques of the interrelationship
of corporeal and techological realities, including such areas as the
mechanics of technology and its instrumentalisation of the body.
This might include topics such as robotisation and cyberisation, the
expansion of human capacities with the aid of new technologies, the
competition between human intelligence and IT, the technological
dimensions of biopolitics and biopower, new cognitive techniques
such as neurohacking, and the emergence of transhuman studies.
We accordingly invite participants in the ‘Forum’ to address the
following questions:
What is the role of anthropology in the discussion of contemporary
1 technologies and the impact of these on the human body? What is the
relationship between anthropology and other disciplines in this area?
What are, in your view, the most promising approaches to the study
2 of the body? Which most deserve discussion and implementation?
Which new problems and questions are raised for scholarly analysis
3 (particularly in fields such as medical anthropology and the
anthropology of consciousness) by new developments in the fields
of biotechnology and the cognitive sciences?
How will the development of new technologies impact upon the future
4 of anthropology and / or the humanities and social sciences generally?
13 F orum
Body and Technology
ELENA GUDOVA
‘It’s Not an Easy Thing to Meet
Your Maker’: The Boundary
between the Human and the Non-Human
in Interactions with Robots
I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.

Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the
Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost
in time like tears in rain. Time to die.
Blade Runner (1982)
In this monologue Roy Batty, the main anta
gonist and the leader of a group of fugitive
replicants, re-lives moments from his life shortly
before his death. He has just saved Rick Deckard,
even though he was trying to kill him, thus
demonstrating the slogan of the company that
made him, ‘more human than human’. This is
not the first time that science fiction, both in
cinema and literature, has reacted more sen
sitively, and far more eloquently, to questions
Elena Gudova that have been occupying science during the
National Research University same period. And, what is far from insignificant,
Higher School of Economics
Moscow, Russia science fiction has a better chance of bringing
lena.a.gudova@gmail.com this agenda to the wider public.1, 2 Many examples
1
E.g. an example of science fiction in the popular cinema has shown that from the 1970s to the present
day the most important topics have been consciousness, identity, relationships (with humans), privacy
and surveillance (in the Foucauldian sense), and also moral action [El Mesbahi 2015].
2
Even though the data of the informational analytical review Public Opinion Regarding the Development
of Science and Technology in Russia [Obshchestvennoe mnenie... 2017] indicate a slow but steady growth
in interest in science on the part of the Russian population.
over the past five to seven years1 deal not only with the progress
of technology and artificial intelligence, but also with the nature
of humanity and the interaction between the human and the non-
human (the cyborg, the android, the robot) and its consequences.
This last has only recently become institutionalised as a distinct
scholarly discipline of human-robot interaction (HRI) studying the
particular features of communication between human beings and
robots, and has certain ethical concepts about how this com
munication should be safe and friendly on both sides. Besides their
practical implications, these aspects have profound philosophical
roots.
In both Philip K. Dick’s original anti-utopia and Ridley Scott’s
cinematic adaptation of it, the image of the future is the same: in
a post-apocalyptic world, humanity has created genetically modified
replicants who are visually indistinguishable from people (they can
only be identified by means of the Voight-Kampff empathy test) and
whom it uses for work in extra-terrestrial colonies. The replicants,
in fact, are in the position of robot-servants with a determinate level
of consciousness and intellect, and some of them have real people’s
memories implanted. All replicants have a limited ‘service period’,
after which they are ‘retired’. The key question for the whole story
is whether humans can be distinguished from non-humans, and
how. But there is another important question: whether such attempts
to distinguish have any point to begin with.
The growing complexity of techno-reality reveals the mismatch
between our perceptions and our attitude to cyborgs. Both ethical
and ontological distinctions are important here. Starting with the
unattractive picture of Blade Runner, it seems useful to examine HRI
from the position of the ontological turn in anthropology. If we
follow the types of boundary between human and animal, organism
and mechanism, and the physical and non-physical proposed by
Donna Haraway [Haraway 1991], the distinction between human
and robot ceases to be so clear-cut and entrains a whole series
of intermediate categories.
I propose to examine their interconnection and the positions
of anthropocentrism, perspectivalism and perspectivism relating to
the question of human rights, on the basis of the material of
observations made during the Thirty Years before Noon Laboratory,
which took place in Moscow on 25–6 March and 1–2 April 2017.
The ludic frame of the Laboratory, culminating in an ‘Agora’ on the
recognition or non-recognition of the rights of a non-human being,

1
Such as Black Mirror (2011–), Her (2013), Transcendence (2014), Ex Machina (2014), Chappie (2015),
Westworld (2016–), Ghost in the Shell (2017), Blade Runner 2049 (2017) and others.
15 F orum
was not only remarkably illustrative of the multiplicity of nature and

Body and Technology
culture, but also demonstrated the significance of the link between

new (enfranchised) ontologies and the new ethics.
On boundaries
Anthropology has always been troubled by the boundaries of the
human, and this has remained a central question for it, posing the
problem of the relationship between the human and the ‘pre-human’
(animal or ‘savage’), and later between the human and the post-
human [Sokolovskiy 2013: 37]. The development of science and
technology makes the drawing of this boundary ever more
complicated, and also frequently equates transhumanism with
posthumanism, which is not altogether correct: transhumanism
supposes a technological (and biological) enhancement of the human
being (assuming a hierarchy in development), whereas posthumanism
is not exclusively focused on technology, and implies no hierarchies.
On the contrary, posthumanism rejects the boundary between
technology and the self and proposes relational and multi-layered
ways of thinking [Ferrando 2013: 30–2].
This posthumanist approach first obtained a relatively wide
acceptance after Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto. Criticising
gender inequality, modern feminist theory, corporality and dualism
in philosophy and social theory, Haraway proposes four inter
pretations of the cyborg concept: a cybernetic organism, a hybrid
of machine and organism, a creature of lived social reality and
a creature of fiction [Haraway 1991]. One of the ideas most im
portant for her is that in fact the border of the cyborg is only an
optical illusion (as we have all been cyborgs for a long time), and
that any attempt to define it is a political act that will lead to border
war.
A good example of this ‘border war’ is the question of enhancement,
already alluded to in the subject field of bioethics. Modern medicine
draws no clear distinction between enhancement and therapy, and
this gives rise to ethical questions, for example the use of prostheses
or performance-enhancing drugs in sport [Bostrom, Roache 2008:
125–8]. In order to speak of enhancement, one first has to determine
what is normal in the organism’s capacities, and this shifts the
‘border discussion to an entirely different level [Soper 1999; Hogle
2005; Lapum et al. 2012]. In this sense bioethics is by its very nature
more a normative and prescriptive than a descriptive science, and
not even by taking into account the assumptions of cultural
relativism can one solve the problem of the stigmatisation of ‘hybrid
organisms’ [Kozhevnikova 2013].
Returning to the Manifesto, however, we should note that it is
precisely the cyborg that is capable of blurring the borders. Haraway
identifies three of them: between human and animal, organism and

mechanism and physical and non-physical [Haraway 2013: 150–2].
The first dichotomy concerns questions of anthropomorphism and
animism.1 Discussing the sociality of robots, Kathleen Richardson
has introduced the term ‘technological animism’ to describe
personhood in the interrelations between the human being and the
humanoid robot [Richardson 2016]. If a robot is programmed to
react on the basis of its perception of its environment, is capable
of action, and even has personhood bestowed upon it, how much
‘humanity’ needs to be added before it appears to us as something
(or someone) else? Or, to put it another way, how much (and what)
can we change in a human being before (s)he ceases to be human?
In a certain sense this is a new reading of the old philosophical
problem of identity, the paradox of Theseus’s ship.2
K. A. Cerulo defines five criteria by which the human is to be
distinguished from the non-human in the social theory of human
interaction:
1. Consciousness — the capacity to be aware of one’s actions and
converse about them.3
2. Intention — the capacity to direct one’s actions in such a way as
to influence a situation and maximise the achievement of goals.
3. Self-identification — the reflection that leads to an awareness
of one’s own identity.
4. Orientation towards the Other — the capacity to take on a role,
to assess the Other’s point of view (in some cases the interaction is
reduced to an internal discussion with oneself).
5. Communication via language – the development of a common
system of concepts and conceptual frameworks (norms, values)
within the framework of interaction by means of language, and also
signs, gestures and other symbolic forms [Cerulo 2009: 4–6].
For some theoretical traditions, such as interactionism and actor-
network theory (ANT), it is more the capacity for action that is
important than whether the subject is a human being. In ANT all
the criteria of interaction enumerated above are inseparable from
relations within the network, which makes the nature of subjectivity
irrelevant [Cerulo 2009: 5]. The shift of focus from nature to action

1
And likewise the relationship between object and subject, nature and culture and other distinctions
that fall within the field of interest of object-oriented ontology or are analysed in the works of Philippe
Descola.

2
See, for example, the problem of identity over time in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: <https://
plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-time/>.

3
Practically in Weber’s sense of ‘social action’, from the point of view of which even some human beings
(those who are asleep, in a coma or in a state of exhaustion) are excluded from social interaction.
17 F orum
and relation connects the boundary between human and animal

Body and Technology
with that between organism and mechanism.1

The distinction between an organism and a mechanism is based on
the idea that machines are not autonomous, self-moving and self-
designing. But, to the extent that machines acquire the capacity to
move, we begin to wonder how far they are ‘alive’. Another ‘living’
subject is connected with sociality. Various non-human beings may
evoke emotional reactions in people and even the fantasy
of reciprocity. The simplest examples of this are the once-popular
Tamagotchi or Furby toys, which imitate the behaviour of a rational
being, react to human presence, and make people want to look after
them. Sherry Turkle has called such objects ‘relational artefacts’,
made in such a way as to create the illusion of understanding and
empathy in interaction with human beings [Turkle 2012]. In this
situation projection (of thoughts and feelings) onto the object turns
into engagement with the subject. Social robots are also relational
artefacts that create the illusion of presence and understanding
[Turkle 2007: 505–7]. This sort of sociality not only vivifies the
objects, but humanises them as well.
At the same time, situations in which it is impossible to determine
clearly whether we are faced with something living or lifeless (not
necessarily only mechanical) produce an ‘uncanny valley’ effect
[Wood 2002]. The more something resembles a human being
externally, the more we are inclined to expect ‘human’ behaviour.
Where there is a dissonance between external appearance and
behaviour (for example, with zombies, corpses, Bunraku puppets,
and also with anthropomorphic robots and cyborgs), we will
experience antipathy and fear, and try to avoid any interaction, let
alone seek empathy or understanding [Mori, MacDorman, Kageki
2012; Richardson 2016].
In a series of experiments, Gray and Wegner have discovered that
the ‘uncanny’ effect is connected with robots’ incapacity for acquiring
sensory experience or feeling anything, and that it is experience (and
not consciousness) that constitutes the fundamental difference
between humans and machines. As they conclude, not without irony,
‘we are happy to have robots that do things, but not feel things’ [Gray,
Wegner 2012: 129]. Replicants were very useful for carrying out tasks,
but they had to fight for the right to feel and experience.
Haraway connects the distinction between the physical and non-
physical with miniaturisation and the consequent increase in the
1
Even office documents may have a conditional agency and act as mediators (see, for example: [Hull
2003]), but robots and cyborgs are in their actions nevertheless capable of a somewhat more evident
influence on the course of events.
potential and capacities of machines.1 The machines’ seeming

invisibility, their practical ‘non-physicality’, may be connected with
their consciousness. If an individual capable of rational behaviour
interacts with an object which for one reason or another has no
consciousness, the thinking actor (i.e. the individual) ‘does the mind’
of the Other and carries out a symbolic ‘ventriloquism’ [Owens 2007:
577]. ‘Doing the mind’ of an Other is not the same thing as taking
on its role, but rather the basic condition for a relationship with
a (physical or non-physical) Other.
The cyborg’s capacity for crossing boundaries means that it cannot
be classified simply: it is both human and non-human, mechanical
and non-mechanical, real and unreal [Richardson 2016: 123]. It is
how we perceive this capacity and act in relation to it, or, more
broadly, how we perceive the type of relationship in which the cyborg
is included, that defines it as an entity. If it is no longer Theseus’s
ship, if cyborgs really are different from people (and we know where
the boundary actually is), ought we to recognise their identity and
perception? How can and should we act in this case? We are of
course limited by the binary divisions mentioned above, since they
may produce a deceptive impression of oppositions (and of
a hierarchy that proceeds from them), but, as Strathern remarks, it
is distinctions that keeps terms from dissipating [Strathern 2011a].
HRI and cyborg ontologies

When the human / animal, organism / mechanism and physical /
non-physical boundaries break down, the focus is upon relationships.2
The relational approach assumes that relations are inseparable from
the actors involved in them. However, the variety of possible forms
of relationship need not be reduced to complete relativism or exclude
comparison. Strathern asserts that here it would be more correct
and more useful to speak of analogies, since the actors exist in
parallel positions and this allows the consequences of their actions
to be correlated [Strathern 2011b]. The question of identity becomes
a question of relationship: when we change the set of relations, we
redefine the social role / status / position of the subject. In this sense
Roy Batty was a human being, since his memories and experience
created a network of human relations. There is, however, another
question: whether the authenticity of these memories should
influence his humanity (since in a replicant they are implanted).

1
For example: ‘People are nowhere near so fluid, being both material and opaque. Cyborgs are ether,
quintessence’ [Haraway 1991: 153].

2
Among the attempts to make theoretical sense of the complex and multi-layered interconnection of new
technologies, enhanced biological nature and consciousness, without having recourse to relationships,
we may list techno-synchronicity [Cerulo, Ruane 1997; Cerulo 2009], biosociality [Rabinow 1992], the
cognisphere [Hayles 2006; 2008], sociotechnical system [Pfaffenberger 1992], etc.
19 F orum
Non-hierarchical alliances and symbiotic attachments give rise to

Body and Technology
a new type of relations, ‘becoming’, which transforms types into

events and objects into actions [Kirksey, Helmreich 2010: 546]. The
framework of ‘becoming’ not only ‘gives voice, agency and
subjectivity’ to the Other (any non-human being), visible in its
differences, but also makes us radically rethink these categories
of our analysis as they pertain to all beings [Ibid.: 563].
Voice, agency and subjectivity are connected by questions
of perspective and representation, which is important when
discussing cyborgs and robots. Otherness is nothing unexpected or
questionable for anthropology, but there is a problem when we agree
with a plurality of perspectives, which assumes a choice, and,
consequently, antagonism. In this sense the divergence between
perspectivalism and perspectivism is an important milestone in the
development of the ‘ontological turn’ arising from the discussion
around de Castro’s Cannibal Metaphysics. The first of these proposes
the singularity of the world and a plurality of viewpoints, and the
second a plurality of worlds and the possibility of taking only one
point of view [Kapferer 2011; Strathern 2011a; Paleček, Risjord
2013].
At present HRI is concentrating on artificial intelligence and social
robotics, but questions of the perception and behaviour of robots
are also being examined [Capurro, Nagenborg 2009; Gunkel 2012;
de Graaf 2016]. The capacity of mechanisms to take ethical decisions
in complex situations has already passed from the subject of
philosophical discussions (or at least Asimov’s ‘three laws of robotics’)
into the category of practical tasks.1 However, both machine ethics
(which deals with the moral behaviour of agents with artificial
intelligence) and robot ethics (which is connected with the moral
behaviour of people in relation to them) are founded on the expected
anthropocentrism and the distinction between the human and the
non-human. It is obvious that progress in the field of machine
learning and programming will permit the taking of decisions to be
entrusted, perhaps even delegated, to cyborgs and robots. But where
ethics is concerned this raises a mass of questions: ought we to allow
non-human subjects the possibility of taking ethical decisions? How
can we supervise them? Should we do so? Who will be responsible
for the decisions taken? But the main question is a much more
complex one: should our own categories of morality extend and
apply to cyborgs at all?
1
This, for example, concerns driverless cars, accidents involving which evoke an extensive response,
from discussions about the safety and reliability of this form of transport to the installation
of a deontological / utilitarian ethical module. See, for example: <https://www.scientificamerican.
com/article/what-the-first-driverless-car-fatality-means-for-self-driving-tech/>, <https://www.
technologyreview.com/s/542626/why-self-driving-cars-must-be-programmed-to-kill/>.
Eduardo Kohn has proposed that ‘[a]ll good anthropology has always
been ontological in that it opens us to other kinds of realities. And
it has also always been political’ [Kohn 2014]. An antagonism
between the existing perspectives of the human and non-human
does not presuppose equality, and therefore replicants, even if they
are ‘more human than human’, need to be got rid of.
The political aspect of HRI is further complicated by the distinction
between cyborgs or robots and the status of artificial intelligence.
Whom can we recognise as the Other? It seems obvious that even
a very high-tech office printer is different from Neil Harbisson, who
had a special antenna implanted in his skull to overcome his colour-
blindness (because of congenital achromatopsia he could only see
in shades of grey), not least because of the importance of their
outward appearance1 [Coeckelbergh 2011: 198]. But how different
should robots and cyborgs be for us to recognise them as subjects
with their own ontologies, and not as objects in our own perspective?
I have demonstrated a few thoughts and an empirical illustration on
the basis of an analysis of material from the Thirty Years before
Noon Laboratory.2
From cyborg ontologies to cyborg rights

The Thirty Years before Noon Laboratory’s object was ‘to develop
humanitarian initiatives directed towards work with new
technologies with the aim of forming the desired image of the
future’.3 The ‘Noon Universe’ invented by the Strugatsky brothers
was used as a framework for the game: the participants were being
prepared for a journey to the planet Saraksh4 thirty years before the
events described in the novel Prisoners of Power, so that, as
‘progressors’,5 they should determine the desired future on Saraksh
and the steps to be taken to achieve it. Over four days the
participants worked out the theoretical concepts and ideas, thought
out the stages of technological development for the next five, ten
and twenty years, engaged in the search for the essential basic values
in the newly built world, and modelled the situation of contact with
the planet’s inhabitants. Although any of the Laboratory’s events
could be of interest to anthropology, I shall concentrate on the
development of general ‘progressor’ values based on Buckminster
1
But here we should also remember the ‘uncanny valley’.
2
<http://futuref.org/lab12>.
3
Quoted from the description on the project’s official website.
4
The setting for the events of the novel Prisoners of Power. The Laboratory premise was that in all areas
of life the situation on the planet was identical with the current situation on Earth, i.e. in practice
Saraksh was a projection of it.
5
Representatives of developed races engaged in the technological and social development of civilisations
that are at an earlier stage.
21 F orum
Fuller’s ‘World Game’1 and Georgy Shchedrovitsky’s organisation

Body and Technology
activity games.2
The game itself was developed by the team of organisers, but, besides,
it has quite complicated rules, so I shall omit any detailed description
of the subject and just give the character of the design. Nearly forty
players3 in teams of three had, over several rounds, to solve various
problems: first to form a world government and define its powers,
and then to model how this government would cope with crisis
points in the life of the planet’s inhabitants (for example, the
explosive growth of nanotechnology or artificial intelligence).
How successfully each problem was solved depended on the values
affirmed by the world government. How, for example, should
humanity react to its first contact with an extra-terrestrial civi
lisation — by showing trust, reflection and attention, or mistrust,
alienation and aggression? The teams offered their sets of three values
for the solution of each successive problem, and their influence on
the final decision might have a different force (from weak to strong)
and effect (good, bad or indifferent). For each new problem the
masters changed the composition of the teams.
In the final round, after passing through all the crisis points, the
participants were invited to assemble in the ‘Agora’ and discuss the
final question: should the non-human be accorded human rights?
a ‘Being’ (as the organisers called him) addressed the participants
with Andrew’s speech from the film Bicentennial Man, asking the
inhabitants of the planet to grant him human rights, so that he (the
Being self-identified as masculine) could marry his beloved.
The participants had to give a single decision as the outcome
of a general discussion, and for further discussion three organisers,
who had prepared for the round in advance, offered possible
decisions:4
1. To agree, and recognise the Being as equal to a human being, and
with equal rights.
1
<https://www.bfi.org/about-fuller/big-ideas/world-game>.
2
It should be noted that the description and interpretation are based on participant observation and
my role as a participant, which introduces certain specific features. There was no original intention
to conduct observation, so the following thoughts might be better called reflection or (at the very
least) autoethnography. However, as observation should, it gives a much fuller idea of the dynamics
of the relations between participants, the game setting and activity of the masters, and communication
within and between teams.
3
They were participants in the Laboratory, quite diverse in both in their socio-demographic character
and in their interests. In the game, the teams were supposed to fulfil their tasks and compete with
the other teams for the opportunity to influence collective decisions and the actions of the world
government.
4
These are certainly hyperbolic and schematic. However, as the organisers themselves said, this was
a deliberate experiment, to give the participants the freedom to accept what had been offered or to
work out any other variant.
2. To remain neutral and require further investigations (how far the

Being resembles a human, how much he loves his intended, and
so on).
3. To refuse the request and banish the Being.
The ‘Agora’ began with three simultaneous discussions: the
organisers, acting as leaders, each tried to win the players over to
his / her side, while the players were free to move about and take
part in any of the discussions. The ‘refuse’ group discussed the
existential risks and malevolence of artificial intelligence, and the
loss of humanity and exclusivity. The ‘neutrals’ argued about
subjectivity and the insufficiency of knowledge for such an important
decision. The ‘accept’ group was touched by the Being’s emotional
address and declared that since he was capable of feeling and pro-
social, he should be recognised as equal to human beings (which
involves the organism / mechanism boundary discussed above).
Since the ‘neutral’ and ‘accept’ groups had attracted an equal number
of participants, the ‘Agora’ was extended for a second round. Here
the most important transition was made: a new group formed to
declare that the very concept of ‘human rights’ was outdated and did
not reflect present realities. We should instead speak of the ‘rights
of living beings’. (This will now be referred to as the RLB group.)
At the same time the ‘accept’ group divided into two sub-groups:
one continued to support recognising the Being’s humanity and
consequent rights (the H group), while the other asserted that
acknowledging someone’s other nature was not equivalent to
granting equal rights (the R group). To avoid further detailed
description of the dynamics of the game, I shall confine myself to
saying that in the end it was the RLB group that got the most votes.
The Being received rights of living beings, but it was not said with
any clarity whether he was now able to marry a human woman.
This is quite an illustrative example from the point of view of cyborg
ontologies. As a first step, the participants effectively confirmed that
a subject’s humanity is often constructed on our perceptions of the
subject’s ability to elicit empathy and demonstrate sociality [Turkle
2007; Cerulo 2009; Richardson 2016]. This is why the instigator
of the ‘refuse’ group hardly attracted any adherents at all, apart from
a couple of tricksters who were testing the game’s robustness.
Nevertheless, the fact that in the first part of the ‘Agora’ the votes
were divided between neutrality and acceptance shows that there
are boundaries, and that they are quite rigorous. How human did
the Being have to be to be recognised as equal to humans? And
should the players for this reason grant him equal rights with
humans? The R group was generous in its acknowledgment
of otherness, but had not moved far from anthropocentrism: the
23 F orum
Being was no different in appearance from a human being, was

Body and Technology
capable of fellow-feeling, of behaving and thinking like a human

being, so why should he not be acknowledged? This decision is also
a direct consequence of the hierarchical way of thinking: the non-
human may be equal to the human, but the political decision about
it remains with the latter.
The RLB group avoided a ‘boundary war’ over the nature of the
cyborg [Haraway 1991] and recognised all beings’ rights, stressing
that humans are not alone in this world (which has been said
amongst anthropologists for a very long time and by very many
people). The RLB group based its argument on the viability and
consciousness of living beings, taking cetaceans as its starting-point.1
There are many beings, and, therefore, many perceptions of the
world, and there should be no hierarchy amongst them, which is
similar to the ideas of perspectivalism.
The separation of rights and nature in the H and R groups in the
second round of the ‘Agora’ is in my view connected with the
difference between perspectivalism and perspectivism. An
acknowledgment of the subject is not the same as an acknowledgment
of his / her capacity to act within the framework of a particular set
of relations or to form a new one. In order to recognise another
nature and grant it equal rights, it is necessary to recognise multi
plicity [Strathern 2011a]. An acknowledgment of a multiple nature
and an affirmation of the same rights allows the human to be
distinguished from the non-human through their connection, since
it focuses on differences and not on similarities.
It is important to note that in each part of the ‘Agora’ the discussion
touched on questions of the ‘universal’ nature and ‘multiple’ culture
of humans and non-humans (on the example of the Being). This
cultivation of multiculturalism and multinaturalism [Kohn 2015]
introduces an additional theoretical complication for understanding
the Other. De Castro, of course, spoke of Native Americans, and not
of potential interaction between humans and robots. Nevertheless,
this instance does illustrate the boundaries between perspectivalism
and perspectivism and allows us to speak not only of new ontologies,
but also of new ethics.
Conclusion
I have attempted to ask the question whether, and how, one can
draw a line between the human and the non-human in human-robot
interaction. The evolution of technologies and biological enhancement
is widening the gap between what we think and feel regarding
cyborgs and how we behave in relation to them. The boundaries
1
<http://www.cetaceanrights.org>.
between human and animal, organism and mechanism, and physical

and non-physical examined by Donna Haraway may become
a political question in a symbolic ‘border war’, and this war also
shows how strong the foundations of perspectivalism are at present.
Using the example of the Thirty Years before Noon Laboratory,
I have described and compared the positions of anthropocentrism,
perspectivalism and perspectivism in the question of ‘human rights’.
It may seem that the ludic setting of the Laboratory again demon
strates only a ‘human’ point of view, since after his address the Being
was not given any opportunity to influence the progress of the
discussion or the decision about his future. But, despite all the
shortcomings of its modelling, this situation is close to reality, when
other species (or those to whom the designation and status of human
is not fully accorded) are deprived of the opportunity to fight for
their rights (or nature). Roy Batty was a ‘replicant’, and even this
designation placed him from the beginning on a lower rung of the
hierarchy of species. Was he ‘more human than human’, as the
company asserted? Perhaps. But an advertising slogan is only one
more value judgment, entirely open to interpretation.
References
Bostrom N., Roache R., ‘Ethical Issues in Human Enhancement’, Ryberg J.,
Petersen T., Wolf C. (eds.), New Waves in Applied Ethics. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, pp. 120–52.
Capurro R., Nagenborg M., Ethics and Robotics. Amsterdam: IOS Press,
2009, 136 pp.
Cerulo K. A., ‘Nonhumans in Social Interaction’, Annual Review of Sociology,
2009, vol. 35, pp. 531–52.
Cerulo K. A., Ruane J. M., ‘Death Comes Alive: Technology and the Re-
Conception of Death’, Science as Culture, 1997, vol. 6, no. 3,
pp. 444–66.
Coeckelbergh M., ‘Humans, Animals, and Robots: a Phenomenological
Approach to Human-Robot Relations’, International Journal
of Social Robotics, 2011, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 197–204.
de Graaf M. M., ‘An Ethical Evaluation of Human-Robot Relationships’,
International Journal of Social Robotics, 2016, vol. 8, no. 4, pp. 589–98.
El Mesbahi M., ‘Human-Robot Interaction Ethics in Sci-Fi Movies: Ethics
Are Not “There”, We Are the Ethics!’, Marcus A. (ed.), Design, User
Experience, and Usability: Design Discourse. DUXU 2015. Lecture
Notes in Computer Science. Cham: Springer, 2015, pp. 590–8.
Ferrando F., ‘Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Antihumanism, Meta
humanism, and New Materialisms’, Existenz, 2013, vol. 8, no. 2,
pp. 26–32.
Gray K., Wegner D. M., ‘Feeling Robots and Human Zombies: Mind
Perception and the Uncanny Valley’, Cognition, 2012, vol. 125, no. 1,
pp. 125–30.
25 F orum
Gunkel D. J., The Machine Question: Critical Perspectives on AI, Robots,
Body and Technology
and Ethics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012, 272 pp.

Haraway D., ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-
Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, Haraway D., Simians,
Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York:
Routledge, 1991, pp. 149–81.
Haraway D., Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature,
2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2013, 421 pp.
Hayles N. K., ‘Unfinished Work from Cyborg to Cognisphere’, Theory,
Culture and Society, 2006, vol. 23, no. 7–8, pp. 159–66.
Hayles N. K., How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics,
Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2008, 350 pp.
Hogle L. F., ‘Enhancement Technologies and the Body’, Annual Review
of Anthropology, 2005, vol. 34, pp. 695–716.
Hull M. S., ‘The File: Agency, Authority, and Autography in an Islamabad
Bureaucracy’, Language and Communication, 2003, vol. 23, no. 3–4,
pp. 287–314.
Kapferer B., ‘Strathern’s New Comparative Anthropology: Thoughts from
Hagen and Zambia’, Common Knowledge, 2011, vol. 17, no. 1,
pp. 104–10.
Kirksey S., Helmreich S., ‘The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography’,
Cultural Anthropology, 2010, vol. 25, no. 4, pp. 545–76.
Kohn E., ‘What an Ontological Anthropology Might Mean’, Fieldsight —
Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology Online, 2014,
vol. 13. <https://culanth.org/fieldsights/463-what-an-ontological-
anthropology-might-mean>.
Kohn E., ‘Anthropology of Ontologies’, Annual Review of Anthropology,
2015, vol. 44, pp. 311–27.
Kozhevnikova M., ‘Klonirovanie lyudey i problemy statusa klona’ [The
Cloning of People and the Problem of the Clone’s Status], Etno
graficeskoe Obozrenie, 2013, no. 3, pp. 95–101. (In Russian).
Lapum J., Fredericks S., Beanlands H., McCay E., Schwind J., Romaniuk D.,
‘A Cyborg Ontology in Health Care: Traversing into the Liminal
Space between Technology and Person-centred Practice’, Nursing
Philosophy, 2012, vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 276–88.
Mori M., MacDorman K. F., Kageki N., ‘The Uncanny Valley [From the
Field]’, IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine, 2012, vol. 19,
no. 2, pp. 98–100.
Obshchestvennoe mnenie o razvitii nauki i tekhnologii v Rossii (Infor
matsionno-analiticheskiy material) [Public Opinion Regarding the
Development of Science and Technology in Russia (Information
and Analysis)]. Moscow: Institute for Statistical Studies and
Economics of Knowledge, National Research University Higher
School of Economics, 2017, 12 pp. (In Russian).
Owens E., ‘Nonbiologic Objects as Actors’, Symbolic Interaction, 2007,
vol. 30, no. 4, pp. 567–84.
Paleček M., Risjord M., ‘Relativism and the Ontological Turn within
Anthropology’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 2013, vol. 43, no. 1,
pp. 3–23.
Pfaffenberger B., ‘Social Anthropology of Technology’, Annual Review
Rabinow P., ‘Artificiality and Enlightenment: From Sociobiology to
Biosociality’, Crary J., Kwinter S. (eds.), Incorporations. New York:
Zone Books, 1992, pp. 234–52.
Richardson K., ‘Technological Animism: The Uncanny Personhood
of Humanoid Machines’, Social Analysis, 2016, vol. 60, no. 1,
pp. 110–28.
Sokolovskiy S. V., ‘O granitsakh cheloveka i chelovecheskogo: bioetika,
postgumanizm i novye tekhnologii’ [On the Boundaries of Humans
and the Human: Bioethics, Posthumanism and New Technologies],
Etnograficeskoe Obozrenie, 2013, no. 3, pp. 37–8. (In Russian).
Soper K., ‘Of OncoMice and Female / Men: Donna Haraway on Cyborg
Ontology’, Capitalism Nature Socialism, 1999, vol. 10, no. 3,
pp. 73–80.
Strathern M., ‘Binary License’, Common Knowledge, 2011a, vol. 17, no. 1,
pp. 87–103.
Strathern M., ‘What Politics?’, Common Knowledge, 2011b, vol. 17, no. 1,
pp. 123–7.
Turkle S., ‘Authenticity in the Age of Digital Companions’, Interaction
Studies, 2007, vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 501–17.
Turkle S., Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less
from Each Other. New York: Basic Books, 2012, 360 pp.
Wood G., Living Dolls: a Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life.
London: Faber and Faber, 2002, 278 pp.
ASYA KARASEVA
When I received the invitation to take part first
in the thematic selection, and then in the
discussion on the topic announced, I was at
a loss. My participation in the relevant section
of the 2017 Congress of Anthropologists and
Ethnologists had been almost by accident: it was
determined by my field material, to which the
focus on the body was highly suited, even
though from the point of view of the subject
of my dissertation it was subsidiary. I digested
Asya Karaseva
European University
a certain amount of the literature, but even
at St Petersburg so did not feel myself sufficiently competent
St Petersburg, Russia / to answer the questions as an expert. The
Tyumen State University
Tyumen, Russia explanation for this is to be found not only in
akarasyova@eu.spb.ru the author’s insurmountable perfectionism
27 F orum
or false modesty, but in the very status of the body and corporeality
Body and Technology
in anthropology: until the 1990s it hardly appeared as an independent

research subject, but it had served as a lens for analysing other topics
almost since the discipline had come into being. (Sociologists,
however, had even worse luck: there the body was absent even as
a means of analysis [Bendelow, Williams 2002: 10].) This special
status of corporeality — ‘an absent presence’ — is often stressed in
the work of social scientists of either research area [Martin 1992;
Lock 1993; Bendelow, Williams 2002; Shilling 2012].
What is the body? The answer to this question in general determines
the methodology, at least within the limits of a particular article.
Collections that contain different approaches to the body and
corporeality [Featherstone, Hepworth, Turner 1991; Csordas 1994;
Kabakova, Kont 2005; Shilling 2012] are eclectic, which underlines
the diversity of possible meanings of ‘the body’.
The multiplicity of meanings of ‘the body’ allows great freedom to
researchers in choosing both their topics and the material for
analysis, allowing them to include in their research not only the
image of the body as a whole or of particular parts of it, but also
emotions, affects and sensory perceptions. Researchers interested
in the topic regard this property of ‘the body’ as something of an
advantage [Lock 1993], and some authors deliberately practise
eclecticism as a method [Wolputte 2004].
These general remarks concern the approach of the social sciences
in general. To identify the specifics of the anthropology of the body
(in the broad sense), it is interesting to compare it with its sister
discipline, the sociology of the body. Sociologists are much more
ready than anthropologists to publish collections of articles on the
topic, with the aim (in my opinion, unsuccessfully) of systematising
the possible approaches to the body: half of the collections mentioned
above are on the sociology of the body, and one of them, The Body
and Social Theory, edited by Chris Shilling [Shilling 2012] has already
gone through three editions and seven printings. Thematically,
sociologists more often analyse the realisation of social control over
the body — corporal pedagogy, including PE lessons and sports
practice, the body through the prism of consumption. Norbert Elias,
Michel Foucault, and Pierre Bourdieu are popular theorists.
(It should be noticed that Elias’s approach makes the inclusion
of emotions in research on the body much less problematical for
sociologists than it is for anthropologists.)
By contrast, anthropologists for the most part publish surveys in the
Annual Review of Anthropology: there have been fourteen reviews1
1
Counting those which have the word ‘body’ in the title.
from 1993 to 2017 (the modal years are 2004 and 2005). The only
anthropological book that brings together various theories of the
body that I have managed to find is the anthology edited by Margaret
Lock and Judith Farquhar [Lock, Farquhar 2007], which combines
classical and contemporary texts and the structure of which well
reflects the interests and viewpoints of the discipline: colonialism,
capitalism, gender, everyday life, the production of knowledge. One
may only add the topics of the symbolic connection between the
body and society and the representational functions of the body,
which were not included in this anthology. The problems of gender
and the status of the female body are a common topic for sociologists
and anthropologists.
It is noteworthy that neither of them, however, seem to examine
the evolution of modern technologies — at least, there are no
articles on this subject either in the collections or in the surveys
of the Annual Review of Anthropology, if one does not count the
rather old survey by Linda Hogle [Hogle 2005], and even Donna
Haraway is somewhat infrequently mentioned. Articles on this
subject, as far as one can judge, are placed in specialised publications
devoted to research on science and technology or the social aspects
of medicine. Technologies prove to be a real blind spot in research
on corporeality.
In her insightful essay ‘The End of the Body?’, Emily Martin cites
Lévi-Strauss: is not an intensification of academic interest in
a subject a sign that the subject is an ‘endangered species’? The
discovery of the fragmented, incomplete body is often presented as
an achievement of the social sciences, but it can hardly be regarded
as such, if in order to see the body beyond the bounds of the body,
it must first be imagined as a whole detached from its environment.
Martin’s research shows that biological knowledge of the body is
directly connected to the technological organisation of society: in
a Fordist production society the female body was represented as
a reproductive machine, while the society of the period of late
capitalism, where, thanks to new communication technologies, time
is accelerating, space is shrinking, change is becoming constant, and
flexibility and adaptability are becoming social values, gave rise to
immunology with its concept of the organism as a whole [Martin
1992]. The imagination of the body as a whole is thus only just taking
shape for researchers, to a large extent thanks to technologies, some
new, and some to which we are well accustomed, and the significance
of which for this process remains to be revealed.
References
Bendelow G. A., Williams S. J., The Lived Body: Sociological Themes,
Embodied Issues. London; New York: Routledge, 2002, 261 pp.
29 F orum
Csordas T. J. (ed.), Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground

Body and Technology
of Culture and Self. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University

Press, 1994, 294 pp.
Featherstone M., Hepworth M., Turner B. S., The Body: Social Process and
Cultural Theory. London; Newbury Park: Sage, 1991, 408 pp.
Hogle L. F., ‘Enhancement Technologies and the Body’, Annual Review
of Anthropology, 2005, vol. 34, no. 1, pp. 695–716.
Kabakova G. I., Conte F. (eds.), Telo v russkoy kulture: Sbornik statey [The
Body in Russian Culture: A Collection of Essays]. Moscow: Novoe
literaturnoe obozrenie, 2005, 400 pp. (In Russian).
Lock M., ‘Cultivating the Body: Anthropology and Epistemologies of Bodily
Practice and Knowledge’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 1993,
vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 133–55.
Lock M., Farquhar J., Beyond the Body Proper: Reading the Anthropology
of Material Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007, 688 pp.
Martin E., ‘The End of the Body?’, American Ethnologist, 1992, vol. 19, no. 1,
pp. 121–40.
Shilling C., The Body and Social Theory, 3rd ed. Los Angeles: Sage, 2012,
313 pp.
Wolputte S. V., ‘Hang on to Your Self: of Bodies, Embodiment, and Selves’,
Annual Review of Anthropology, 2004, vol. 33, no. 1, pp. 251–69.
MAGDALENA KOZHEVNIKOVA
Posthumanism / Postanthropology:
The Value of the Biological Body
There are two tendencies in collision in the
humanities today, each of which has its own
view of the problem of human corporeality.
I have in mind posthumanism and trans
humanism. While the first is inspired by biology,
the second is rooted in the world of technology.
In spite of certain similarities (the greatest
of which is dissatisfaction with the condition
of modern man and the goal of changing his /
her status) there is a great difference between
these tendencies. The transhumanists, it seems
to me, are more conservative in their approach.
Continuing the tradition of the Enlightenment,
they aim for progress, intellectual development,
and an escape from the limitations imposed
Magdalena Kozhevnikova on us by the biological body. Posthumanism,
Institute of Philosophy, on the other hand, is effecting a real revolution
Russian Academy of Sciences
Moscow, Russia in thought about humanity and its position in
kmagdalena@yandex.ru the world: it is discarding anthropocentrism and
the idea that humanity has a privileged position over other living
beings. This tendency, which is becoming ever more widespread in
the humanities, is the one on which I would like to concentrate. Its
influence on anthropology may seem somewhat paradoxical when
the very name of the latter discipline indicates that humanity is at
the centre of its interests. Nevertheless it is worth considering
whether anthropology can study non-human subjects, such as
animals and plants, in the same way in which it sometimes studies
other cultures — looking at them from a distance, without engaging
with them in a common language (be it verbal or symbolic). Can
non-human subjects become the classic Other for postanthropology?
Posthumanism has been evolving since the 1970s. The first to use
the term was the literary theorist Ihab Hassan, who asserted that the
idea of the human being needed rethinking. All culture founded
on anthropocentrism began to be subject to revision. Moreover, it
began to be said that there could be no further development of the
humanities that did not take account of the most recent achievements
of the natural sciences. a lot of people point out that it was the
‘revolution in biology’ that gave rise to the ‘posthumanist revolution’;
since the middle of the twentieth century there have been many
discoveries, such as the molecular level of life, the structure of DNA,
and progress in genetics and neuroscience has shone a new light on
many human characteristics. Everything ‘human’, including culture,
has proved to be a product of evolution. The difference between
human beings and the rest of the living world ceased to be perceived
as a difference in quality, and became only a difference of level. This
is followed by a gradual expansion (still new and unaccustomed in
Russia) of the concept of the subject to include so-called non-human
subjects or non-human persons: animals, cyborgs, hybrids, robots
and artificial intelligence.
In this context it is no less interesting how the perception of the
human body is changing, particularly if one compares the points
of view of the transhumanists and posthumanists. The transhumanists,
who remain profoundly anthropocentric, continue the age-old
tradition with its Judaeo-Christian roots, typical of Western culture,
of thinking of the human body as a punishment, a prison, a restriction
on the development of the ‘real’ human being, who is buried deep
inside the body and who can only be freed by being released from
this burden. For the transhumanists biology is a liability and
a negative experience that needs to be overcome. The human being
of the future will be a virtual human, liberated from corporeality,
i.e. from disease, ageing and death.
The posthumanists, by contrast, see value in the biological body.
First of all, one should note the very great influence of the biological
sciences on posthumanism. Awareness of horizontal gene transfer
31 F orum
and the evolved microbiota of bodies forces us to repeat, after Donna

Body and Technology
Haraway, that ‘we have never been human’. Indeed, it is impossible

to draw a line between what is ‘human’ in our bodies and what is
not. In this way, ‘nasze jednostkowe bycie w świecie faktycznie
oznacza bycie wielogatunkową wspólnotą uczestniczącą w kluczowym
procesie nieustannej wymiany [our individual existence in the world
actually signifies existence as part of a community of multiple species
participating in a crucial process of constant exchange],’ remarks
Monika Bakke [Bakke 2015: 94]. All living organisms — bacteria
and viruses, fungi and microscopic animals — are full participants
in our life, which loses its individual character. Bakke proposes
conceptualising the human body as a ‘superorganism’, and the actual
human more as householder than as predator.
However, to these thoughts of the posthumanists about the crossover
of various life-forms we may add the new hybrid reality connected
with the development of technology. In fact, the idea of the body as
a ‘superorganism’ would have been impossible without the dis
coveries made with the help of technology. The most recent techno
logies help us to take another step forward, not only observing the
crossover between life-forms, but also creating it. I have in mind the
area of the hybridisation and chimaerisation of different organisms,
including humans. Crossing the living with the non-living, humans
with animals, robots with plants — in the twenty-first century a new
‘inter-species’ reality has emerged which, as it changes living
organisms, forces us to discard our accustomed classification
of species: transgenic animals and plants, animal chimaeras with the
organs of other species, cyborg insects, robots with isolated living
brains or growing together with plants. Such organisms are not only
being created in laboratories: hybrid organisms may be seen at bio-
art exhibitions, and transgenic products bought at supermarkets.
It is justifiable to assert that the development of biology and
biotechnology has led to the phenomenon of crossing species
boundaries, and this affects the social and philosophical sciences,
including anthropology, because human beings are also involved in
‘interspeciation’.
In my opinion, the gradual transformation of species, like the
hybridisation of human bodies, is one factor that leads us to accept
extra-species ethics. Another such factor is the increase in our
knowledge of the cognitive faculties of animals and their capacity
for both negative and positive experience, that is, an emotionally
rich life like ours with room for the anticipation of the good and the
avoidance of the bad. Animal ethics takes all this into account, but
extra-species ethics is something more than the struggle for animal
rights and thinking of them as subjects. The foundation of extra-
species ethics is non-anthropocentrism. Non-anthropocentrism
arises in turn, as we have already said, from an appreciation that the
difference between human beings and the rest of the living world is
less significant than we thought even a few decades ago. One of the
chief aspects of the commonality of all living things is the common
experience of all corporeal beings of ‘being in the world’. ‘All life is
incorporated,’ remarks Bakke. All life derives pleasure and suffers
from its corporeality. This experience has allowed us to set about
expanding ethics to include other living (i.e. corporeal) beings. If
we achieve the revolution to which the transhumanists aspire and
become virtual beings, if we discard our corporeality, then in all
probability we shall fall back into anthropocentrism, or more likely
into a new form of it, since the new bodiless human will not be the
same sort of human being. I dare say that a better understanding
of our biological bodies would allow us to expand our ethics in
a more logical and coherent manner, while the lack of a biological
body would result in ethical regression.
References
Bakke M., ‘Estetyka w działaniu pośród nie-ludzkich ciał w erze
biotechnologii’, Małecki W., Koczanowicz L. (red.), Estetyka na
żywo: pragmatyzm wobec sztuki, etyki i polityki. Kraków: Aureus,
2015, pp. 89–108.
VICTOR KRUTKIN
Human Corporeality and the Technologies

of ‘Light Writing’
1. The body in the world of artefacts
A human being experiences the effects not only
of the forces of nature, but also of factors that
(s)he himself / herself has produced. More than
a century and a half has passed since artificial
images of the photographic type were invented,
and people have been surrounded by them ever
since. Sometimes they surround people like fog
or rain, sometimes like a clinging spider’s web,
and frequently they inspire images of happiness
and clarity. The time is past when this medium
was associated with a window into the world
of ‘historic truth’, but this does not diminish
our interest in ‘light writing’, as is proved by the
Victor Krutkin multitude of scholarly conferences on the
Udmurt State University
Izhevsk, Russia subject. In 2014 a new periodical, Anthropology
krutkin1@yandex.ru and Photography, began to come out in London.
33 F orum
Questions of the connection between technology and human beings

Body and Technology
are often discussed in the context of the social sciences’ turn towards
materiality and corporeality. Daniel Miller provides a new meaning
for Hegel’s concept of ‘objectification’ [Miller 1987: 19–82]. In order
to realise and understand itself, the subject creates (alienates or
objectifies) an object and externalises it in material or ideal form.
Representations of this kind may use various vectors — visible
figurative forms, audible sonic rhythms, kinaesthetically palpable bodily
motions, impressions of taste or smell. Such an object is apprehended
or acquired by the subject, and both parties are changed in this process
of production and consumption. The dialectic of subject and object
consists in the subject’s becoming its own object and returning to itself
at another level, and this continues cyclically, as each objectification
brings about a new modification of the subject. An important aspect
of this is the particular connection of the parties: the subject is never
the subject per se, but is always defined by its relationship to the object.
a culture has no subject, neither in the image of a particular person
nor in society as a whole, because the subject should be considered as
both the creator and the creation of the culture.
The materiality of artefacts is a characteristic of objects in their effect
on each other and on human beings. People organise the world
through their artefacts, and by this very process human beings are
organised. Does society consist of people (together with their
activities, institutions and ideas) or should the objects arising in the
course of their activities also be included in the social world? And
if objects are to be allowed into the social reality, how are they to be
interpreted — as symbols of social relations (signs) or as things
endowed with independent activity? The material turn is connected
with the recognition that objects are not just signs and that not only
people are active. People organise objects, and find themselves
organised by them, and there emerges in people’s behaviour what
Miller calls ‘the humility of things’. ‘In a sense artefacts have a certain
“humility” in that they are reticent about revealing their power to
determine what is socially conceivable’ [Miller 1994: 409]. Artefacts
form a wider field than the signs of language.
Materiality is not an original characteristic of objects, historically it
is formed in objectifications. Materiality and substantiality are
identified in popular discourse, but they are not the same thing.
‘Substantiality’ is a question of the thresholds of our perceptions.
Objectification is a movement to mediate the unmediated. But in
reality people encounter not only that which bears the imprint
of media, but also that which is unmediated, that which continues
to live its own life in objects.
Materiality is a product of becoming, it is a product of the mate
rialisation of the immaterial. As a term, ‘immaterial’ is preferable
to the negative ‘non-material’. ‘The immaterial’ is not anti-

materiality, it is an expression of the presence of ‘another materiality’,
whereas the ‘non-material’ only embodies the idea of an absence
of qualities. For example, people might use the expression ‘a non-
alcoholic drink’, but in this case they are, precisely, saying what there
is not in the drink, and not saying what there is — water, sugar,
vitamins, salts, etc.
Materiality itself is many-layered, and research into the technologies
of socio-cultural objectification shows that the division of culture
into material and non-material (substantial and palpable, on the one
hand, and insubstantial and impalpable on the other) leads us up
the blind alley of dualistic oppositions. This can be avoided if we
learn to speak of the materiality of ‘non-material’ culture, discover
its origin as that of artefacts on the whole. As Marshall McLuhan
remarked, there are palpable things, ‘hardware’, such as bats and
balls, knives and forks, railways, space ships, radios and computers.
There are impalpable things, ‘sofware’, such as theories and scientific
laws, philosophical systems, forms and styles of painting, poetry,
music, etc. ‘All are equally artefacts, all equally human, all equally
susceptible to analysis,’ and we must be prepared for all our
accustomed distinctions between sciences and arts, things and ideas,
physics and metaphysics to lose their former rigour [McLuhan,
McLuhan 1988].
An art lover might be alarmed at the proposition of regarding a work
of art as an artefact, but this is not an attempt to deprecate art. On
the contrary, art wins from this approach: we can understand its
effect better.
Artefacts form the environment in which human corporeality is
shaped. The idea of ‘the body’ may take part in various discourses.
It may, for example, be a metaphor for ‘human incompleteness’,
when we are told that ‘this is only the body, there are the soul and
the spirit besides.’ It may be a metaphor for ‘human ontological
integrity’, when we are told that the multi-faceted nature of
corporeality leads people to speak of ‘the body of the spirit, the body
of the soul, and, finally, the body of the body.’ But in any case it will
be right to regard the body as the means by which nature becomes
a human being.
What role did technology play in the coming into existence of the
human being and of culture?
Researchers consider that at the root of the turn towards materiality
we find the works of the anthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan
[Ingold 1999: 411–53; Krutkin 2015: 187–99]. As a palaeontologist,
Leroi-Gourhan relied on the results of the most diverse disciplines,
from archaeology and biology to sociology and art history [Leroi-
35 F orum
Gourhan 1993]. His palaeontological perspective led him to imagine

Body and Technology
technology as the collective name for everything that works by

mediation, when the principle of circular motion is used. He believed
that the underlying principles of technology were present at the
beginning of life and evolved gradually over time; technology is
a factor in the biological dimension of humanity. Technology is older
not only than labour, but even older than humanity. The exciting
picture of the evolution of life drawn by the scholar — from fish to
computers — cannot fail to impress the reader by its scale.
The ancestors of man evolved in parallel with other mammals until
they began to walk upright, at which point there was a sudden
change. It was not cranial capacity but the vertical position and the
evolution of movement that played the decisive part in anthropo
genesis. It would be a mistake to think that the specifics of humanity
are that humans use tools and animals do not. In Leroi-Gourhan’s
opinion, the specifics of the human relation to the world are that
people can separate tools from their bodies, whereas animals’ tools
(and they are perfect in their way) are merged with their bodies
[Leroi-Gourhan 1993: 237].
The liberation of the hands from their locomotive function caused
the emergence of two important connections. The first is the pair
‘hand and tool’. The liberation of the mouth from the function
of seizing and holding prey caused the realisation of another pair,
‘face and language’. The motor functions of the hands and face are
decisive factors in the emergence of gesture, which is on the one
hand connected with material action, and on the other with language
and the aural symbol [Leroi-Gourhan 1993: 187]. The hand is not
a hand per se, it is what it does when using tools, and the capacity
for language too only exists in the process of speech.
The making of stone tools, he considers, is a bridge between the
animal world and the human world, in which tools may be separated
from the body. Gesture begins as a chain of operations with tools,
and this chain is at the same time an expression of knowledge and
ability, and here the human being’s movements and perceptions are
linked.
Gestures of this sort go beyond the task of adapting to a situation,
they are capable of creating their own situation. a tool which is
‘liberated’ from the body does not by any means become an external
prosthesis, it is connected with the body as before, but it is an
‘outpouring’ or ‘secretion’ of the anthropoid body and brain [Leroi-
Gourhan 1993: 91]. Using the idea of gesture, Leroi-Gourhan
demonstrates that tools and bodies are deeply interpenetrative. Tools
and bodies invent each other, and this is what lies at the root of the
triumph over the dualism of the substantial and the insubstantial,
the material and the immaterial.
Gesture is not a kind of language, but a part of every language. Our

speech relies on articulatory gestures. We have no grounds for
opposing the ‘language of words’ to the ‘language of gestures’.
Gestures are accompanied by a one-sided semiotic conceptualisation;
a gesture is not a sign, it is ‘le travail qui précède la constitution du
signe (du sens) dans la communication’ [italics in the original. —
V.K.] [Kristeva 1968: 50].
According to Leroi-Gourhan, the meaning of a gesture consists in
the work that it does, without reference to the meanings that the
parties to the communication have available to them, with no need
for a symbolic code or of a recipient to ‘read’ the gesture as a sign.
What is important from the palaeontological point of view is not
the opposition between gesture and speech, but the discovery of their
origin from a common root.
His thoughts on technology depended on a huge archive of de
scriptions of technical processes — forging, trimming, casting,
shaping — which at first were achieved by manpower, then by the
power of animals, air, wind, water and fire.
The invention of the wheeled cart, the plough, the windmill and the
sailing ship should be seen not only as the impulse of the human spirit,
but also as a biological evolutionary phenomenon [Leroi-Gourhan
1993: 246], as mutations of the external socio-cultural material
organism, which is a continuation of the physiological human body.
Technical contrivances, in Leroi-Gourhan’s opinion, are at the same
time tools and gestures, organised in a particular order, and this
syntax provides series of actions with both stability and flexibility
[Leroi-Gourhan 1993: 231–3].
The forces of nature and the artefacts of culture that act on
humanity — where will they lead? Leroi-Gurhan’s answer — to
placing humanity on an evolutionary scale between its wild ancestor
and a spiritualised angel — is a romantic dream. Humanity’s double
may be not an angel, but a perfect machine, an automised robot. He
wrote that ‘[t]he nightmare picture of robots pursuing human beings
in a forest of mechanical tubes will come true only to the extent that
other human beings will have regulated the robots’ automatic system’
[Leroi-Gourhan 1993: 249].
Production and language, i.e. tools and signals, albeit in an
embryonic form, are nevertheless present among our elder brethren.
But what is not present in the world of animals? They have no writing
or reading of symbols [Leroi-Gourhan 1993: 188]. He has in mind
that writing that left traces 30,000 years ago on the walls of caves;
he has many works devoted to them.
Is it true that these cave-paintings were a hunting manual, an
encyclopaedia of the animal world, exercises of ancient artists? Leroi-
37 F orum
Gourhan is inclined to think that these paintings were the graphic

Body and Technology
representations of myths. They do not in the least resemble artistic

copies of reality. They were the work of people who used these
images to study the art of sight and the art of speech, and learnt to
connect the image and the word.
Marie-José Mondzain, a key author in contemporary visual
research, thinks that it is wrong to consider images as derived from
vision. ‘We do not see the world because we have eyes’ [Mondzain
2010: 308]. Leroi-Gourhan writes about this too: ‘Two languages,
both springing from the same source, came into existence at the
two poles of the operating field — the language of hearing, which
is linked with the development of the sound-coordinating areas,
and the language of sight, which in turn is connected with the
development of the gesture-coordinating areas, the gestures being
translated into graphic symbols’ [Leroi-Gourhan 1993: 195].
Mondzain also makes an important methodological observation
for our question: ‘Leroi-Gourhan (1964–5) is no doubt the one
who has come closest to what philosophy might be able to gain
from this testimony when the expert renounces analogical fictions’
[Mondzain 2010: 312].
2. Image as artefact. From mythography to digital

representation
In Lev Manovich’s words, we need to learn to read the word
‘photography’ anew. ‘“Photographic” today is really photo-GRAPHIC,
the photo providing only an initial layer for the overall graphical mix’
[Manovich 2006].
A photographic image is an artefact, although it may seem that
figures appear by themselves on the sensitive emulsion. But the
image does not appear because we have forgotten to cover the lens.
And to set about ‘light writing’ it is not enough just to give the
camera to the cameraman, we need him / her to have a particular
vision. This is the idea of the psychologist James Gibson: besides
direct perception, people have ‘visual perception’, when people cross
from the visible world to the perceptual field [Gibson 1979].
The philosopher Ortega y Gasset also has a picturesque description
of this transition. Let us imagine that we are looking at a garden
through a window-pane. Our eyes have to get used to it. What we
want to see is the garden, that is what we focus our attention on,
and our gaze passes through the glass without stopping. Seeing the
garden and seeing the glass in the window are two incompatible
processes: the one excludes the other, and each requires a different
adjustment of our gaze. In everyday life priority and importance will
be accorded to reality, such as it is outside the window. To cross
over to visual perception (to the photographic representation, but
not only that) we have to bear in mind the glass through which we
are looking [Ortega y Gasset 1928: 17].
Onto this screen (which may be imaginary) is projected the
representation of what we see. There is an easy way of crossing over
to visual perception, and that is the simple gesture of making
a square with the fingers on the plane of the imagined frame. This
is every camera operator’s gesture.
The image is an artefact like other artefacts, it is an objectification,
the product of the mediation of the non-mediated, a materialisation
of the immaterial. These characteristics are applicable to any image.
Like other artefacts, images are a means of organising the world. It
is also true that they organise humanity from the direction
of perception. This is done by the artefacts themselves, they enter
experience as endued with a particular affordance (Gibson’s
neologism). Artefacts (things, images, symbols) in connection one
with another form the cultural landscape. The materiality of the
landscape lies in its action, its capacity for participating in the
formation of people’s identity.
The materiality of the image is connected with substantial parameters:
thick cardboard, and the frame in which the photograph is mounted.
However, the materiality of the photograph is not just a matter of the
substance of the cardboard, but in the work of the medium.
Photography works, because the materialisation of the immaterial is
realised in it when it allows something to be seen through itself. In
Elizabeth Edwards’s words, ‘photography as an artefact is not only
the scene for human action and interpretation, it is an inalienable
environment for the interpretation itself’ [Edwards 2002: 67]. Without
this sort of transparency it does not cross the horizon of the material,
and remains immanent. Sometimes this transparency is characterised
as ‘virtuality’. The concepts of the real and the virtual have their own
history, but is it right completely to deprive the virtual of the status
of the real? The opinion of W. J. Mitchell, an author who stands and
the beginning of the visual turn, is typical. He remarks that ‘The
metaphor of “virtuality” seemed a powerful one as we first struggled
to understand the implications of digital information, but it has long
outlived its usefulness. <…> It makes more sense to recognize that
invisible, intangible, electromagnetically encoded information
establishes new types of relationships among physical events occurring
in physical places’ [italics in the original. — V.K.] [Mitchell 2004: 4].
The first images, in the opinion of Vilém Flusser, functioned as
signposts in the world of myth. The mythographic system of signposts
was the platform for palaeolithic art. It served as a map for a very
long time, but with time the images lose the power to give directions,
and conceal the world to such an extent that man begins to live as
a function of the images that (s)he has created. Flusser noted that
39 F orum
then a crisis would supervene: graphic images had ceased to fulfil the
Body and Technology
function of the signposts that they were at the time of the first myths.
However, the ancient images contained within themselves the way
out of the impasse. Alphabets were composed from their graphic
components, as if from pixel elements. The invention of written
language was a means of breaking through the barrier and discovering
a new way of orientation. Phonemic speech was recorded in suitable
linear graphemes, and alphabetic writing came into being. Five
thousand years ago, in conditions of settled habitation and the
development of metalworking, the tasks of writing down the sacrifices
made to the gods, peoples’ debts and military victories acquired
relevance. Texts were invented in order to demystify images and
purge them of magic. But is not history going round in circles? Flusser
thinks that when there is an excessive number of texts, they stop
providing directions. The function of the technogenic image is to free
humanity from the necessity of linear thought, replacing historical
consciousness with a second-degree magical consciousness and
conceptual capacity with second-degree imagination. The invention
of photography, from Flusser’s point of view, is as historically
significant event as the invention of writing [Flusser 1983].
The representation of the world appears within the bounds of the
photographic frame. Framing declares the world to be visible, where
the limits of the visible direct the beholder also to the invisible. This
is what Hubert Damisch notes: ‘One forgets, in the process, that the
image the first photographers were hoping to seize, and the very
latent image which they were able to reveal and develop, were in no
sense naturally given’ [italics in the original. — V.K.] [Damisch 1978:
71]. Approaching photography as an artefact allows us to bring
together the graphic and the photographic, and removes the brusque
opposition between analogue and digital representation. The
transition from the visible to the invisible is not the capacity of all
photography, but that of ‘good’ photography. From this point of view
a good photograph is one which is imbued with a particular
transparency, which shows the invisible, which allows something to
be seen through itself.
Photography nowadays is ceasing to be regarded as an historical
document illustrating an existing historical event. In Favero’s words,
instead of being looked at as an object, a photograph should be used
as an object to be looked through. Photography is a type of passage,
a channel of connection between objects, history and people.
Photography is the inspirer of the history that may come to pass,
and not a visual representation of the history that has already been
[Favero 2017].
We do not find in photography simply the reflection of objects: here
a particular version of the world is composed of light and shade
by technological means, and a visual component of the cultural

landscape is formed. It is hard to ignore this in research on society
today. As the English anthropologist Daniel Miller bears witness,
every day there are about 350 million photographs posted on
Facebook, about fifty-five million on Instagram, about 400 million
on WhatsApp, and about 450 million on Snapchat [Miller 2015].
Photography is fragile and vulnerable in that it cannot do anything
about the frivolous haste of those photographers who do not aim
for transparency in their photographs and care nothing for the
transition from the visible to the invisible. Neither can it do anything
about the viewer’s choice of the screen of the visible field on which,
in one way or another, the viewers project the image.
3. The photographic camera.

The theatre of photographic gestures
Damisch notes that one must not imagine the black box of the
camera to be ‘neutrality’ or its settings unprejudiced [Damisch 1978:
71]. As a tool, this box is connected with human gestures. Many
researchers have written about this.
The camera, as the instrument of photography, contains within itself
the means to codify and develop the photographic gesture. The event
of the gesture evolves within the camera, and this is facilitated
by a complex mechanism of bolted joints, cogs, transmissions, guides
for the movement of the lens, shutter mechanisms, mirrors and
prisms. This is noted in Parshchikov’s observations: ‘The modern
camera is a smoothly organised miniaturised theatre, democratic in
the ancient sense, and relatively accessible;’ ‘the visual potential
of the stage equipment of the theatre almost coincides with the
working possibilities of the lens. Brightness and darkness are
regulated, mixed and quantified by a turn of the aperture stop.’
Regulating the mixture of light and darkness produces the mediation
of the unmediated, and framing produces the materialisation of the
immaterial. It was noticed long ago that a big enlargement reveals
the optical unconscious. Parshchikov writes that ‘the camera chooses
the living space for its intended hero by means of the magic ring
of the depth of field, which links the functional quantity of the
necessary light with the occupation of space. This is the collaboration
of field and focusing, their existential parameter’ [Parshchikov s.d.].
We use light as a dramatic force symbolising the distribution of good
and evil in the world.
As (s)he looks through the view-finder, the photographer waits for
the moment when the picture will look like what (s)he thinks about
it. (S)he is present in the frame, because the camera fixes his / her
decision to press the button [Berger 2013]. The photograph and his /
her viewer think in images.
41 F orum
Good photography is directing the camera and knowing how to obey

Body and Technology
its codes, not only acquiring the necessary gestures, but also
extending one’s bodily experience. People make sense of the world
not only with logic and language, but also with body and feelings.
As John Berger remarks, ‘looking brings closer’, and there is
a connection between ‘displacement and vision’; he states ironically
that there is ‘a certain parallel between the act of piloting a bike and
the act of drawing’ [Berger 2011]. The same thing can be heard in
Flusser’s words: the photo-gesture is an act of pursuit in which the
photographer and his / her camera are fused into an indivisible
function [Flusser 1983].
Technology and corporeality, in Leroi-Gourhan’s opinion, can only
be understood as a unity. Technology is both tools and gestures,
organised in a particular sequence, and this syntax bestows upon
series of actions both stability and flexibility [Leroi-Gourhan 1993:
231–3]. A gesture begins as a realisable intention, as a chain of
operations performed on the world with tools, and this chain is at
the same time an expression of knowledge and ability, where human
movement and perception are linked.
A person is involved in the process of the genesis of photographic
materiality in his / her entire corporeality, as François Laruelle
writes: ‘Before the eye, the hand, the torso are implicated in it,
perhaps it is from the most obscure and the most irreflexive depth
of the body that the photographic art departs’ [Laruelle 2011: 11].
Laruelle’s question, ‘How exactly does the photographer, through
his body, his eye, his camera, relate himself to the World?’ [Ibid.: 8]
could be extended: how can a person looking at a photograph or
screen correlate himself / herself with the world? (S)he does not do
so simply through the information received, but through the
participation in the image that (s)he experiences — when (s)he is
not acting, but acted upon. Laruelle’s ideas about non-photography
are no more an attempt to do away with what we know about
photography than non-Euclidian geometry renders Euclid’s figures
unnecessary. What is new is neither a new way of producing photo
graphs nor new ways of ‘thinking about photography’. It is a question
of a new ‘thinking with photography’.
References
Berger J., Bento’s Sketchbook. London: Verso, 2011, 167 pp.
Berger J., Understanding a Photograph, 2nd ed. London: Penguin, 2013,
219 pp.
Damisch H., ‘Five Notes for a Phenomenology of the Photographic Image’,
October, 1978, vol. 5, pp. 70–2.
Edwards E., ‘Material Beings: Objecthood and Ethnographic Photographs’,
Visual Studies, 2002, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 67–75.
Favero P., ‘“The Transparent Photograph”: Reflections on the Ontology

of Photographs in a Changing Digital Landscape’, Anthropology and
Photography, 2017, no. 7, pp. 1–16.
Flusser V., Für eine Philosophie der Fotografie. Göttingen: European
Photography, 1983, 58 SS.
Gibson J., The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Hillsdale, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1979, XIV+332 pp.
Ingold T., ‘“Tools for the Hand, Language for the Face”: An Appreciation
of Leroi-Gourhan’s Gesture and Speech’, Studies in History and
Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 1999, vol. 30, no. 4,
pp. 411–53.
Kristeva J., ‘Le geste, pratique ou communication?’, Langages, 1968, no. 10,
pp. 48–64.
Krutkin V. L., ‘Materialnost sotsiokulturnoy zhizni v antropologii Andre
Lerua-Gurana [The Materiality of Sociocultural Life in the
Anthropology of André Leroi-Gourhan]’, Zhurnal sotsiologii
i sotsialnoy antropologii, 2015, vol. 18, no. 4(81), pp. 187–99.
(In Russian).
Laruelle F., The Concept of Non-Photography. Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic;
New York: Sequence, 2011, VIII+143+VIII+143 pp.
Leroi-Gourhan A., Gesture and Speech. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993,
431 pp.
Manovich L., ‘Image Future’, 2006. <http://manovich.net/content/04-
projects/048-image-future/45_article_2006.pdf>.
McLuhan M., McLuhan E., Laws of Media: The New Science. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1988, XI+252 pp.
Miller D., Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford, UK; New York:
Basil Blackwell, 1987, VIII+240 pp.
Miller D., ‘Artefacts and the Meaning of Things’, Ingold T. (ed.), Companion
Encyclopedia of Anthropology. London; New York: Routledge, 1994,
pp. 396–419.
Miller D., ‘Photography in the Age of Snapchat’, Anthropology and
Photography, 2015, no. 1, pp. 1–17.
Mitchell W. J., Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City. Boston: MIT
Press, 2004, 259 pp.
Mondzain M.-J., ‘What Does Seeing an Image Mean?’, Journal of Visual
Culture, 2010, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 307–15.
Ortega y Gasset J., La deshumanización del arte; Ideas sobre la novella,
2nd ed. Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1928, 161 pp.
Parshchikov A. M., ‘Snimayu ne ya, snimaet kamera’, s.d. <http://
parshchikov.ru/nulevaya-stepen-morali/snimayu-ne-ya-snimaet-
kamera>. (In Russian).
43 F orum
ALEKSANDRA KURLENKOVA
Body and Technology
I shall begin by saying that I do not think it

1 productive to separate the subject, methods and
theoretical approaches of anthropology and
other disciplines. Good articles in the social
sciences solve specific theoretical problems
and / or change the social agenda or the language
in which some phenomenon is spoken of. To
this end the author may use those resources and
rely on those authors that are relevant to his /
her aims, and even go beyond the boundaries
of the academic genre. As an example one might
take the way in which Donna Haraway describes
the figure of a cyborg as ‘a creature of social
reality as well as a creature of fiction’ [Haraway
1991: 149]. She uses for her own ends the ideas
of feminists and critical theorists, science and
technology scholars, anthropologists, philo
sophers and even the authors of feminist science
fiction, which allow her to reveal the figure
of the cyborg from different angles. (She
borrows the critique of writing and literacy as
the basis for distinguishing between ‘civilised’
and ‘savage’ peoples from the anthropologists
James Clifford and George Marcus.) It is thus
quite logical for every researcher to assemble
his / her toolkit to fit the problem that (s)he is
trying to solve.
When speaking of the anthropological view
of the body and technology, one should perhaps
recall the attention paid by anthropologists to
the cosmologies of ‘non-Western’ communities,
which drew the boundaries between beings,
including human and non-human beings, in the
most diverse ways. If we want to re-think our
ideas about the body and technologies, we can
turn to examples of the categorisations of the
world of, say, Australian Aborigines, for whom
a man, his / her group and his / her totem are
Aleksandra Kurlenkova merged into a single whole [Durkheim, Mauss
N. N. Miklukho-Maklai Institute
of Ethnology and Anthropology, 1903]. Using the multiple means of classifying
Russian Academy of Sciences the world described by anthropologists, we can
Moscow, Russia / offer conceptualisations of the body and
New York University
New York, USA technologies which are new in principle, such
askurlenkova@gmail.com as those in which they are not opposed to each
other, but presented as something combined, inseparable, as part

of a complex interlinked system of ‘man + environment’.
The interest in the body sui generis, and not in its representations
2 or the discourse about it, etc., that the social sciences have mapped
out, seems on the whole important and interesting. Social con
structivism, for all its merits, did not allow us to speak about the
biology of the body (including distinctions in biologies of bodies),
consigning that domain to researchers in the natural sciences and
medicine. ‘In various forms and variants the social sciences
delineated their own objects alongside those of biology. One of the
arguments for doing so was that this helped to ward off racism’
[italics in the original. — A.K.] [Mol 2002: 18]. Annemarie Mol
briefly, but pithily expresses the policy of the social sciences ever
since the Second World War: so as to avoid racist and eugenicist
discourses, the researchers in the social sciences distanced themselves
from conversations about the material, physiological body, regarding
it rather as the sand, the blank, passive, neutral sheet of paper on
which social phenomena leave their traces. Attempts to create
a special region of ‘the social’, with which it was allowable to work,
as opposed to ‘the biological’, which was the domain of biologists
and medics, led to the creation of a whole series of dualisms: sex vs.
gender, disease (pathology) vs. illness (the experience of being ill),
impairment (physical damage) vs. disability (invalidity).
In medical anthropology this favoured the situation whereby one
of the key directions of work became the study of the subjective
meanings that people give to their conditions (the analysis of
narratives on illness; see, for example: [Mattingly, Garro 2001]).
Attention to meaning became part of that intellectual movement
which is called the interpretative, or symbolic approach. This
approach, which began in the works of Clifford Geertz, George
Marcus and James Clifford, directs the researcher’s attention towards
the conceptual world of the people being studied, the language
of their pain, fears and experiences. Following the call of Clifford
Geertz, anthropologists set about ‘reading the texts’ of culture and
their hermeneutic interpretation. Medical anthropologists confined
themselves to a certain kind of text, principally the subjective
experiences of patients. Disturbed by the facelessness of medicine,
the predominance of the language of pathology, i.e. functional harm
to the body, medical anthropologists set themselves an entirely
applied task: to convince doctors that they should take account of the
patients’ perspective, with their interpretations of their own bodies
and explicatory models of illness. The doctor’s task is correct
translation from the language of illness to the language of disease,
and that of the anthropologist is to play the role of cultural broker,
of translator, conveying to the doctor the experience and ideas of the
patient about what is happening to him / her, the social context
45 F orum
of his / her life. Drawing a line between the biological and the
Body and Technology
social / cultural dimensions of the body and concentrating on the

second dimension provided a solution to a series of problems:
showing the variability and constructibility of ideas about bodily
infirmities, the importance of social, family, subjective meanings
of illness (and also for a more effective treatment and a greater
readiness on the part of the patient to listen to the doctor and follow
his / her instructions). However, the human body remained without
reflection. Impairment, disease and sex became the social scientists’
‘blind spot’. Knowledge about the physical body was left entirely to
the doctors and natural scientists.
Works by Annemarie Mol and her colleagues (the author will be
grateful for information about other texts that are significant in this
sense) frankly upset the status quo, invading spaces and contexts that
had been labelled as ‘Western medicine’. They began to analyse how
diseases are ‘made’ in clinical circumstances: how medical diagnoses
are made, how treatment is carried out, ‘the way people’s bodies and
lives are shaped by the activities of doctors, nurses, technicians, and
technologies, and the work involved in making textbooks come true’
[Mol, Berg 1998: 3]. Shifting attention from meanings and ideas to
practices, they began to show that diseases are not singular, any more
than the practices of doctors from different specialisms, different
hospitals, different countries, etc., are singular.
Likewise of interest is the conceptualisation of the body proposed
by Mol as a semi-permeable system constantly interrelating with the
outside world: ‘[T]he metabolic body of a person with diabetes
absorbs food and fluids from the outside, and expels waste. It does
not keep all that is foreign to it outside itself, but exchanges matter
with the rest of the world. a moment ago, the apple was still in the
fruit bowl. Now you have bitten into it, chewed and swallowed it,
and started to partially digest it. a moment ago, the water was still
in your glass, now it is being absorbed in your intestines and
thinning your blood, which will thicken again in your kidneys. The
boundaries are not open. The intestinal lining allows carbohydrates
to pass, but it stops bacteria. Lung parenchyma allows oxygen to
enter, but keeps soot particles out. Urea exits via the kidneys, but
protein is not meant to do so. Neither closed off, nor open, the
boundaries of a metabolic body are semi-permeable’ [Mol 2008: 32].
It seems important to me here that the author displays the body not
as an autonomous entity, but as surrounded by the world and
constantly in contact with it. In this sense a diabetic’s body, like
anyone else’s, cannot be conceptualised in isolation from all those
foodstuffs which (s)he swallows every day, physical activities,
stressful events, or the technologies which enable the various
physiological indicators to be observed (such as the sugar level on
the screen of a glucose meter).
It would be nice if, by analogy with such important ideas of the early
3 anthropologists as the critique of cultural absolutism and
ethnocentrism, the anthropology of today and the future were to
work more towards a re-evaluation of the foundations of
anthropocentrism. The development of biotechnology in the second
half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first
has provided a large number of empirical cases for blurring the
boundaries between human beings and technology, and between
human beings and other animals. For example, in the 1970s, when
artificial breathing apparatus was invented, there began to be people
whose brain had ceased to function, but whose heart continued to
beat thanks to the machine. In parallel with the blurring of the
boundaries between human beings and technologies, animal rights
activists began to speak of the relativity of the categories of ‘man’
and ‘animal’. In 1975 the Australian moral philosopher and
utilitarian Peter Singer asked in his book Animal Liberation what
there is in the concept of ‘man’ that gives every living representative
of the species Homo sapiens inalienable rights but excludes non-
human animals, notwithstanding the cognitive abilities of particular
representatives of different species. He proposed the use of the term
speciesism (by analogy with sexism and racism) to characterise
‘a prejudice or attitude of bias in favor of the interests of members
of one’s own species and against those of members of other species’
[Singer 2002: 6], and defends the idea that non-human animals
deserve the same consideration for their interests and needs as
humans. An ever-growing awareness of the interdependency of the
various life-forms on Earth, as well as the production of new
chimaeras in the laboratories of the world, may push anthropologists
towards new conceptualisations of the world in which the myth
of modern autonomous man is replaced by other myths that reject
the pure categories of ‘human’, ‘technology’, ‘animal’ and are
populated by ‘cyborgs’, ‘borderline entities’, ‘monsters’ — ‘signs
of possible worlds <…> for which we are responsible’ [Haraway
1991: 2].
References
Durkheim E., Mauss M., ‘De quelques formes primitives de la classification:
Contribution à l’étude des représentations collectives’, L’Année
sociologique, 1903, no. 3, pp. 1–72.
Haraway D., Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. The Reinvention of Nature.
New York: Routledge, 1991, X+287 pp.
Mattingly С., Garro L. (eds.), Narrative and the Cultural Construction
of Illness and Healing. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001,
288 pp.
Mol A., The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2002, XII+196 pp.
47 F orum
Mol A., The Logic of Care. Health and the Problem of Patient Choice.
Body and Technology
Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2008, XII+129 pp.

Mol A., Berg M., ‘Differences in Medicine: An Introduction’, Mol A.,
Berg M. (eds.), Differences in Medicine. Unraveling Practices,
Techniques, and Bodies. Durham, NC; London: Duke University
Press, 1998, pp. 1–12.
Singer P., Animal Liberation. New York: Harper Collins Publishers Inc.,
2002, 324 pp.
ANNA MALYAR
My train of thought about the questions asked
3 by the editors of Forum for Anthropology and
Culture, was like the process of factorisation in
mathematics: reducing the body as an object
of scholarly research into a series of multi
dimensional projections on the basis of its
properties / factors. Accordingly, the ‘Forum’’s
questions have taken on the following form in
my text: what could be the research projections
of the body in the technological dimensions
of the future and how can they become the
subject of anthropology?
Obviously, we must distinguish between the
body as the material location of an individual
and bodies as the paradigmatic objects of techno
logies (bio-political, repressive, modernist, etc.).
In my opinion, a significant amount of anthro
pological research into the body technologies
of the future has inherited, albeit in an inverted
form, the semantic fog of the twentieth
century — the episteme of the body-signifier,
the body-metaphor, the imaginary abstract
bodily structure (the ‘body map’, the ‘body
diagram’). This imaginary body brings me to
the first problematic point: the question of the
anthropological researcher’s wishes. The
declared orientation towards the body looks, in
this case, somewhat speculative: the body as
a thing escapes the researcher’s gaze (or rather
the researcher does not want to allow his / her
Anna Malyar gaze to rest upon the body), and is replaced by
Novokuznetsk Branch a machine, a signifier, a topology, a force — one
Kemerovo State University
Novokuznetsk, Russia
or another set of representations that may be
luureed@mail.ru important for ethnography, but are not always
valid for technology. As a result the body (and bodies) have been
scattered at random beneath the lens of anthropology which is
brought to bear on it: and their innumerable reproductions (icono
graphy, body diagrams), the boundaries and divisions of the body,
endlessly differentiated ‘other’ bodies (diseased, female, homosexual,
juvenile, dead) have become visible and significant.
The synthesis of technology and the semiotic body is now represented
by the concepts of the technological mediation of the body, and their
influence will probably only increase [Belting 2005; Dant 2010; Zeman
2012], etc. The future technological projection of the semiotic body
will be research into the techniques of digitising the body and the
phenomenology of the digital body: the processes and principles of its
encoding, the creation of digital copies or reproductions and their
distribution over web information channels. The empirical plan of this
projection proposes the existence of the body in two registers
of informational being: firstly, the seeing and functional body-subject
(centred around the apparatus of perception, natural or technologically
supplied, functionally technomorphic — with the help of an
exoskeleton, transplanted organs or, at the very least, glasses);
secondly, the body-communication presented to some other, a bodily
image conveyed by artificial channels. Accordingly, the programme
of anthropological research in the first case should be questions about
the integration of the body, its technological enhancements and
supplements, extensions and intrusions [Sokolovskiy 2017: 25, 33],
the humanity of perception and recognition devices, the limits and
ethics of enhancing bodily functions (and even, probably, sickness as
morphism1): the orientation of the registration of celestial bodies on
the spectrum of visible light (i.e. visible to humans), exoskeletons and
biological prostheses, devices to aid seeing (lenses, synthetic crystals)
and so forth. In the second case research will be focused on problems
of encoding and the translation of the body (the stigmatisation
of bodies and conditions, bodily nomenclature, linguistic, visual and
cybernetic codes, the syntax and dispersion of bodies — virtual
distribution on the net).
The toponymic body-code: a series of project sketches made by the
citizens of Novokuznetsk in 2015 showed how easy it is to work in
body-metaphors. The informants placed geographical objects —
significant cities and regions — on the silhouette of a body, creating
a multidimensional map of the relations of power and ideology, the
regional division of labour, spatial dispositions and scaling.
Let us not forget that Latour’s inversion of actancy is an element
of the technological meta-narrative, which returns us to the

1
An apologia for certain genetic defects and their carriers as a new type of people, BIID syndrome,
deliberate infection of children with chickenpox, etc.
49 F orum
question of the anthropological logic that reconstructs that meta-

Body and Technology
narrative.
I pin my hopes of a new projection — of the body-as-thing, of flesh,
4 of organic substance — in the field of anthropology on the ‘material
turn’, and suppose that it will be conditioned by a very minor shift
in the anthropological paradigm. Two other groups of factors will
have a much greater effect on the realisation of the body-as-thing,
in the first place, progress in bio-technologies affiliated to the
substance of the body: tissue-engineering, organ transplants, genetic
modification, cloning, the technologies for the destruction and
transformation of the dead body (dissolving in potassium hydroxide,
freezing with liquid nitrogen before crushing the mineralised
remains, making posthumous souvenirs out of compacted remains,
etc.).
The other group of factors that convincingly confirm the body-as-
thing in its status as an object of anthropology is composed of the
effects observed over recent years of public reactions to those
technologies: news about techniques for transforming flesh (not
necessarily human flesh) is regularly disseminated in the media and
produces an active public response.
I notice that the organic status of the body is becoming the locus
of the bio-political guerrilla war of today, the resistance to expert
discourse in the form of HIV-dissidence (the ‘invisible’ virus is
declared to be non-existent), refusal to vaccinate (vaccinations
‘admit’ illness into a healthy substance, making it unhealthy),
‘ecological’ burials, which quickly return the body to the form
of nourishing humus, economic and ecological institutional
limitations on genetically modified food.
How can the ‘biomass’ of a repressive metaphor become the
analytical apparatus of anthropology?
The model for a new vision of body technologies remains for me the
fictional television series (to be precise, not science fiction, but rather
science phantasmagoria) Lexx,1 which contains a radical view of the
politics and technology of the corporeality of the future. It is a future
in which engineering technologies are biological: apparatus consists
of flesh and organs, living machines feed and die. In this ‘inside-out’
world, the human body, by contrast, may be ‘decarbonised’, have its
vulnerable and corruptible organic nature removed, along with the
subjectivity that is, metaphysically, linked with it. The subject with
its desires and motivations is concentrated in the organic components
of the body, and what remains after their removal is only the actant,
the bodily machine. Ecology merges with bio-politics: the processing
1
Lexx, 1997–2002, dir. Ch. Bould, P. Donovan et al., Canada, Germany, Britain, USA.
of the bodies of criminals in bio-reactors into fuel releases the
morally and juridically ‘pure’ substance of their flesh for further
circulation. Overall, the relationship between corporeality and
technology in this version of the future perverts the technological
paradigm of the modern world, which opposes inanimate ‘iron’
devices to the flesh of the ‘living’ human being, creating a symbolic
plan which is perpendicular to it, in which, essentially, new
anthropological projections of the body are possible — not only the
technological extension of the body, but the corporeal realisation
of technology [Dant 2010] in the spirit of Leroi-Gourhan.1
The bus body: a series of experiments with young people in Novo
kuznetsk in 2016–2017 showed the existence of an interiorised image
of the ‘bus body’, a standard idea of the corporeality of the passenger
(self and other) travelling in public transport: those parts of the body
which may legitimately come into contact with a stranger, the degree
of spatial closeness and contact with the bodies of other passengers
and parts of the bus.
This plan focuses the following areas of problems: firstly, the
formulation of new foundations for the social subject (unless it is
further displaced by technologically and humanly neutral ‘actancy’).
Reformulating the comic cliché ‘Where shall we make the subject?’,
should it be a source of reflexive consciousness, or is diversity and
indeterminacy in its actions enough for us to speak of its ‘free will’?
What will be the demarcation between the ‘real’, ‘natural’ human
subject and its organic or inorganic (digital, mechanical) analogue?
Another area of problems is connected with the conceptualisation
of the social in a bio-technological world. What groups and
communities will be formed by the new corporeal objects? How will
the technologies of the organic change the corporeal mediation
of power? What semantic structures will form the basis of a new
sociality? How will a technologically modified body become
equivalent for exchange: will its technomorphism constitute an
excess or a deficiency or ‘realness’?
In my opinion, bio-technologies are, paradoxically, archaising the
perception of the organic body by explicating basic mythological
structures. Thus the fear of infection, of a force invisible to the eye
which changes or destroys the body from within (often by means
of eating or breathing), could once be observed in the mythology
of exposure to radiation [Mirnyy 2009], in the fear of technological
substances poisoning our usual food (‘nitrates’ in notions about fruit
and vegetables in the 1980s, ‘hormones’ and ‘antibiotics’ and modified
genetic structures in the meat and vegetables of the present day).

1
See Graham — the bio-model of a car driver’s body that enables survival in crashes, made by Patricia
Piccinini.
51 F orum
The basis of infection is the permeability of the body-as-thing

Body and Technology
by other substances and the impossibility of controlling their

interference with the body: radiation, nitrates and GMOs cannot be
‘seen’ without using technical equipment for discovering and
recognising them; there is no control over their borders; they are
dispersed throughout the environment, passing through all defensive
barriers, including the walls of the house, clothing, and the limits
of the body, like a magic influence besieging the ‘fortress’ of the body
[Voynilov, Polyakova 2016: 198].
Current discourses on substance effectively combine the fear
of infection with revulsion at ‘unclean’ organic flesh for which the
source or technology of production has not been socially validated.
Monitoring carried out by the Institute for Statistical Studies and
Economics of Knowledge, a research institute of the Higher School
of Economics, on the social demand amongst Russian citizens for
new technologies has produced instructive results. On the list
of technologies (including biological technologies), the one that
creates the greatest apprehension and receives the least approval
from the people surveyed is ‘growing meat from cell cultures’: in
2010 this technology was approved by 47 %, and not approved under
any circumstances by 37 %. In 2010 growing meat produced
‘concern, apprehension’ among 26 %, and in 2015 among 35 %
[Sobolevskaya 2016; Voynilov, Polyakova 2016]. Artificially culti
vated meat produced more concern and apprehension than biscuits
made from crickets, which were disgusting, but ‘comprehensible’,
and was less acceptable to the respondents than genetic intervention
in the human body.
The Real and meat: let us remember that in 2013 the University
of Maastricht announced that it had successfully ‘cultivated’ meat
from bovine stem cells. Eating the meat was an important ritual
performance, camouflaging its real ‘repulsiveness’. The meat, which
was originally colourless, and was presented to the public as
a homogeneous mass in a laboratory vessel, was coloured to imitate
‘normal’ meat and cooked by ‘a well-known chef’ in the form
of hamburgers. This attempt to legitimise the meat by imitating the
culinary canon can hardly be considered a success; the people who
tasted it noticed its gastronomic deficiencies, in that it did not have
‘the taste of meat’ and was far too dry and tough.
This case is noteworthy is several respects. Firstly, it illustrates the
problems of the semantic differentiation of corporeality — natural or
artificial, organic or inorganic (but what is to be regarded as the
opposite — mechanical? synthetic? mineral?). In vitro meat is
articulated as ‘artificial’ or ‘synthetic’, although its genetic make-up
and biological processes are no different from the ‘natural’ production
of flesh, and there is no synthesis in the strict sense of the word.
Secondly, the bio-technological product was noticed to lack ‘real’

taste, consistency and tenderness: the reproduction of flesh was
perceived rather as some dreadful imitation than as a functional
analogue.1 The case of the cultivated meat concludes the fantastic
dimension of the corporeal, the axis that separates at one end socially
valid decarbonised substance (for example, by cremation) and at the
other the reality of cultivated meat that has not undergone
symbolisation nor been integrated into the social order. What
symbolic status will organs grown in the laboratory and transplanted
into human tissue receive in the future? What will be the
phenomenological foundations of the new ‘natural condition’
of flesh?
The problem areas enumerated above are to some extent founded
in the futuristic impulse of the technologies of a ‘post-human’ or
‘trans-human’ future. There is, however, one area of body technology
that is already part of ordinary life but has not yet, as far as I know,
received anything like a full ethnographic description. This is the
Russian segment of food supplements and devices for medical self-
treatment (stimulators, applicators, massagers): the discourses and
actant systems that articulate them form the local semantic field into
which the new bio-technologies will be integrated.
I think that it is time that the body was grasped by its flesh, and that
this must be done by anthropology as the only one of the social
sciences that has a materially orientated methodological apparatus
(see the tendency of materiology: [Oushakine 2013] and the turn
towards biology: [Bogomyagkova 2018: 36]). The idea of a discrete,
simple unit of the ‘natural’ organic body which is subject to
technological ‘extensions’ and ‘modifications’ evidently needs re-
assessment: the boundaries of that body and its substantial con
ditions may turn out not to be where we are accustomed to speak
of them. I see the key methodological problem as access to field
material about the body: as a bulwark of the Real, bodily experience
may be encoded at several levels of symbolic systems or be entirely
incapable of verbalisation.
References
Belting H., ‘Image, Medium, Body: a New Approach to Iconology’, Critical
Inquiry, 2005, vol. 31, no. 2, pp. 302–19.
Bogomyagkova E. S., ‘Povorot k biologii: perspektivy razvitiya sotsio
logicheskogo znaniya’ [A Turn to Biology: The Future Development
of Sociological Knowledge], Vestnik Sankt-Peterburgskogo
universiteta. Sotsiologiya, 2018, vol. 11, no. 11, pp. 35–50.
(In Russian).

1
Examples of functional analogues would be, for example, margarine instead of butter or a mechanical
prosthesis instead of a limb.
53 F orum
Dant T., ‘The Work of Repair: Gesture, Emotion and Sensual Knowledge’,
Body and Technology
Sociological Research Online, 2010, vol. 15, no. 3. <http://www.

socresonline.org.uk/15/3/7.html>.
Mirnyy S., ‘Chernobyl kak infotravma’ [Chernobyl as an Infotrauma],
Oushakine S., Trubina E. (eds.), Travma:punkty: Sbornik statey
[Trauma:Points. a Collection of Essays]. Moscow: Novoe lite
raturnoe obozrenie, 2009, pp. 209–45. (In Russian).
Oushakine S., ‘Dinamiziruyushchaya veshch’ [The Dynamicising Object],
Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2013, no. 120, pp. 29–34. (In
Russian).
Sobolevskaya O. V., ‘Rossiyane ne doveryayut biomeditsinskim tekhno
logiyam’ [Russians Mistrust Biomedical Technologies], Novosti NIU
VShE, 26 May 2016. <https://issek.hse.ru/news/182899963.html>.
(In Russian).
Sokolovskiy S. V., ‘Antropotekhnomorfizmy i antropologiya tekhno-korpo-
realnosti’ [Anthrotechnomorphisms and the Anthropology
of Techno-Corpo-Reality], Sotsiologiya vlasti, 2017, vol. 29, no. 3,
pp. 23–40. (In Russian).
Voynilov Yu., Polyakova V., ‘Moe telo — moya krepost: obshchestvennoe
mnenie o biomeditsinskikh tekhnologiyakh’ [My Body Is My
Fortress: Public Opinion on Biomedical Technologies], Sotsiologiya
vlasti, 2016, vol. 28, no. 1, pp. 185–207. (In Russian).
Zeman D., ‘Science and Technology Studies (STS): možnosti a meze
antropologie v laboratořích’, AntropoWebzin, 2012, no. 3,
pp. 153–9.
DMITRIY MIKHEL
Modern anthropology is an area of knowledge
1 which is relevant to the problems of corporeality
and technology. Most of all this concerns such
components of it as medical anthropology, but
it is also appropriate for other sections of socio-
cultural anthropology, including the anthro
pology of music, the anthropology of diet,
military anthropology (the anthropology of the
armed forces), etc. In a number of aspects there
is a crossover between the anthropology of the
body and science and technology studies (STS),
as well as philosophical anthropology and trans-
human research.
Dmitriy Mikhel
‘The anthropological approach’ to studying the
Russian Presidential Academy problems of the body and technologies is the
of National Economy and Public same as the approach to studying the other
Administration
Moscow, Russia
fields of subjects that socio-cultural anthropology
dmitrymikhel@mail.ru deals with: studying the object in its entirety
(as a whole) using participant observation and applying other

anthropological (or ethnographic) methods, including the method
of participant practice, i.e. trying the problem out on oneself.
In this sense anthropology allow us to give what might be called an
anthropological picture of the interaction between the body and
technology. What is ‘anthropological’ here is the attachment to
a particular socio-cultural system, be it the culture of a specific
ethnos or a separate social group. Examples of this would be: the
practice of inoculation among the pastoral peoples of East Africa
(in the past and in the present), socio-cultural contexts for radical
body art in Sydney, the survival of patients in intensive care wards
in Moscow, the post-operative experience of patients with
transplanted kidneys (and other organs), the aestheticisation of the
female body in the context of the development of practices of the
treatment and prophylaxis of breast cancer in the USA (or other
countries).
That is, unlike, for example, the philosophical view of the same
object, where ‘breadth’ of view and ‘universality’ of explanations
predominate, in anthropology, as a rule, the ‘specific’ and ‘local’
predominate.
I personally have a greater familiarity with and understanding of the
2 approaches approved by medical anthropology. On of them is
presented in the celebrated article ‘The Mindful Body’ by Nancy
Scheper-Hughes and Margaret M. Lock (1990), in which the authors
formulate a series of questions regarding the medico-anthropological
perspectives of research into corporeality. Developing Foucault’s
ideas, they distinguish three types of corporeality, the individual, the
social and the political, presenting the body as a surface for the
expression of human experience — individual, social and political.
I think that it is precisely within the framework of this experience
that the experience of the interaction between the body and
technology is present. For Lock, for example, this was the foundation
of her own research on corporeal experience in the context of the
spread of the technologies enabling artificial life-support and
transplants in North America. Such is her book Twice Dead and
a whole series of publications on the anthropology of bio-medicine
(1990 — present).
In short, any technology which can be applied to human beings is
never presented in its ‘pure form’, but in a ‘cultural package’ and
clad in social relationships. For example, the bio-medical technology
of organ transplantation is not simply a set of particular measures
and methods (selection of the donor, genotyping, surgical
intervention, implantation, anastomosis, immunosuppression, and
so on), but also a social action, which, among other things,
establishes new social connections between the donor and the
55 F orum
recipient and between the recipient and the relatives of the dead
Body and Technology
donor. In the context of such an approach it is clearly visible that

donor organs have their own ‘social life’. The technology of organ
transplantation crosses the boundaries between the living and the
dead, between bodies, between the natural and the artificial, crosses
the boundaries of morality, and sometimes even those of the law (in
the case of the illegal trade in donor organs, which is yet another
by-product of globalisation and neo-liberal economic models).
Besides the immediate task of the anthropological study and
3 description of many new cultural phenomena — bio-medical
technologies, cognitive technologies, digital technologies, nano
technologies — in their effect on (traditional) human corporeality,
it is evident that there may also be the new and unexpected task
of studying and describing various types of hybrid corporeality, i.e.
bodies and bodily experience characterised by the implantation
(under the skin or into the tissues) of new technologies. For the most
part these are technologies for preserving life and observation.
Perhaps the first to raise this subject among medical anthropologists
was Cecil Helman in his book The Body of Frankenstein’s Monster
(1991), which described a series of medical innovations such as
prosthesis, organ transplantation and so forth, in relation to British
and American cultural experience.
In this sense many different hybrid beings have recently ‘slipped’
into the field of interest of socio-cultural anthropology, their
‘hybridity’ being conditioned precisely by the combination of the
organic and the technical. In my book Voploshchennyy chelovek:
zapadnaya kultura, meditsinskiy kontrol i telo [Man Incarnate:
Western Culture, Medical Supervision and the Body] (2000)
I attempted to call these phenomena ‘cyborg bodies’ and ‘symborg
bodies’. Much water has flowed under the bridge since then, and the
number of publications on the topic has increased incredibly. There
is whole genre of research into cyborg technology, which has
attracted the attention of many authors in various lands. Nor are
some of our transplantologists standing aloof from it, seriously
considering the question of how, using certain artificial ways and
means, they can ensure the survival of donor organs or create
artificial ones. From the point of view of these professionals such
approaches are more humane and less costly than relying on the use
of organs from dead donors, of whom there are never enough, nor
will there ever be, given the growing demand.
Another topic is the various technologies of human ‘enhancement’,
be it the use of drugs to improve the memory (nootropics, for
instance), use of hormone preparations to promote muscle growth,
or the use of endoprostheses of the bones or soft tissues. This is
a very broad field of research, treading a path towards the study
of the ‘brave new world’ (in the spirit of Aldous Huxley) about which
Francis Fukuyama warned in his book Our Posthuman Future
(2002). For the anthropology of consciousness and medical anthro
pology the study of shamanism in all its aspects may prove useful,
particularly insofar as it is interested in hallucinations, trances and
altered states of consciousness. However, much has already been
done in this direction, among others by the Russian medical
anthropologist Valentina Kharitonova. From the perspective
of philosophy and bio-ethics it is a subject that has long been
comprehensively studied by a group of researchers from the Institute
of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, headed by the
late Boris Yudin and Pavel Tishchenko.
In his latest research, the Italian social anthropologist Antonio
Maturo has shown that, for example, progress in the sphere
of technological ‘enhancement’ of modern human beings is leading
to the emergence of a new type of society, which he calls ‘bionic’.
Moreover, the reasons for the growing demand for enhancement
technologies are not only the promotion of new products and
services by the companies that produce them, but also the conscious
choice of consumers who are ever more inclined to solve their
personal problems by purely technical means, without recourse to
the help of their family and friends.
The evolution of new technologies is already having an effect on the
4 evolution of anthropology and the other social sciences and
humanities. I have already mentioned the growing interest of medical
anthropologists in the phenomenon of bio-medicine and bio-medical
technologies. Contemporary STS is developing in the same way.
There is much that is new in the sphere of anthropology and art,
and anthropological research into sport. The sphere of cultural and
media studies is also developing.
This may with time lead to the emergence of other new fields
of knowledge, including anthropological ones. By the middle of the
twenty-first century it will hardly be a novelty to leaf through
a journal entitled The Anthropology of New Technologies, or even
Transplantology, bearing in mind the growing interest in various
trans-human projects, the active interpretation of the use of robo
technic technologies in warfare, and the great expectations laid upon
the use of exoskeletons (in medicine and again in military use), and
so on.
Personally I would not wish artificially to accelerate this process
of entering into the new technological age, but most probably it will
happen whether we like it or not. Experts believe that in only a few
years’ time we shall see the swift establishment of a new technological
order with a wide application of personless (pilotless) devices, both
in the military sphere and in everyday life. For anthropologists this
57 F orum
will mean at the least a new stage in the development of their
Body and Technology
discipline. Then we shall all be faced with many questions about

whether our present culture can accept the challenge and whether
our own bodies will be able to adapt to this technological reality.
IGOR MOROZOV
Although the attention of ethnographical studies
1 (now included in the wide spectrum of anthro
pological subdisciplines) has always been drawn
to the problems of corporeality and technology,
traditional approaches have in the main stressed
the description of practices associated with cor
poreality (for example, rituals surrounding birth
or rites of initiation or passage), or else the role
of technology in various systems of husbandry
(for example, the use of draught animals, or
of the ard or plough).
The new turns in the study of corporeality are
connected with the interpretation of the role
of the body in social practices, beginning with
relations between the sexes and the problem
of sexuality and the new wave of body symbolism
(from subcultural practices to the problem
of image), and ending with the problems
of a ‘healthy lifestyle’ and the ‘healthy body’ as
a whole. The body has acquired a commercial
element, which in turn has provided the sti
mulus for the genesis and evolution of new
practices (from body-building to cosmetology)
that strengthen and emphasise its value and
status. The body has always personified status
and power, but in new conditions this role
becomes particularly significant, and cor
poreality becomes an important subject to be
studied by the social sciences, marketing, image-
making and political studies.
As technology improves our lives, making them
more comfortable and diverse (in the sense
Igor Morozov
of providing new opportunities for develop
N. N. Miklukho-Maklai Institute ment), it also systematically destroys many
of Ethnology and Anthropology, established ethical norms and standards,
Moscow, Russia
subjecting us to a trial of our ‘humanity’. Is it
mianov@rambler.ru permissible to sacrifice the life of another
human being and use his / her body or organs to prolong one’s own
life? This, of course, is not a new question, and humanity has given
different answers to it at different stages of its development (was the
life of a slave of much value to his / her master, or of an ‘Untermensch’
to a Nazi?). And these are questions for philosophy and above all
for ethics.
Evidently we are faced with an old problem which requires a new
solution in the conditions of the modern world, which again faces
us with the questions of what a ‘human being’ is, and what
‘humanity’ is. The answer to these seemingly obvious questions is
not as simple as it seems at first sight. It is enough to remember that
the solution to the dilemma of ‘the human vs. the non-human’ has
always been at the centre of attention of religious doctrines and
practices. To what extent is God / the Divine anthropomorphic? The
problem of this sort of isomorphism has been solved in different
ways by the world’s religions, which, as they moved away from
zoomorphic or polymorphic hypostases of the divinity, nevertheless
strove to affirm its human epiphanies, since the possibility of the
non-human essence of the divinity and its inaccessibility to human
reason looks frightening. This problem has deep cultural and
historical roots, which becomes obvious when one studies
anthropomorphic objects in culture (we ran up against this when
studying the ‘doll phenomenon’), and is the key to many problems
of the human psyche, since our perception of the outside world is
anthropocentric and inclined to anthropomorphise it, that is, to
endue the phenomena and objects surrounding us (including those
that are not alive, are inanimate) with human characteristics and
features. Here there is a wide field for psychological research.
The inclusion of modern technologies and the practices associated
2 with them in the field of anthropological research substantially
changes research strategies and tactics, and requires new approaches
and methods. In the first place these are of course methods that will
allow us to see the place of human beings in the world of things,
and the mutual link between the ‘living’ and ‘lifeless’, their influence
on each other and their implantation in the wide network of socio-
cultural communications (Latour). Things, as Baudrillard has already
shown, do not only form the sociosphere that surrounds us and
which is directly connected with social roles and status, but to a large
extent they determine a new, ‘mythical’ hyperreality in which the
only ‘real’ reality is death. This possibly allows it to be said that
research into the problems of dying and death as ‘the last bastion’
of corporeality, where it is fully denoted as the distinct border
between ‘alive’ and ‘dead’, ‘dead’ and ‘lifeless’, will be useful for the
understanding of general problems of ‘the corporeal’ and its
correlation with the ‘mechanical’ or ‘virtual’. We can all feel the
pressure of this ‘new corporeality’ when we are travelling in a vehicle
59 F orum
and using it as an external envelope and accelerator, when we use

Body and Technology
various gadgets, or when we turn to the personal pages of deceased

friends on social networks.
As for research into the re-emerging multi-component human
communities, we see great potential in the approaches that are set
out in the framework of multi-species ethnography, which are
directed towards studying the role of human beings in the formation
and development of different biocoenoses, which are considered as
systems involving feedback. Domestic animals, birds, trees, fungi,
microbes and viruses are not only the ‘environment’ which human
beings inhabit and, to a certain extent, create, but also those com
ponents of that environment which to a great extent determine
human behaviour, and make people organise their dietary, domestic
and even cultural strategies. One would like to think that Homo
sapiens will occupy an important social and biological niche in post-
human societies too. The biocoenosis that comes into being will also
include new components, such as nanorobots that will take on the
role of the microbiota and control and regulate vital parameters
of the organism, from the circulation of the blood to the elimination
of harmful substances and cancer cells.
The commercial component has always been present in corporeality:
3 the trade in slaves (‘biological machines’), sexual services and body
parts for medical and magical purposes was known in antiquity and
still exists in modern ‘primitive’ cultures (for example, the use of the
body parts of albinos in East Africa). Anthropologists are also
thoroughly familiar with the status attached to war trophies in the
form of artefacts made from the bodies of the enemy: scalps, skulls,
hands, ears, etc., and also the use of parts of the bodies of outstanding
warriors as food in ritual cannibalism.
Modern global marketing strategies have of course brought about
radical change in the pragmatic component of such ‘exchanges’,
turning the trade in human organs into a high-tech practice ‘based
on humanitarian principles’, even if they are obtained by illegal
methods, for example in war zones. Many modern medical techno
logies are based on the use of parts of other people’s bodies, and this
includes not only organs such as the kidneys or the heart, but also
blood or sperm ‘banks’, which are also often set up on a commercial
basis. The prospects presented by the possibility (still hard to
imagine) of transplanting the brain (or head) into a different body
threaten to open up a real Pandora’s box, considering how rapidly
the population of the ‘golden billion’1 is ageing. One can imagine
how prominent in this case are the problems of bio-ethics, which
1
a term used in Russian journalism to denote the inhabitants of the richest countries in the world
[Trans.].
has to answer the question of where to draw the line between ‘useful
improvements’ or ‘interventions’ and dangerous experiments
directed against humanity as a biological species.
Modern technologies, as they presume the wide use of various
4 ‘substitutes’ for human beings, from industrial robots to artificial
intelligence, are creating the conditions for a revolution which may
lead to the emergence of ‘post-humanity’ and will inevitably face us
with the problem of a ‘new humanity’. There are several key
problems connected with this. Firstly, there arises the necessity to
redefine the concepts of ‘living / lifeless’ and the boundaries between
them. The definitions and distinctions that exist at present proceed
from the differences between organic and inorganic, or protein-based
and non-protein-based bodies — although, as we know, in archaic
models of the world this boundary was different and ‘lifeless’ natural
objects and elements (stones, trees, earth, water) were endowed with
subjectivity and the capacity for active participation and development.
In this sense technological progress, paradoxically, tends to send us
back into a world in which things and ‘lifeless’ bodies are endowed
with ‘humanity’ and the capacity of ‘living’ beings for interaction
and development. And although this does not contradict our
consciousness’s capacity for anthropomorphising things (not to
mention animals), the transition to a new ‘humanness’ may be very
painful, since it will demand the working out of a new ethics and
a new understanding of the place of the ‘living’ (including human
beings) in the environment. of course, thanks to the long and
purposeful activity of the ecological movement, we are already
prepared to accept that mankind is not ‘the king of nature’. But to
agree that we are by no means ‘the crown of creation’ and that
a human being is no more than ‘a talking ape’ will be much harder,
if indeed it will be possible.
To acknowledge the ‘lifeless’ as ‘living’ (according to the classification
accepted today) is indeed an extremely complex problem. It is one
thing to call one’s car Susie, Lucy or Tiger Cub (surveys show that
this happens quite often) and part of a computer a motherboard,
and quite another to regard a mechanism, even one that is anthro
pomorphic and endowed with artificial intelligence, as one’s equal.
Especially if it becomes clear that this mechanism is gradually
beginning to excel you in all those spheres of activity of which only
a human being was previously capable. In this way, the first thing
that can be seen as an immediate prospect is an accelerated
development of a ‘new ethics’ capable of taking account of the
emerging prospects for relationships within the ‘human — (non-
anthropomorphic / anthropomorphic) machine’ system. The existing
developments in the field of techno-ethics are clearly inadequate,
being for the most part oriented upon the technical environment
of the industrial era.
61 F orum
Another problem concerning a wide spectrum of anthropological

Body and Technology
disciplines is the taxonomy of post-human beings, since there are

already cyborgs among us, that is, people equipped with artificial
limbs and other organs, and also mechanical devices or elements
that correct defects of speech, sight and hearing. And in the near
future we shall encounter man-like robots (androids), replicants
(biologically modified copies of people, adapted to life and work in
hostile environments such as the ocean depths or outer space) and
possibly even chimaeras (organisms created by crossing different
species) in our streets and houses. This list should of course also
include non-anthropomorphic robots, devices endowed with
artificial intelligence and mounted in different sorts of bodywork
and environment. What will be the relationship between these kinds
of beings? Will they resemble the existing relationships in human
communities, determined by social, professional, ethnic or racial
affinity? Or will new social structures and hierarchies of inequality
emerge? We imagine that these differences can determine whole
directions of research both within the frameworks of the existing
anthropological disciplines and in new sciences about the ‘post-
human’ order which is coming into being before our eyes. It is
understandable that this will require significant effort in reinterpreting
and assigning new meanings to many social institutions which have
been regarded as unshakeable for centuries (education, labour, the
family, leisure, health care, the organisation of domestic and other
spaces, the relationship with the environment and much else). Will
friendship and love be replaced by various types of ‘non-business
contact’ (since, at least for some of the ‘post-humans’ listed above,
biological means of reproduction will be irrelevant), and if so, what?
Will medical treatment come to be the same thing as repairs? What
form will social communications take, from theatre and cinema to
mass meetings and demonstrations? We are faced with these
questions, and many others, today, since the answers will be needed
tomorrow. And it is better to have a plan of action ready than to be
caught unawares by the approaching ‘singularity’.
MICHELE RIVKIN-FISH
Feminist Anthropologies of Reproduction:

Studying Bodies, Technologies,
and Social Dynamics for Three Decades
Introduction
Michele Rivkin-Fish I am grateful for the opportunity to address the
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, USA important questions posed by this issue of Forum
mrfish@unc.edu for Anthropology and Culture. At the same time,
I take issue with the assumption posed by Sergei Sokolovskiy that

‘Until recently, medical anthropology, with its focus on the cultural
construction of health management and illness, maintained a largely
separate existence from the anthropology of bodily techniques and
technologies, and it was only radical changes in contemporary
biomedical practices that brought about the shared interest of those
working in the different subdisciplines in striving for some kind
of synthesis of the different disciplines.’ Feminist anthropologists
working on reproduction have long explored the relationships
between bodies and technologies, raising critical questions regarding
how these relationships get defined by various social authorities,
contested, and transformed over time. Moreover, since the late
1980s, feminist anthropologists working on issues related to
reproduction forged path-breaking trajectories bringing questions
of the body, gender, and technologies into cultural anthropology as
a whole; and they did so largely by training our methods and theories
on cultural processes in the US and Western Europe, in contrast to
what had been the discipline’s characteristic focus on non-western
cultures. Feminist anthropologists were among the first to examine
the symbolic and political provenance of bodily techniques; the
consequences of the introduction of novel technologies for enhancing
or correcting the body, and for controlling, transforming, and
deploying the body for multiple social and political goals. They have
studied symbolic constructions of the gendered, raced, and aging
human body, and shown how the individual human body gets cast
as a microcosm of the broader social body — often the nation but
also other essentialised collectivities [Anagnost 1995; Kahn 2000;
Rivkin-Fish 2006; Inhorn, Birenbaum-Carmeli 2008; Gammeltoft
2014]. In the following discussion, I delve into some of the landmark
scholarly works in the anthropology of reproduction, and I present
some of the most interesting, recent texts that point to new directions
researchers are taking. My focus on classic texts in this literature
serves to emphasise that the maxim, ‘you need to know where you’ve
come from in order to know where you’re going’ is as relevant for
scholarly endeavours as it is for everyday life.
Women’s bodies through the prism of the medical gaze:

Feminist critiques
Inspired by feminist critiques of a male-dominated obstetrics field,
with its often patronising, controlling treatment of women, Emily
Martin and Robbie Davis-Floyd, respectively, brought core concepts
from cultural anthropology to an analysis of the gendered inequalities
reproduced in American medicine. In stark contrast to biomedicine’s
claims to present acultural Truths about the human body and re
productive processes, Emily Martin’s 1987 ethnography, The Woman
in the Body: a Cultural Analysis of Reproduction [Martin 1992]
63 F orum
demonstrated how scientific constructions of women’s bodies are

Body and Technology
imbued with culturally resonant, gendered imagery reflecting

assumptions about women as inferior to men, and women’s bodies
as inferior to men’s bodies. In early-mid twentieth century scientific
medicine, bodies were imagined through the key trope of the
machine, and bodily systems were described through analogies to
industrialisation and hierarchical forms of communication. In other
words, Martin’s research explores the consequences of a scientific
worldview that conceptualises the female body through tropes related
to technology. For example, scientific descriptions portrayed birth
as a production process in which the uterus’ efficiency should be
managed by the doctor, who was conceptualised as a ‘mechanic’ or
even ‘factory supervisor’. Menstruation and menopause were
characterised as processes of ‘failed production’ [Martin 1992: 57,
63]. Ethnographically, Martin examined whether women of different
backgrounds accepted these forms of knowledge when thinking
about their bodily processes and themselves. She found that educated
women, those who had invested in and committed themselves to
the authority of scientific paradigms, reproduced these same images
of women’s bodies. On the contrary, when she asked working class
women how they would explain female reproductive processes, she
found they used imagery that did not communicate ‘failure’ or
‘breakdown’, but addressed the phenomenological aspects of the
various bodily experiences and placed them in the meaningful
context of a woman’s life course. The salience of technological
imagery for conceptualising the human body, Martin shows, must
be examined in tandem with key forms of social stratification.
People’s relations to dominant cultural meanings partly reflect their
social positionality. The Woman in the Body emerged at a moment
when feminist scholarship was burgeoning and paying particular
attention to interrogating the social and gendered effects of a techno
logically-focused biomedicine. But it was the first ethnographic
inquiry into the diverse ways women relate to biomedicine’s
symbolism and the social effects that result.
Another important classic is Robbie Davis-Floyd’s Birth as an
American Rite of Passage [Davis-Floyd 1992], which draws on
anthropological insights about the function of rituals to communicate
key cultural values and inscribe central cultural hierarchies on people’s
bodies. Davis-Floyd examines mainstream American hospital birth
as a ritual event that transforms a pregnant woman into a socially
competent mother — one who recognises the authority of biomedicine
to direct her and her child’s lives. In the biomedical imagination,
Davis-Floyd shows, the birth process is construed as a dangerous act
of unruly nature. The expert use of technology, biomedical practitioners
claim, is needed to control this unpredictability, and place it under
scientific management. Davis-Floyd analyses the entire scope
of routinised practices and procedures characterising American

hospital birth in the 1980s, from the institution’s insistence that
women wear hospital gowns and sit in a wheelchair, to the routine
use of pubic shaving, enemas, pushing in a prone position, episiotomies,
and increasing rates of caesarian sections. Dispelling common
assumptions that these procedures had health benefits, she reveals
them to be unnecessary and even harmful practices that conveyed
a cultural fear of women’s bodies. Davis-Floyd contrasts the
‘technocratic’ approach to birth with a ‘holistic’ approach cultivated
and undertaken by home birth advocates and the feminist midwifery
movement, in which ‘natural’ processes are celebrated, women’s
interests and collective knowledge about their bodies are prioritised,
and the benefits of biotechnological management are questioned on
the basis of a concern with women’s equality.1
A key theme in the anthropology of reproduction has examined the
social effects occurring when new biotechnologies become adopted
in local communities. Some studies have highlighted the perseverance
of cultural values and meanings in the face of material change; many
have detailed the kinds of contestations that arise to maintain or
wrest control over the uses and meanings of these biotechnologies.
Whether examining the spread of techniques of the body such as
coitus interruptus (CI) in nineteenth century Sicily, or the uptake
of sophisticated biotechnologies such as in vitro fertilisation and
gestational surrogacy in twenty-first century Moscow, anthropologists
have explored the ways the significance attributed to technologies
is enmeshed in broader systems of knowledge and structures
of inequality, from class to race, gender, and sexuality.
Jane Schneider and Peter Schneider’s Festival of the Poor [Schneider,
Schneider 1996] demonstrates how changing fertility practices in
nineteenth century Italy were driven by new notions of ‘respectability’
linked to bodily techniques. Specifically, as educated Sicilians began
using coitus interruptus to prevent pregnancy, cultural discourses
circulated that ascribed cultural prestige to practices of limiting
of childbearing in the name of ‘rationality’. CI was considered a sign
of deliberate ‘sexual restraint’ — considered both a moral good in
itself, and a rational practice of preventing one’s family’s impo
verishment by heeding economic constraints. Conversely, Sicilians
who continued to have greater numbers of children became
besmirched with the cultural stigma of ‘irrationality’, left farther
adrift from emerging notions of respectability.
The Schneiders also devote considerable attention to understanding
why poor families were less likely to adopt CI and strive to limit

1
In the context of Russian anthropology, a similar approach has been adopted by Ekaterina Belousova
[Eds.].
65 F orum
their childbearing. If educated classes blamed poor people for their

Body and Technology
supposed failure to contain their sexual desire, demographers and

sociologists also described the poor in culturally biased terms —
presuming them fatalistic and less practiced in rationally planning
their lives. Other scholars have argued that poor couples who had
large families were actually acting according to a personal rationality
based on practices of treating children as source of labour and old-
age security, rather than as economic drains. In contrast with these
approaches, Schneider and Schneider highlight the ways patriarchal
family structure and gender relations, along with capitalist boom
and bust cycles, shaped working-class Sicilians’ reproductive
practices. The locus of agency was not entirely situated within the
couple, they show, as people of all classes lived in contexts
of reputational networks that helped define what constituted a good
family and largely determined reproductive practices [Schneider,
Schneider 1996: 8–9]. Bodily techniques, in other words, are taken
up and deployed as part of broader conceptual and moral
understandings, embedded in patterns of social authority, and
constitute symbolic expressions of identity, power, and social
distinction. They are not universally determined by individual agents,
nor are bodily techniques always expressions of the pursuit
of rationally defined ends. The Schneiders demonstrated how fertility
outcomes often represented the expectations of patriarchal family
ideology, not individual Sicilians’ decisions.
Understanding local cultural ideas about fertility, women’s virtue,
and aging are central to grasping the logic of contraceptive use, as
persuasively argued in Caroline Bledsoe’s ethnography, Contingent
Lives: Fertility, Time, and Aging in West Africa [Bledsoe 2002].
Bledsoe’s study of Gambian culture emerged during her collaboration
with demographers analysing contraception survey data in the
society. She was intrigued by findings showing that a small
proportion of respondents who had not yet had their desired number
of children began using contraceptives in their early-mid thirties.
Whereas the demographers dismissed these findings as errors
(‘noise’), Bledsoe explored the issue ethnographically, and found
that decisions to use contraceptives when more children were still
wanted had epistemological roots in Gambian understandings of the
body and reproductive processes. Specifically, Gambian views held
that women’s bodies are finite sources of energy deployed for various
purposes over the course of one’s life; a virtuous woman is one who
uses her bodily energy to bear and raise children and care for her
family. If a woman has not been able to conceive, or the children
she has borne died, she strives to rest her body for a period of time
to gather up her remaining energy and deploy it for the purpose
of having and raising children. Rather than view female fertility as
waning with age, Gambian cultural views judged a woman by how
she expended her given bodily energy and what she used it for.
Contraceptives were embraced as affording women a ‘rest’ necessary
to regenerate strength and give birth and care for more children in
the future. Bledsoe’s ethnography thus reveals how contraceptive
technologies were deployed in the service of specific cultural notions
of virtue and bodily function, in contradistinction to scientific ideas
about the reproductive lifecycle and process of aging. This research
presents a powerful, cautionary tale to experts in international
development and global health: local cultural knowledge about
bodies, technologies, and ideals of virtue is crucial for unearthing
the logics guiding behaviour.
A growing body of ethnographic work by feminist anthropologists
of reproduction has been focusing on late twentieth — twenty-first
century biotechnologies, including in vitro fertilisation, surrogate
motherhood, and prenatal diagnostic technologies, from ultrasound
scanning to amniocentesis. These studies continue key lines
of inquiry established in earlier work by delving into the historical
and cultural meanings associated with technologies and the ways
their significations become linked to broader hegemonic systems
of power, such as kinship ideologies and nationalism. The analysis
of how new technologies become deployed and made meaningful
also returns us time and again to the persistent problems of social
inequality.
Helena Ragoné’s Surrogate Motherhood: Conception in the Heart
[Ragoné 1994] is one of the very first ethnographies of surrogate
motherhood, based on fieldwork undertaken in the US with
surrogate mothers, commissioning parents, and the surrogate
agencies that brought them together in contractual arrangements.
At the time of this study, surrogate mothers were artificially
inseminated with the sperm of the commissioning father, as egg
extraction and IVF were not yet in common use. Such ‘traditional’
surrogate mothers were thus genetically related to the fetuses they
carried and children they bore, a situation that led to the infamous
Baby M case in 1987, in which the surrogate mother refused to
relinquish the child to the commissioning parents upon giving birth,
and years of contentious legal battles ensued. Ragoné posed several
questions of anthropological import in her ethnography: would
technological practices of surrogacy change the nature of kinship,
and if so, how? How did cultural efforts to legitimise surrogacy
involve specific social interventions into the meanings of the process,
including the technology and the relationships between parties?
Symbolically, the notion of being a surrogate mother — of carrying
and bearing a child only to relinquish it to another family — aroused
cultural discomforts by acknowledging that women do not always
want to mother the children they bear, and may be willing to use
their bodies and intimate capacities for financial gain. Moreover,
67 F orum
traditional surrogacy, in which the genetic father’s sperm was used

Body and Technology
to impregnate the genetic mother, carried socially awkward

intimations of sexual infidelity and threatened the commissioning
mother’s status as a ‘real’ mother-to-be. Ragoné found that surrogate
agencies thus promoted a cultural construction of surrogacy that
aimed to alleviate the tensions around these various social anxieties.
They cast surrogate mothers as altruistic agents providing ‘the gift
of life’ to barren parents; they encouraged commissioning mothers
to become friendly with their surrogates, highlighting the woman-
woman relationship while diminishing the connections made
between gametes of the commissioning father and surrogate.
Additional cultural work aimed to legitimise the compensation
surrogate mothers received. Instead of being a ‘payment’ for
temporary use of a woman’s body (with its attendant echoes
of prostitution), the monetary exchange would be redefined as a ‘gift’
and institutionalised as a trust for the surrogate’s own children’s
college tuition or the family’s needs, rather than made as a cash
payment. Yet rather than working to continue the friendship and
perhaps creating new kinds of kinship relations between surrogates
and the families they provide children for, agencies encouraged
commissioning parents to cut ties with their surrogates after the
birth and relinquishment of the baby. The heterosexual, nuclear
family model was reaffirmed as the dominant and superior model
for American society, leaving the working-class surrogates feeling
abandoned by the women they had helped to create as mothers.
Ragoné emphasised that it was the hegemony of cultural notions
of nuclear family, rather than the technology of surrogacy per se,
that propelled the meanings and significance of this practice.
Prenatal testing has been a key site for anthropological investigations
of the social accommodations to new reproductive technologies.
Rayna Rapp’s study, Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social
Impact of Amniocentesis in America [Rapp 2000], explores how new
forms of knowledge made possible by technological capabilities raise
ethical dilemmas that women navigate as they conceptualise
themselves and their responsibilities as potential mothers.
Rapp studied women’s experiences with amniocentesis, a diagnostic
procedure in which amniotic fluid is suctioned with a needle from
a pregnant woman, and used to discover and identify chromosomal
abnormalities and neural tube defects in a foetus. It has long been
offered to American women who were at least 35 years old while
pregnant and is undertaken in the second trimester. Rapp’s ethno
graphy examines how women in New York City who were offered
the procedure responded, and why; and among those who took the
test, Rapp investigated how they responded to a positive diagnosis
of foetal abnormality. Testing Women, Testing the Fetus demonstrates
the complex cultural, symbolic, economic, and moral concerns that

women from different socio-economic and religious backgrounds
bring to these decisions; inasmuch as there is no societal-wide
consensus as to how to manage these technological capacities and
the knowledge they provide, Rapp dubs the women ‘moral pioneers’.
For many women in the age of new reproductive technologies, the
pregnant body has become a site where making ethical determinations
about what constitutes a person worthy of being born, and what
justifies termination of an affected foetus, is an unavoidable
requirement.
The array of values and concerns that women invoked to guide their
decisions about whether to continue or terminate the pregnancy
reveal how complex and often painful these experiences can be. For
example, white middle class women frequently conveyed tensions
between embracing technology as a means of exerting control over
one’s life and a discomfiting view of themselves as ‘selfish’ for how
this priority underwrote their willingness to abort an affected foetus.
Latina migrant women framed an openness to aborting an affected
foetus in terms of their commitment to the socio-economic promises
of migration, and well-being of other family members [Rapp 2000:
136–7]. At the same time, Rapp demonstrates that women’s socio-
economic and religious backgrounds are not determinative
of women’s attitudes towards amniocentesis or decisions about
parenting a disabled child. Women’s responses to this technology
also stem from their personal experiences. The availability
of amniocentesis for both eugenic and liberating purposes has
inaugurated a new frontier of moral deliberations regarding cultural,
economic, and personal concerns. Amniocentesis is not, in-and-of-
itself, a driver of change, for the process of confronting and using
this biotechnology is ultimately to confront broader personal and
cultural forms of knowledge and ethics about the meaning
of parenthood, personhood, and interpersonal obligation.
If Rapp’s case of amniocentesis explores a subset of women with
atypical pregnancy trajectories, Janelle Taylor’s study The Public Life
of the Fetal Sonogram examines the social meanings of a technology
that has become routinely used during pregnancies in Euro-
American contexts and beyond [Taylor 2008]. Sonogram images
of the foetus have not only entered the social worlds of pregnant
women; they have become central to the political strategies
of activists seeking to ban abortion, and even been commodified in
advertisements aimed at selling commercial products to families.
Taylor asserts that examining the uses of ultrasound images for
a variety of agendas has implications for how we theorise technology
as a social phenomenon. a common assumption that it is possible
to inquire how a given technology ‘impacts society’ is inadequate,
for this phrasing presumes that a ‘technology’ can be understood
69 F orum
outside of and separate from the ‘social’ context in which it is

Body and Technology
embedded. In contrast, societies make technologies meaningful,

conceptualising them as ‘useful’ or ‘dangerous’ or ‘appropriate’ or
in need of regulation, etc., through cultural and political processes
that construct the technology a priori.
Moreover, Taylor goes further in arguing against the very concept
of ‘the body’ as a singular, universal entity that can be analysed apart
from social processes [Taylor 2008: 11]. The use and significance
of ultrasound images, for example, calls into question how we locate
the boundaries of the body, and how such boundaries become
malleable in everyday life. It leads us to think about how what used
to be considered internal to and inseparable from a woman’s body,
a fetus, is now appearing to enter the public sphere separated from
the body that gestates it. If interiors can ‘surface’ and become forces
promoting economic or political action, then representations of ‘the
body’ are unstable. Drawing on Judith Butler and Annemarie Mol,
she urges us to think instead of bodies as something that people
collectively do in diverse ways, rather than as a thing people have
[Ibid.: 12]. The social analysis of bodies and technologies is useful
as a broader prism through which societal processes come into relief,
and, as we saw with Schneider and Schneider, Martin, Davis-Floyd,
and Ragoné, these processes often involve the reproduction and
naturalisation of systemic inequalities.
Finally, Veronika Siegl’s doctoral dissertation, ‘Fragile Truths: The
Ethical Labour of Doing Trans-/National Surrogacy in Russia and
Ukraine’ examines the oppressive structures constraining both the
infertile female body and the surrogate’s body in Russia and
Ukraine [Siegl 2018]. On the one hand, Russia’s cultural stigma
of childlessness and infertility, and the controversial character
of surrogacy, leads commissioning mothers to hide their surrogacy
arrangements from virtually everyone except their husbands. They
justify this secrecy as a moral act protecting their child from
society’s hostility and discrimination. On the other hand, surrogate
mothers endure deep economic displacement, stigma, and
a dehumanising treatment as the incubators of a future product.
In stark contrast with the US case Ragoné studied, Russian
surrogacy agencies symbolically construct the gestational process
as a purely ‘business’ matter. Agencies construct the surrogate’s
body as ‘risky’, and construct the surrogacy process as a mechanistic
‘work’ experience that demands obedient and docile workers who
have no emotional attachment to the ‘product’ they provide. When
the surrogate mothers expressed concerns about the future lives
of the children they bear, and about the parents who will raise
them, the surrogate agency rebuffed their concerns as outside of the
surrogates’ scope of privileged knowledge. In this way, Siegl shows
how agencies actually created much of the risk at stake through
their distrust, lack of transparency, and rigid approach to the

‘business style’. Siegl’s study demonstrates how an understanding
of these multiple inequalities at stake in infertility and surrogacy —
located in specific cultural, institutional, and political-economic
conditions — complicates conventional debates about the ethics
of surrogacy. Ethnographic insights offer necessary insights into
nuance and complexity of on-the-ground dilemmas, mitigating
against unreflective acceptance of abstract, universal, or ideological
judgments about technologies, bodies, and justice.
Conclusion
Feminist anthropologists of reproduction have done extensive work
detailing diverse symbolic constructions of the human body,
deployed for varying political goals, historically and at the con
temporary moment. The body as machine has been a central
metaphor in Euro-American cultural contexts. These scholars are
committed to critically examining how various metaphors can work
to reproduce or ameliorate social inequalities. Still, the feminist
ethnographies examined here do not ideologically reject the idea
that some technologies, in some contexts, can be empowering. Bodily
techniques and technologies can provide women with new
knowledge that augments their sense of control over their lives and
requires them to make moral determinations about life itself. In
contrast with assumptions that technologies in-and-of-themselves
bring on social transformation, these ethnographies show how
technologies get taken up in creative and flexible ways, put to use
to achieve broader political goals and to realise long-standing notions
of the good life, gendered virtue, or practices of distinction. Feminist
anthropologists have explored the variety of moral concerns arising
from the use of reproductive technologies and the diverse ways
women navigate their decisions and justify them. a key insight
of ethnographic research on the body and technology is that medical
and scientific expectations about the appropriate use of technologies
(such as the contraceptive pill) may be undermined by culturally
specific notions regarding the body’s capacities, women’s proper
roles, and how to preserve each of them. This line of scholarship
brings theory to bear on significant matters of public policy, and
opens up the possibility of bringing the field into a much-needed,
critical dialogue with public health, international development, social
work, medicine, and the field of human rights.
References
Anagnost A., ‘A Surfeit of Bodies: Population and the Rationality of the
State in Post-Mao China’, Ginsburg F. D., Rapp R. (eds.), Conceiving
the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995, pp. 22–41.
71 F orum
Bledsoe C. H., Contingent Lives: Fertility, Time, and Aging in West Africa.
Body and Technology
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002, XX+396 pp.

Davis-Floyd R., Birth as an American Rite of Passage. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1992, XII+382 pp. (Comparative Studies
of Health Systems and Medical Care, 35).
Gammeltoft T. M., Haunting Images: a Cultural Account of Selective
Reproduction in Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press,
2014, XIII+315 pp.
Inhorn M. C., Birenbaum-Carmeli D., ‘Assisted Reproductive Technologies
and Culture Change’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 2008, vol. 37,
no. 1, pp. 177–96.
Kahn S. M., Reproducing Jews: a Cultural Account of Assisted Conception
in Israel. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000, VIII+227 pp.
Martin E., The Woman in the Body: a Cultural Analysis of Reproduction,
new and exp. ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992, XX+276 pp.
Ragoné H., Surrogate Motherhood: Conception in the Heart. Boulder:
Westview Press, 1994, XIV+215 pp.
Rapp R., Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis
in America. New York; London: Routledge, 2000, XII+361 pp.
(Anthropology of Everyday Life).
Rivkin-Fish M., ‘From “Demographic Crisis” to a “Dying Nation”: The
Politics of Language and Reproduction in Russia’, Goscilo H.,
Lanoux A. (eds.), Gender and National Identity in Twentieth-Century
Russian Culture. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press,
2006, pp. 151–73.
Schneider J., Schneider P., Festival of the Poor: Fertility Decline & the
Ideology of Class in Sicily, 1860–1980. Tucson: University of Arizona
Press, 1996, X+322 pp.
Siegl V., Fragile Truths: The Ethical Labour of Doing Trans-/National
Surrogacy in Russia and Ukraine: PhD Thesis, Institut für
Sozialanthropologie, Universität Bern. Bern, 2018.
Taylor J., The Public Life of the Fetal Sonogram: Technology, Consumption,
and the Politics of Reproduction. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 2008, XI+205 pp.
IRINA SIROTKINA
Let us begin with what we understand by
1 ‘technical’ and ‘technology’. The Greek word
τέχνη means skill, or knowing how to do
something. For this reason τέχνη is an in
Irina Sirotkina
S. I. Vavilov Institute
alienable part of the ἄνθρωπος, human being.
for the History of Science Human beings are distinguished from the
and Technology, animal world by their greater practical know
Moscow, Russia
ledge, their more perfect skills, to which, it
isiro1@yandex.ru seems, there is no end. The role of anthropology
in studying technology as the extension of human capabilities, or,

as the methodologists would say, human adaptation, is hard to
exaggerate.
While we are focusing on words, we might remember another term
in which ‘human’ and ‘technology’ are combined: anthropotechnics.
This is how, at the beginning of the twentieth century, a project for
improving the ‘human race’ was named, by analogy with zootechnics
or animal husbandry — improving animal breeds. In our country
the project was supported by biologists and anthropologists who
formed the Russian Eugenics Society in 1920; some of them
subsequently became the fathers of Soviet genetics. Eugenics,
anthropotechnics and genetics were later criticised as an animalist
approach to humanity. By a play of words, one may say that ‘human
husbandry’ never did come into existence as a separate discipline,
while ‘human sciences’ became more culturally orientated. (One
might recall Velimir Khlebnikov’s distinction between linguistics,
the study of languages, and linguogenics, the growing of new ones.)
The creation of the ‘new man’ in the Soviet Union followed an
ideological path, not a biological one.
I would suggest that we should remember the concept of a ‘motor
2 culture’ put forward by Aleksei Gastev, an activist of the workers’
movement and one of the ideologues of Proletkult, at the very
beginning of the 1920s [Gastev 1925]. It is interesting in that it unites
bodily motion, which was traditionally considered a ‘natural’ thing,
with culture, and, therefore, with technology.
As we know, physical motion has been studied for a long time:
mathematics and mechanics have formulated the laws of dynamics,
and anatomy and physiology have analysed the motor apparatus
of human beings and animals. At the end of the nineteenth and
beginning of the twentieth centuries, new methods for recording
and analysing movements appeared, including photography and
cinematography, and new disciplines combining physical and
biological sciences were formed such as biomechanics, the physiology
of labour and the physiology of motion, and kinesiology. Each
studied movement as a physical process from its own angle:
biomechanics dealt with the structure and function of the motor
apparatus, the physiology of labour with muscle fatigue, the
physiology of motion with the co-ordination and regulation
of movements by the nervous system, and kinesiology with the
application of the laws of motion to therapy and rehabilitation. The
body and its movements caught the attention of such diverse
disciplines as anthropology and psychoanalysis. At the beginning
of the twentieth century there was a great surge in interest in the
representation of motion in art: avant-garde painters tried to convey
and depict motion in their works, and the new theatre, dance and
73 F orum
cinema explored the possibilities of expression and conveyance

Body and Technology
of motion. Vladimir Mayakovsky rapped out in verse:

Our god is the run.
Our heart is the drum.
Nevertheless the collocation ‘motor culture’ sounded unusual and
challenging: at a time when ‘culture’ was conventionally the name
only for what was ‘high’ and ‘spiritual’, speaking of ‘the culture
of labour’ seemed paradoxical, almost an oxymoron.
Gastev found the sources of culture in economics, husbandry and
especially industry. In his view, the new Soviet man must have
complete control over his / her body and his / her tools, and be
equally well organised at his / her workplace and in his / her everyday
life. Gastev defined ‘motor culture’ as the sum of the people’s
motivational habits and skills, ‘the motion of one’s own body,
expressed in such acts as the defence of the organism against attack,
the attack itself, pursuit, motor strength, swiftness, what is called
motor speed, the cultivation of a precision of movements. The
cultivation of their deftness and economy will create a new man with
a new motor culture, who will cultivate in himself a vital real
portativity’ [italics in the original. — I.S.] [Gastev 1924].
So long as we do not think too much about the meaning of
‘portativity’, which recalls one of Andrei Platonov’s neologisms and
means carrying out cations efficiently on limited resources, Gastev’s
intentions are perfectly clear. He wanted factories, on a country-wide
scale, to be turned into ‘vast laboratories’ in which the machine
would organise the worker’s activity, cultivate self-control, discipline
and intellect. In 1920 Gastev founded the Central Institute of Labour
to educate the vast mass of erstwhile peasants, waifs and strays that
revolution and war had brought into the cities. He regarded the
countryside as virgin land in need of ‘colonising’. Peasants all needed
to be taught, as quickly as possible, not only vocational skills, but
also new behaviour and the urban way of life, formulate new motor
habits, be given new ‘work settings’. Gastev had no time to study
anything in depth, not even motor culture, but he left us the concept,
and it would be a shame not to make use of it.
We are fortunate: all of us, not just the biologists and physiologists,
3 can study corporeality simply because we have bodies. The
anthropologist can do this through self-observation, developing
those capacities in himself / herself that are now so popular in dance
and motion therapy and other body-orientated practices. For nearly
a century there has been a widespread discourse amongst both
‘anthropologists’ and ‘anthropogenicists’ in which we find terms
such as ‘the kinetic intellect’ and ‘the mindful body’, and so forth,
while mindfulness is regarded as a goal, a desirable characteristic.
In Russian, as in other languages, there is ever more talk about

mysledeyatelnost [‘thought-activity’], mysl-chuvstvo [‘thought-
feeling’] and mudrost tela [‘the wisdom of the body’], that is, yet
again, the awareness of one’s own body, bodily, or ‘motor’ intellect.
Firstly, new technologies introduce a new motor culture, new
4 gestures, or, to use Marcel Mauss’s expression, techniques du corps.
For example, in order to enlarge an image on the screen of your
smartphone, you spread it with your fingers. On some smartphones,
if you are typing text, you can touch the first letter of the word, and
then move your finger to the last letter, and the smartphone will
type the whole word. The Apple Corporation has already taken out
a patent on the Swype keyboard controlled by movements of the
finger from the first letter to the last. When gestures for the use
of digital technology, or others, are patented, they are included in
the process of commercialisation, and participate in the capitalist
economy. On the one hand motor culture is intimate, but on the
other, like everything else, it is subject to standardisation and
exploitation.
Secondly, new technologies confirm the thesis that the body is always
a medium. It is our main tool; we use it to do everything that we do.
(One might object to this that the ‘brain-computer interface’ does
exist, as it were direct control, ‘by the power of thought’, from the
brain to the object via the computer. When, for example, a paralysed
person looks at a glass of water and wants to have it, his / her brain
sends a signal to the computer via electrodes and then a robot device
brings the glass to him / her. However, these interfaces are still at the
experimental stage: they are very hard to use, and patients require
lengthy training before they can send the right signals to the computer
and finally get their drink of water.) When we interpret the human
being mediatively, we understand the body more and more as
constructed. The constructed body begins with the simplest of technical
adaptations — the mirror. Up to the age of two, a child takes his / her
reflection in the mirror to be another child and does not recognise
himself / herself. (S)he begins to recognise himself / herself through
the image of the other, and (s)he has intermediaries / media in order
to understand that (s)he has a body. His / her own body and its
reflection in the mirror are a constructed virtual object obtained by
a combination of different ideas and images, real and imaginary. When
we look in the mirror, we often react to our image emotionally — we
are displeased, or, conversely, pleased with what we see. In the process
the real image always collides within us with the ideal, virtual image,
with the person we want to be. The practice of the selfie is connected
with this, because this is a constant work at bringing our real image
closer to the ideal, to our virtual body, our virtual ‘I’. There are no
grounds for thinking that, as biotechnologies develop, this work will
come to a stop: quite the reverse.
75 F orum
Not long ago the term ‘net literature’ came into being to denote
Body and Technology
literature that exists exclusively on line. By analogy we could create

the term ‘net body’. In some sense the body is always on the net,
because it is included in various practices, mediative and otherwise.
The snag is that we also get the body directly, immediately, through
our inner sensations and experiences. We have, recently, been
transferring our bodies step by step into media space, and we are
aware that, both in this space and in general, our body is not just
an object or a thing, but a very complex configuration. So complex,
that there will always be something for the anthropologists of the
future to do and make sense of.
References
Gastev A. K., Novaya kulturnaya ustanovka [The New Cultural Stance].
Moscow: VTsSPS-TsIT, 1924, 48 pp. (Orga-biblioteka TsIT, no. 3).
(In Russian).
Gastev A. K., ‘Dvigatelnaya kultura (na osnove metodiki TsIT)’ [Motion
Culture (Derived from the Methodology of the Central Institute
of Labour)], Organizatsiya truda, 1925, no. 6, pp. 12–3. (In Russian).
ELENA SOKOLOVA
If we are to speak of the role and function
1 of anthropology, it seems to me that currently
there is nothing conceptually new: we have the
same comparative-descriptive research, critical
works, applied research and various com
binations of the above. But there are interesting
tendencies, which, I think, are having
a substantial effect on the agenda for con
temporary research into the body and techno
logy, and also on the interaction between
anthropology and other disciplines within the
framework of that research.
The first of these is the transition from research
into individual aspects to integrated experience,
the return of the ethnographic method to its
classical form, which presupposes an ‘integrated
method’ and ‘sensitivity to the context’ [Stewart
Elena Sokolova 1998]. Here, even at the planning stage, we can
N. N. Miklukho-Maklai Institute observe an evident turning-back from largely
of Ethnology and Anthropology, digital research towards integrated research (see,
Moscow, Russia for example: [Hine 2015; Pink et al. 2016;
elena.k.sokolova@gmail.com Hjorth et al. 2017], etc.), and thus a new space
is found for the body and bodily experience. In order to describe

integrated experience anthropologists are finding theoretical
groundings in philosophy, for example phenomenology [Boellstorff
2011], methods of conveying bodily sensory experience in art,1 etc.
In turn, collections of articles on the body represent an attempt to
translate the diversity of the bodily experience of modern man in
all its combinations, including experience of interaction with
technologies [Mascia-Lees 2011]. In such a way anthropology is
continuing to develop methodologically, coming into contact,
according to the situation, with other disciplines, incorporating their
tools and potential, and so to claim to study the integral experience
of the interaction between humanity and technology, including
techno-sensory experience.
Secondly, one would like to point out the noticeable growth in
anthropologists’ interest in applied research. Certainly, applied
anthropology has existed for a long time in international practice,
and there are associations and conferences and anthropologists who
are on the payroll of public-sector bodies and businesses. Advocacy —
the culture of civic involvement by anthropologists — is not a new
departure either. But it is now that the attempt to find a practical
use for anthropology is gathering strength, thanks to the need for
the majority of young scholars to find their place and their funding
in a changing world, in which the academic system is undergoing
painful transformations and 80 % of graduates are unable to find
permanent employment.2 The professional community first needs
to reconvince itself, and then everybody else, that ‘Anthropology
matters!’3 As an example of the applied turn within actual research
connected with the body and technologies, one may cite anthro
pologist Daniel Miller’s current project: ‘We will combine an
intellectual challenge of understanding the impact of new media on
the contemporary nature of ageing with an applied challenge to use
this knowledge to help make mHealth (mobile health) interventions
more effective.’4
In the Russian experience there does not seem to have been any
great shift of the tectonic plates. The reason for this may lie in the
lack of any systemic contacts with international scholarship. Except
for a few research centres, in our country anthropology, as far as its
interests are concerned, is still often ethnology, and attempts at

1
Visual Research Network. Creative Image: Ways of Seeing, Representing and Reshaping Reality. <https://
networks.h-net.org/node/73374/announcements/1519975/vrn-residency-conference-creative-image-
ways-seeing >; Ethnographic Terminalia. Chicago 2013. <http://ethnographicterminalia.org/chicago>.

2
By which we mean tenure-track positions (cf. ‘Academic Precarity in American Anthropology: a Forum’,
Cultural Anthropology. <https://culanth.org/fieldsights/series/academic-precarity-in-american-
anthropology-a-forum>).

3
The name of the AAA conference in 2019.

4
See the UCL ASSA project website: <https://www.ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/assa/>.
77 F orum
interdisciplinary contacts and research connected with present-day

Body and Technology
technological experience are met with questions and incomprehension.

This also applies to research into the body. ‘Tell me, which ethnic
group is it whose body you are studying on the internet?’ The body,
it seems, is not interesting outside politics, outside its ethnic
affinities, the rare exception being physical anthropology with its
modernist methods that everyone understands, which are regarded
as more scientific than the methods of modern social research. We
shall hope that with time this situation will change.
The habit of according bodily experience a lower priority than
conceptual experience, and also of dividing experience into real and
virtual, body and technology, is not only that of modern scholars.
As one participant in an on-line school of internet research1 put it,
the body and the internet are correlated more or less in the same
way as ‘warm and scooter’ — as if they exist in separate dimensions
and have no chance of meeting. In a society in which — not without
the help of technology — experience continues to fragment, there
are not many forces that are capable of using opposite tools. The
potential ambition of modern anthropology must be to lead the
interdisciplinary dialogue and restore the integrity of human
experience of interaction with technology, including its bodily-
sensory dimension.
It is supposed that modern ethnographic research must be based on
2 field materials, but at the same time have a firm connection with
theory, be ‘empirically grounded and theoretically rich’, as the
organisers of international conferences put it. But the theoretical
approaches frequently used for studying the interaction of the body
and technology need not be anthropological in their origin — they
may be philosophical, sociological, or belong to STS — and in
practice the situation is one of mutual enrichment.
In my opinion, there are several approaches to the construction
of bodies that are interesting, such as Annemarie Mol’s conception
of the multiple body [Mol 2002] and Donna Haraway’s cyborg
[Haraway 1985]. Phenomenology ([Merleau-Ponty 1945] and
others) gives a first-person perspective, and so does its continuation
post-phenomenology, which focuses on human relationships with
technology [Ihde 1979; 1998; 2001; Verbeek 2001; 2008; Rosenberger,
Verbeek 2017]. At the same time there is an understanding that
texts on the theory of the body often exclude the experience of the
body, they are disembodied. The task therefore remains of finding
new methods of integrating theory and practice, and also a new
language.
1
See the independent research project of the Club of Amateurs of the Internet and Society ‘Onlayn-
shkola’18’: <http://clubforinternet.net/school_18>.
Besides the theoretical approaches, it seems to me that it is extremely

important also to consider the organisational approaches: to study
how modern research laboratories’ work is organised, whether they
consist of anthropologists or are interdisciplinary, how expertise is
acquired, what technologies are used, etc.
At the present level of technological development anthropologists
3 study transhumanists as a group of people with particular convictions,
and not as modified bodies (unfortunately, at present one can only
dream of modification of any significance, freezing the body in
anticipation [Bernstein 2015]).
But if it is a question of the further evolution of technology, of the
future of bio- and neuro-technology, it may be supposed that such
projects will require of anthropologists both profound expertise in
the subject field and technical skills, and as a result they will be closer
to the experience of Helmreich [Helmreich 2009] or Haraway
[Haraway 2008] than to the classic works of Bronisław Malinowski.
An example of anthropological research focused on complex systems
of interaction between humans and technology might be research
into telemedicine (see, for example: [Oudshoorn 2011; Pols 2012])
or experimental biomedicine [Song 2017]. Medical anthropology is
close to STS, and there are grounds for expecting even greater
interdisciplinarity: a significant part of the international 4S
community (Society for Social Studies of Science) is already made
up of anthropologists.
Ethics — the area where the isolation of Russian scholarship is most
acutely felt — will be a most important point on the agenda.
It is already possible to observe in Russia that techno-optimists in
4 the state and business are already talking about the humanities in
the past tense. One can hear many speculations about the further
evolution of technology and the hopes and fears associated with it.
But what will the future really be like? In my opinion this is still an
open question. According to Nassim Taleb’s theory [Taleb 2012],
new technologies, like everything new, are fragile, so let us equip
ourselves with the anthropologist’s most important tool — the
notebook. (And, just in case, let us also learn programming and how
to preach digital ethnography.)
References
Bernstein A., ‘Freeze, Die, Come to Life: The Many Paths to Immortality
in Post-Soviet Russia’, American Ethnologist, 2015, vol. 42, is. 4,
pp. 766–81.
Boellstorff T., ‘Placing the Virtual Body: Avatar, Chora, Cypherg’, Mascia-
Lees F. E. (ed.), a Companion to the Anthropology of the Body and
79 F orum
Embodiment. Chichester, West Sussex, UK; Malden, MA: Wiley-

Body and Technology
Blackwell, 2011, pp. 504–20.

Haraway D., ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist
Feminism in the 1980s’, Socialist Review, 1985, no. 80, pp. 65–109.
Haraway D., When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2008, X+423 pp. (Posthumanities, 3).
Helmreich S., Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009, XVII+403 pp.
Hine C., Ethnography for the Internet: Embedded, Embodied and Everyday.
London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015, VIII+221 pp.
Hjorth L., Horst H., Galloway A., Bell G. (eds.), The Routledge Companion
to Digital Ethnography. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon; New York,
NY: Routledge, 2017, XXIV+493 pp.
Ihde D., Technics and Praxis. Boston: Pallas Paperbacks, 1979, 151 pp.
Ihde D., ‘Bodies, Virtual Bodies and Technology’, Welton D. (ed.), Body
and Flesh. a Philosophical Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub
lishers, 1998, pp. 349–57.
Ihde D., Bodies in Technology. Minneapolis: University оf Minnesota Press,
2001, XX+155 pp.
Mascia-Lees F. E. (ed.), a Companion to the Anthropology of the Body and
Embodiment. Chichester, West Sussex, UK; Malden, MA: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2011, XXV+529 pp.
Merleau-Ponty M., Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard, 1945,
XVI+531 pp.
Oudshoorn N., Telecare Technologies and the Transformation of Healthcare.
Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, X+241 pp.
Pink S., Horst H., Postill J., Hjorth L., Lewis T., Tacchi J., Digital Ethno
graphy: Principles and Practice. Los Angeles: Sage, 2016, XIII+202 pp.
Pols J., Care at a Distance: On the Closeness of Technology. Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2012, 204 рp.
Rosenberger R., Verbeek P.-P., ‘A Field Guide to Postphenomenology’,
Rosenberger R., Verbeek P.-P. (eds.), Postphenomenological
Investigations: Essays on Human-Technology Relations. Lanham,
MA: Lexington Books, 2017, pp. 9–41.
Song P., Biomedical Odysseys: Fetal Cell Experiments from Cyberspace to
China. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017, XVI+296 pp.
Stewart A., The Ethnographer’s Method. New Delhi: Sage, 1998, 104 pp.
Taleb N. N., Antifragile. Things that Gain from Disorder. New York:
Random House, 2012, XXI+519 pp.
Verbeek P.-P., ‘Don Ihde: The Technological Lifeworld’, Achterhuis H. (ed.),
American Philosophy of Technology: The Empirical Turn. Blooming
ton: Indiana University Press, 2001, pp. 119–46.
Verbeek P.-P., ‘Cyborg Intentionality: Rethinking the Phenomenology
of Human-Technology Relations’, Phenomenology and the Cognitive
Sciences, 2008, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 387–95.
LILIIA ZEMNUKHOVA
Modern technologies are becoming universal
1 and are gradually occupying all spheres
of everyday life. They are not only mediators
and (co-)participants in our actions, but also
facilitators of a new order and a new social
experience and interaction with the non-
material.
The influence of information technologies on
human corporeality should be taken into
account, in view of the role played by the body
and physiology in their development. As the
history of the development of the field of
human-computer interaction (HCI) shows,
development was at first based on physical and
psycho-physiological metrics, for example Fitts’s
Law or Hick’s Law for the development of
interfaces. Then the cognitive revolution shifted
the focus from human corporeality to human
cognitive potential. Attention returned to the
users’ physical characteristics thanks to col
laboration with anthropologists: they drew
attention to the diversity of users, their cultural
practices and social situations.
In turn, the influence of technologies on human
corporeality is discussed in psychology, philo
sophy, cognitive science, sociology and anthro
pology, and the different disciplines display
different dynamics and tendencies. The range
of problems discussed by anthropology, being
less visionary and futurological, has to do with
current experience, changes in the everyday
order and the construction of new orders. The
anthropology of technologies makes it possible
to work with various aspects of the ‘interfaces’
of interaction, where human corporeality is
presented in a so-called multi-modal form:
movement, touch, voice, orientation in space.
In our sociological project for studying socio-
technical barriers (RSF no. 17-78-20164) we rely
on anthropological research into corporeality in
Liliia Zemnukhova order to analyse geo-locational games in
European University a situation of public presence, interaction with
at St Petersburg
St Petersburg, Russia speaking robot assistants, and the use of turn
l.zemnukhova@gmail.com stiles. It is the anthropological approach that
81 F orum
makes it possible to collect detailed descriptions of situations, in

Body and Technology
order to follow the dynamics of micro-alterations.

I regard as promising those approaches that work with questions
2 that are ancillary for the analysts (though in a certain sense fun
damental to the humanities); the objectification and metrics of the
body for use in digital technologies, the anthropomorphisation
of modern technologies, and the problem of the ‘uncanny valley’.
This is a research horizon for the next few decades, because it seems
now that it is anthropologists who can bring order and normality
to the many different new experiments in interaction with modern
technologies.
The second direction is connected with the destruction and alteration
of the boundaries of human corporeality, from exoskeletons to
augmented reality and virtual reality, which influence the paradigms
and normativity of the perception of the body, objectification and
symbolification. The evolution of these technologies leads to
difficulties in interpreting the experience of the user and their
permissible application. Many questions end up on the agenda
of technology companies or political decisions, and an anthropological
perspective could standardise this sort of experience.
Finally, experiments with the body will be something for which
expertise is lacking, since the developers are not engaged in the
analysis of everyday experience. Such phenomena as biohacking
require not only, and not so much, theoretical interpretation as
detailed study at the level of everyday experience and of interaction
with technologies and with the body.
The cognitive sciences and biotechnology are pioneering fields,
3 practically impenetrable to the social sciences and humanities. The
main reason is that the social sciences raise a multitude of ethical,
legal and moral questions, to answer which requires a long time and
a sufficient amount of empirical data, small data collected qualitatively
from specific examples.
Medical anthropology has promoted itself as an interdisciplinary
field, but at the same time it depends on the tendencies and
limitations of the field in which it is working. For example,
biotechnology is currently actively influencing changes in many
aspects of medicine, and in this case the task of anthropology
includes dealing with its technological aspects. Cognitive science,
though, in its interaction with technological developments, is
directed towards the solution of specific problems. The field
of behavioural economics, say, recently recognised with a Nobel
Prize, is a direction not only for cognitive sciences, but also for the
anthropology of consciousness. The task of anthropology is to
provide explanations which are not reduced to biologism
or psychologism, but take account of the cultural practices and
traditions that are transformed under the influence of technological
evolution.
For the time being the future of the humanities and social sciences
4 seems to have been set aside: in a technocratic picture of the world,
the social and cultural aspects of the evolution of technologies recede
into the background. Knowledge from the social sciences and
humanities introduces many more unknown variables into the
developers’ equations, and their task is to find solutions to their
problems, and not to complicate them. As a result expertise in the
social sciences and humanities will, against a background of techno
logical evolution, constantly come up against structural limitations.
However, for several decades, active attempts have been being made
to put a social science / humanities accompaniment to the evolution
of new technologies onto the agenda and institutionalise it, beginning
with such global projects with unclear social effects as the Human
Genome Project. From an STS point of view interest becomes
particularly topical at times of breakdowns, failures and accidents.
For this reason, the more situations and precedents there are for
everyday interaction with technologies, the more threats, risks and
complications to their dissemination, the more awareness there is
of the need for knowledge of the social sciences and humanities.
83 F orum
Sergei Sokolovskiy
Anthropology of the Living and the Dead:
The Case of the Human Body and Technics
(an Afterword to the Discussion)
This paper summarizes the discussion on anthropological approaches to the study of the interface of human body and
technologies. Employing the concept of ‘hypocognition’ suggested by Robert Levy, the author describes the search for
the conceptual tools necessary to create interdisciplinary dialogue in this new research field. In addition to a brief
overview of this search and the resulting discussion, the paper argues with the traditional approach to the human body
and technologies as separate phenomena. As new technologies interact with the human body in new and intricate ways,
and influence human beings, societies, and cultures across the world, their study must become part and parcel
of anthropology, which has so far focused on tradition and paid less attention to innovations.
Keywords: technology research in anthropology, body studies, hypocognition, interdisciplinary dialogue.
Discussions in interdisciplinary areas of research

may be likened to a conversation which, in
Merleau-Ponty’s words, is only genuine when
it allows the people conversing access to ideas
which were not only unfamiliar to them pre
viously, but even to ideas of which they would
not even have been capable [Merleau-Ponty
1964: 29]. This, as far as I can understand,
happens because any discipline has its own
conceptual toolkit which is designed only for
solving its own problems and which creates
a particular viewpoint of the subject, or a vision
which is as unique and idiosyncratic as the
individual manners of perceiving things.
Our professional vision, in any case, is that
of Western man from the time of the invention
of conceptual thought, and is realised not so
much through the eyes as through the operation
of the intellect. For this reason the words for
seeing, understanding and recognising are
contextual synonyms in many European
languages. The obverse to this visualisation is
a blindness caused by the lack of suitable
concepts, which has been called hypocognition
(a term invented by the American anthropologist
Robert Levy, who worked on Tahiti [Levy 1973:
Sergei Sokolovskiy 285, 324]). The bearers of any disciplinary
N. N. Miklukho-Maklai Institute knowledge, though practically clairvoyant in
of Ethnology and Anthropology, ‘their own field’, are doomed to hypocognition
Moscow, Russia when they encounter new areas of knowledge
SokolovskiSerg@gmail.com or unaccustomed views of a subject that they
know. People are incapable of assimilating even a thousandth of the

sum of concepts available to humanity nowadays, since during their
entire lives they do not encounter many of the social, cultural,
scholarly or philosophical discourses. It is on account of these
circumstances that interdisciplinary areas of research, as sites for
meeting and exchanging unique knowledge and vocabularies, are
the catalysts of innovation and the motors of scientific evolution.
However, the bare fact that the bearers of different vocabularies have
met cannot guarantee the success of the exchange. It would be naïve
to suppose that reality itself could become the meta-language for
that sort of ‘conversation’. What is needed is a sort of outer frame,
a common vocabulary, a search for metaphors and analogies, and
an interdisciplinary translation, so that a conversation between
members of different disciplinary communities could be genuine,
and the interlocutors have access to new ideas at which they would
never have arrived without such an exchange.
This was precisely the task of the discussion in this issue of the
Forum: a search for a common conceptual framework that would
allow representatives of different disciplines (in particular, medical
anthropology, the anthropology of catastrophes, the anthropology
of the body and techno-anthropology, as well as the sociology,
history and philosophy of the body and technology, and, of course,
researchers into practices, rituals, skills, habits and habitus) to
deepen their own vision and enrich their departmental vocabularies
and viewpoints as a result of an exchange of opinions on the
proposed topic. This idea has its own prehistory, and a brief
acquaintance with it may illuminate certain sides of the discussion
presented in this issue.
One of the first publications in the study of contemporary techno-
culture in Russian anthropology was the thematic issue New
Approaches to the Study of Material Culture, which included, inter
alia, Phillip Vannini’s survey of the anthropology and sociology
of technology and David Hess’s survey of the ethnography of science
and technology (Etnograficeskoe Obozrenie, 2011, no. 5), and also
Natalya Bogatyr’s field research on contemporary digital technologies
[Bogatyr 2011]. Soon afterwards there was an issue on the
anthropology of organisations with important works for our subject
on the role of the material infrastructure and technological
innovations (Etnograficeskoe Obozrenie, 2012, no. 3), and a year later
(Etnograficeskoe Obozrenie, 2013, no. 3) there was an examination
of the ethical problems of post-humanism and new technologies,
and all the interested authors on the editorial board were invited to
publish their research on such subjects as ‘prostheses and the limits
of the body, the interrelationship of the living and the inorganic,
of the human body and new technologies, neurobiology and the
problem of artificial intelligence’ [Sokolovskiy 2013: 38]. Among the
85 F orum
thematic issues of the future was the topic of ‘The Living and the
Body and Technology
Inert: Old Mythologies, New Technologies and the Human Body’.

Some results of research on the problem of the localisation of techno-
scholarship [Zemnukhova, Sivkov 2017], with important insights
for theory and methodology, were published in 2017 in the thematic
issue The Anthropology of Spaces and Mobilities. Finally, at the
Twelfth Congress of Anthropologists and Ethnologists of Russia
(Izhevsk, July 2017) there was a section on ‘Technology and
Corporeality: New Concepts and Methods of Research’, the
participants in which made up the majority of the pool of authors
of the present ‘Forum’. Alongside this, a special issue of Sotsiologiya
vlasti [Sociology of Power] (2017, no. 3) was published in April 2018
on The Ontology of the Body and Medical Practice examining the
problems of interaction between the body and technology.
All these works created the conditions for carrying out research on
subjects which are quite traditional for our ethnography on the basis
of new approaches and methods but, above all, in the framework
of a renewed and enriched conceptual context for examining the
interaction between the living and the dead, the bodily and the
technical. In particular, it became possible to study burial rituals and
thanatological practices against the wide background of the
interactions of the living-organic-natural and the inert-inorganic-
technical, and 2018 saw the beginning of the research project ‘The
Dead in the World of the Living: Cross-Cultural Research into the
Communicative Aspects of Thanatological Practices and Beliefs’
(grant RSF no. 18-18-00082), directed towards the study of such
practices in a number of European, Asian and African countries.
It was in the context of this project that the specific theoretical,
methodological and meta-scientific questions that then formed the
basis for discussion by participants in the present ‘Forum’ were
formulated.
At first sight the combination of a set of problems so traditional for
ethnographers with actor-network methodology and a consideration
of previously ignored technological aspects of these practices (and
technology is used everywhere here, not only in the course of burial
or dealing with the dead body: it mediates the commemorative
practices and communication between the living and the dead) seems
strained. This sort of scepticism, I am convinced, is the result of those
stereotypes of thought which the new methods are trying to do away
with. Gregory Bateson, as we know, has called for the fundamental
unit of evolution to be regarded, not as the individual organism, but
its union with its environment (‘the unit of survival is the organism-
in-its-environment’ [Bateson 1987: 319–20]), which, applied to
humanity, might be understood as the individual, the bearer
of a particular culture, in union with his / her technical and techno
logical skills, implants, prostheses, extensions and ‘capsules’ and all
the man-made artificial environment. (I have previously suggested

a special term to express this union — technomorph [Sokolovskiy
2017].)
Anthropologists have generally ignored the extent to which human
behaviour is conditioned by the technical environment, because the
essence of this behaviour was being examined in its semiotic,
symbolic, mental or cognitive components. This ignorance is one
of the stereotypes of the modern mentality, already implanted by the
Cartesian opposition between cogito and the body. Contemporary
neurophysical, psychological and cognitive sciences eliminate this
opposition with the concept of the embodied mind or the mindful
body (Irina Sirotkina also mentions this; see this issue). Furthermore,
in order to eliminate the opposition between human beings and
their environment, the concepts of the cyborg, hybrid, artificial
corporeality, etc. have been put forward. Peter Sloterdijk, the
German philosopher, and author of an original conception of the
morphology of human living-spaces in the era of media-
technological globalisation, starting from Heidegger’s conception
of Dasein (‘being in [the world]’), bases his approach to the
description of socio-cultural processes (‘spherology’) on a specific
understanding of human corporeality. He also pays attention to the
circumstance that the use of biotechnologies (in other words,
technical transformations of biological material, including the
human body) is opening an era of the radical transformation
of humanity, and he stresses the significance of genetic engineering
and biotechnologies for contemporary theories of culture. In
Sloterdijk’s view man is not so much animal rationale as, above all,
an animal with a body: human corporeality is formulated by his /
her own cultural practices and is revealed thanks to the development
of technology, since his / her skill (τέχνη) and the technogenic effect
on the environment that this causes reveal new aspects of human
corporeality [Sloterdijk 1998; 1999; 2004]. This dialectic between
the body and technology, already adumbrated by Heidegger and
developed by Sloterdijk within his ‘post-metaphysical philosophy’,
expresses their complex interdependency in the process
of somatotechnogenesis and highlights in a new way the relationship
between the human organism and the techno-environment with
which it is connected. Here the body and environment again appear
as an evolving unity, as the technique of survival and the condition
of life, the boundary of which (death, the transformation of the
living into the dead) is to an equal extent defined as bodily
dysfunction, disease, infirmity or disadaptation and as the technical
breakdown of human subsistence infrastructure or a technogenic
catastrophe.
The participants in this discussion, one way or another, touch on
all these topics in connection with anthropology and its role in
87 F orum
opening up this thematic area, and many of them note the primitive
Body and Technology
consistency and original unity of that which is distinguished and

counterposed in the ‘Forum’’s questions: the body and technology.
So Irina Sirotkina draws our attention to the fact that τέχνη, while
it remains a human skill, cannot but be an integral part of the
ἄνθρωπος, and for that very reason ‘The role of anthropology in
studying technology as the extension of human capabilities, or, as
the methodologists would say, human ‘enskilment’, is hard to
exaggerate’ [italics mine. — S.S.]. Victor Krutkin takes a very
similar position, sharing the approach of Dan Miller, who treats
the relationship between technology and human beings as a process
of objectification expressed in the dialectic between subject and
object, consisting of ‘the subject’s becoming its own object and
returning to itself at another level, and this continues cyclically, as
each objectification brings about a new modification of the subject.
<…> People organise the world through their artefacts, and by this
very process human beings are organised.’ He also reminds us
of the sayings of André Leroi-Gourhan, that ‘technology is a factor
in the biological dimension of humanity,’ an evolutionary factor,
in the course of the development of which ‘tools and bodies are
deeply interpenetrative.’ Aleksandra Kurlenkova, reproducing
Bateson’s thesis and taking into account non-Western ways
of categorising and drawing boundaries between the living and the
inert, also writes of the possibility of ‘conceptualisations of the
body and technologies which are new in principle,’ for example,
those ‘in which they are not opposed to each other, but presented
as something comb ined, inseparable, as part of a complex
interlinked system of “man + environment”.’ Elena Gudova
connects the sources of the critique of the dualism of body and
technology with Donna Haraway’s well-known ‘Cyborg Manifesto’
[Haraway 1985]. (It is worth noting that the term was first
proposed in 1960 in the article ‘Cyborgs and Space’ in the
September issue of Astronautics by the talented Viennese-born
pianist, inventor and researcher Manfred Clynes and Nathan
S. Kline, the director of the Rockland Research Center and Clinic
[Clynes, Kline 1960].)
In his contribution Dmitriy Mikhel does not consider the question
of whether the body and technology comprise a single whole or are
in opposition to each other, but his example of the technologies
of organ transplants, which cross ‘the boundaries between the living
and the dead, <…> between the natural and the artificial,’ testifies
to the complex unity of corporeality and technology and their
intimate interdependence, thinking about which requires the
creation of special concepts. His question of whether our bodies can
adapt to the new technological reality provides another viewpoint
for the problem of the relation of the body and technology:
harmonious or unharmonious co-existence within the ensembles

that they form. Elena Sokolova believes that the body and technology
form a whole, since they are parts of a single human experience.
Magdalena Kozhevnikova takes a somewhat different position on
the question of the correlation between technology and the body.
She regards technology as a means of observing the ‘crossover of life-
forms’, and in the case of the most recent technology, as a tool for
crossing the living and the lifeless and creating hybrids and
chimaeras. The instrumental treatment of technology has deep
historical and philosophical roots, but needs a more profound
development and a concretisation of the very category of instrument
and a clarification of the genesis of instrumentality. And if in the
first case (technology as a means of observation) technology can be
considered as the realisation of ‘human adaptation’, in the second
example (the use of technology for crossing species and creating
living-lifeless hybrids) technology functions in a guise previously
foreign to it as the source of new forms of life.
The question of the role of anthropology in studying the inter
relationship of the body and technology raises the problem
of a justified amplification of its object, in particular the inclusion
of new technologies in it. What arguments are there in favour
of their inclusion, and what objections could be raised to the
broadening of the area of anthropological interests, which is already
fragmentary and hard to survey? This is not the first year when
anthropologists, Russians included, have been studying modern
technologies and their influence on human corporeality, but — with
very rare exceptions — hitherto such research has only been
conducted in medical anthropology, where integrating the problems
of corporeality and the apparatus of biotechnology and reproductive
technology has been at the centre of attention. The contributions to
this issue include Michele Rivkin-Fish’s study of how technology
has impacted upon this area, entrenching power hierarchies and
gender asymmetries rather than fostering the breakdown
of boundaries that is often addressed in studies of biotechnology
more broadly. Another area of anthropological research where our
field of interest, if not central, inevitably crops up, is the anthropology
of professions, since the professional experience of the respondents
often concerns subjects which have a direct relation to the interface
between body and technology.
It is hardly possible to dispute the legitimacy of including in the
subject of the discipline the human body, on the one hand, and
technology on the other, since they were being studied in the initial
stages of the nascent discipline of anthropology. Towards the end
of the nineteenth century material culture became a privileged source
for the reconstruction of the history of illiterate peoples. The
difference from archaeology expressed itself here in that the objects
89 F orum
under study were not artefacts from excavations, but things that
Body and Technology
were still being used by people in the cultures that the anthropologists
were studying. Physical anthropology, or bio-anthropology, made
the human body (which moreover was also studied in the many
medical sciences, just as its representation was studied in various
disciplines of the humanities) its main subject, finding its own
perspective and concentrating at first on its geographical and cultural
variation. Doubts as to the justification for including these areas in
anthropology as a subject arise not in respect of these long-
established and now traditional areas of anthropological interest,
but when contemporary technical apparatus and new technologies
are added to its sphere. Indeed, material culture, as understood in
classical ethnography, excluded from its attention objects of assembly-
line or mass production and industrial technologies as not ‘ethno
graphic’ enough. As part of the industrial global culture and urban
everyday life, mass-produced artefacts caught anthropologists’
attention only when they transformed traditions and traditional
societies.
The situation today, however, has changed radically, and not only
because of the rise of urban and medical anthropology and the
anthropology of professions, but also by reason of the growing
influence of the technical sciences on all aspects of culture and
society. It would, however, be wrong to assert that in other ages the
‘new technologies’ of the day were less influential in this respect. In
the end, change in the technological order was always accompanied
by radical changes in culture in general and everyday practices in
particular. In the past too introduced novelties have led to the rise
and fall of whole civilisations, and they were no less complicated
than those of today (cf. [Lansing 1991]). However, the tempo
of those changes on the whole corresponded to the tempo of the
succession of generations, or lagged behind it, so that they were not
so noticeable, and their transforming influence on cultural traditions
was not so obtrusive. Nowadays the speed of the technical innovations
that are reshaping our everyday life is such that no specialist studying
culture and tradition can ignore this factor and is forced to look for
new approaches or language that would allow the description and
analysis of the kaleidoscope of new practices and the transforming
structures of everyday life; moreover the changes induced by these
technologies affect the whole of society and culture, effacing the
differences between urban and rural localities the world over. Such
technologies often enter into fundamentally new relations with
human corporeality, not only transforming our habits, skills,
practices, dispositions, the scheme and image of the body and the
habitus as a whole, but also demonstrating ever newer and more
intimate kinds of integration and hybridisation of the somatic and
the technical, the organic and the inorganic, the living and the inert.
Technology saturates modern everyday life and is becoming

ubiquitous (as many of the participants in the discussion note), and
therefore anthropologists studying this everyday life and aiming for
a holistic description must include it in the subject of their research,
and, moreover, as Liliia Zemnukhova remarks, it is the anthro
pological approach that ‘makes it possible to collect detailed
descriptions of situations, in order to follow the dynamics of micro-
alterations.’ Anna Malyar, noting the shortage of anthropological
research into ‘the body-as-thing’, calls for ‘the body [to be] grasped
by its flesh,’ and writes that ‘this must be done by anthropology as
the only one of the social sciences that has a materially orientated
methodological apparatus.’ Igor Morozov draws our attention to the
multiplication of the perspectives from which corporeality, which
is becoming ‘an important subject to be studied by the social
sciences, marketing, image-making and political studies,’ may be
examined. He also touches on the problem of the anthropo
morphisation of technology, which complicates our notions of the
‘human’ and ‘non-human’. At the same time technology (apart from
the very specific case of medical anthropology) remains, as Asya
Karaseva concludes after examining nearly a score of surveys of the
sociology and anthropology of the body, ‘a real blind spot in research
on corporeality’.
Since the spread of new technologies is transforming the traditional
objects of anthropological research, making us change our
methodology and research methods, the ‘Forum’ questionnaire
included questions about the promising approaches for studying
corporeality, old and new, and the effect of the successes
of biotechnologies and cognitive sciences on our discipline. The
answer to the question whether there have existed in the history
of anthropology concepts that have influenced contemporary
approaches to the study of technology and the body assumes
a detailed set of ideas about the concept of technology and its
evolution in those aspects of corporeality which are involved in
interaction with technologies or subject to their influence. The dawn
of anthropological research, as such, into traditional technologies
came at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth
centuries [Hutton 1944], after which this field suffered a prolonged
crisis, dropping out of sight into museum anthropology, which was
not very prestigious at that time (Bronisław Malinowski, for example,
thought that in ethnology the study of technology was ‘scientifically
sterile’ [Malinowski 1935, I: 460]). Until the formation of new
approaches to material culture and technology almost a hundred
years later, with the realisation of the highly important role
of technology for at least three key areas of anthropological
interest — the culture of everyday life, the reproduction of tradition
and the ecology and evolution of man — research into technology
91 F orum
remained a peripheral activity for anthropologists. The individual

Body and Technology
works that appeared during this period could not change the
situation [Pfaffenberger 1992]. Nevertheless it was anthropologists
who were the originators of several key ideas for the research area
that we are interested in. Besides the widely known works of Marcel
Mauss on the techniques of the body and André Leroi-Gourhan,
who developed the principles of comparative technology, some of the
already mentioned ideas of Gregory Bateson, and also Edward Hall,
Mary Douglas, David Schneider, Marilyn Strathern and other
classical authors of our discipline who prepared the soil for the
development of medical anthropology and techno-anthropology and
offered a profound interpretation of the influence of new technologies
on many social institutions (including the transformation — and
the very concept of the category — of kinship, and on customary
systems of categorisation, on ecology and on ethics), were important
for the study of the interaction between the body and technology in
this period of waning interest and still exert a stimulating influence
on the corresponding research today.
The participants in the present discussion identified many promising
directions of anthropological research into corporeality and
technology. In the area of methodology the respondents note a turn
towards non-anthropocentric anthropology (Magdalena Kozhev
nikova, Aleksandra Kurlenkova), treatments of the body as con
struction and as media (Irina Sirotkina) and a revision of the
boundaries of the body (Anna Malyar), and towards the study of the
ethical problems of post- and trans-humanism (Magdalena
Kozhevnikova). From a practical point of view they named among
such directions the study of the digitisation of the body and its
functions, the anthropomorphisation of modern technology (Igor
Morozov), and bodily aspects of enhanced and virtual reality (Elena
Sokolova). In addition they write about the need to analyse practices
that are becoming part of the new everyday life such as biohacking,
the influence of biotechnology on the bodily mediation of power
(Liliia Zemnukhova, Anna Malyar), hybrid corporeality (Dmitriy
Mikhel, Magdalena Kozhevnikova), the culture of movement and
working practices (Irina Sirotkina), bodily sensory interaction with
technology (Elena Sokolova), the commercialisation of the body
(Igor Morozov) and the technology of human ‘improvement’
(Dmitriy Mikhel).
In respect of the last it must be noted that attempts at such
improvement have been observed for as long as humanity has
existed: human beings have, over the millennia, used mineral,
vegetable and animal resources in their pharmacopoeia. Many
of these substances, including those that affect the consciousness,
laid the foundations of modern therapeutic medicine. However,
traditional medicine did not interfere — at least, did not consciously
and deliberately interfere — in the regulation of the functions

of the human organism at the sub-cellular or genetic levels, and
did not have the technology to transplant organs or to grow them
from stem cells; prostheses and implants were also at a qualitatively
different level. Contemporary biotechnologies are carrying out
interventions in the human mind and body on a hitherto
unprecedented scale. The humanisation of the inorganic (robo
tisation, artificial intelligence, the emergence of a particular field
of ethics concerning relations with machines and the issue
of machine rights) on the one hand, and the insertion of synthetic
materials and devices, both organic and inorganic, into the human
body on the other are apparently forming a new research field,
emerging from the interface between the problems of corporeality
and technology, for the anthropologist. Human enhancement or
technically augmented cognition should not escape interrogation
by anthropologists, because, whatever anthropologists may be
engaged in, so long as their discipline exists its main focus is
human beings and the processes that take place in their con
sciousness and bodies.
Anthropologists have hitherto played secondary roles in research
into these problems: in medicine they acted as consultants on
culture, and for technology companies they provided interaction
and feedback between the engineers and the users of the companies’
products. These are important roles, but they cannot be considered
sufficient, since the increasing tempo of innovation and its growing
influence on humanity raises the question of a more profound
understanding of specific areas of medicine and technology. This
task implies a change in the whole system of professional training
and teaching, and the mastering of a range of specialities. Without
this, anthropology will always be lagging behind both the dynamic
of culture and society and the dynamic of changes in human
behaviour, including bodily aspects of this behaviour. However,
knowledge in this field is becoming more and more interdisciplinary,
which makes new demands on the systems for its transmission.
Should we maintain the barriers between disciplines and jealously
guard the boundaries between them (for this is the principle on
which the higher education examination and degree-awarding
system is built, as is the business of academic publishing), or do we
need to make a radical turn towards universal education on
irreductionist and holistic principles? This is the most substantial
and serious question, since it concerns the future both of the
education system, and of scholarship in general.
93 F orum
Acknowledgements
Body and Technology
I should like to express my gratitude to all the members of the ad hoc
research group supported by the Russian Science Foundation research
project (grant no. 18-18-00082), discussions with whom helped me to
formulate the questions proposed here for discussion, and better to present
the conceptual horizon for examining the dialectic between the living and
the dead, one manifestation of which is undoubtedly the interrelationships
between the body and technology. My particular gratitude is due to the
members of the editorial board of Antropologicheskij forum, for refining
the formulation of the questions, and also to all the participants for the
time they spent on it and for an interesting discussion.
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the Prism of Relations between Users and Technologies], Etno
graficeskoe Obozrenie, 2011, no. 5, pp. 30–9. (In Russian).
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1960, pp. 26–7, 74–7. <https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/4df3/9d87
55c0b3e083cfaf0bfb6e3ff8afe77247.pdf>.
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Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1935, 500+350 pp.
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Sokolovskiy S. V., ‘O granitsakh cheloveka i chelovecheskogo: bioetika,
postgumanizm i novye tekhnologii’ [On the Boundaries of the
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realnosti’ [Anthropotechnomorphisms and the Anthropology
of Techno-Corpo-Reality], Sotsiologiya vlasti, 2017, vol. 29, no. 3,
Zemnukhova L. V., Sivkov D. Yu., ‘Rabotat (v)meste: lokalizatsiya tekhno-
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The answers originally written in Russian

were translated by Ralph Cleminson
The Human
in Techno-Media:
New Topics
in Anthropological
Research
97 T he H uman in T echno - M edia
Sergei Sokolovskiy
Bodies and Technologies
through the Prism of Techno-Anthropology
The paper deals with the interface of the human body and (new) technologies; its aim being an overview of the field with
a purpose to include the relevant topics within the legitimate concerns of anthropology. The author discusses the choice
from competing theories and conceptual tools, necessary for the study of corporeality and technology, as well as their
interaction. The concepts of body schema and body image serve as conceptual tools and examples of various forms of
bodily integration with technical apparatus in different types of media, both real and virtual, offline and online. The
analogy between the concept of Umwelt, introduced by German bio-semiotician Jakob von Uexküll for animal perception
analysis, and the concept of technosphere by humans, provides a unique perspective on technical milieu as essential part
of various human-machine assemblages. It is argued that lived (phenomenological) body, social body and physical body
have their own modi of presence and forms of integration with technical objects in different types of virtual and actual
reality.
Keywords: technologies, corporeality, techno-anthropology, body schema, body image, skills, habitus.
The anthropology of technology has been less

fortunate than the anthropology of the body.
As early as the beginning of the last century,
anthropologists’ interest in artefacts had dimi
nished, and the focus had been transferred
to social organisation, symbols and rituals
(cf. [Pfaffenberger 1992: 491]), whereas research
into human corporeality, in such physico-
anthropological disciplines as somatology,
craniology and palaeoanthropology, went on
almost without interruption and continued
to evolve in collaboration with genetics, physio
logy and medicine [Alekseev 1979: 39–51].
Given the uneven pace of development in the
said fields, the whole sphere of the interaction
between bodies and technologies could not
become the object of anthropological inves
tigation, and even if it occasionally did, this was
for the most part only when the body was
viewed as an instrument (for example in the
concepts the techniques of the body of Mauss
Sergei Sokolovskiy
N. N. Miklukho-Maklai Institute and Leroi-Gourhan). Everything changed when
of Ethnology and Anthropology, Science and Technology Studies (STS) came
Russian Academy of Sciences into being as an independent discipline,
32a Leninskiy Av.,
Moscow, Russia although anthropologists played only a modest
SokolovskiSerg@gmail.com part in its genesis, allowing sociologists,
philosophers and historians of science and technology to take the

lead — but this did not prevent some of their ideas and observations
from proving key to the subject later on.1
One such idea was the assertion, formulated by Gregory Bateson,
that the fundamental unit of the evolutionary process is not the
organism or the population, but the ‘organism plus environment’
[italics in the original. — S.S.] [Bateson 1987: 320]. Similar ideas can
by found in the works of the French physician and philosopher
Georges Canguilhem [Canguilhem 2008: 111], and the biologist and
philosopher Jakob von Uexküll (born in Estonia but working mostly
in Germany), who divided the organism’s environment into what it
generates through its own perception (Umwelt) and what surrounds
it (Umgebung) [von Uexküll 1921: 4–5], and likewise in those of the
Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben [Agamben 2002: cap. 10]. This
idea diverges not only from the postulates of Darwinism, but also
from the ideologies of common sense and scientific realism, which
stress the autonomy of organisms and their qualitative distinction
from the other objects and environments that surround them. We
construct hypotheses upon the data of our visual perception to the
detriment of our own sensations in other channels of perception —
tactile, thermoceptive, auditory, olfactory — and forgetting that other
living beings perceive the world differently. Indeed, to our vision all
living beings move about in space, and their very movement testifies
to their separateness and autonomy from it. Von Uexküll calls these
physical surroundings Umgebung. Unlike the Umwelt of living
beings, this environment is accessible to visual perception. The
‘inner’ or subjective environment, produced by the organs of
perception peculiar to each particular biological species, the Umwelt,
can be reconstructed only by painstaking research, as von Uexküll
himself did in respect of ticks, amoebas, oysters and sea urchins, but
it is impossible to see it by direct natural observation.
For a human being these worlds of other species remain literally in
the mind’s eye. I would suggest that the ‘invisibility’ of the Umwelt
played a dirty trick on the theorists of biology, who for a long time
conceived of the units of selection as individuals or collections of
individuals and not as combinations of ‘organism plus environment’.
Attempts to think in this way were hampered by purely terminological
complications. What should these new unities be called? If we remain
with Bateson’s terminology, then we retain, albeit only at the
terminological level, the contraposition of organism and environment
(and that without the distinction between Umwelt and Umgebung).
What are we to call that synthesis of the living and the inorganic in
the Umwelt that provides for the survival of species?

1
This article does not contain any survey of the corresponding ideas of STS, since it is to be found in
other publications by the author [Sokolovskiy 2016a; 2016b].
To overcome this contraposition of the living and the inorganic,

Sergei Sokolovskiy. Bodies and Technologies through the Prism of Techno-Anthropology
nature and culture, human and animal, organism and machine,

Donna Haraway develops a special vocabulary of hybridity, using
centaur-concepts that have become widely known thanks to her
work, such as cyborg (a cybernetic organism, a synthesis of the
technical or inorganic and the living), chimaera and mosaic [Hara
way 1991: 149–81; 2008], but these too do nothing more than
transfer all the oppositions enumerated into the inner content of the
terms, without abolishing them.
I am unable to suggest a universal solution, only a few ideas regarding
one particular species, Homo sapiens. They are connected with a loose
comparison of von Uexküll’s Umwelt to the human technosphere.
The risk in such a comparison lies in the fact that besides a ‘secondary
nature’ (an expression which I shall replace in the discussion that
follows with the term ‘technosphere’), human beings also produce
a traditional Umwelt in von Uexküll’s sense of the word, which cannot
but complicate the analysis of ‘body-environment’ ensembles which,
it seems to me, is essential to the examination of the interface between
corporeality and technology. Thus in the case of Homo sapiens we
have three environments instead of the standard two: 1) the physical
environment common to all species on earth, von Uexküll’s Umge
bung; 2) the perceived environment, or Umwelt in von Uexküll’s
sense; 3) the techno-environment, which combines characteristics
of the Umwelt and the Umgebung.
In the majority of cases the production of the Umwelt does not go
beyond its phenomenological version, so to speak, since in
production of this sort it is only a matter of the active role of per
ception: the tick, being deaf and blind, perceives the world through
chemo- and thermoception, and we know about this through
research, but we cannot immerse ourselves in that world, since we
do not have analogous channels of perception, or even if we have
them (as in the case of thermoception) they have a substantially
different range of perception. Every species, von Uexküll claims,
creates its own ‘proximate environment’. Only in the case of human
beings can we speak of production in the stricter, or fuller sense, as
of the preparation of artefacts and the creation thereof on the basis
of a special environment, or in a looser sense and with various
provisos in respect of those animals which build themselves places
to live or to feed their young (social insects — termites, ants, bees
and wasps; most birds, which build nests; burrowing animals, which
make themselves places to live underground; beavers; certain species
of fish, which make nests out of sand, pebbles, their own saliva, and
so on) or use special constructions to attract members of the opposite
sex (bowerbirds — for an interpretation of their behaviour in the
context of evolutionary theory and technogenesis see in greater
detail: [Sokolovskiy 2017]).
Unlike the Umwelt, the techno-environment is not produced only

subjectively, and not apprehended only phenomenologically, but quite
objectively and physically as a result of the use of the whole body or
its members as instruments (techniques of the body) with the help of
unprocessed or roughly processed objects from the environment (this
may be observed among animals: the use of stones by sea otters, of
sticks and stones by the higher primates, of broken-off twigs for
reaching insects by finches, and so on), but among humans also with
the help of specially constructed tools, apparatus, machines and
automata, or complex socio-technical systems (e.g. urban
infrastructure). Within the topic under discussion it is important to
stress that technology (or techniques in the case of techniques of the
body) are not only the product of conscious or (in the case of animals)
instinctive or reflex actions of bodily effort, but also media that at the
same time exert a reactive effect on the body and consciousness and
modify both them and the influence of the physical environment.
In writing these lines I rely on the technique of writing developed
by experience, that is, my own skills in dealing with language and
technical equipment (in this case a computer keyboard), and ex
perience continual resistance from the language of oppositions,
which is innate to the ideology of modernity and not prepared to
give in without a struggle. Instead of the concepts of consciousness
and body (or, what is yet more important for this subject, body and
technology) I would like to use some single concept which does not
contrapose them, preserving and not camouflaging both registers
of the thinking organism (which affects the world with the help of
implements as a result of its thinking activities). The closest can
didates — Leibniz’s monad or the less pretentious Homo faber,
person, personality — do indeed contain the essential semantic
elements, but by no means in the foreground, but in conjunction
with others of no less significance. In other words, although we can
think about ‘embodied consciousness’, we have no ready-made terms
for expressing the indivisibility of spirit and body, or of body and
technique, in the language of modernity, and we must have recourse
to descriptive constructions or centaur-terms.
It is such a term that I propose to use to express the primordial
concrescence of human corporeality and the techno-environment
that human beings are constantly producing and improving. Instead
of techno-environment one could use the much more familiar term
culture, but in this context the meanings derived from the Greek
τέχνη — deftness, craft, art — are more important. Another term
that I have suggested — technomorph — was intended to reflect the
synthesis, which originated at the very beginning of the process of
sapientation and only intensified over time, of man-made artefacts
and the human body, and the evolution of the latter under the
influence of the technosphere.
But at this point many questions arise. What is meant by such

a synthesis? Which body, or register of corporeality, among those

that exist, is meant? What does the component morph express in
this term? Still, it is easier to answer the last question: what is meant
is the responsive influence of technologies on the body, which
produces, inter alia, phenotypical differences between the corporeality
and habitus of ‘inhabitants’ of distinct techno-environments. The
other questions require more extensive commentary.
To describe the existing range of connections between corporeality
and technology and the technomorphs, who come into being as
a result of their action — from profound integration to remote
interaction — we need a more detailed understanding of how the
body and technology have been thought of at different stages of the
history of their study. This presupposes a survey of the philosophical,
sociological and historical research into corporeality and techno
logy. However it is understandable that such an aim can hardly
be achieved within the scope of an article, so that one must have
recourse to a schematic exposition of certain subjects, offering an
admittedly incomplete sketch of the evolution of different tendencies
or ideas in our area of interest, that of the interaction between bodies
and technologies. Besides, in order to examine the problems of the
interface between the body and technology, in the middle of which
the contemporary technologies of human enhancement are located,
we must first present the history of the development of ideas in each
of these two areas separately.
The philosophy of technology and techno-anthropology

The most interesting ideas for the nascent techno-anthropology
were summed up in research on the philosophy of technology, the
first works on which appeared at the end of the nineteenth and
beginning of the twentieth centuries. The literature on this field is
now so extensive that it is standard to divide it into several stages,
or ‘waves’ (cf. [Berg Olsen, Selinger, Riis 2009]). It is customary to
name among the founders of the philosophy of technology Ernst
Kapp (1808–1896) and his book Grundlinien einer Philosophie der
Technik, who proposed to examine technology on the basis of his
‘anthropological criterion’ inspired by Protagoras (‘man is the
measure of all things’) and Organprojektion principle. This principle
is the forerunner of the idea of tools as extensions of bodily organs
later formulated by Edward Hall [Hall 1989]. Marshall McLuhan
(who later borrowed this term from Hall) had the similar idea of
outering. Kapp regarded the world of artificial objects created by
human beings in the literal sense as a projection of their inner world
[Kapp 1877: 121ff.]. Kapp’s insight into the genesis of technology
is still relevant today.
Another acknowledged forefather of the philosophy of technology

is the French philosopher Alfred Victor Espinas (1844–1922), who
followed in Kapp’s footsteps and whose collection of works Les
origines de la technologie demonstrated the necessity of the systematic
study of the ‘useful arts’ and human practices, which, in his opinion,
complemented the science of consciousness with ‘the philosophy of
action’, which he called ‘general praxeology’ [Espinas 1897: 7–10].
He put forward a programme of research into the morphology,
physiology and evolution of technology from antiquity to the present
day. For the topic under discussion here it is important to note that
the view of technologies as combinations of practices does not
contrapose the body and technology, but stresses their fundamental
unity and conjunction in specific practices.
In Russia we may enrol in the cohort of theorists Peter Engelmeyer,
who from the 1880s to the 1920s published about thirty books and
articles, including a survey of the basic publications of the time in
the area of the philosophy of technology [Engelmeyer 1905]. Among
the authors of the ‘first wave’ of the philosophers of technology (the
period from the end of the nineteenth century to the end of the First
World War) the German biophysicist and philosopher Friedrich
Dessauer (1881–1963) is usually included; he was an opponent of
the instrumentalist understanding of technology, and insisted upon
the ethical questions relating to its development [Dessauer 1928;
1956]. The beginning of a systematic philosophical interpretation of
technology, still influential in contemporary discussions, is connected
with the name of Martin Heidegger, who proposed an ontological
definition of technology, and also with the works of philosophers
and historians of technology such as Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul,
and Hans Jonas.
Still influential are the works of representatives of the ‘second wave’
of the philosophy of technology, the critical Frankfurt School of
Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer and Jürgen
Habermas, who discussed the political and cultural effects of its
development. The works of this period are also concerned with
discussing the ontological and metaphysical problems of technology
as a special sphere of human activity. As for the American
philosophy of technology of this period, the particular contribution
to its development made by John Dewey should be mentioned, as
should, in Europe, Ortega y Gasset and Karl Jaspers. A significant
aspect of the first two periods of the philosophical interpretation
of technology was the debate between techno-optimists and techno-
pessimists.
The third period or ‘wave’ of the study of technology differs from
the preceding ones in its more pragmatic approach [Achterhuis
2001], and is connected with the names of Paul Durbin, who
described the evolution of this philosophical subdiscipline in the

USA [Durbin 1990; 2006], and the historian of technology Carl

Mitcham [Mitcham 1994]. Mitcham tried to propose a common
platform for the different philosophies of technology, but his
synthesis was judged to be premature [Durbin 2006: 6]. Indeed, the
views of most of the ‘third wave’ philosophers of technology —
Gilbert Simondon, Albert Borgmann, Hubert Dreyfus, Andrew
Finberg, Donna Haraway, Don Ihde, Langdon Winner, Friedrich
Rapp, Heinrich Beck, Günter Ropohl and others — cannot be
combined within a single approach towards the understanding of
technology or its role in relation to man and society. The existing
plurality of approaches towards conceptualisation and analysis in
the philosophy of technology inevitably has an effect on the
programmes of its study in other disciplines, including the
examination of its interconnections with corporeality.
The fourth period in the development of research into technology
and the philosophy of technology is characterised by a particular
attention to the influence of the techno-environment on human
beings within the framework of an interpretation of the anthropocene.
This, the latest period of research, has coincided with the institutional
recognition of the new anthropological discipline, the anthropology
of technology, or techno-anthropology. Unlike previous research
into traditional technologies within the study of the material culture
of particular societies or peoples, which developed in both
archaeology and anthropology as part of the study of the cultures
of predominantly non-industrial societies, techno-anthropology
studies modern, mass technology and the products of the global
techno-culture. It is, however, worth remembering that the greater
part of the research in this area (excluding medical anthropology
with its focus on biotechnologies) seldom concerns itself with the
problems of the interaction of the body and technology, and more
often concentrates on the study of the social, cultural and ecological
consequences of new technologies or on attitudes to technical
innovation in various subcultures.
Research centres of techno-anthropology

Technology in the broad sense has always been part of the object of
anthropological research: even if we take an over-strict approach to
subject boundaries and exclude from among its initiates such figures
as Marcel Mauss, we shall still count no small number of prominent
anthropologists who have paid significant attention to different
technologies and techniques or particular branches of them. André
Leroi-Gourhan followed Mauss in making a significant contribution
to the study of the techniques of the body and developed the
principles of comparative technology which subsequently formed
the basis of the French school of cultural technology or the ethnology

of technique; Claude Lévi-Strauss analysed culinary technologies on
the basis of his field materials, and Pierre Lemonnier, who is less
well known in Russia, undertook in his book Elements for an
Anthropology of Technology an attempt to identify and describe
universal human technologies, comparing his field material from
New Guinea with the technologies of the aerospace industry [Lemon
nier 1992]. Since the 1980s, thanks to the rise of STS, anthropologists
have more and more often not only turned their attention to the
technologies of traditional societies, but made the technical sciences
and the new technologies that they have produced the objects of
their research.
As the predecessors of techno-anthropology some authors [Børsen,
Botin 2013] name Lewis Mumford, the American historian and
philosopher of technology, and his book Technics and Civilization
[Mumford 1934], which has already become a classic, Jacques Ellul
and his La technique, ou, l’enjeu du siècle (English translation: [Ellul
1964]), and the German-American philosopher Hans Jonas and his
Das Prinzip Verantwortung: Versuch einer Ethik für die technologische
Zivilisation [Jonas 1979].
At another centre where techno-anthropology is being developed,
in Barcelona at the Sociedad de la Innovación, techno-anthropology
is viewed principally as a means of developing digital culture and
the culture of innovation, as a result of which the forerunners of
this new discipline there are thought to be the American cognitivist
anthropologist Roy d’Andrade and the Spanish anthropologist
María Jesús Buxó Rey [Colobrans et al. 2012: 141]. In France the
anthropologists who specialise in research into technology are
grouped around the journal Techniques & Culture. Revue
semestrielle d’anthropologie des techniques, which has been
published since 1983. At the University of Aalborg in Denmark
there is a master’s programme in techno-anthropology. North
American researchers into technology are grouped into the Society
for the History of Technology, which publishes Technology and
Culture, and the Society for Philosophy and Technology, which
publishes Philosophy and Technology, History of Technology and
Technology and Human Values. Also to be mentioned are Techné:
Research in Philosophy and Technology, the official journal of the
Society for Philosophy and Technology, which has been very
important for the development of techno-anthropological research,
and the EASST Review, the journal of the European Association
for the Study of Science and Technology. Worldwide, including
Russia, most anthropological research in the techno-anthropological
genre is conducted in interdisciplinary research centres, often
affiliated with STS.
The first Russian social scientists to engage in the study of modern

technologies were the historians of science and sociologists. Anthro

pologists began to take an interest in these problems later, and there
can hardly be more than a few dozen of them in the country who
do so even today. The leading journal in this direction should be
considered Sotsiologiya nauki i tekhnologiy, but there are also regular
publications in this subject area in Voprosy filosofii, Logos, Sotsiologiya
vlasti (see: 2012, no. 6–7; 2017, no. 3), Chelovek and Etnograficheskoe
Obozrenie (see: 2011, no. 5; 2012, no. 3). It should be noted that
most Russian techno-anthropologists, except for those who have
chosen to specialise in medical anthropology, have not paid any
special attention to the interface between the body and technology.
Most recently similar topics have been studied in the so-called
anthropology of risk, in connection with the study of the effect on
people of technogenic catastrophes and breakdowns in the
functioning of life- sustaining infrastructures (see, for example, Asya
Karaseva’s article in this issue).
The body and corporeality as subjects for the social sciences

The human body has appeared in various guises in the social sciences
and humanities, three of which are the most important: the physical
body (Körper, corps, тело), the living or lived body, the flesh (Leib,
chair, плоть), and the social body, which combines some features
of the first two, but has distinct specifics. Studying these different
manifestations of the body requires different conceptual toolkits,
and for this reason each has been studied by different disciplines at
different periods and in different amounts of detail. Best known to
us, since it fits best into the Cartesian heritage of modernity and the
notions of common sense, is the physical body, which possesses not
only dimensions, but also biochemical, anatomical and physiological
features. It is this body that most often fits the discourses of various
sciences — medical, physical anthropological, technical, and so on.
It is a shame how little scholars in general, and Russian anthropo
logists in particular, know about the lived body, since it is hard for
objectivising scientific discourse to grasp. We know it for the most
part from the works of the phenomenologists, Henri Bergson,
Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Hermann Schmitz; considering philo
sophical writings in Russian, the book that must be mentioned first
and foremost is Valeriy Podoroga’s Fenomenologiya tela [Podoroga
1995]. As for the social body, the body as it exists for others, this is
the one that has most often been the object of study in the social
sciences and its representations extend over a wide spectrum, from
artistic to scientific, but unlike the physical body it is not a matter
of the biological, but of the cultural and social aspects of corporeality.
This is the body that is decorated and displayed and subjected to
aesthetic and moral evaluation.
Returning to the case of Russian anthropology, its history reveals

a substantial number of works on the physical body, mostly in such
areas of physical anthropology as somatology and palaeoanthropology
(forensics). The ‘social body’, athletic, aestheticised, fashionable, and
so on, has been a little less fortunate, though nowadays there are
specialised journals devoted to its study (for example, the regular
section on ‘The Body’ in Teoriya mody: odezhda, telo, kultura
[Theory of Fashion: Clothing. Body. Culture]) focusing on research
into the social and cultural dimensions of corporeality. Some areas
of gender studies should also, evidently, be included among the social
aspects of corporeality, at least those which do not lose sight of the
bodily aspects of the social roles of men and women (cf. for example,
the works of Marina Butovskaya, Igor Morozov, Elena Omelchenko,
Natalia Pushkareva, Serguei Oushakine, Tatyana Shchepanskaya and
others). In this context we must also mention the research into sexual
culture in Russia carried out in the late 1990s and early 2000s by Igor
Semenovich Kon [Kon 1998; 2010; 2017].
Unlike the physical and social bodies, the lived body has hardly been
studied at all by Russian anthropologists. However, there are some
rare exceptions that should be mentioned. These are the works of
Ya. V. Chesnov, and in particular his Telesnost cheloveka: filosofsko-
antropologicheskoe ponimanie [Chesnov 2007], in which he studied
the folklore of the peoples of the Caucasus in his usual mytho
poetical manner. Cognitive anthropology, or the anthropology of
consciousness, also has a certain relevance for the topic under
examination, although, judging by its second designation, it would
seem that it should not have anything to do with the body. However,
its sphere of interest does include so-called altered states of
consciousness, which are often related directly to the perceived or
lived body (cf. the works of V. I. Kharitonova and her colleagues).
The mode of existence or manner of presence of the three bodies,
or bodily aspects, in particular environments are substantially
different. The physical or material body occupies space and interacts
directly with the material world, it is accessible to objective obser
vation and measurement, including the tracking and digitisation of
its physiological conditions and processes — respiratory rate, pulse,
blood pressure and so on. If the manner of its presence differs from
the means of presence of other living organisms or things, it is not
so much its physical form that is responsible for this as the modes
of perception of the body of the Other, i.e. the social body. Anti
cipating, I will note that the physical body is also able to be present
in the background in certain kinds of virtual environments.
Sociologists, social psychologists and anthropologists have described
many details of the manner of presence of social bodies. The classic
work in this genre is Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self
in Everyday Life [Goffman 1956]. It is the social body that is

foregrounded in rituals [Turner 1969; van Gennep 1999], including

social rituals [Goffman 1967]. There is, however, a special class of
ritual, age-related rites of passage, during which the physical body
of adolescents is subjected to various trials (scarification, cauterisation,
piercing, tattooing, etc., cf. [Mednikova 2007]) which symbolise their
passage from the animal or natural state and transformation into
‘complete human beings’. In parallel with this, their natural, i.e.
physical bodies become social bodies. One might view the use of
cosmetics, tobacco or alcohol from a certain age as a distant analogy
of such transformations in today’s urban civilisation. The medical
discourse about the harm to health caused by all these practices is
ineffectual in this case precisely because of their symbolic and ritual
nature. The lived body, obviously, is involved in all practices of this
sort, and its affective life has a substantial effect on them, but the
social side remains primary here, since without social models these
practices might not exist at all.
Body and environment. The manner of presence or means of
involvement in different types of environment of each of the three
bodies depends not only on their immanent properties, but also on
the specific type of environment. Besides the techno-environment,
which is created by man-made artefacts, there are also artificial
environments which are created for the purpose not so much of
satisfying basic human needs as of serving aesthetic, moral, com
municative and recreational needs.
The virtual environment is not typologically homogeneous and there
is a gradation in the degree to which it takes hold of our consciousness
and / or body (I am not sure that their Cartesian contraposition is
appropriate here). Graduated virtuality is best demonstrated from
specific examples, but in order to provide them we must first
introduce a number of concepts which are important for such an
examination. These are first and foremost body schema and body
image, and also a family of concepts that describe the somatic
routinisation of actions or their patterns (so-called motor schemas).
At the centre of this cluster is the concept of embodiment, which is
semantically linked to concepts such as habit, ability, skill, body
technique, habitus and disposition, and also to a wide range of other
terms which offer possibilities for the analysis of the processes of
the bodily assimilation or incorporation and ‘embodiment’ not only
of consciousness, in relation to which the concept of embodiment
and the adjective embodied are most often used, but also to the cases
(which are more interesting to use in the context of the interaction
of body and technology) of implants, prostheses, tools, apparatus
and extensions which become parts of the body, including the
processes of including all these devices and apparatus in the body
schema or body image.
It is appropriate to use the idea of graduated virtuality in connection

with the fact that alongside the old mimetic technologies and arts
that lead to a duplication of reality — books, theatre, music, cinema,
television, telephone, offline games and other arts, including
painting, sculpture and ballet, which may be viewed as technologies
for seizing our emotions, and, therefore, our bodies, and immersing
them in the reality that has been created by means of these techno
logies — there have appeared new immersive technologies:
computers and smartphones with online environments, 3D techno
logies of augmented reality, remote-controlled robots that provide
perceptual feedback in real time, sophisticated immersive video
games, etc. Graduation in this case means that each of the techno
logies listed has not only its own means of capturing the consciousness,
feelings and bodies, but also involves the particular sense organs in
varying scope, including not only visualisation, but also auditory,
tactile and other complex sensations — interoception, kinaesthetics,
proprioception — the sense of balance and sensation of muscular
effort, etc.
In a phenomenological analysis the synthetic sensation of being in
two places at once, one real (e.g. in front of a computer screen) and
one virtual (e.g. the feedback from your avatar in a video game) is
usually denoted by the term re-embodiment. Specific research into
different kinds of embodiment in online virtual environments and
the comparison of them, for example, with the integration of tools
or objects which are in direct contact with the body (Merleau-Ponty’s
famous example of the blind man’s cane [Merleau-Ponty 1945: 167,
177–8] or Heidegger’s of the hammer [Heidegger 1967: 69–70])
reveal substantial differences between the means of bodily integration
in the two cases.
Graduated transitions from reality to virtuality in different types of
situations may be described in terms of the involvement in them of
the various corporeal aspects only by taking into account the
relationship between body schema and body image. The body image
is the set of intentional states and dispositions, including the per
ception of, suppositions about, and attitude towards one’s own body,
which is the object of these dispositions, suppositions, etc. [Gallagher
2005: 25], whereas the body schema is usually understood as the
pre-reflexive synthesis of the signals received from the body’s various
organs and subsystems, on the basis of which automatic or un
conscious actions of the body, such as underlie all its conscious or
intentional actions, become possible. The body schema characterises
the lived body, or flesh, while the body image is more closely
connected with the social body. We encounter the body image when
we look at our own reflection in the mirror, in a photograph, on the
computer screen, or in the course of various cosmetic, sanitary or
medical procedures, when assessing the body from the position of
the social norms of beauty and ugliness, and so on. Unlike this, the
body schema is to do not with visual images and social norms, but
with bodily sensations and dispositions that are not usually reflected
upon: we are well aware of the dimensions of our body, and we do
not have to issue conscious commands to our hands and feet in
order to walk or run, or measure the width of our shoulders before
passing through a doorway. Here the focus is on obstacles and the
environment as a whole, and not on the body.
How do we integrate or incorporate different things to make them
part of the body image or body schema? For example, as a result of
prolonged use the blind man’s cane enters his / her body schema
and is felt as part of it. In respect of objects that come into contact
with the body, however, there is also a gradation, ranging from
prostheses and implants which are incorporated inside the body
(such as pacemakers), which, it seems to me, it is convenient to
include under the term incorporations, to different tools that come
into contact with the body and which, over time, as a result of
training and the formation of skill or habit turn into parts of its
schema — they can be conveniently designated by Hall and
McLuhan’s term extensions. As a tool, for example a joiner’s ham
mer, is used, and as a skill is developed, the hammer recedes from
the focus of attention and begins to function as part of the body.
This is the moment of integration of the tool into the body schema,
as a result of which the schema itself is modified, since the hammer
in the hand creates a possibility for interaction with the environment
in a different way. The body, modified or re-equipped in such
a manner, obtains new potential on account of the extension which
has become part of the body schema. For the tool, apparatus or
machine, integration into the body scheme means inclusion in the
lived body (of the driver, the pilot), which gives rise to a new creature
active in the world, a techno-organic hybrid of body and machine
or body and tool (a technomorph). These examples clarify the
complexity of the interaction between corporeality and technology
and illustrate the range of hybrids or assemblages that emerge,
including bodies (in their various enactments) and artefacts. Certain
kinds of complex technical devices (such as most means of transport
with a human being as driver), as skills are formed, do not only fit
themselves into the body schema, but also make the physical body
a part of themselves, or rather, they combine it with the machine.
In this case we can also speak of a scale of inclusion / exclusion with
various levels or degrees of synthesis between the body and diverse
technical apparatus or environments.
New technologies, in particular those used in telemedicine, remote-
controlled robots and tools make possible the interaction with
surgical instruments and the body of the patient at a distance, some
times a significant distance. Here the surgeon’s hand assimilates and
integrates into the body schema the monitor or joystick with which
(s)he has an immediate contact. The artificial hand or the manipulator
of the robot which is performing the operation at a distance from
the surgeon are also felt by him / her, and in that sense they are also
integrated, but that sort of integration takes place at a less perceptively
saturated level of the body image [Besmer 2015], since their
movements are monitored visually. The difference between the
integration of the distant manipulator and that of the tool in direct
contact with the body is that the latter provides instant feedback not
only of a visual but also of a tactile nature, and delivers various
proprioceptive signals: we can feel its weight and our own muscular
effort in guiding this ‘add-on’, and so forth. Technology is evolving
rapidly, and perhaps in the near future surgeons will also get
a nuanced tactile connection with the patient who is being operated
on at a distance, but until this happens the difference between virtual
and real contact in the processes of integration or embodiment will
remain the difference between integration into the body schema and
integration into the body image. The immersive 3D technologies
used in training pilots and astronauts, which are ever increasing in
complexity, will probably soon efface these boundaries in the modes
of bodily integration, but as soon as they disappear we shall cease
to distinguish the virtual and real environments. Even today, new
technologies make it a meaningful question to ask: what is the
character of the distinctions between virtual and actual realities, are
they qualitative or only quantitative? The phenomena of distributed
awareness (for example, during a telephone conversation) or dis
tributed bodily perception (as in the example of a remote surgical
operation) do not only pose the problem of the limits of the body,
but also draw our attention to the reality-virtuality continuum, which
is brought into existence in different ways and to different degrees
in the course of using particular technologies.
Certain philosophers are beginning to have doubts about whether
the subjective side of corporeality can be interpreted ontologically,
and even greater doubts about the stability and, therefore, the
independent reality of many types or concrete versions of artefacts.
In this context let us remember Quine’s maxim, no entity without
identity [Quine 1969: 23]: the artefact’s loss of self-identity is
considered from this perspective as evidence of its secondary or
derivative character and speaks of its lack of autonomy and de
pendence on the awareness and intentions of the human being,
which may be interpreted in the light of what was said above as an
unexpected confirmation of the primitive unity of the human being
and the artificial environment, the technosphere, that (s)he creates.
A discussion of the conditions under which different types of
artefacts preserve their identity would take us away from our topic,
since in this context it is important to stress that the integration
of artefacts into the body schema or body image changes not only
this schema or image, but also the body’s means of interaction with
the surrounding world: it changes the body itself in all its aspects,
lived, physical and social. In consequence of the differences between
the body techniques in different professions, which come about
because of the use either of the body itself as a tool, or of the typical
artefacts for a given profession, we can tell the difference between
the hands of a pianist and the hands of a miner, the figure of a sumo
wrestler and the figure of a boxer, the feet of a ballerina and the feet
of a footballer. The bodily habits and abilities (techniques of the
body) that result from routine interaction with particular artefacts
modify both the somatic (physiological and morphological) and
phenomenological (lived body) aspects of corporeality: a circumstance
to which too little attention has been paid both in the ethnography
of material culture and in physical anthropology (although in the
latter there is research into the anatomical constitutions typical of
representatives of different professions).
***
The interaction of body and equipment, of corporeality and new
technologies, is not yet a regular research subject for anthropologists
in our country, with the possible exception of reproductive techno
logies in medical anthropology, where the body is primarily present
in its physical aspect. Anthropologists and sociologists pay sufficient
attention to the body and technology separately, and also to the
abilities and practices that emerge when they come together, but
they seldom study these last in the aspect of the interaction of bodies
and things, human corporeality and the techno-environment. The
problems of the transformation of culture and society induced by
new technologies obscure the complex interdependencies of bodies
and techniques and the phenomenon of the techno-organic hybrids,
concrescences and assemblages arising from them, which have long
been agents or actors forming contemporary societies and cultures.
Techno-anthropologists must advance from providing expertise to
major technological projects and from the applied aspects of the
anthropology of technology with their standard questions if why
such-and-such a technology or technical innovation is not adopted
by particular cultures, to the fundamental problems of the increasing
tempo of the co-ordinated (or, by contrast, unharmonious) trans
formation of corporeality and technologies. The application of
anthropological knowledge in the development of technologies
cannot be denied. It has recently received legislative support in our
country, for example in the law on ethnological expertise. Regarding
the latter it must, however, be remarked that it could have relied on
techno-anthropology to a far greater extent, if the anthropologists
involved in it, who are well informed about the culture and current
problems of the ethnic communities affected by development

projects, were equally well acquainted with the corresponding
techno-culture and the technical side of the projects in progress. If
they are not, mediation has little success because its one-sidedness
is evident not only to ‘techies’, but to society at large.
The social body continues to be studied outside its technological
context, and today this must already be considered a methodological
defect. Finally, the lived body, as already noted, has hardly attracted
the attention of anthropologists at all, so that the methods for
studying it are either underdeveloped or totally lacking. The nature
of the lived body, which is in principle pre-reflexive, and its
‘unobjectivised’ character, if one may so express it, are the main
obstacles in the way of understanding it. Ethnographers must learn
to catch the moments of transformation of the body schema into
body image, when the tool with which the body is interacting comes
into the focus of attention (focalisation) and its disappearance in
the course of bodily integration (defocalisation), the formation of
a new habitus and the emergence of new technomorphs (the
cyborgification of the human being). It is not easy to reconstruct
these moments. The double delay — of the analytical method with
regard to the raw data of observation, and of the mediating memory,
connected with the impossibility of combining observation and
analysis, as is the fugitive nature of the dispositions of one’s own
body — continues to maintain the body’s status as the intimate
object that we know least well. Nevertheless it is techno-anthropology,
in my view, that has the capacity to be the field in which there will
be opportunities for integrating knowledge about all three aspects
of the body enumerated above, and their interactions with the
techno-environment. Unlike sociology, which examines both
corporeality and technology above all in their interconnections with
society, and not with each other, anthropology has accumulated
significant experience of research into technology (the tradition of
studying material culture) and corporeality in its various dimensions
(bio- and medical anthropology, the anthropology of the body).
Anthropology’s very position at the boundary between the social
and biological sciences on the one hand and the humanities on the
other creates a unique opportunity for developing this important
direction in interdisciplinary research.
Acknowledgements
This article was written within the framework of a research project
supported by the Russian Science Foundation (grant no. 18-18-00082).
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Turner V., The Ritual Process. Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine
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Translated by Ralph Cleminson

Elena Sokolova
The Smartphone as Witness:
Technological Mediation
of Bodily Sensory Experience
The article explores how the use of smartphones — one of the most widespread user technologies at the moment —
changes the traditional (offline) body-oriented practice of authentic movement. It aims to determine one role of the
smartphone as a technology of mediation, as well as to highlight the effects of mediation at the level of bodily and sensory
experience. Technological industries increasingly focus on data methods that help to exclude the so-called human factor:
errors, incorrect information, and the high costs of contact. However, in this general context of the increasing efficiency
of research, there is a desire not to exclude the subjective position of a user altogether: it has value for a social researcher,
making it possible, with the help of a holistic ethnographic approach, to discover meanings that are inaccessible to big
data methods. Based on empirical material, a smartphone can immediately absorb a user’s attention and remove them
from the surrounding environment. It also gives users an opportunity to become creators. In this sense, a smartphone
camera is like a traditional camera, but it becomes much more effective. It has the potential for expanding a user’s
capabilities by connecting people and providing a constant flow of information feedback, including visual feedback.
However, there are some limitations imposed by technological mediation, such as a decrease in the ability to fully maintain
contact with the bodily-sensory dimension of self and others, compared to offline situations. Intruding into a practice
of authentic movement, a smartphone can be perceived as a technological other, an abstract figure filled with various
individual meanings, fears, and expectations. As a witness, a smartphone acts the eye of Big Brother, turning authentic
movement into performance, but does not allow the majority of practitioners, with their disconnected bodies, to gain an
effective sense of this process. Therefore, many of them are not ready to use smartphones in their regular offline formats.
Technologies make us connected and visible, but this does not mean to that we are seen in the sense of genuine co-
presence in authentic movement.
Keywords: body, technologies, smartphone, mediation, authentic movement, witnessing, experiment, ethnography,
postphenomenology.
The laboratory method

I have never envied the trailblazers.
(From an Instagram meme)
The idea of studying the influence of the smart
phone on bodily sensory experience came to the
author in 2015 when she was choosing a subject
for her dissertation on socio-cultural anthro
pology. UX (user experience) is being studied
by companies — producers of devices and
software — everywhere, but it has a very limited
range of tasks and methods, which as a rule
extends to a specific set of functions or sequence
of user actions, whereas the social interest in the
consequences of the use of smartphones goes
far beyond what companies need. The problem
Elena Sokolova
N. N. Miklukho-Maklai Institute of smartphones is not a narrowly specialised one
of Ethnology and Anthropology, immediately connected with the device, but to
Russian Academy of Sciences a great extent it concerns its functional pos
32a Leninskiy Av.,
Moscow, Russia sibilities, for example, access to the Internet, to
elena.k.sokolova@gmail.com various programmes and applications, to social
networks, etc. In this way it is connected with the agenda of ethics,

Elena Sokolova. The Smartphone as Witness: Technological Mediation of Bodily Sensory Experience
politics and conscious practice in the sphere of the use of technology,

which includes the appearance of such terms as digital addiction,
informational literacy and media ecology. Some recent examples that
may be cited are the WHO’s recognition of ‘Gaming Disorder’ as
a disease [Heater 2018] or the wide discussion of the economics of
attention and the harmfulness of social networks [Williams 2017;
Lanier 2018].
The evolution of information technology has led to a sharp increase
in the complexity of the socio-technological system and a growth in
the volume of the information consumed, which is becoming hard
for a human being, as a biological creature which is evolving more
slowly than the technologies, to cope with. This situation creates
a need for an artificial adaptive interface, such as neuroassistants.1
Neurotechnology is still something of a niche subject at present,
whereas assistive technologies based on artificial intelligence
developed by leading companies such as Amazon or Yandex are
quickly becoming mass products, with the important caveat that
from the point of view of their readiness to do anything really useful
they too are in their initial stages and can only carry out simple tasks.
While engineers are still working on solving the problem of the
excess of information, users find themselves alone with their
smartphones round the clock, check them on average 47 times a day,
or 82 times a day if they are between 18 and 24 years old [Alderman
2017], and also frequently asking themselves how they can combine
social activity on the net with a perceived deteriorating quality of
life.2 The bodily sensory dimension of user experience acquires
particular importance and can have a substantial influence on
behavioural strategies in respect of technology. After Google and
Apple have announced their programmes in the areas of digital
wellness and digital health, which allow users to monitor and limit
the time they spend ‘on the smartphone’ [Bloomberg 2018; Haselton
2018], it is becoming obvious that a further growth of involvement
will be possible only on condition of a healthy integration of human
beings and information technologies; but how can this be attained?
To re-phrase it in accordance with the tendencies of contemporary
scientific activism, can a social researcher assist in this mission and
1
Kaplan A., Shchukin T., Gusev A., Galkina N., Sokolova E., Levich P., Panelnaya diskussiya ‘Neyro
tekhnologii: vozmozhnosti i opasnosti. Kakoy mir my sozdaem?’ [Panel Discussion on ‘Neurotechnologies:
Opportunities and Dangers. What Sort of World Are We Creating?’]. <https://youtu.be/4HEw4FtCNd8>.
(In Russian).
2
How Heavy Use of Social Media Is Linked to Mental Illness. <https://www.economist.com/
graphicdetail/2018/05/18/how-heavy-use-of-social-media-is-linked-to-mental-illness> [Restricted
access to full text]; RSPH. Instagram Ranked Worst for Young People’s Mental Health. <https://www.
rsph.org.uk/about-us/news/instagram-ranked-worst-for-young-people-s-mental-health.html>. See
also: [Twenge 2017].
be a catalyst in his / her own field, having access to the resources

necessary for a qualitative (from the point of view of method) re
flection on technological practices?
To answer this question, which had arisen before the technological
giants had started officially to care about their users’ health, the
author of this article attempted to organise interdisciplinary research
groups and projects that would open up a space for experimentation
and permit research into the experience of the body and technologies
collectively.
Lab-1: Theory
The idea of a laboratory to study digital dependencies was one of
the first and most obvious ones, but force of circumstances has
prevented it from being realised yet. Instead, as one of the projects
of the online school The Club of Amateurs of the Internet and
Society, an independent scientific web community of social
researchers into technology, ‘The Body and the Internet’, an inter
disciplinary distance-learning track, was launched, combining
a theoretical course with opportunities for research. The idea of the
track was to collect theories, methods and practices, including in
the field of its interests both the various forms of human embodiment
in virtual space (which make up the traditional subject of digital
ethnography) and immediate bodily sensory experience connected
with Internet use. Before beginning the track we asked what the
body does in the Internet, how online experience influences offline
experience, and vice versa, and whether the body can be the interface
for the collection of realities. The track took place in March-June
2018 with three tutors, five lecturers and twelve participants, among
whom there were anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists,
philosophers, specialists in cultural studies, artists, and others.
Preparing and running the track allowed the collection of various
theoretical approaches to the study of the experience of the body
and technology, and likewise the study of the phenomenon of the
digital technological mediation of bodily experience, which will be
very briefly systematised below as relevant to the subject of the
present article.
So, how can we approach the study of the bodily sensory experience
of smartphone use? It is possible to identify three important axes of
possibilities, connected with the directions of theoretical analysis.
The first axis concerns the correlation of the body and technology:
the choice to study the body and the technology indivisibly, as
‘techno-corpo-reality’ [Sokolovskiy 2017], or study their relationship
[Ihde 1975], identifying for analysis the active role of technology
and the possibility of technological mediation [Rosenberger, Verbeek
2015: 20].
The second axis concerns the so-called realities of the body: the
choice to study virtual bodies on the screen, technological virtuality

or else the actual physical aspect of user experience; here also appears
the possibility of the unification or correlation of this experience —
the body of cyborgs [Haraway 1985], integrated or multiple bodies,
examined in various theoretical conceptions. Thus the study of the
body and corporeality may be approached from the positions of
philosophy, history, politics or standards [Sirotkina 2018]. It is
possible to identify the physical body, ‘which has measurements,
biochemistry, anatomy and physiology’, the social body, ‘which can
be beautified and displayed’, and the experienced body, the idea of
which refers us to phenomenology [Sokolovskiy 2018]. Annemarie
Mol’s conception of the body multiple, presented in her work of
the same name on the ontology of medical practice, is widely used.
Mol’s postulate is that if reality is multiple, no object, body or disease
can be singular [Mol 2002: 6]. It is, however, not a question of
fragmentation, but rather of ‘the intricately coordinated crowd’
[Ibid.: VIII].
The third axis concerns the researcher’s position: whether the
experience will be in the first person, in which case we return to
phenomenological analysis [Merleau-Ponty 1945] and its post-
phenomenological version [Ihde 2002], or whether the researcher
will follow the tradition of separating the subject and object, so that
we study the technological experience of other people, be it in
classical or digital ethnography [Miller, Sinanan 2014]. 1 Such
a framework can be useful insofar as it allows a clearer designation
of the researcher’s theoretical and methodological position. It also
sometimes makes the interpretation of field results easier, particularly
in situations where, at the level of ordinary users immersed in
technological experience but without experience of reflection, there
is no adequate language for it.
Lab-2: Practice
Another source of field material for the article was another research
laboratory — the experimental session of the technological mediation
of movement at the annual international laboratory meeting of
practitioners of authentic movement, which is attended by Russian-
speaking participants from various countries and has a ten-year
history of experiments with the content and form of processes. The
practice of authentic movement was chosen for the study of the body
and technology for three reasons. 1) It develops body consciousness
and a special language that allows bodily sensory experience to be
expressed more completely. 2) Being orientated towards traditional
1
See also UCL ASSA: <https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/assa/>.
offline formats where practitioners meet face to face, it has for many
years remained outside the processes of technologising experience
and is therefore of interest to research as a natural example of partial
disengagement from the use of technology.1 3) It has a set of signs
which appear contradictory: it is at once simple, traditional and
innovative in essence, and invites practitioners to study new
experience and new formats. An example of its experimental format
would be the aforementioned laboratory, within which, in June 2017,
the author of this article proposed the idea of working with the
technologies of mediation and the possibilities of interpreting the
experience: using a smartphone instead of the usual live evidence in
the process of movement. The idea was to study how devices
introduced into the process of practice would influence the processes
of movement and providing evidence, and also to discuss this in
a group of practitioners with significant experience that was quite
varied (meaning different versions of authentic movement, but
individual differences are also important). Other participants in the
laboratory also expressed similar ideas, such as topics like incorrect
evidence, work with the bandwidth of attention, and so on. In this
way the process with smartphones, including photo and video
recordings, was added to the agenda of the laboratory, which was
made up of nineteen practitioners of authentic movement.
The present article combines the results of the two above-mentioned
laboratories, which became resources for the theoretical and
empirical basis of research. The aim of the article is to study how
the use of smartphones, which embody the contemporary mass
technologies of mediation, changes the traditional offline body-
orientated practice of authentic movement. The tasks were to
determine the role of the smartphone as a technology of mediation
for the participants in the laboratory and to identify the effects of
the mediation at the level of bodily sensory experience. As
a hypothesis the proposition was put forward that experienced
participants who had a body consciousness that had been developed
over many years of regular practice would, both as movers and as
witnesses, be able to integrate the appearance of the smartphone as
an additional circumstance of practice without any substantial loss
in the quality of their attention. This hypothesis seems important to
the author, insofar as its confirmation could provide a basis for
hoping that the techniques of conscious bodily presence could be
transferred to the area of conscious bodily co-presence with
technologies.
For its theoretical position the article takes the deliberate identification
of the technology of mediation for the purpose of studying it.

1
Digital Disengagement. <https://sites.google.com/view/digitaldisengagementproject/home>.
The author is primarily interested in how the smartphone is per

ceived, its role both spontaneously designated and reflected on in

the group, and its functions; particular space is given the study of
the process of mediation and its effects. The author also proceeds
from the position of the multiplicity of realities and bodies in the
experience of practice, understood as the presence not only of
technological virtuality, but also of the virtuality of the inner world
of images and fantasies, which, in certain varieties of the practice
of authentic movement prevails over body tracking in accordance
with the Jungian active imagination. The third position arises from
the complex nature of the practice under investigation, which is
by nature dual, including the roles of mover and witness. There is
a place in the investigation for the first-person position, one close
to phenomenology, but there is also the participant observer:
the witness.
Methodologically the article is primarily about a specific laboratory,
about an experiment which lasted for half a day, including the
processes of movement and witnessing for each participant, and also
a series of reflection sessions, first in pairs and then by everyone
together, and, after a certain amount of time, the report on the
laboratory. It should also be noted that a further basis is the long
experience of field observation and practice of authentic movement,
which provides a deeper understanding both of the practice itself
and of the peculiarities of the community of practitioners. It is thus
a matter of adding classical ethnography to the experiment, and also
some elements of digital ethnography in those parts that deal with
new formats of practice arising from the evolution of technology.
In the technological industries it is becoming more and more
accepted to orientate oneself towards programmed methods of
research which exclude the so-called human factor: mistakes,
incorrect or deliberately false information and the high cost of
contact. But, against a background of increasing efficiency there is
a wish not to exclude the human being altogether: his / her subjective
experience is of value not only to himself / herself, but also to the
researcher whom, by means of the integral approach, classical offline
ethnography, it permits to discover meanings that are inaccessible
to big data methods [Miller et al. 2016; Utekhin 2017].
Another road to direct experience

Before proceeding to the description and analysis of the results of
the experiment with the smartphone, we shall give a brief account
of what authentic movement is. It is a body-orientated practice that
goes back to the work of Mary Starks Whitehouse (1911–1979), an
American dancer and, later, Jungian therapist who studied the nature
of movement [Whitehouse 1999]. In a broad sense authentic
movement could be defined as ‘a simple form of self-directed

movement’.1 This expression, used by the international community,
stresses the inward direction of the attention, towards the study of
movement and experience of a mover as a whole. As a rule, the
mover’s eyes are closed at that moment, since this way it is easier to
direct one’s attention and study the impulses that arise. As a rule,
in the general process, which takes place directly, the mover and the
witness are present together in the same limited time and space. The
presence of the witness forms the basis of the practice: in one
definition ‘Authentic Movement, compassionate witnessing of
movement becoming conscious, is a process grounded in the
relationship between a mover and a witness.’2
Comparing authentic movement with traditional Buddhist
meditation, Linda Hartley says that it is ‘another road to direct
experience’, and describes this experience as addressing the body:
‘Paying attention to the sensory world around me, and within me,
I come into my body, this place, the present moment.’ 3 In the
mover’s experience Hartley distinguishes ‘inner sensations, feelings,
images, and movement impulses’, and in the witness’s ‘sensations
that may be evoked in me in the presence of the mover; proprio
ceptive or kinesthetic experiences within my own body, or sensory
perceptions of space, light, sound, weight, and so on,’ which are
perceived and acknowledged ‘as my own experiences’.
In this way, authentic movement may be imagined as an instrument
for addressing one’s own immediate bodily sensory experience which
may be used for various purposes and in various circumstances.
At present authentic movement may be an independent practice
[Adler 2002] or integrated into therapeutic [Chodorow 1991],
somatic, meditative, dance, artistic and other practices. There is no
single format, understanding or description of authentic movement:
it is constantly evolving and metamorphosing, splitting into different
versions which, moreover, depend substantially at the level of
individual practice on the interests and personal experience of the
practitioners themselves.
The deliberate choice of a body-orientated practice is explained by
a multitude of factors. Bodily experience is, as a rule, given a low
priority in contemporary culture in comparison with conceptual
knowledge. History, philosophy and other contemporary social
theories that study the problem of corporeality allow a better
understanding of why this happens, but provide no means of

1
Authentic Movement Community. <https://membersam.org>.

2
Adler J., ‘Discipline of Authentic Movement’. <https://disciplineofauthenticmovement.com/discipline-
of-authentic-movement/a-brief-description-of-the-discipline-of-authentic-movement/>.

3
Hartley L., ‘An Enquiry into Direct Experience’. <http://www.lindahartley.co.uk/article_an-enquiry-
into-direct-experience.html>.
changing the situation qualitatively. It may moreover be observed

that the theoretical texts written about the body most often use the
sort of conceptual toolkit and regime that make it difficult or
impossible to integrate bodily experience while reading them, that
is, they are themselves disembodied. Most people have a very low
body consciousness and find it difficult to describe their experience:
for this you need a particular method and language, and also
a developed ability for attentive observation while remaining within
the process of interaction. Those practitioners of authentic movement
who have long experience possess both the method and language of
description, since the practice itself contains the instruments for
reflection on that experience. Authentic movement studies not only
movement and the body as such, but also the body in its relationships,
the collective body. The relational direction of the practice creates
the conditions for analysing how the intrusion of the smartphone
will affect the relations between the participants: whether the
smartphone will be perceived as another participant in the process,
as an independent technological witness or as an appendage to
another, human participant; whether it will have any substantial
effect on the practice, helping or hindering it; whether the
practitioners who have tried such an experiment will be ready to use
technology in their processes in future. In this way the study of the
technology of mediation in the practice of authentic movement offers
not only extended opportunities for observing bodily sensory
experience and verbal reflection, but also touches on the social
aspects of the practice.
The big eye

This section is devoted to smartphones that are unambiguously
perceived as companions to modern human beings. According to
statistics, at the time of writing more than 5,000,000,000 people
worldwide use mobile telephones, the number of users is continuing
to rise,1 and smartphones already make up over 80 % of sales of
mobile phones.2 The use of smartphones changes everyday life and
influences practices [Goggin, Hjorth 2014] and bodily patterns
[Glazkov 2017], and ‘as the bearer of social media, [the smartphone]
is now perhaps, of all our possessions, the one that is most important
to us’ [Favorov 2016].
The researcher is thus dealing with a mass practice which can be
approached in extremely different ways. This article aims to examine
1
We Are Social Marketing Agency, Global Digital Report 2018. <https://wearesocial.com/blog/2018/01/
global-digital-report-2018>.
2
‘Feature Phone & Smartphone Sales as Share of Total Mobile Phone Sales Worldwide from 1Q’09 to
4Q’17’, Statista 2018. <https://www.statista.com/statistics/617945/feature-phone-smartphone-share-
of-global-mobile-phone-sales/>.
the potential of the smartphone as a special technological actor, and

also as an interface connecting other actors, including the influence
that it has on them. Interesting here is the post-phenomenological
analysis which identifies in the relations between human beings and
technologies a special type of alterity relations. They ‘engage techno
logies themselves as quasi-objects or even quasi-others’ [Ihde 2009:
42]. Examples of such technologies may be gadgets, robots, or
chatbots, which represent the technological other. Mediated relations
are also identified, defined as ‘relations with artifacts, in which they
mediate people’s relations with their world’ [Verbeek 2005: 125].
This type includes hermeneutic relations, when ‘the world is not
perceived through the artifact but by means of it,’ and also embodiment
relations, when the technologies are included in experience and
change bodily sensory perception either in the direction of enhance
ment or, conversely, reduction [Verbeek 2005]. Post-phenomenology
studies the ‘fundamentally mediated character’ of relations when
there is no direct connection between subject and object [Rosenberger,
Verbeek 2015: 12] and there is the potential for a completely new
type of knowledge [Ibid.: 151]. Subject and object are thus formed
in their mediated correlation, but while actor-network theory studies
complex networks of relations from outside, from a third-person
perspective, post-phenomenology, focusing on the relations between
the human being and the world and considering their technologically
mediated character, studies the possibility of a view from inside,
setting off from the researcher’s own perspective. It is not necessarily
the distinction between humans and technologies that it wants to
depart from, but their radical separation, allowing the con
ceptualisation of an active role for technologies [Ibid.: 20].
When they study technological others in the context of post-
phenomenology, researchers, one way or another, need to resort to
metaphors: ‘Have you ever thought why a cell phone has a screen?’
‘If technology is a quasi-other, then <…>, the screen is the quasi-
face’ [Wellner 2014: 299]. It became evident from empirical material
in the laboratory setting that the smartphone may be perceived as
some sort of independent figure. But the essential element here was
the question of what or who stood behind this figure of the other:
the smartphone is endued with meanings and names. In different
circumstances it can manifest itself as an inhuman horror or a little
living phone. For example, a participant might imagine his / her
audience of subscribers to his / her social network channel on the
other side of the screen, paying attention to him / her, and then it
might be perceived as a real support, another resource of valuable
witness attention [Inf. 3]. Or, by contrast, when there is nothing on
the other side but the unknown, a horror that cannot even be
qualified as human, it is non-human, ‘alien’, and this sensation
‘makes you shudder’ [Inf. 17]. Then the process of movement can
turn into a process on motifs from the Netflix serial Black Mirror,
which shows an anti-utopia of the near future. During the group

reflection, one of the participants in the laboratory expressed the
idea that we have no common experience or common words to
bestow on technology: ‘The position is comprehensible: we say that
we have not created an archetype in our culture to imbue a technical
object with something for it to correspond with blocks at the
conscious level’ [Inf. 17]. This may be why everyone imbues it with
something for himself / herself, starting from his / her own subjective
experience, conscious and subconscious, which is so hard to
interpret: ‘I ask myself, whose view is this? Because, when I set up
a camera, I am certainly not intending to post anything anywhere...
To be honest, I still haven’t entirely found an answer’ [Inf. 14].
One wonders whether a smartphone could be a proper witness in
the process of authentic movement, and if so, how. Continuing the
chain of logic that proposes that the screen should be considered
a quasi-face, one might say that a smartphone’s camera is its quasi-
eyes: the eye or the view, the presence of which changes the process,
in itself creates a completely different perception of the experience.
One might say that for some people the smartphone becomes
another participant in the process, and intrudes into it. Thus we get
the metaphor of the big eye, by analogy with Orwell’s Big Brother,
who is watching everyone. On the one hand, the smartphone camera
becomes a silent witness, claiming the potential to take over the
function not only of the external witness, but of the internal one
too: ‘At certain points I delegated the function of my internal witness
to this technical whatsit <…> I thought that at that moment I could
let my internal witness go, since everything would be filmed anyway
and I could look at it later’ [Inf. 12]. On the other hand, the smart
phone camera only appears silent, but it can be perceived as noise,
a significant distortion: ‘The presence of the camera introduced
a great deal of noise into the process when it was being witnessed’
[Inf. 7]; its iron view is felt as intrusive, inappropriate, ‘something
to be overcome’, from which one has to ‘free oneself’ in the process
of movement [Ibid.]. Otherwise it might lead ‘to a sort of not entirely
being sincere on one’s own part’ [Inf. 14]. The process might
overflow into ‘performance, and back again, when the focus of
attention becomes external instead of internal’ [Inf. 1]. On the basis
of the laboratory results it became clear that the smartphone can be
used as an instrument that allows the mover to study and interpret
his / her own experience, and the witness to engage in making art.
We can speak of a technological other quite distinctly identified in
a number of cases, which is noticeably different from a living
participant and brings into the process of authentic movement both
new possibilities and hindrances. Technically, the smartphone may
be a witness. We shall discuss below how this sort of witnessing
influences the bodily sensory experience of the participants, both

users and witnesses, and also, finally, whether such a witness is
desirable for practitioners who are accustomed to close human
contact.
The body of the witness

Before moving on to the bodily sensory effects of technologically
mediated witnessing, observation of the process of movement
through the smartphone’s screen, and the possibility of taking
photographs and videos, it is essential to mention the living witness,
with whom we shall be comparing the smartphone in what follows.
The presence of the witness forms the basis of the practice of
authentic movement, but it is not simply a matter of seeing someone
else, but, to a much greater extent, of being seen, to receive the
support of a special property or resource thanks to which development
becomes possible. As Janet Adler, one of Mary Starks Whitehouse’s
students and one of the best-known teachers of authentic movement,
writes, the presence of the external witness is necessary for the mover
to become aware of his / her own experience [Adler 2002: 6].
Developing the technique of witnessing is one of the principal tasks
of the practice, and moreover different types of witnessing are
distinguished. For example, a witness may be internal or external,
moving in the process or sitting on the edge of the circle, and an
external witness may have different means of witnessing: (s)he might
simply be silently present, (s)he might respond to the mover like an
echo, (s)he might bear witness in words and gestures, returning
episodes of this process to the mover, speak about their own
experience in the presence of someone else, and so on: witnessing
is different in different formats of authentic movement, but the
witness’s main purpose remains the same: to be with the mover in
shared experience, to be present with him or her in the moment.
We shall examine below the influence of the smartphone on the
practice for the role of the mover and for the role of the witness.
The presence of the smartphone may sometimes be felt by the
movers as pressure, so the question is how strongly this pressure is
felt and to what extent its influence is critical for the process.
According to the laboratory results, this is very individual. We can
try to analyse this experience in the terminology of extension or
reduction of bodily sensory experience. Watching the recorded
process may be an extension, when the mover becomes the witness
of his / her own movement not only from inside but also from
outside, which adds another dimension that was not previously there:
‘It is useful as a resource for a mover to be in a field of double
attention and then to get double feedback’ [Inf. 8]; ‘All the shots
that we got are important, because they help me combine how I feel
on the inside with how I look from the outside’ [Inf. 1]; ‘There is
value in seeing how I look to other people, and besides, it reconstructs

the sequence of the parts of the movement’ [Inf. 4]; ‘When I watched
the recording I noticed several times the difference between how the
movement feels from the inside (and the internal image that it
produces) and how it is perceived from the outside (by me!)’ [Inf.
11]. The witness recording may also be a different, creative kind of
resource: ‘The way some of the subjects of the process are highlighted
by a cameraman gives a special flavour to the feedback <…> a subtle
moment of unity’ [Inf. 3]. In this way, technological mediation may
be a further tool for self-study, and also for the integration of external
and internal images: ‘A recording of the movement may be useful
if one has a wish to be better visually understood and represented’
[Inf. 11]. The experience of watching the recording works not only
like memory, but can also produce bodily empathy. The quality of
the photography is also important: in one case, when the same
process was recorded with two cameras, one static and one held by
the witness, the material from the non-living camera turned out to
be uninteresting, and the material creatively taken by the witness,
with a living camera, produced a correspondingly lively response.
However, a certain layer of bodily sensory experience may be
eliminated through technological mediation on the side of the
originator of the experience, a mover. In the words of one participant,
in the role of mover ‘setting up a camera means to be immediately
deprived of a large part of the authenticity and depth of the process’
[Inf. 14]. The presence of the camera can sometimes immobilise
participants or deprive them of a sense of being connected with
themselves. But some did not notice any particular difference: ‘With
the camera or without, I feel the presence and attention of the
witness, and enter the process with confidence’ [Inf. 8]. It is also
interesting how the participants describe this experience from the
point of view of bodily sensations: ‘Do I feel the presence of the
camera? I suppose I do. How do I feel about it? Alright. Is my body
tense? Yes’ [Inf. 15].
It was possible to record more results on the role of the witness; in
the reflection, the focus of attention was on this position. On the
basis of the resulting imbalance between the roles it cannot be said
definitely that the mediation is more critical and the transformation
more palpable for the person who is watching. Nevertheless it may
be noted that the greatest losses were recorded in the bodily
experience of the witness. The exclusion of bodily co-presence, of
bodily empathy may be called the extreme position of reduction. The
concept of bodily empathy refers to the understanding of the somatic
mode of attention, which ‘means not only attention to and with one’s
own body, but includes attention to the bodies of others,’ and is used
in anthropology in studying healing practices [Csordas 2002: 245].
Within authentic movement it is a particular skill, which allows the

material obtained as a result of the experiment to be discussed in
considerable depth. For example, the participants noted that the
witness’s body is excluded from the process: attention wanders, they
cannot witness, and they fall out. This does not necessarily happen
entirely, but many people noticed the change in the usual regime of
witnessing.
Two different positions can be clearly identified: that of the witness
and that of the cameraman. For example, ‘if I haven’t got my phone
with me, it’s one experience, and if I start to film it, to put it, say,
on YouTube, that is a completely different position of me’ [Inf. 17].
One can hide behind the camera from any negative situation,
however emotionally loaded it is. One can simply get one’s smart
phone out and start filming. In the present case it is a question of
the quality of witnessing, the co-experience and co-participation,
which changes. A line is drawn between immediate and mediated
perception: ‘A person making a documentary film is a witness to the
event, but not at all a witness in the sense [of authentic movement]’
[Inf. 17]. In this way, in certain cases the camera switches on
a different regime of co-presence, it distances the person who is
seeing through the screen from what is happening. The presence of
the smartphone may turn the witness into a cameraman: ‘I had great
fun filming, but at the same time I wasn’t a witness’ [Inf. 14]; ‘the
witness seems to be dissolved behind this veil of technical action’
[Inf. 5]. In the process of the practice there are transitions from one
regime to the other: ‘There was a constant interior grinding at how
to arrange things so as to fit everything into the frame, and then
“Aaaah, I’m not seeing him, I’m not witnessing now” and there was
something touching about that grinding’ [Inf. 3]. It is interesting
that some of the informants could sometimes combine the two
regimes: ‘You break out of the limits of your own camera work and
you are nevertheless present’ [Inf. 3] — and some could not: ‘At
each particular moment I can either film, or else I can see, live, and
feel’ [Inf. 14]. The integration of the experience of technologies that
would allow them to remain in bodily presence was unattainable for
the majority of experienced body-orientated practitioners.
In the words of some of the participants in the process, the focus in
this sort of witnessing shifts to visuality. The camera provides extra
possibilities connected with the transformation and mediation of
the visual information which the human body does not have: ‘What
riches!’ [Inf. 2]. Then, in post-phenomenological terms, this could
be a relation of extension: ‘Several flows of this additional beauty
<…> perspectives, levels, this can be tied in with the textures — and
so many more volumes emerge’ [Ibid.]. A witness with a smartphone
in his / her hands receives additional means of participating in the
process, which (s)he perceives as an active position: ‘There is an
element of co-creativity in witnessing through a camera, and

therefore it acquires special value’ [Inf. 11], and that is new

possibilities of witnessing: ‘The angle changes, and as a witness
I experience this process literally as my own <…> this focus can be
directed there like a torch: it can be switched on and in some way
light it up’ [Inf. 5].
Unlike the ‘regime of being’, the use of a smartphone, even for
witnessing or creative purposes, is a ‘regime of doing’ [Inf. 14]. When
in a particular person’s experience these regimes alternate and are
not compatible, the witness, from the point of view of bodily
awareness, ‘loses’ both the mover and himself / herself, and as
a result ‘all that is left is the image frames [Ibid.]. But there are
participants who were capable of overcoming the situation in which
‘the camera broke the connection with the mover,’ although,
admittedly, they had to ‘make an effort and achieved it only with
difficulty’ [Inf. 8]. Those for whom ‘the channel of empathy remained
open’ speak of getting used to it and of a skill: ‘I’m already used to
it’ [Inf. 3]. The practice of authentic movement reveals various
regimes of witnessing: it can be contemplative, or it can be extremely
involved at the level of bodily sensory experience, a sort of bodily
empathy. It is on this regime of witnessing that technological
mediation has a noticeable effect, as if it switches it off or substantially
reduces the possibility of empathetic bodily co-presence for many
participants. Instead it offers the tempting alternative of ‘getting
stuck’ in the telephone: ‘At first I was concentrating more on the
telephone’ [Inf. 9], but also of recording ‘all this beauty’ [Inf. 2, 7],
of becoming creative.
The visual element, selfies, for example, is being studied ever more
widely, but scholars do not always have the chance to go beyond
clustering, and to analyse what is behind the content more pro
foundly. In this way, cutting-edge science often ends up with
a virtual body unconnected to the physical or experienced body, the
here body, which cannot be pinned down by external digital methods.
Sometimes it is a matter of research which could not have been done
previously and which is interesting. For example, we find the use of
data-methods that reveal how digital photo-cultures differ in
different countries [Redi et al. 2016]. There are also classical
ethnographic approaches that make it possible to draw from
comparative qualitative field material the conclusion that
‘Generalisations about new visual forms such as the selfie are often
inaccurate’ [Miller et al. 2016: XVI], since they have to be examined
in conjunction with social relationships [Ibid.: 16]. But so far it is
difficult to discover any research that goes beyond sociality in its
integration, and includes bodily experience. This may be a question
for the near future, when in conditions of more substantial
information overload society will be forced to return to the body,
which has dropped out of the process of mediated communication,

and also to provide the technological and methodological
opportunities for this. So far one can observe individual precursors
of this in the trends of the golden billion, who are promoting the
offline as the new luxury.
To be or not to be
There follows a short concluding section devoted to reflection within
the laboratory, and beyond. The question of whether or not one
needs a smartphone in the process of a traditional offline practice
provoked an active discussion among the participants. The question
had arisen spontaneously before the beginning of the process during
a discussion of the idea of technological mediation. Certain
participants expressed a lack of interest in engaging in such a process
for a variety of reasons: some already had such experience, and some
refused to have it, considering that it contradicted the idea of
immediate contact in the practice of authentic movement. The word
‘split’ was heard several times in the discussion both before and after
the process, but in the case of this particular laboratory there was
no digital divide, as it is called, when there are those who accept the
technology and those who reject it. The whole group took part in
the experiment. The reason for this may be that this was just one
more experiment in a place which is specially intended for
experiments in a practice which proceeds as a new experiment every
time: the participant closes his / her eyes and does not know what
will happen next. The reasons for voting ‘for’ were to a large extent
connected with the challenges of everyday life, such as an interest
in ‘grasping the difference in the inner state of a mover (in this case
me) with video recording and without, since in everyday life I am
very familiar with the sensation of a growing inner tension if I know
that I am being filmed’ [Inf. 11]. This could be designated as an
interest in studying the reality ‘connected to the web’ outside the hall.
The most exciting result of the experiment for the community was
the discovery of the polyphony of individual experience: ‘After my
relationship with the camera in [authentic movement] had been
structured by experience, I was surprised at how differently relations
with the camera had turned out in other groups’ [Inf. 11]; ‘I was
struck by the multi-faceted perception of both movers and witnesses’
[Inf. 8]; ‘I am now coming to terms with how different these realities
are’ [Inf. 3]. But although many participants discovered for
themselves interesting elements of their own perception of techno
logy (‘On the whole I didn’t like it, but one has to get something
useful out of it’ [Inf. 1]), experimenting with technological
meditation is unlikely to become part of the practice of authentic
movement. The participants’ experience thus brought to light the
contradiction between technological mediation and the principles

of authentic movement, such as involved bodily witnessing or the

development of the skill of the interior witness. The attractive idea
of integrating realities is not always a success in practice: each
participant has his / her own attitudes, interests, and requirements.
Those who are able to be ‘either in the frame or in reality (bodily,
emotional)’ [Inf. 14] are looking for the reality of bodily sensory
experience and relations with the other in authentic movement, for
the possibility of been really seen — and this is what the practice is
all about. If the quality of contact with oneself and the other is lost,
the practice ceases to have any meaning, and perhaps ceases to be
authentic movement in that sense in which experienced practitioners
understand it. However, this is not the case with those who succeed
in integrating technological experience, using photography and video
recording, and posting on social media — they do it anyway.
To sum up, it may be said that introducing the smartphone into the
process changes the traditional (offline) body-orientated practice of
authentic movement substantially, and there is no single possible
evaluation of this change, since the results vary substantially among
the participants in the laboratory.
1. The smartphone is perceived in a wide spectrum of emotions and
meanings, which takes into account the diversity of individual and
situational factors. As a technological other in post-phenomenological
terms, the smartphone exists, but it is not defined for society as
a whole. Apart from the camera eye, the images that occur and are
described by the participants do not repeat themselves, and this may
be a subject for further research.
2. In the role of mover one may observe an effect of expansion of
experience in the form of feedback, including the appearance of
digital copies and the opportunity of being one’s own exterior
witness, integrating the experience of movement perceived from the
inside and from the outside. But alongside these positive and neutral
instances there are instances of the reduction of bodily sensory
experience when the presence of the smartphone deprived the
process of depth.
3. In the witness’s role the effects of the presence of the smartphone
are even more polarised. The comment most often heard was that
it reduced bodily awareness to different extents, from a greater
instability of attention to a complete exclusion of the body from the
process of witnessing. A pattern of switching regimes of attention
(and the bodily presence connected with it) was also identified, and
they described the distinct roles of the witness and the cameraman,
who, in his / her bodily response and the quality of his / her co-
experience is no longer a witness in the terms of authentic move
ment. Technological mediation works differently in the roles of
mover and witness, but often the presence of the smartphone leads
to the connection with the self being enfeebled or even broken, both
among movers and witnesses.
Within the laboratory the participants spontaneously separated, in
the process of description, their experiences as movers and as
witnesses. It is important to note, however, that experience of a role
is not strictly fixed and depends on individual skills. The topic of
skills is a relevant one for the community and was discussed more
than once during reflection; besides studying regimes of redirecting
attention, the concept of bandwidth of attention was also discussed,
the capacity to absorb different kinds of experience and integrate it,
and how one can work with this and develop. As it emerges from
the works of Janet Adler,1 who has been practising for fifty years,
the integration of roles takes place as experience is accumulated. The
practice may move gradually from a clear distinction between mover
and witness until it arrives at the mover-witness, and the integral
witness is one of the stages in this process. In this way, as a possible
continuation of the research it would be interesting to examine the
stages of witnessing from practical material, and also try to correlate
these stages with the ability to integrate technology while retaining
bodily presence. Before the beginning of the research the hypothesis
was put forward that experienced practitioners of authentic
movement would be able to integrate the appearance of the smart
phone as an additional circumstance of the practice, but as such it
was not confirmed. As a result the smartphone may change the
practice, it may hinder the practice, it may provide additional
opportunities for studying oneself, but as a rule the majority of
participants do not succeed in maintaining their bodily presence in
the process. Perhaps the next generation of gadgets and the next
generation of practitioners of authentic movement will give different
results. Independently of the current field, the way suggested by
Janet Adler seems methodologically interesting to the author: it may
be that by working in such a direction it will be possible to attempt
to come closer in practice to studying not the bodily sensory
experience of the interaction between human beings and techno
logy — the version that post-phenomenology has been proposing
for several decades — but techno-corpo-reality.
It is also essential to remark that witnessing in the practice of
authentic movement is both methodologically and ethically different
from simple observation. Regarding method, the witness does not
simply observe the mover, but at the same time observes himself /
herself in the presence of the mover. On the ethical side authentic

1
Adler J., ‘The Mandorla and the Discipline of Authentic Movement’. <https://
disciplineofauthenticmovement.com/discipline-of-authentic-movement/the-mandorla-and-the-
discipline-of-authentic-movement/>.
movement also goes beyond contemporary social sciences with their

informed consent and ethics committees, postulating that the mover

is the owner of his / her own experience, and trying to make this
proposition a reality in practice. In Janet Adler’s version the witness
may ask whether the mover needs his / her witnessing, and also what
sort of witnessing in form or in a particular episode the mover wishes
to have. If during witnessing the mover says that it is enough for
him / her, the witness stops talking, even if (s)he is overflowing with
material that (s)he has not yet expressed. In this way the witness
learns to take control of his / her experience and contain it, in the
same way that (s)he learns not to interpret the mover’s experience
and not to transfer his / her own experience to the mover’s, but to
witness the movement and what it says about the experience, the
mover’s direct speech, in the moment when it happens. Witnessing
in authentic movement is different from what is called participant
observation in anthropology, where mutual influence between the
researcher and his / her human object is allowed, the creation of
a common experience and even a common culture [Wagner 1981],
but nevertheless a certain distance is taken for granted, and, above
all, there is the possibility of projecting the researcher’s position onto
the object of study, which is a universal practice. It is also different
from auto-ethnography, which can use analytical reflection and
compares the positions, methods and results of research. Authentic
movement may thus be not only a field, but also a source of method,
particularly in those areas where a profound qualitative analysis
connected with the experience of the here body is required. It may
be the very direction of research which it will be hardest of all to
replace with machines.
In conclusion I would like to advert to an interview with the British
anthropologist Daniel Miller, who quoted a factory worker ‘Life
outside the mobile phone is unbearable’ [Favorov 2016]. It is
a problem not only of smartphones, but of life, and that it can be
just as unbearable, if not more so, in the smartphone. From empirical
material one can well understand the urge to use the smartphone as
an activity that can redirect the focus of attention in an instant and
occupy it, plunging us into the space of our own personal interests
and allowing us to feel like creators — and to be them. In this sense
the modern smartphone’s camera is in many respects the heir to the
camera described by Sontag, which ‘offers, in one easy, habit-forming
activity, both participation and alienation in our own lives and those
of others — allowing us to participate, while confirming alienation’
[Sontag 1977: 167]. True, being connected to the net, the smartphone
is much more effective: more personalised, more interactive. Its
presence has the potential for expanding our opportunities by
connecting us with other people, and also adding another, digital
dimension of ourselves, helping us to see ourselves from outside
in a huge flow of feedback, including visual feedback. But one can

also see the limitations that technological mediation imposes. As
noted above, it can be a matter of lowering the capacity to maintain
full contact with bodily sensory change in ourselves and others, in
comparison with offline situations. In the process of practice the
smartphone is perceived as a technological other, full of personal
meanings, fears and expectations. As a witness, the smartphone is
Big Brother’s big eye, which turns movement into performance, but
does not allow most people to be fully aware of this art with their
bodies, and therefore most practitioners of authentic movement are
not prepared to use it when they have regular offline formats
available. Even though modern technology allows us to be in touch
and in view all the time, this does not mean being seen in the sense
in which practitioners of authentic movement use the co-presence
of the mover and witness to become aware of themselves and their
experience. It may be a new task for modern man not only to
integrate technology into life, but also to maintain his / her own
integration, expanded into virtual space.
informants
(All the participants of the laboratory were assigned numbers between
1 and 19. Only the participants quoted in the paper are included in the
list)
Inf. 1, f, 32
Inf. 2, m, 39
Inf. 3, f, 39
Inf. 4, f, 35
Inf. 5, m, 36
Inf. 7, f, 31
Inf. 8, f, 32
Inf. 9, f, 43
Inf. 11, f, 45
Inf. 12, f, 49
Inf. 14, f, 32
Inf. 15, f, 44
Inf. 17, m, 36
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Evgenia Nim
Self-tracking as a Practice of Quantifying the Body:
Conceptual Outlines
The article addresses the understudied phenomenon of digital quantification of the body and everyday life, which has
arisen due to the proliferation of wearable and mobile fitness technologies. The author reviews a number of recent studies
which have contributed significantly to the conceptualisation of digital self-tracking. Examining various approaches and
directions in the study of self-tracking, the author focuses on three aspects: a) on the manifestations and discourses of
self-tracking; b) on its styles and practices; and c) on its social contexts and effects. The works under review show how
trackers of physical and social activities can transform people’s everyday practices, and how users interact with fitness
technologies, interpret quantified data and construct their own embodied identity. Importantly, the efficiency of self-
tracking tools is associated with their ‘sociability’ and ‘intelligence’ — qualities achieved through the anthropomorphising
of digital devices and the creation of a culture of sharing. The analysis also emphasises that the practice of self-tracking
goes beyond individual experience, actively invading other social worlds, and may eventually become an inherent feature
of a ‘sensor society’. Summarising the outcomes of current research, the author comes to the conclusion that further
conceptualisation of digital self-tracking must take into account its complex and multi-vectored nature. On the one hand,
self-tracking is productive, as it contributes to the broadening of possibilities for self-knowledge and self-management,
but on the other hand, it can have disciplinary, discriminatory, coercive, and alienating effects.
Keywords: embodiment, health, self-tracking, lifelogging, wearable and mobile fitness technologies.
We are currently observing a process of

digitalisation and quantification of the body
by means of mobile and wearable devices. The
use of all kinds of devices and applications for
monitoring health and physical activity is
becoming a noticeable trend of everyday life,
ever more widespread in character. And while
fitness bracelets and smart watches remain to
a large extent niche products popular with
young people and sportsmen, medical and
fitness applications for smartphones are
intended for quite a wide public. IT giants like
Apple, Google, and Samsung are involved in
the development of digital health platforms,
and, overall, intensive growth is expected in
the market segment of digital fitness techno
logies.
With the help of self-monitoring devices, users
can measure various biometric indicators:
number of steps taken, quantity of calories
burnt, quality of sleep, blood pressure and pulse,
stress level, and so on. Bodily activity is
Evgenia Nim
constantly digitised and turned into a collection
National Research University of data for personal analytics. It is supposed that
Higher School of Economics by correcting one’s habits with the help of such
20 Myasnitskaya Str.,
Moscow, Russia
technology, one can improve how one feels, get
nimeg@mail.ru oneself into condition as desired, and, overall,
optimise one’s life. The phenomenon in which we are interested,

that of the quantification of the body, is denoted in the English-
language research literature by the concept of ‘self-tracking’, and
also by a series of related or synonymous concepts such as ‘life
logging’, ‘self-surveillance’, ‘the quantified self’ and ‘personal
informatics’.1
The concept of self-tracking is not yet in active circulation in
the Russian segment of the social sciences (at least, the Akademiya
Google2 search engine does not know the word) and the present
article is intended to plug that gap. Without pretending to a complete
historiography of the question, we shall present a survey of the key
trajectories in the study of self-tracking, focusing on three aspects:
the manifestations and discourses of self-tracking, its styles and
practices, and also the social contexts and effects of the quantification
of the body. This will permit an understanding of the directions
in which the current conceptual assemblage of self-tracking is
proceeding, and also what prospects there are for the further
conceptualisation of this social phenomenon.
The phenomenon and discourses of self-tracking

In its most general aspect, the concept of self-tracking describes
biometric practices directed towards the regular monitoring,
recording, and measurement of the details of human behaviour or
bodily functions [Lupton 2016a: 2]. Although digital fitness
technologies began to be actively developed during the last ten years,
the actual phenomenon of self-tracking is not a fundamentally new
thing in human history. Reflexive methods of tracking and
documenting the life of one’s own or someone else’s body have
existed for many centuries. In some families the tradition of
measuring a child’s height by making marks on the door-post is still
very much alive. The use of such devices as scales became widespread
at the end of the nineteenth century, and the apparatus migrated
from the doctor’s surgery onto the streets, public squares and
shops, and later into the intimate space of the home [Crawford,

1
Lifelogging is the practice of documenting one’s everyday life by means of portable digital devices
(cameras, sensors, etc.) over a given period of time. Lifelogging need not be connected with the ideas
of self-optimisation (like self-tracking), and often has the function of computerised memory. Self-
observation is a concept developed in surveillance studies, where ‘observation from above’ (surveillance)
is distinguished from ‘observation from below’ (sousveillance). Personal informatics and personal
analytics are terms which are often used in research on the interaction between human beings and
computers. ‘Quantified Self’ is the name of a community centred upon a site of the same name, whose
members use data from portable devices and mobile applications for the purposes of self-understanding
and self-improvement. At present the concept of the ‘quantified self’ refers to any practices of digital
self-tracking. In the present article the terms enumerated here are used in a synonymous context, but
they are examined in greater detail in a number of works [Lupton 2016a; Neff, Nafus 2016; Selke
2016].

2
The equivalent of Google Scholar [Eds.].
Lingel, Karppi 2015: 481]. Over time various means of bodily self-
Evgenia Nim. Self-tracking as a Practice of Quantifying the Body: Conceptual Outlines
monitoring became part of the domestic routine, though they were

mostly used only in cases of necessity: thermometers, blood pressure
monitors, glucose meters, pulse oximeters, pedometers, breathalysers
and pregnancy tests. Diary entries in which people record their
physical and emotional conditions based on their subjective feelings
can also be included among the tools of self-tracking.
However, before digital self-tracking technologies were invented,
bodily experience itself was generally felt to be qualitative and
not quantitative. For example, Michel de Certeau wrote in 1984
that steps cannot be measured statistically, since the tactile and
kinaesthetic properties of each are unique [de Certeau 1984: 97].
Walking is here understood as a means of assimilating urban space;
the individualised ‘rhetoric’ of the walk, according to de Certeau,
cannot be reproduced or calculated (unlike prescribed routes). Yet,
as James Gilmore remarks [Gilmore 2016: 4], portable devices like
Fitbit (the first fitness device, released in 2008) convert steps into
quantitative data, and mobile apps like MapMyRun convert spatial
navigation into automatic operations of observation and mapping.
The qualitative character of steps acquires a quantitative dimension,
which becomes dominant in the perception of the owners of portable
fitness devices. Furthermore, people adapt their pedestrian and other
practices to the recommendations of these devices, for example
choosing routes that allow them to take the ‘necessary’ number of
steps. The writer and designer Craig Mod followed this motive when
deciding which places and sights to visit in Paris. On one occasion,
when he had forgotten his Fitbit fitness bracelet at his hotel, first he
felt devastated that his steps through Paris were not being measured
and counted, but then he still managed to enjoy the beauties of
the city without using his device [Mod 2012]. Informants often admit
to researchers that they cannot begin some activity (running,
walking, training, eating, sleeping, working, sexual intercourse)
without switching on the option for tracking and generating data,
otherwise the activity is perceived as pointless, as a waste of time.1
Another important element is the possibility of sharing one’s data
with other people: indicators and achievements become more
significant when they are evaluated by the external community. The
digital quantification of the body goes beyond individual experience,
and there comes into being a culture of self-tracking that brings
about an active expansion into different social worlds (sport,
medicine, the family, work, education, insurance, etc.).
1
For example, one informant admitted to ethnographers that if he forgot to put on his Fitbit bracelet
before starting to play football, he would continue to play, but feel irritated, as if the time were being
spent to no purpose [Pink, Fors 2017: 232].
The pioneer of this culture was the global movement and community

called ‘Quantified Self’ (QS), founded in 2007 by Gary Wolf and
Kevin Kelly, the editors of the American magazine Wired. Its
numerous adepts, following their motto of ‘self-knowledge through
numbers’, share their experiences of self-measurement at local
meetings and annual international conferences in Europe and
America.1 It is not only QS activists that take part, but also poli
ticians, self-tracking technology developers, academics and clinicians.
The QS site offers more than five hundred instruments for individual
monitoring of physical and social activity, and also a large quantity
of video materials presenting the methods and results of the
application of self-tracking technologies. In addition, in 2012
the Quantified Self Institute (QSI) was founded at the Hanze
University of Applied Science in the Netherlands and, alongside
applied research, is developing its own educational programmes
at first-degree level. Among these is a minor in ‘Global Health
& Quantified Self’ (and a summer school with the same name), and
also minors in ‘Healthy Ageing’ and an ‘Honours Minor in Research
Skills’, which assumes the study of various aspects of self-tracking.2
At present, ‘Quantified Self’ refers not only to the community and
its website,3 but is also a general designation for all digital practices
connected with individual measurement of biometric data. In this
sense QS is a synonym for self-tracking.
The concept of self-tracking has already been included in the Oxford
English Dictionary, where it is defined as ‘The practice of sys
tematically recording information about one’s diet, health, or
activities, typically by means of a smartphone, so as to discover
behavioural patterns that may be adjusted to help improve one’s
physical or mental well-being’ [Oxford Dictionaries 2018]. The
problems of self-tracking are appearing more and more often in
the media and on social networks: digital self-measurement is
becoming a popular cultural trend in society. The growing interest
in the phenomenon is also shared by representatives of the most
diverse branches of scholarship, from medicine, information science
and mobile design to sociology and ethnography.4 The study of QS

1
In particular, the Quantified Self Symposium 2018 took place on 19 April at the University of California
at San Diego, and the previous conference took place on 17–8 June 2017 in Amsterdam together with
the Quantified Self Institute (QSI) at the Hanze University of Applied Science.
2
See the QSI site: <http://qsinstitute.com/services/education/>.
3
<http://qsinstitute.com/>.
4
This interest has manifested itself in the organisation of a series of conferences on the subject, in
particular ‘Metric Culture: The Quantified Self and Beyond’ (7–9 June 2017, Aarhus Institute of Advanced
Studies, Denmark); ‘Monitoring the Self: Negotiating Technologies of Health, Identity and Governance’
(8–10 November 2017, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, Finland); ‘Labouring Bodies and
the Quantified Self’ (5–6 October 2018, University of Mannheim, Germany). We should also note
the geographical extent of scholarly publications on self-tracking: the subject is being studied by
is taking place at the crossroads between such tendencies as research

into mediatisation, sensor technologies, corporeality and everyday

life, digital health, data and algorithms, surveillance studies, etc.
Moreover, two key discourses are observable in the corpus of
literature on QS, which we shall call ‘emancipatory’ and ‘critical’.
In the first case, the accent is on the liberating potential of
the practice of digital self-tracking, manifested in the expansion of
the opportunities for self-knowledge and control over many aspects
of one’s life, including the improvement of one’s physical, psycho
logical and social well-being. An important direction here is
the study and development of effective systems of personal infor
matics, intended for the collection and analysis of personal data, and
also to motivate users to change their behaviour [Li, Dey, Forlizzi
2010; Rooksby et al. 2014; Epstein et al. 2015; Kersten-van Dijk et
al. 2017]. Another significant layer of literature supporting the
discourse of self-optimisation is devoted to the prospects for using
the technologies of self-tracking in the area of digital health, where
they may help to lower the risks of falling ill and improve com
munication between patients and doctors [Swan 2009; 2012; Turner-
McGrievy et al. 2013; Topol 2012; 2015; Wang et al. 2014]. Overall,
typical of the ‘emancipatory’ perspective are ideas of how quantitative
data can allow cognitive access to oneself, revealing hitherto
concealed patterns and connections, and that they are more reliable,
objective, intellectual and performative in comparison with sensory
experience, and that in the end the figures reflect our true selves
[Lupton 2016b: 65]. Equipped with sensors, the body comes to
resemble an experimental laboratory, an information machine (the
working of which can be evaluated in terms of expenses, conditions
and productivity) or an ‘intelligent’ thing, integrated into the digital
environment along with other smart objects.
The critical view, primarily developed within the social sciences,
articulates as series of contradictions and problems connected with
the spread of QS culture [Whitson 2013; Lupton 2016a; Neff, Nafus
2016; Selke 2016; Ajana 2018]. Basing themselves most of all on
the works of Michel Foucault [Foucault 1986 (1984); 2004],
a number of authors have examined self-tracking as a disciplinary
practice of ‘The Care of the Self’, and the fitness devices themselves
as the normative instruments of bio-pedagogy, which impel people
to construct ‘ideal’ bodies [Ruckenstein 2014; Lupton 2016a;
Fotopoulou, O’Riordan 2017]. The object of critical reflection here
is the policy of neo-liberalism, which places on the citizen entire
responsibility for his / her own health and well-being, nudging him /
her towards effective self-supervision, including by digital tracking
researchers from the USA, Europe, Australia and East Asia. Russian scholars are only just beginning to
assimilate this subject area.
[Kelly 2013]. The culture of lifelogging is also fed by the ideology of

‘metric power’ [Beer 2016] and ‘dataism’ [van Dijck 2014], based on
a belief in the creative power of algorithms and big data, while
the latter are included in the processes of social categorisation, dis
crimination and exclusion. Furthermore, in the post-Snowden world
questions of privacy and the security of data systems are making
researchers uneasy, including the ambivalent attitude of society
towards the problem of the confidentiality of personal data [Spiller
et al. 2018]. The platforms used for self-tracking are not neutral, and
the information that they collect and process may serve the
commercial and administrative interests of third parties who make
profits out of voluntary digital labour [Till 2014].
Unquestionably, the research landscape that is forming around
the study of self-tracking cannot be reduced to the two poles of
discourse here described, but demonstrates an increasing diversity
of theoretical approaches and empirical methods. The various
practices and styles of self-tracking are of particular interest to
anthropologists and sociologists, and so are users’ perceptions
of the technologies of self-supervision and their interpretations of
the data that they receive.
Practices and styles of self-tracking

The specifics of the interaction between users and their self-tracking
tools and ‘digital doubles’ (visual representations of their own
activity in the form of data)1 have been studied in a whole series of
investigations.
The British researcher John Rooksby and his colleagues have identified
five styles of self-tracking from interviews with users of digital fitness
technologies [Rooksby et al. 2014]: directive, documentary, diagnostic,
collecting rewards, and fetishised. This typology is based on
the distinction of the aims and motives of lifeloggers.
Directive tracking presupposes the setting and systematic achievement
of specific goals, for example losing weight or fulfilling training
programmes. The goal is often prompted by the device itself, such
as the ten thousand steps that pedometers recommend as standard.
Documentary tracking makes no claims to palpable changes in
activity or lifestyle, although with time it may change into regular
monitoring of the first type. People can observe the quality of their
sleep, the distance they have walked or their food consumption
episodically, out of a feeling of curiosity and the desire to have

1
By ‘digital doubles’ we understand the concept of the ‘data double’ developed within the research on
self-tracking by Minna Ruckenstein [Ruckenstein 2014]. It describes the conversion of human minds
and bodies into flows of data which can be reconstructed as visual images for the purpose of personal
perception and interaction with them.
a documentary history that they can share on social media.

Diagnostic tracking is a relatively rare practice, since it is oriented

toward the analytical search for mutual connections between two or
more things. For example, one of the people surveyed had established
by means of lifelogging technology that his stomach problems
resulted from the combination of medicines with particular
foodstuffs; another informant had obtained a Jawbone UP fitness
bracelet specially in order to discover the reasons why he felt so bad
in the morning despite having had an adequate amount of sleep
[Rooksby et al. 2014: 1168]. The reward-collecting style of self-
monitoring is maintained by various encouragements of digital ‘care
of the self’. These prizes and bonuses may be symbolic (in the form
of ‘medals’ and ‘leader boards’ and other gamified indicators of
achievement), or material, including receiving Amazon gift vouchers
or reduced insurance premiums (for policy-holders of those
insurance companies that have marketing partnerships with
the producers of fitness trackers). Finally, fetishised tracking is
characteristic of the adepts of the ‘Quantified Self’ movement and
digital ‘geeks’ who are purely interested in the latest gadgets and
technologies. In addition, portable devices and brands may be
attributes of prestige and fashion that underline their owners’ status.
John Rooksby and his colleagues’ typology allows an understanding
of the intentions of the self-trackers, but does not take into account
the social contexts of their use, omitting the hermeneutics of
the relations between people and their devices. Australian researchers
[Lyall, Robards 2018] have, in the course of in-depth interviews,
established three roles (which are not mutually exclusive) which
users attribute to their self-tracking devices: tool, toy and tutor.
In the last case the app is acknowledged to have the ability to teach
people and even to manage their lives — qualities which pertain to
social subjects.
Other authors have discovered a more evident tendency toward
anthropomorphising self-quantification systems [Rettberg 2018;
Ruffino 2018]. Although the technologies are non-human agents,
their users often see them as social beings that ‘tell’ them when and
how much they must walk, stand, sleep, eat, etc. [Kreitzberg et al.
2016: 99]. The perception of means of documenting everyday life as
companions is not new in itself; it applies particularly to paper
diaries, which have served people as silent interlocutors for many
a long year [Rettberg 2018: 32]. But while paper diaries and many
other instruments of QS take on the role of passive listeners and
vessels for information, there are now technologies being developed
that have their own ‘personalities’ and are able to engage in dialogue
and tell stories. For example, the Lark app, which has an interface
like that of a messenger, communicates with its users in conversational
English, wishes them good morning, encourages various kinds
of activity, reminds them when they need to rest, and sometimes
even tries to make jokes. However, the user cannot answer
the application in natural language; instead of that (s)he must choose
from a small selection of possible answers. The Vi sports earphones,
made by LifeBEAM and equipped with biosensors and artificial
intelligence, demonstrate an even greater anthropomorphism. An
auditory personal trainer, analogous to Apple Siri and presented as
‘a friend for your fitness’, ever ready to help, ‘lives’ in them. It is
the sociality and ‘rationality’ of fitness technologies that attracts
the consumer, and that is what the modern mobile and portable
device industry is aiming for. This marketing strategy of a close
connection between human being and device is subtly decoded by
the British media researcher Paolo Ruffino, who uses a romantic
metaphor to describe his two-year ‘relationship’ with his Nike+
FuelBand bracelet, which ended in a break-up [Ruffino 2018].
Undoubtedly, electronic fitness technologies may be perceived not
only as ‘significant others’, but also as ‘parts of oneself’, blurring
the boundary between the body and its ‘digital double’. They shape
the corporeal self, often setting the parameters for the interpretations
and sensations of one’s own physical conditions. In other words,
users begin, subjectively, to feel tired or rested, fatter or thinner,
healthy or infirm in the actual process of perceiving the ‘objective’
visualisations of their biometric data. Let us cite one autoethnographic
testimony: ‘We (the Apps and I) had co-constructed a digital model
of my self, and here I was, managing myself, it seems, by proxy. The
feedback from that digital model often took precedence over how
I physically felt. When I didn’t eat “enough” protein I felt weaker,
and when I had too much sugar I felt fatter. These were delayed
reactions; a re-reading of my body from the model’ [Williams 2013].
It remains an open question for the author of these reflections
whether the digital model of himself was bringing him closer to
himself or, on the contrary, taking him further away.
Let us note that the viewpoint of self-tracking works not only at an
individual level, but also at an interpersonal one, when users share
their biometrics with each other. Thus one informant informed
ethnographers that he examines the data about his wife’s sleep
quality and physical activity in order to predict the mood in which
she will arrive home from work. If the indicators show a low level
of physical activity and poor sleep, he prepares to be gentler and
more considerate when she comes home [Pink, Fors 2017: 233]. In
this case the use of tracking technology furthers a greater mutual
understanding in the family. At the same time, the fact that he needs
to use a digital device to understand the condition of a person close
to him suggests a weakened ability to ‘read’ someone else directly.
The fitness technology is a sort of ‘prosthesis’ for this ability, and
the personal relationship is profoundly mediatised.
Although the above examples indicate a noticeable and many-sided

influence of self-tracking on people’s lives, in most cases, with

the exception of members of the ‘Quantified Self’ movement, these
effects are selective, temporary or mitigated in character [Didžiokaitė,
Saukko, Greiffenhagen 2017]. Many users do indeed achieve
the goals that they have set themselves with the help of this sort of
self-supervision: they lose weight, feel better, improve their sports
results, and so on. But, probably, a significant number of them
afterwards ‘drop’ their fitness apps and devices or relegate them to
the background, only occasionally taking an interest in the data.
Why does this happen? There are several possible reasons: once
the goal is achieved, the motivation disappears; they are stressed
when they discover things going wrong and inaccurate data; they
are irritated by the work of entering the data (when it has to be done
manually); the information they get appears trivial; they find
something else to amuse themselves with (if it was a ‘toy’); they are
concerned about their security or unwilling to become dependent
on technology; they are disillusioned with the very idea of
a ‘quantified self’. People’s relationships with particular fitness
devices or brands begin, develop, and come to an end, but the
tendency to quantify the body and everyday life is itself constantly
on the rise.
The social contexts of self-tracking

To a large extent the attractiveness of QS culture is connected with
the fact that it is a culture of sharing, it creates and maintains
communities. The possibility of sharing one’s biometric data with
other people over social media or special digital platforms is one
of the key factors in the popularity of the practices of self-tracking.
For example, self-tracking apps such as Strava, Endomondo,
Garmin Connect, or Runkeeper have social network functions
that allow users to get in touch with each other. Facebook, Twitter
and Instagram are also actively used by lifeloggers for com
munication. The largest sharing platform is the site of the
‘Quantified Self’ community, which has over 70,000 members
worldwide.1
As Rachael Kent has noted [Kent 2018: 66], other people’s voyeuristic
attention on social media does act as a motivational instrument.
Posts, likes, comments, observation of each other’s ‘progress’ and
a spirit of competition stimulate users to continue with self-tracking
and press on to improve their results. The media representation of
working on one’s health stresses the choice of a ‘proper’ lifestyle
demonstrating the capacity for self-management which is highly
1
<http://qsinstitute.com/about/what-is-quantified-self/>.
regarded in the culture of neo-liberalism with its specific type of

‘governmentality’ and biopower [Rose 2006; Miller, Rose 2008].
At the same time the image of the ‘healthy self’ that is formed is
in practice a collective product, the work of the online community.
Its construction proceeds taking into account the shared tacit
expectations and norms of the web fitness community. In particular,
to avoid criticism one should not display unnecessary fanaticism or
excessively idealise one’s body and lifestyle. Moreover, visual
representations of bodies or diets should be aesthetically pleasing.
The ‘real’ physical body remains concealed, replaced by quantitative
data, and also by carefully constructed narratives and images by
which other people evaluate its condition. In the course of in-depth
interviews with respondents who regularly exchange tracking data
on social media, Kent discovered an interesting tendency: the more
lifeloggers ‘share’ and discuss their practice with the community,
the more likes and followers they have, the ‘healthier’ they feel [Kent
2018: 66–73]. This ‘healthy’ identity is a collective construction,
which may not altogether reflect the ‘real’ state of affairs, particularly
because the fitness devices and apps that it is based on do not give
particularly accurate measurements.
Such conclusions confirm the idea previously expressed by James
Gilmore [Gilmore 2016: 2531] that the sociality of fitness technologies,
which is connected with the sharing option, allows them to be seen
as a qualitative as well as a quantitative phenomenon. Society
is ‘added’ to these technologies because they have in addition
a socialising effect.
There is one more important element characteristic of societal
participation in digitalisation self-supervision practices. So far we
have been examining self-tracking primarily as a private occupation
and a personal choice, but that is not always what it is. The culture
of lifelogging extends to many segments of the social world, and is
becoming ever more compulsory in nature. The Australian socio
logist Deborah Lupton [Lupton 2016a: 115–38] has identified five
regimes of self-monitoring, depending on how voluntary it is and
with what aims it is being done: private, pushed, communal, imposed
and exploited.
Private tracking is the personal free choice of the lifelogger and may
have a great variety of goals, from discovering and constructing one’s
corporeality to ludic experiments with data. The private character
of this monitoring practice is best expressed by the ‘n=1’ concept
shared by the members of the ‘Quantified Self’ community. It takes
for granted that personal information must remain personal, to
a certain extent even offering ‘soft resistance’ to the victory march
of the big data [Nafus, Sherman 2014] in which third persons (state
and commercial organisations) are so interested.
Pushed self-tracking is characterised by outside influence coming

from another social actor (employer, insurance company, parents

or educational institution). For example, employees are offered
the use of a fitness bracelet within the framework of a corporate
health programme. And although digital monitoring of one’s health
and productivity is relatively voluntary in this case, it is to a greater
extent a response to external pressure or propaganda. There is a fine
line between this mode and imposed self-tracking, when a person
has practically no choice but to use the fitness device and allow third
parties (his / her employer, say) to examine his / her personal data.
Considering that this practice is beginning to be institutionalised,
refusal to participate in programmes of this sort threatens the loss
of better career opportunities or other social privileges.
The communal self-tracking examined above is primarily that of
those who regularly share their biometric data with other people.
Moreover, their communality may manifest itself not only in
competitions and discussions with other lifeloggers, but also in civic
initiatives such as crowd-sourcing, when, for example, people
monitor their running or cycling routes or their health indicators
so that they can form part of a big database. This information can
then be used by the local authorities or town planners in their efforts
to realise the concept of a ‘smart’ or ‘healthy’ town. Another good
illustration would be the online platform ‘PatientsLikeMe’, which
was created so that patients suffering from the same maladies could
exchange data with each other. However, in this case the unique
information uploaded by users becomes accessible to representatives
of the medical and pharmaceutical industries. Personal information
is transformed into commercialised big data.
Exploited fitness tracking is evidently where all the other modes of
self-monitoring are inevitably heading. In the modern economy of
digital knowledge, biometric data are converted into a valuable
commodity, produced free of charge by the lifeloggers themselves,
while the results of their labours are used by other actors [Till 2014].
Considering that digitised human bodies become nodes in
the Internet of things, generating information and exchanging it with
other intelligent objects, in the near future it will be hard to escape
from the ‘sensory society’ [Andrejevic, Burdon 2015], as it will be
to find out where your personal data have gone.
Fantasising about those prospects, Deborah Lupton writes that in
the future we can expect to have chairs that track how long anyone
has sat on them, chopping boards that record our culinary habits,
sofas that expel their owners when they have been sitting for too
long and 3D printers that prepare food in accordance with daily data
about people’s physical activity [Lupton 2016a: 139–48]. Self-
tracking may become an integral part of everyday life, and this is
far from a digital (anti-)utopia. Like any other innovation, digital

self-tracking is a complex, multi-dimensional phenomenon, and
its effect on people’s lives has many vectors: as it creates new
opportunities, it also gives rise to risks and contradictions. If the
social costs of this technology turn out to be too high, there will
inevitably be tactics of resistance in society directed towards limiting
its scale and effects.
Conclusion
The study of self-tracking is only just taking shape as an independent
interdisciplinary direction arising out of the crossover between many
areas, from sociology and ethnography to computer science and
medicine.
This survey of existing publications on the topic allows us to make
a number of generalisations that reflect the key trajectories of
the conceptualisation of the QS phenomenon within media and
cultural studies.
Firstly, digital fitness technologies construct a corporal identity that
is perceived through data (‘you are your data’). But the ‘digital
double’ is not a mirror that reflects the ‘real’ condition of mind and
body, but a reductive model. There are various ways of interacting
with this model: in one case there may be a ‘gap’ between it and
the ‘bodily self’ which allows the discrepancies between the
representation of one’s condition as data and one’s own sensations
to be identified; in another case these very bodily sensations are
partly conditioned by interpretation of the data, i.e. they are formed
by the model. One way or another, tracking assists in self-knowledge
and the ‘objectivist’ or ‘constructivist’ modes of perception of
the data depend on a range of cognitive and social factors.
Secondly, the technologies of self-tracking encourage changes in
everyday life, allowing routine practices (physical, spatial, com
municative, consumer, labour, etc.) to be modified. People can
achieve the goals they have set themselves by using fitness devices —
have a good night’s sleep, lose weight, be more active, work more
productively. However, it is not entirely clear to what extent these
achievements are due to QS technologies, although their stimulating
effect is acknowledged by the users themselves. This requires asking
the question of wherein the source of motivation lies: in the device
itself, in the person or in society? In our opinion, this source is
divided: even the most inspiring interface is only effective where
there is personal motivation, and that is formed to a large extent
by the social environment. Self-tracking devices are instruments of
biopolitics, they contain the imperative to look after oneself and
the ideal of health shared by the consumer.
Thirdly, the main distinction between modern tracking technologies

and older ones (such as mechanical scales) is their sociality and

‘intelligence’, which means the possibility of bilateral communication.
This possibility is realised in two ways: through anthropomorphising
the lifelogging instruments and through the creation of a culture of
sharing. Above all, the fitness device itself becomes an active
companion, capable of maintaining a ‘human’ dialogue with its
owner, and as artificial intelligence technologies evolve, this trend
will become ever stronger. In addition, a lifelogger’s companions
are also the other people with whom (s)he shares biometric data on
social media and in conjunction with whom (s)he constructs his /
her ‘healthy self’. In the foreseeable future this fitness community
will be joined by intelligent things that will monitor the condition
and activity of a person in the background.
Fourthly, although today self-tracking may be a personal hobby,
a movement or a subculture, it is gradually invading different social
worlds and acquiring features of compulsion and exploitation. In
this context self-tracking should be examined as a complex multi-
vector phenomenon. On the one hand, it is a potential productive
practice, allowing increased opportunities for self-management and
a reduction in various individual and social risks. On the other,
self-tracking may have a disciplinary, discriminatory, alienating and
manipulative character. Therefore future social research into
the digital technologies for self-measurement should not lose its
focus of critical reflection.
Acknowledgments
The article was prepared within the framework of the Academic Fund
Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics
(HSE) in 2017–9 (grant no. 17-01-0077) and within the framework of
the Russian Academic Excellence Project ‘5-100’.
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Articles
155 A rticles
Stanislav Petriashin
Socialist Realism and Ethnography:
The Study and Representation of Soviet
Contemporaneity in Ethnographic Museums
in the 1930s
The paper addresses the influence of socialist realism on the research and representation of Soviet contemporaneity in
ethnographic museums in the 1930s on the basis of a case study of The State Museum of Ethnography in Leningrad.
A comparison of museum ethnography at the time of ‘cultural revolution’ and mature Stalinism reveals an array of features
pointing to the impact of socialist realism. The Soviet historical narrative was embedded into museum displays, in some
cases transformed into fictionalised biography. ‘Leading’ and ‘distinguished’ districts, collective farms, plants and people
replaced ‘average’ ones in their roles of typical objects of fieldwork study and exhibition representation. Avant-garde
design was replaced by socialist realist designs; life groups with picturesque backdrops became the constructive and
conceptual dominants of exhibitions. Socialist construction was displayed not only by flat paper materials (photographs,
diagrams, slogans, etc.) and collections of industrial objects, etc., but also by paintings, graphics, sculptures, and folk
decorative arts. The making of politically appropriate displays presupposed a powerful interweaving of science and
ideologically inspired art throughout all phases of preparation: from fieldwork to the mounting of the exhibition in the
museum. As a result, in the second half of 1930s ethnographers were no longer able to study contemporaneity as such;
rather, they were expected to investigate ‘the green shoots of the future in the present’.
Keywords: socialist realism, cultural revolution, ethnographic museum, history of ethnography, ethnography of
contemporaneity.
‘Modern Russia, obviously, is full to the brim

with unusual new content. It is sloughing its
skin painfully and with difficulty, like an aged
snake. But the bright and curious colours of
renewal are everywhere showing through the
dull scales of the past,’ wrote V. G. Bogoraz in
his introduction to the collection Old and New
Lifestyle [Tan-Bogoraz 1924: 7]. This sort of
‘revolutionary’ view that divided reality into
the old and the new, the backward and the
progressive, was being actively put forward
by state propaganda, and found support among
scholars sympathetic to the Soviet regime. In the
first ten years after the revolution a particular
tendency in Soviet ethnography took shape,
which might be called at different times the
study of the new way of life, of the building of
socialism, or the culture and life of collective
Stanislav Petriashin
farmers / workers or, finally, the study of
The Russian Museum contemporaneity. This was usually understood
of Ethnography as research into the new forms of social life and
4/1 Inzhenernaya Str.,
St Petersburg, Russia
culture of the socialist period which were
s-petryashin@yandex.ru appearing under the influence of the policies of
the Soviet state, and also of harmful survivals from the past, so that
they could be eradicated as soon as possible.1
Throughout the whole history of Soviet ethnography discussions
about the study of contemporaneity and the forms of its representation
continued, changing depending on the political environment and
the current requirements of the ideology. After the end of the Second
World War there was a further surge in interest in the ethnographical
study of contemporaneity, against the background of the ongoing
campaign of the ‘struggle against cosmopolitanism’. At this time,
the leadership of the Institute of Ethnography openly declared that
ethnography should keep up with socialist realist literature in its
research into contemporaneity. In particular, S. P. Tolstov, the
director of the Institute, called upon ethnographers in 1949 to follow
the example of such writers as T. Z. Semushkin and G. D. Gulia,
whose works described Soviet man overcoming the survivals from
the past and conquering his / her class enemies [Alymov 2009: 13].
P. I. Kushner, the leading ideologist of the study of contemporaneity,
proposed that ethnographers should arm themselves with the
concept of ‘typicality’: ‘In the report of the Central Committee of
the CPSU at the nineteenth Party Congress, G. M. Malenkov touched
upon the problem of “typicality” in literature. The conclusions that
he drew are applicable not only to literature — in any case, they
should be accepted by ethnographers in their research. That which
is typical is that which expresses with the greatest fullness and acuity
the essence of a phenomenon’ [Kushner 1953: 24]. Accordingly, the
foremost collective farms with well-established business practices,
developed mechanisation, and the conditions for improving the
material condition of the life of the collective farmers and their
cultural development were acknowledged as ‘typical’ — suitable for
the study of the effect of collectivisation on the culture and way of
life of the population [Ibid.].
The first researcher to pay attention to the connexion between
ethnography and socialist realism was Yuri Slezkine [Slezkine 2017:
346–63]. In his opinion, the fact that ethnography turned towards
socialist realism and contemporaneity at the end of the 1940s and
beginning of the 1950s was not only a politically motivated move,
but also a reaction against the crisis of ethnography in the 1930s:
the painful Marxification, the repression of ‘bourgeois’ scholars, and
the conversion of ethnography into ‘the theory of primordial
communism’ [Slezkine 1993; 2017: 291] (see also: [Solovey 1998;
Novozhilov 2012: 91]). Post-war ethnography took up the subject
of the ‘great journey’, which by then had already been present

1
In the 1920s the study of the new way of life also included the influences of the revolution and
the Civil War, with particular attention paid to the influence of the city and of capitalism on the
countryside.
157 A rticles
in literature for twenty years. The subject of the ‘journey’ from the
Stanislav Petriashin. Socialist Realism and Ethnography: The Study and Representation of Soviet Contemporaneity in Ethnographic Museums in the 1930s
dark, backward, and elemental past into the bright, progressive and
conscious future came to determine the structure and contents of
ethnographic works. Peoples, according to Slezkine, became in the
works of this time analogues of the positive heroes of socialist realist
literature [Slezkine 2017: 358].
M. Haber’s work on the search for the ‘typical’ Russian collective
farm by Kushner and his colleagues [Haber 2014] (see also: [Alymov
2010]) has led her to the conclusion that socialist realism served as
an instrument for identifying, categorising and classifying the objects
of study. Ethnographers saw their task as not only describing, but
also changing reality: they were ‘social engineers’ with the aim of
making the life of the collective farm more like the socialist realist
ideal of it disseminated in the media and in fiction. In this context
Haber reads Kushner’s report of his 1951 expedition as a socialist
realist text which has as its subject the conflict between the principled
scholar-protagonist and his backward bureaucrat-antagonists who
fail to understand the importance of his research and put obstacles
in his path.
In this way the problem of the influence of socialist realism on Soviet
ethnography was stated only on the basis of post-war ethnography.
Socialist realism, however, had first appeared in the first half of the
1930s, which makes one think of the possibility that there was such
influence even earlier. An examination of museum ethnography on
the basis of the State Museum of Ethnography1 (SME) in Leningrad
shows that Tolstov’s and Kushner’s interest in studying con
temporaneity and in socialist realism had been prepared for by the
whole direction taken by museum ethnography in the decade before
the war. At that time socialist realism had already had a significant
influence on the practices of the study and representation of Soviet
contemporaneity in ethnographic museums. When did the aesthetics
of socialist realism penetrate into museum ethnography and how
did it manifest itself? How did socialist realist literature and art
influence museum ethnography? How did the SME’s fieldwork and
exhibits on the building of socialism change during the period of
socialist realism? The present work is intended to answer these and
other questions.
Socialist realism was recognised as the basic direction of Soviet art
in 1932, and its foundational principles were formulated and model
works presented to the public in 1933–4. Socialist realism replaced
the cultural pluralism of the 1920s and the radical experiments of
1
From 1902 to 1934 the Ethnographical Department of the State Russian Museum (ED SRM), from 1934
the State Museum of Ethnography, from 1948 the State Museum of the Ethnography of the Peoples of
the USSR, and since 1992 the Russian Museum of Ethnography.
the period of cultural revolution (1928–31) [Bullitt 1976; Groys 1992;

Paperny 2011]. Following K. Clark, we may say that under Stalin
the Soviet Union was aspiring to the utopia of Schiller’s ‘aesthetic
state’, that is a state in which the citizens are governed in their
actions not by external physical compulsion or laws, but by a sense
of beauty, by common aesthetic ideals [Clark 2011: 12]. Close
attention to cultural policy on the part of the party leadership and
Stalin personally resulted in an interpenetration of ideology, policy
and aesthetics. The consequence of their confluence was socialist
realism. According to Evgeny Dobrenko, its function was principally
to replace Soviet reality with aestheticised copies of it which played
the role of socialism as such [Dobrenko 2007]. The illusion of
a harmonic unity of all areas of life — the ideal of a totalitarian
state — was created by aesthetic means [Günther 2000].
At the same time, the aesthetics of socialist realism have certain
recognisable features: a tendency towards romantic heroism, neo
classicism, figurativeness, etc. The principles of socialist realism
(party spirit, nationality, conscientiousness, etc.) formulated by
Soviet ideologues were to distinguish socialist realism from other
tendencies in art (bourgeois, apolitical, etc.), and at the same time
blur the boundaries between art and politics and ideology. As a result
it is problematic and virtually impossible to make a definite dis
tinction between the influences of ideology and socialist realism on
museum ethnography. Ethnography in the museum also depended
on Soviet museum practice — a specific embodiment and conductor
of the ideology and aesthetic ideals of the period [Reid 2001; Jolles
2005]. Nevertheless I think it possible within the context of the
present work to speak of the influence of socialist realism, if it is
possible to observe a heightened attention on the part of ethno
graphers to the sphere of art and an aestheticisation of research,
collecting and exhibition work in the spirit of socialist realism.
The three sections of the article will be dedicated accordingly to the
exhibition narrative, the principles on which the objects for fieldwork
and exhibition were chosen, and the artistic frame of exhibitions
and folk art as a means of presenting Soviet contemporaneity. Each
section is constructed on the basis of a comparison between museum
ethnography of the time of the cultural revolution and that of mature
Stalinism, which allows the influence of socialist realism to be drawn
more clearly.
The historical narrative and the novelisation of ethnography

The active Sovietisation of museums and other cultural establishments
began in 1927. Special commissions, on which representatives of the
Party were included, were set up in various institutions to organise
the celebrations of the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution,
159 A rticles
and their critical outlook usually required the subordination of

cultural work to the aims of political propaganda. At the Ethno

graphical Department of the State Russian Museum (ED SRM)
a group of Politprosvet activists found many shortcomings, primarily
the absence of any exhibits on the achievements of the Soviet regime.
The lack of the necessary resources and poor funding, however,
allowed the task of creating a new exhibition to be deferred for
a while. The changes mostly concerned how excursions were con
ducted [Hirsch 2005: 197–204]. As a compromise the museum staff
continued to lead excursions through exhibitions which had been
created before the revolution and which presented models of the
culture of the peoples of the USSR at the turn of the century,1 but
as they did so they expatiated upon the hard life of the people under
the tsars and the successes achieved by the Soviet regime. To make
the guides’ life easier, alongside the thematic material exhibits
diagrams were set up showing the Soviet achievements in the same
sphere of life. The excursion proceeded from a holder for a glowing
pine splinter to the subject of electrification, from the ard and plough
to the story of the modern development of agriculture, from the
position of women in pre-revolutionary times to their position in
the present day, and so on [ARME, f. 2, op. 1, d. 232, ff. 26–7].
The break came in 1930, when, at the First All-Russian Museum
Congress, a directive was issued that exhibitions should be con
structed on Marxist foundations. According to the congress
resolution, museums should become a propaganda weapon in the
struggle for socialist reconstruction and show ‘the dialectical process
of the class struggle’ [Shangina 1991: 75]. The basic purpose of
ethnographical museums in this was defined as ‘showing the results
of the national policy of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the
annihilation of inequality between peoples, the industrialisation of
backward regions and the flourishing of national cultures’ [Milonov
1930: 4–5]. Soviet museums were to give up systematic (‘object-
oriented’) exhibition in favour of the Marxist principle, i.e. showing
historical progress and identifying the ‘class reality’ of things for the
edification of the broad masses of the people.
How these and other somewhat abstract directives were to be put into
practice was unclear, and this resulted in a diversity of approaches
to the construction of museum exhibitions. In particular, the
historical narrative as the foundation for the exhibition plan was not
yet a commonplace of Soviet museums. For example, the Lenin
grad State Anti-Religious Museum proposed to its visitors an
introduction to the history of religious ideas (from primitive beliefs
1
The ED SRM exhibition was supposed to open in 1914, but it remained unfinished because of the war.
After part of the collection had been evacuated and returned, the exhibition was put together again
and opened in 1923.
to contemporary monotheistic religions) and their social roots. At

the same time the Central Anti-Religious Museum of Moscow
displayed a synchronic cross-section of various religions and beliefs
together with their theatrical unmasking [Jolles 2005: 446–7; Paine
2009].
The exhibitions opened at the ED SRM in the 1930s were as follows:
‘The Ukrainian Village Before and After October’ (1931), ‘Peoples
of the Sayan-Altai in the Past and Present’ (1931), ‘Byelorussia and
the BSSR’ (1933). The Ukrainian exhibition was the first experiment
of the collective of the Ethnographical Department in creating
a Marxist exhibition. Each subject, in the words of B. G. Kryzhanovskiy,
was presented in ‘the evolution not only of the process of production,
but also in its historical aspect’ [ARME, f. 2, op. 1, d. 315, f. 14], that
is, in comparison of the pre-revolutionary with the contemporary.
For example, a scene showing the ritual conjuring of the harvest at
New Year was opposed to a photograph of the chemical cleansing
of grain using formalin [Solovyeva 1931: 150]. The woman question
was illustrated in the pre-revolutionary section by mannequins in
costume grouped around a well, and in the contemporary section
by a stand with photographs illustrating Party and Soviet work with
women [Ibid.: 151]. One might consider this approach a direct
continuation of the experience of the late 1920s of combining an
essentially pre-revolutionary exhibit with a Soviet propagandist
excursion. The Soviet historical narrative in the Ukrainian exhibition
was thus fragmented into a mosaic of many individual stories put
together to contrast two synchronic cross-sections of culture: ‘before’
and ‘after’.
The exhibition was closed not long after its opening: the Party
organs’ opinion was that it idealised village life and failed to reflect
the connection between the town and the countryside or the class
divisions among the peasantry [Grusman, Dmitriev 2014: 13]. The
exhibition showed collectivisation as a purely economic undertaking,
‘the technical transformation of the land area’ [Solovyeva 1931: 151],
whereas its role in creating the new man, socialist culture and
lifestyle was undervalued. Soviet contemporaneity, displayed through
photographs and diagrams, lost out considerably in comparison with
pre-revolutionary culture, which was represented by the rich material
collection and re-created scenes.
The next exhibition, ‘Peoples of the Sayan-Altai in the Past and
Present’, was acknowledged to be more successful. The exhibition
was presented as a historical succession of stages in the evolution of
society from the primordial communist horde to the era of the
building of socialism. The designers of the exhibition took account
of their colleagues’ mistakes and sharpened the focus on the class
struggle, but it was noted as a shortcoming of their work that the
161 A rticles
section on the building of socialism was not presented sufficiently

completely, and for the most part by means of two-dimensional

material [Potapov 1932: 95]. The structure of all the subsequent
exhibitions of the 1930s repeated, in general terms, that of the Sayan-
Altai exhibition.
At the beginning of 1933 the ‘Byelorussia and the BSSR’ exhibition
was opened. Like the Ukrainian exhibition, after the opening it was
severely criticised and closed for reconstruction. In 1934, the ED SRM
became independent as the State Museum of Ethnography. In the
second half of the 1930s the following exhibitions were opened:
‘The Uzbeks’ (1935–6), ‘Karelia and the Kola Peninsula’ (1935), ‘The
Russian Inhabitants of the Black Earth Regions’ (1936), ‘The Evenks
Then and Now’ (1936), ‘The Chukchi and Koryaks Then and Now’
(1938), ‘The Turkmen Then and Now’ (1938), ‘The History of Russia
in the Eighteenth Century’1 (1938), ‘Jews in Imperial Russia and in
the USSR’ (1939), ‘The Peoples of the North Caucasus Then and
Now’ (1939). The exhibitions of the second half of the 1930s were
on the whole favourably received by the authorities, but in the
summer of 1937, after a series of miscalculations came to light, the
whole museum was closed for reorganisation of the exhibits and
reopened only at the end of the year, under a new director. Judging
by the correlation of critical and positive comments, the public
preferred the exhibitions of the second half of the 1930s to those of
the beginning of the decade [Baranov 2017].
Most of the exhibitions of the second half of the 1930s began with
a presentation of the time of the Russian colonisation of the area,
feudalism or capitalism of post-reform Russia. The sections on the
revolutions of 1905 and 1917, the Civil War and the intervention
could be transitional towards modernity. All the exhibitions ended
with a section devoted to the building of socialism.
Slezkine’s observation about the ethnographic texts of the 1950s is
perfectly applicable to the museum exhibitions examined here.
It might be said that they embodied the narrative of the ‘great
journey’ of a people, corresponding to the ‘founding story’ of the
socialist realist Bildungsroman [Clark 1981]: the protagonist (the
people), naturally inclined to justice and full of creative energy,
struggles against an antagonist (‘tsarism’, interventionists, kulaks,
and so on), and under the sensitive leadership of the Party solves its
labour and social problems (reconstructing the economy, subduing
nature, raising literacy levels, and so on), and in the process is ‘re-
forged’ as the new man (from a backward tribe into a socialist
nation), overcomes harmful character traits (‘survivals from the past’)
1
An exhibition of the SME’s History and Way of Life Department. In 1941 the department was disbanded
and its collections transferred to the Hermitage.
and becomes a mature, responsible personality, a conscientious

communist (while retaining its ethnic individuality in the ‘national
form’ of its culture, it acquires ‘socialist content’). This was confirmed
by dioramas, statistical data and diagrams that declared the hard lot
and exploitation of the people under the tsars and the increase in the
number of cattle, amount of land sown, harvest yields, construction
of factories, upbuilding of national culture, and opening of schools,
kindergartens, houses of culture, etc. under socialism. The indicators
of the latest five-year plan informed the visitor of the people’s
inevitable bright future, already ‘germinating’ in the present.
According to Clark, in the culture of mature socialism the literary
biography, be it of real or fictional persons, was the basic means of
constructing and representing national history [Clark 2011: 104]. The
canonical works of socialist realist literature, accordingly, were
constructed around a biographical narrative [Clark 1981]. In this
connection it was natural that the protagonist of a museum narrative
might be an individual person — a fictional hero whose biography
embodied the fate of a people at a particular period (a typical person
in typical circumstances). In the second half of the 1930s E. N. Stu
denetskaya, the head of the Department of the Peoples of the
Caucasus, decided to make the excursion more entertaining and
gave it a novelised form. The first ‘story excursion’ was intended
for schoolchildren and was called ‘The Tale of Little Maisxon’. It told
of three generations of Uzbek women from the middle of the
nineteenth century to the present: ‘The mannequins depicting people
in situational scenes and interiors were given names and biographies,
and became the characters in the story’ [Kryukova, Studenetskaya
1971: 52; ARME, f. 2, op. 1, d. 479, ff. 1–10]. Maisxon was an Uzbek
girl from a poor peasant family, born in the middle of the nineteenth
century. Her individual fate was shown as an example of Uzbek life
before the revolution. The apotheosis of tsarism was the 1916
uprising, in the course of which Maisxon, by that time an elderly
woman, was killed. The contrast of her daughter Hasima’s life on the
collective farm, and especially her granddaughter’s, was drawn in
bright colours: ‘On each occasion young Maisxon, the granddaughter
of the old Maisxon who lived in feudal Bukhara, was given features
that brought her close to the viewers; she made parachute jumps, she
helped to build the Fergana Canal, she voted in elections to the
Soviets, in a word, at the will of the guide she did everything that it
was particularly important to tell the audience about at that particular
moment’ [Kryukova, Studenetskaya 1971: 52].
For the exhibition of the peoples of the North Caucasus Studenetskaya
devised an excursion called ‘A Hundred Years in the Life of Aekhsaer’
[ARME, f. 2, op. 1, d. 763]. Aekhsaer, born in pre-revolutionary
Ossetia, encounters the horrors of tsarism and the feudal system
in the Caucasus: as a boy he is taken prisoner during a raid
163 A rticles
by Kabardian uzdeni (the upper class) and sold into slavery to
a Balkar prince; after the emancipation of 1866 he is exploited

by the rich. He suffers from legal injustice, and his wife from her
lack of rights in patriarchal Osset society. Aekhsaer becomes
a worker at the Sadon Mines, makes the acquaintance of Kirov and
discusses the mountain peoples’ problems with him. During the
Civil War he is a brave red partisan. Under the Soviet regime
Aekhsaer moves down from the mountains to a new settlement on
the plain. His son Chermen becomes the chairman of a prosperous
collective farm, and his grandson Beybulat is a tractor-driver.
Similar excursions were devised by other members of the staff of the
SME who appreciated Studenetskaya’s work. N. A. Fedorova’s
excursion ‘Two Childhoods’ was intended for the exhibition on the
Russian Black Earth Regions. For the History and Way of Life
Department’s ‘History of Russia in the Eighteenth Century’
exhibition the story-excursion ‘The Moor of Peter the Great’ was
devised by N. F. Pantyushkin and ‘The History of a Serf Family’
by V. B. Kholtsev [Kryukova, Studenetskaya 1971: 52].
The ethnography of contemporaneity in search of the ‘typical’

At the end of the twenties and beginning of the thirties ethnography
was being switched onto ‘Marxist rails’ at high speed. One
consequence of its active Sovietisation was the requirement for
ethnographical study of the contemporary building of socialism.
Under the aegis of the Academy of Sciences’ Institute for the Study
of the Peoples of the USSR, founded in 1930, expeditions to the
nascent collective farms were organised. As a result of their field
research a series of works were published in the journal Sovetskaya
etnografiya for 1931–2, as were two collections of articles on ‘life
and work on the collective farms’. Ethnographers described the
vicissitudes of the class struggle and the process of creating collective
farms in their dependency on socio-economic and geographical
conditions, and the influence of the collective farm system on the
outlook, social relationships, material culture and everyday life of
the peasants.
Among the authors published in these collections we shall take note
of A. K. Supinskiy and A. Ya. Duysburg, who worked at the ED
SRM. After the First All-Russian Museum Congress in 1930, research
in Soviet museums was entirely subordinated to exhibition work,
and therefore their study of the collective farms was not simply pure
research, but had an applied dimension, namely collecting material
for the planned exhibition on ‘Byelorussia and the BSSR’. Two other
authors, A. G. Danilin and V. P. Muratkhan, became employees of
the ED SRM / SME several years after the collections had been
published.
Let us consider the principles of choice of objects for field research

followed by the authors of these collections when they were studying
the building of socialism. The choice of a particular region might be
based on its typicality for the area or republic. For example, Danilin
and his colleagues investigated the Borovichsky District, defined
by them as ‘average for the Leningrad Oblast’ [Danilin 1931: 9].
A. N. Bernshtam and F. N. Shaburov worked in impoverished
regions near Samarkand and Ashgabat which were analogous in
their characteristics to other suburbs of large cities in the Central
Asian republics [Bernshtam 1931; Shaburov 1931]. In other cases
they deliberately chose a region that was a long way from the
administrative centres. Thus Supinskiy and Duysburg worked in ‘the
most out-of-the-way and backward part of the Mogilev District’
[Duysburg 1931: 179]: they thought that they could show the class
struggle more vividly with such an approach.
The choice of particular collective farms for study was also de
termined on various other principles. E. R. Leper, V. P. Muratkhan,
A. G. Danilin and F. N. Shaburov studied a large number of collective
farms which were supposed to serve as examples of their basic types:
large and small, established in rich or poor settlements, close to
towns or distant from them, already working for several years or
newly organised, etc. Together they provided the average picture
for each region. For example, Leper worked on the collective farms
of Podsosenskiy Kust, which, according to her description, were in
their composition and economic position ‘typical average collective
farms’ for the Minetskiy District of Leningrad Oblast [Leper 1931:
81]. Other authors preferred a monographic approach and focused
their attention on a single collective farm. Thus, Supinskiy and
Duysburg based their work on collective farms that were notable for
their acute class struggle (the Ilyich collective farm) and international
make-up (the Oktyabr collective farm). A special position is occupied
by the work of A. N. Kondaurov, who, out of all the collective farms
of the Qurghonteppa District of the Tajik SSR, chose the most
progressive and, at the same time, ‘typical’, the Guliston collective
farm: ‘This collective farm is interesting because it is typical of the
collective farms with relocated workers in the said district, and
because it is one of the best organised and strongest collective farms
in the district; this distinctive feature of it provides material for the
most exact conclusions regarding the collectivisation of relocated
workers’ [Kondaurov 1931: 75].
In their justification of their choice of region and collective farm for
their fieldwork, most of the authors in these collections are close
to the researchers into the ‘new way of life’ of the 1920s. In local
monographic studies (M. Ya. Fenomenov, A. M. Bolshakov,
M. D. Golubykh and others) the object of study is as a rule also the
most ‘usual’ and ‘typical’ settlements and collective undertakings
165 A rticles
in the chosen region [Vernyaev 2005: 37]. Work at the ED SRM was
conducted in a similar key. For example the museum expeditions

to the Leningrad Oblast in 1932 tried to include in the research
a large number of collective farms in the Gdovsko-Chudskoy and
Efimovskiy Districts, without concentrating on the strongest and
most successful of them [Malinovskaya 1932].
However, there were also researchers who followed the same
principles as Kondaurov in their choice of location for their
fieldwork. Thus S. G. Grinina, on arriving in Petrozavodsk in 1932,
applied to the provincial union of collective farms, where, in
conjunction with local agronomists and museum workers, she chose
to study the Olonetsky District as the most agricultural in Karelia
[ARME, f. 2, op. 1, d. 413, f. 1]. At the Olonets regional union of
collective farms Grinina was directed towards the leading Iskra
collective farm, the prizewinner both in the sowing campaign and
at the regional horticultural show.
It was this principle of choosing an object for field research that was
to dominate in future. Behind the different approaches there were
different understandings of what was typical. In the case of studies
of contemporaneity in the 1920s and early 30s it was usually objects
that were statistically average that were considered typical. In Marxist
aesthetics and socialist realism it was not the most widespread
representatives of their kind that were regarded as typical, but those
that expressed its essence most strikingly. A literary character, for
example, had to combine personal individuality with general class
characteristics. Since the essence of socialism was defined
teleologically, as movement towards universal prosperity under
communism, then it was the most ‘prosperous’ and ‘progressive’
collective farms, factories and people (economically and culturally)
that were the most typical.
I shall give a few examples. In 1934 V. S. Dubov was sent to Karelia
to collect material on contemporaneity to be included in the
exhibition on ‘The Leningrad Oblast and Karelia’ that was then being
prepared. Out of the regions studied, he paid special attention to
Olonets, as the most highly developed in its agriculture. Out of the
‘strongest Karelian collective farms’ Dubov chose Druzhba, as it was
the current holder of the red banner for preparations for the spring
sowing [ARME, f. 2, op. 1, d. 481, ff. 1–2].
In 1936 N. P. Grinkova and her colleagues undertook a large two-
month expedition to the Voronezh Oblast. Colleagues from the
museum had to collect material on the building of socialism for the
exhibition on ‘The Russian Population of the Black-Earth Regions’.
The choice of the Voronezh Oblast was influenced by the fact that
‘this province is one of the foremost in the RSFSR in the work of
the building of socialism’ [Grinkova 1936b: 120]. However, another
important circumstance was that the museum already had extensive

collections illustrating the pre-revolutionary villages of that area.
One of the largest Soviet grain farms in the area, the Vorobyevskiy,
which was also known for its theatre and strong Pioneer organisation,
was studied. The Red October collective farm in the Berezovsky
District attracted the ethnographers’ attention for the high level of
its cultural activities: a model experimental school, and the first
collective farm music school [Grinkova 1936b: 121–2]. Other
collective farms were found worthy of study thanks to the presence
of an experimental agricultural station, a leading equine stud farm,
outstanding sugar beet production, and so on.
The same principle guided the choice of industrial objects. For
example, in his 1935 expedition to Karelia, G. A. Nikitin, besides
studying ‘the best two Veps national collective farms’, collected
material at the Shoksha quartzite quarries. The choice of this object
of research was justified by the fact that objects made out of Shoksha
porphyry were well-known: ‘Napoleon’s sarcophagus in Paris is
made out of it, and Shoksha porphyry adorns Lenin’s mausoleum’
[Potapov 1936: 160].
The choice of province or republic for an expedition was usually
dictated by the museum’s stated task of studying and displaying
a particular people or large subdivision of it, but subsequent
choices were partly delegated to the local bureaucrats and cultural
workers. Thus a standard expedition began at the provincial or
regional capital, where statistical material on the economy and
demographics of the region under study was collected in various
Soviet establishments.1 There also, in the process of consultation
and reaching agreement, the ‘correct’ (typical) research objects,
which could present the province or republic in the best light, were
identified.
The concentric circles of the ‘typical’ went from the region to the
collective farm and ended up with ‘distinguished’ individuals, shock
workers, stakhanovites, award-holders, and so on. For example,
among the fundamental task of the Turkmen expedition of 1937 led
by M. V. Sazonova and A. S. Morozova were: ‘1) Observing and
recording the life on the leading collective farms of the Turkmen
SSR, particular distinguished people in the sphere of agriculture, life
at the main industrial enterprises, the cultural growth of the masses,
prosperous life; 2) Photographing the distinguished persons and
stakhanovites of the country, domestic circumstances characteristic
of their prosperity and cultural attainments, clubs, schools, kinder
gartens, creches, playgrounds, socialist townships and settlements,
etc.; 3) Collecting numerical statistical material at the People’s

1
The republican or provincial planning committees, executive committees, people’s commissariats, etc.
167 A rticles
Commissariats for the last two five-year plans and the prospects for
the third five-year plan’ [ARME, f. 2, op. 1, d. 598, f. 60].

The poetics of the ethnographers’ expedition reports of the second
half of the 1930s are close to those of travel literature in its socialist
realist variant [Balina 2000]. In this sort of essay the journey to
another place (within the boundaries of the USSR) was split in two
temporally: one part of the things and people encountered embodied
the murky past, while the other represented the progressive future.
It was necessary actively to struggle with backwardness in alliance
with the progressive. In the same way ethnographers studying the
collective farms kept parallel accounts of the ‘survivals’ and ‘new
shoots of the future’. Although, according to the official plans, the
expeditions were primarily intended to study the building of
socialism, the museum workers were also faced with the task of
acquiring objects to fill up the gaps in the pre-revolutionary material
collections. In order to study traditional culture they might
deliberately travel to out-of-the-way places far from the administrative
centres. For example, in 1935 the expedition led by N. P. Grinkova
and N. A. Dyleva worked at two collective farms in the Pinezhsky
District. The first collective farm (Sdvig) was ‘as indicated by the
regional organisations <…> one of the foremost in the region’, and
the other (1 May) ‘one of the most backward’ [Grinkova 1936a: 161].
It is telling that for the most part they studied the building of
socialism at the first and traditional culture at the second.
Thus the practice of many researchers of the time of the cultural
revolution, of studying backward, poor or middling regions and
collective farms was in the aesthetics of socialist realism no longer
acceptable. In a well-known speech of 1934 Stalin had asserted that
the country had ‘got rid of its backward and mediaeval aspect’ and
‘liquidated the parasitic classes’ [Stalin 1951: 306, 334]. The under
standable reluctance of cultural and scientific workers to contradict
the Leader led to a tendency to ‘varnish’ reality, that is, not to sketch
the glowing prospects of poor or uncommitted peasants in the
conditions of the ‘class war’, but to show the achievements in the
building of socialism already made, and well-fed and happy collective
farmers.
The contents of the museum exhibitions depended on the field
material collected. It was the expedition that, in T. A. Kryukova’s
words, had to give ‘a clear illustration, and fill the exhibition with
specific, genuine material’. As a result, responsibility for the
completeness and scientific value of the exhibition was borne entirely
by the people who had done the fieldwork [ARME, f. 2, op. 2, d. 131,
f. 3]. In the end, ‘typical’ objects of field research became
representative objects in the museum exhibitions. For example,
the Industriya Soviet farm studied by Z. P. Malinovskaya in 1932
had a small subsection of the ‘Karelia and the Kola Peninsula’

exhibition dedicated to it. As the most northerly Soviet farm in the
Soviet Union, it embodied the excitement of overcoming nature in
the North and the successes of Soviet agronomists and plant-breeders
[ARME, f. 2, op. 1, d. 496, f. 20]. In the same exhibition the Karelian
logging industry was represented by the Kondopoga Paper and
Cellulose Complex, the building of national culture by literature in
Karelian published by Kirja publishers, the fishing industry by the
Murmansk trawler base, etc.
‘Distinguished’ people, as ‘typical’ Soviet citizens of a particular
ethnicity, also became part of the exhibitions. The museum workers
collected their (auto)biographies in the field, and then quoted from
them in the exhibitions. For example, ‘The Evenks Then and Now’
used portrait photographs of stakhanovite hunters and letters from
them in which they ‘warmly thanked the Great Stalin for their happy
lives’ and told how they hunted, were raising their level of culture
and becoming prosperous [Kratkiy putevoditel… 1939: 19].
The subject of transformatory socialist labour creating the new man
was also developed using the example of particular outstanding
individuals. An extract from a conversation with the decorated
section leader Faizulla Yunusov, shown at ‘The Uzbeks Then and
Now’, is telling: ‘I want our leaders to know that the old people on
the collective farm have grown young again. I’m already 62, but
I don’t feel old and I work better than the young men. I’ve only
started to like work on the collective farm. How could you like
working before, when it was a torment for you and only made other
people’s lives better? Our section has brought in a harvest of
5,700 kg/ha. My section’s secret is that we don’t say what the most
important work is. All our work is the most important’ [ARME, f. 2,
op. 1, d. 479, f. 68].
‘Picture’ ethnography and the turn to art

The Marxist museum, according to the precepts of the cultural
revolution, had not only to supply its visitors with specific infor
mation, as pre-revolutionary museums had, but also to transform
them. The orientation towards the broad masses required new
techniques of exhibition that were capable of having an emotional
effect on the public, impress and educate them. As Gorky wrote, in
order to make ordinary people aware of the achievements of the
Soviet regime, they must be told ‘simply, clearly, and with
illustrations’ [Gorky 1930: 3]. The Zeitgeist in ethnography was well
expressed by B. M. Sokolov, the director of the Moscow Museum
of Ethnology, in his paper at a conference of ethnographers in 1929.
He noted that ‘there was a time when to introduce an illustration
or a photograph in our museums was regarded as a glaring breach
169 A rticles
of museum practice. Bringing in any sort of map, diagram, model,

maquette, cast, dummy, etc. was regarded as something absolutely

unscientific’ [Arzyutov et al. 2014: 347]. In the new conditions, he
said, the museum should cast aside its fear of using ancillary
expository methods.
These ideas were a commonplace for Soviet museum practice at the
end of the 1920s. Thus K. E. Grinevich called for the organisation
of a museum ‘that speaks for itself’ by means of ‘hanging at the
entrance to the museum, at the beginning of the viewing, a plan of
the rooms of the museum with arrows indicating the direction of
the route to be taken through it, by numbering the cases in the order
in which they are to be looked at, by means of a system of triple
labelling <…>, by means of supplementing the basic material
exhibition with illustrative material in the form of plans, drawings,
photographs, diagrams, placards, etc. This must all make the
museum exhibits easy to see and understand and leave a long-lasting
impression on the visitor’s brain’ [Grinevich 1929: 97].
One of the problems of the ‘museum that spoke for itself’ was the
tendency to ‘liberate ourselves from things’ and replace them with
two-dimensional paper materials [Stanyukovich 1978: 200]. This was
particularly relevant to the display of the building of socialism in
view of the lack of proper material collections on this subject in the
majority of museums. In his survey of the ethnographical exhibitions
in the Central Museum of Ethnology and the Moscow Regional
Museum, N. A. Shneerson criticised the transition from museum
display methods to ‘literary’ ones: ‘[O]n the walls (and, as the “last
word” in museum technique, on the ceilings) they hang placards,
quotations from the classics of Marxism, photographs and suchlike
material’ [Shneerson 1932: 27]. The ED SRM / SME exhibitions of
the 1930s experienced the same difficulties. Supinskiy, interpreting
the unsuccessful experience of the Byelorussian exhibition, wrote
that the museum had not provided the curators with the necessary
tangible material on the Soviet way of life and had allowed ‘an
excessive enthusiasm for two-dimensional material, which, no matter
how it was presented, detracted to a considerable extent from the
expected effect’ [ARME, f. 2, op. 1, d. 566, f. 10].
To develop the subject of contemporaneity, Soviet museums, as well
as two-dimensional material, exhibited industrial collections, and
occasionally real machines [‘Na novom etape…’ 1934: 9]. However,
this move, although perfectly justified in museums of technology
and industry and in the corresponding sections of local studies
museums, did not answer the requirements of ethnographic
exhibitions. Thus the industrial collections exhibited at the
Byelorussian exhibition of the ED SRM could not, in the critics’
opinion, reveal the new man who was striving to create the Soviet
order: ‘The designers of this exhibition are mistaken in their

assumption that in order to characterise the socialist way of life in
the construction of Soviet Byelorussia it is enough to display button
factories and knitting mills and so forth. They do not understand
that it is not the simple fact of such works’ existence that is
characteristic of socialist Byelorussia, but that new way of life of the
workers both at their workplace and in their social life which can
exist only in a country under the dictatorship of the proletariat which
is building socialism’ [‘Na novom etape...’ 1934: 8–9].
Another problem for Soviet museums was the transformation of
exhibitions into decorative constructions in which artistic design
overpowered the museum exhibits. In Shneerson’s opinion,
museums that had conceded the leading role in exhibitions to artists
inevitably descended to spectacular types of display ‘where the
deciding factor is the external effect, and not the scientifically
grounded display of class relations’, and turned into ‘stage sets’
[Shneerson 1932: 28, 30]. I. M. Zykov made similar criticisms of the
intrusive ‘advertising’ decorative design of the ‘Giants of the Five-
Year Plan’ exhibition in the Moscow Park of Culture and Rest ‘stuck
in the ruts of formalist excesses’ [Zykov 1932: 35–8].
This last critical expression is worth considering. Attacks on the
artists’ designs were often brought about by the presence of avant-
garde elements. At the beginning of the 1930s a whole series of
exhibitions entirely devoted to criticising avant-garde art were
opened at the Russian Museum, Tretyakov Gallery and State
Museum of Modern Western Art. At the same time the design of
these and other contemporary exhibitions had inherited a great deal
from avant-garde design principles. For example, combining on
a single surface drawing and text (slogan), exhibiting them together
with sculpture and accompanying them with films expressed the
constructivist idea of the synthesis of the arts [Jolles 2005: 436;
Chlenova 2017].
At the ED SRM exhibition on Byelorussia the large hall devoted to
the building of socialism was designed in the constructivist manner,
and this was one of the pretexts for criticism. For example, near the
entrance to the hall one corner was divided off with plywood stands:
‘The left-hand side was a dirty crimson; it was occupied by photo
graphs of counter-revolutionaries and illustrations of the criminal
activities of the White bandits. The back wall was black: on this
funereal background were mounted photographs of the victims of
the White Terror and the revolutionary struggle. The right-hand
side was red: it was devoted to the Red Army of the BSSR’ [Gagen-
Torn 1934: 67]. The designers of this exhibition were not alone in
their efforts to make the artistic design relevant and up-to-date.
Similar experiments could be noted in other ethnographical
171 A rticles
museums, and this provoked severe criticism from I. K. Luppol.
He considered that the enthusiasm for constructivist and futurist

design in ethnographic exhibitions led to a disjunction between
contents and form, which offended the eye and made it hard to take
in the material effectively [Luppol 1932: 13]. The stylistic watershed
came in 1932, while the Byelorussia exhibition was being prepared
at the Russian Museum: constructivism was criticised in all forms
of art. The stylistic diversity of the 1920s was replaced by socialist
realism. In this sense the artistic design of the exhibition was already
out of date when it opened (at the beginning of 1933), and was
doomed to be criticised.
After becoming independent in 1934, the SME engaged in active
expeditionary and collecting work and began to build new
exhibitions. In 1935–6 ‘The Uzbeks’ opened, covering three stages
of history: feudal, ‘colonial’ and socialist. In showing contemporaneity
the curators stressed the practical side of life. There were many scenes
showing the productive everyday life of collective farmers in the
cotton fields, workers in the sulphur mines at Sho’rsuv and at
a textile factory in Tashkent. Domestic and social life were
represented by a collective farm worker’s dwelling and a red tea-
house. Artists were employed to design the exhibition, and came up
with an original project based on picturesque dioramas and murals
for the re-created scenes. The large-scale, expressive works by the
artists (A. V. Kruchinin, A. I. Zakolodin-Mitin and others) were
very effective, although two-dimensional material was also present
[Kryukova, Studenetskaya 1971: 42]. When working on the
exhibition the museum staff made use of the experience of the
Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography’s exhibition on ‘Eastern
Bukhara under the Emirate’ [Stanyukovich 1978: 208].
‘The Uzbeks’ exhibition was pronounced a success, and the design
principles developed there repeated with certain variations in all the
following exhibitions of the 1930s. The idea of employing artists as
designers was an innovation in comparison with the exhibition work
of the 1920s, and made the exhibitions brighter and more accessible
to ordinary visitors [Kryukova, Studenetskaya 1971: 19]. The
picturesque dioramas and murals (pictures and sculptures were also
occasionally used), particularly those dedicated to the building of
socialism, were both thematically and stylistically executed in the
spirit of socialist realism. As an example we may examine the logging
scene at the ‘Karelia and the Kola Peninsula’ exhibition, opened at
the end of 1935 (artistic design by G. N. Traugot and I. A. Korotkov).
There were two mannequins in the scene, depicting woodcutters,
a Karelian and a Canadian Finn, with an American axe and a bow
saw, ‘the newest implements for sawing and chopping wood’ [ARME,
f. 2, op. 1, d. 496, f. 13]. The Canadian Finn was standing, leaning
on his axe, and the Karelian was bending over a felled tree.
The backdrop to the scene was a mural painted by V. V. Pakulin.

The artist had depicted timber being loaded onto a lorry with the
help of a derrick and a temporary road made of logs passing through
a majestic pine forest. The picture clearly expresses the ideas of
technology overcoming nature and the laying of the road to the
bright future. A panoramic view disappearing into infinity created
an effect of sublimity, and the faraway look from above suggests that
the work has encapsulated rational inventive thought, the ideology
of ‘high modernism’ [Scott 1998]. The exhibition ‘Jews in Imperial
Russia and in the USSR’ in 1939 may be considered the culmination
of the evolution of the design principles outlined above. For the first
time the basis for the decorative setting of the exhibition was not
formed of murals and dioramas, but wall painting, and drawings,
sculptures and easel paintings were also extensively used [ARME,
f. 2, op. 5, d. 48, f. 13]. The instructions for painting the walls of the
middle part of the hall devoted to the Jewish Autonomous Oblast
set out the artist’s task like this: ‘To depict contemporary life and
living conditions in the Jewish A. O. To give a typical impression of
the Jewish A. O. based on studies, documentary drawings and
personal observations. The wall-painting should show the most
characteristic features and peculiarities of the nature and way of life
in the Jewish A. O., conveying as concretely as possible the natural
riches and life of the Oblast and achieving a realistic treatment in
its depiction of people’ [ARME, f. 9, op. 3, d. 4, f. 85]. The orientation
towards typicality, realism, and the representation of riches
prescribed in the instructions allow it to be said that the curators
had a conscious desire to get socialist realist works from the artist.
No fewer than eighteen artists were employed to create the murals,
dioramas, maquettes, paintings, drawings and sculptures that were
exhibited and used in the design [ARME, f. 2, op. 5, d. 48, ff. 13–4].
Among them S. B. Yudovin, a well-known Soviet artist, occupied
a special position, and his sketches were used for many of the
elements of the decorative design, maquettes and re-created scenes.
Together with employees of the SME he was a member of the
commission responsible for accepting the paintings and maquettes,
and acted as a consultant. About ten engravings and drawings by
Yudovin were shown at the exhibition, including some in the
socialist realist style, such as ‘The Cruiser “Aurora”’, ‘On the Neva
in October 1917’ and ‘Presenting the Act for Perpetual Use of the
Land’ [Ivanov 2010].
The artists’ participation in the life of the museum was not restricted
to designing exhibitions. They often took part in ethnographic field
research, during which they made drawings and sketches from life
and conversed with people. For example, the artists G. N. Traugot
and I. A. Korotkov travelled to the Kola Peninsula in 1935 as part
of a museum expedition. During the two and a half months that
173 A rticles
they spent there they made about a hundred studies and drawings
[Potapov 1936: 159].

In the second half of the 1930s the museum staff decided to liven
up their relatively tedious paper materials and industrial collections
in the Soviet sections by showing works of contemporary decorative
and applied folk art. Accordingly, whereas, at the beginning of the
decade expeditions for representing contemporaneity had largely
collected wall newspapers, posters, people’s work records and objects
reflecting the cycle of industrial production, by the end of it the
collections began to accumulate lacquer miniatures, lace work, clay
toys, scrimshaw, carpets, and so on. Among such things the museum
staff were particularly attracted by items with ‘Soviet subjects’ —
portraits of Lenin, Stalin and the leaders of the Party and government,
depictions of the arms of the USSR, hammers and sickles, five-
pointed stars, scenes of collective farm life, etc. It was considered
that such objects reflected the new prosperous life and were an
expression of the people’s ‘love, trust and gratitude’ to its ‘leaders’
[ARME, f. 2, op. 2, d. 142, f. 21]. To expand the subject of folk art
they also collected the costumes of groups of amateur performers.
Objects of contemporary applied and decorative folk art were
exhibited in the Soviet sections of the permanent exhibitions and
also at temporary exhibitions: ‘Examples of the Folk Art of the
Chuvash and Mari’ (1939), ‘Examples of Georgian Folk Art’ (1940),
‘Arts and Crafts of the Russian North’ (1940) and others [Kryukova,
Studenetskaya 1971: 89–90]. In the first years after the Second World
War, when the permanent exhibitions had been dismantled, there
were also temporary exhibitions devoted to folk art [Baranov 2011:
415–7]. They were all based on the SME’s usual opposition between
pre-revolutionary and Soviet times.
What caused this turn towards folk art? When the sections showing
the life of various peoples under socialism showed contemporaneity
using paper materials and industrial collections, they were all more
or less the same [Kryukova, Studenetskaya 1971: 48]. Objects of
decorative and applied folk art were much more attractive, did not
go out of date from one five-year plan to the next, corresponded
beautifully to the formula ‘national in form and socialist in content’,
allowed the life of Soviet people to be aestheticised and presented
as fine and devoid of any contradictions or harmful ‘survivals’. In
this way, the problem of acquiring more objects for the collections
was partly solved by ‘moving away from the ethnographical profile
of the museum towards pure art history’ [ARME, f. 2, op. 1, d. 964,
f. 10], which may be assessed as a crisis in museum representation
[Baranov 2011: 418].
The general political and cultural context was also pushing them
towards folk art. In 1934 Gorky, speaking to the First Congress of
Soviet Writers, had legitimised the study and popularisation of

folklore and of ‘popular creativity’ in a wider sense as the works of
the labouring masses. Folk art became the primordial communist
prototype for the Soviet art of socialist realism [Yustus 2000]. The
book The Creativity of the Peoples of the USSR, edited by Gorky and
Mekhlis in 1937, was put forward as a model collection of con
temporary folklore. This collection contained various types of recent
Soviet folklore: tales, toasts, songs, and so on about Lenin, Stalin,
the revolution, and old and new life. Besides the texts, the book also
contained many photographs of works of decorative and applied
folk art (carpets, embroidery, lace, etc.) figuring pictures of Lenin
and Stalin, Soviet emblems, and so on, surrounded by traditional
ornamentation [Gorky, Mekhlis 1937].
Conclusion
Exhibition work in museums at the time of the cultural revolution
was the laboratory in which various methods and approaches to
creating a Marxist exhibition were tested. Most of the elements that
composed museum ethnography in the socialist realist period can
be found in the ethnography and museum practice of the beginning
of the 1930s: historical narrative as the basis for the exhibition, field
work on the ‘foremost’ collective farms, colourful artistic design.
These principles, however, co-existed with others, and only assumed
a dominant position in the middle of the 1930s. The desired influence
of socialist realism on museum ethnography manifested itself mostly
in their specific development. The historical narrative approached
literary biography, and ‘new people’ (stakhanovites, award-holders)
were added to the collective farms and factories as ‘typical’ objects
of field study and display. Avant-garde exhibition design gave way
to socialist realism, and art was no longer confined to the decoration
of the exhibition and became an exhibit in its own right.
The SME’s main exhibition language came to be that of re-created
scenes. They had been known before, but it was only in the second
half of the 1930s that they became the main constructive elements
and semantic cores of all the most important thematic sections of
the exhibitions. At the same time, historical narratives were con
structed out of series of such scenes (from the interior of a peasant
cottage to the interior of a collective farm worker’s dwelling, and so
on). This sort of scene was supposed to present to the eyes of the
visitor a cast taken from a fragment of reality, re-created with
scientific accuracy and artistic conviction inside the museum space.
Its claim to documentary truthfulness, aesthetic attractiveness and
accessibility to the broad masses allowed the re-created scene to fulfil
the didactic functions of education and propaganda. Moreover,
the process of creating such scenes, from research in the field
175 A rticles
to mounting the exhibition, presupposed such an intimate inter

weaving of science and ideologically-charged art that it makes one

speak of museum ethnography as ‘socialist realist science’.1 From
this perspective the re-created scenes may be described as socialist
realist installations made out of ready-made ethnographical and
quasi-ethnographical objects, anthropological mannequins and
painted backgrounds. The museum ethnographers, as bearers of the
scientific ethos, would hardly have agreed with such an approach,
but this sort of interpretation would perhaps have been congenial
to the artists who worked on exhibitions in the 1930s.
The change in the principles for choosing objects for study in the field
reflected shifts in the ideals about the object field of ethnography.
Pre-revolutionary ethnography as a rule had worked in ‘far-flung
corners’ a long way from roads and cities, which corresponded to an
orientation towards studying the past in the present — ‘the living
past’. This orientation was dominant for a long time in anthropology
abroad [Fabian 1983]. Ethnographers studying the new way of life
and the building of socialism in the 1920s and at the beginning of the
1930s adopted the principle of statistically average typicality and tried
to work on average collective farms or else to embrace the whole
spectrum of different types of collective farm (both rich and poor).
At this period the ethnography of contemporaneity was immersed in
the present, in the current moment, for example, it was supposed that
there had been no class struggle in the collective farms in the past,
nor would there be in the future. By the middle of the 1930s ethno
graphers came to be guided by the socialist realist principle of
typicality and to work on the ‘foremost’ collective farms and ‘foremost’
factories and talk to ‘distinguished’ people. Like artists and writers,
the museum staff had to ‘write what ought to be as if it were what is’
[Sinyavskiy 2003: 165]. In this way, at this stage the basic subject of
the ethnography of contemporaneity became the future in the present.
From this perspective one could speak of a gap opening up between
museum ethnography and academic ethnography in the 1930s.
Within the framework of the latter, museum staff (whether
dependent on Narkompros or on the Academy of Science) worked
primarily on the history of illiterate peoples and survivals from the
pre-capitalist era. In parallel in their museum activities they worked
on displaying the building of socialism in the USSR or of imperialist
colonialism abroad [Stanyukovich 1978: 194–217]. We find hardly
anything about the ethnography of the building of socialism in the
two main sections of the journal Sovetskaya etnografiya (‘Articles’
and ‘Materials’), but in the sections ‘Chronicle’ and ‘Expeditions’
the subject appears regularly in reports of expeditions and surveys
1
Such a description does not imply that the ethnographical research on Soviet contemporaneity, field
materials and museum collections of the 1930–50s are without scholarly value.
of exhibition work. In this way the study of contemporaneity in the

1930s was pushed to the margins of academic ethnography:
exhibitions in museums and short communications in journals,
printed in small type. But for the man in the street — and for the
Party boss too — it was the museum exhibition, with its accent on
contemporaneity, that was the face of ethnography.
Abbreviations
ARME — Archive of the Russian Museum of Ethnography
ED SRM — Ethnographical Department of the State Russian Museum
SME — State Museum of Ethnography
Archival materials
ARME, f. 2, op. 1, d. 232. Protocols of sessions of the bureau of the
ethnographical cell. 1927.
ARME, f. 2, op. 1, d. 315. Protocols of sessions of the bureau of the
ethnographical cell. 1930.
ARME, f. 2, op. 1, d. 413. Report on S. G. Grinina’s travel to Karelia to
collect ethnographical material for the exhibition ‘The Leningrad
Oblast and Karelia’. 1932.
ARME, f. 2, op. 1, d. 479. Articles, notes and copies of documents collected
for the exhibition ‘The Uzbeks Then and Now’. 1934–5.
ARME, f. 2, op. 1, d. 481. V. S. Dubov’s report on his travel to Karelia to
study the building of national culture. 1934.
ARME, f. 2, op. 1, d. 496. A short guide to the exhibition ‘Karelia and the
Kola Peninsula’. 1935.
ARME, f. 2, op. 1, d. 566. Report on the state of ethnographical scholarship
with a survey of the exhibition activity of the ethnographical
museum.
ARME, f. 2, op. 1, d. 598. Protocols of meetings and sessions of the Scientific
Council. 1937–8.
ARME, f. 2, op. 1, d. 763. Methods developed by E. N. Studenetskaya on
the subject of ‘A Hundred Years in the Life of Aekhsaer’ for the
exhibition ‘The Peoples of the North Caucasus Then and Now’. 1939.
ARME, f. 2, op. 1, d. 964. Materials (plans, protocols, reactions) for the
exhibition ‘Folk Art and National Costume of the Slavonic Peoples’.
1947–8.
ARME, f. 2, op. 2, d. 131. T. A. Kryukova’s essay on folk art in Voronezh
Oblast. 1936.
ARME, f. 2, op. 2, d. 142. Ethnographic essays by T. A. Kryukova on ‘Clay
Toys from Lipetsk’ and by A. S. Morozova on ‘New Themes in
Turkmen Carpets’, etc. 1938.
ARME, f. 2, op. 5, d. 48. ‘From Our Experience in Constructing the
Exhibition “Jews in Imperial Russia and in the USSR”’ (articles
by I. M. Pulner and M. I. Shakhnovich). 1940.
177 A rticles
ARME, f. 9, op. 3, d. 4. Texts, descriptions of maquettes, re-created scenes

and other materials for the theme plan of the exhibition ‘Jews in
Imperial Russia and in the USSR’. 1938–9.
Sources
Arzyutov D. V., Alymov S. S., Anderson D. G. (eds.), Ot klassikov k mark
sizmu: soveshchanie etnografov Moskvy i Leningrada (5–11 aprelya
1929 g.) [From Classics to Marxism: The Conference of Moscow
and Leningrad Ethnographers (5–11 April, 1929)]. St Petersburg:
MAE RAS, 2014, 511 pp. (Kunstkamera — Archive, vol. 7).
(In Russian).
Gorky M., ‘Ot redaktsii’ [From the Editors], Nashi dostizheniya, 1930, no. 1,
Gorky M., Mekhlis L. (eds.), Tvorchestvo narodov SSSR [The Creativity
of the Peoples of the USSR]. Moscow: Pravda, 1937, 534 pp.
(In Russian).
Kratkiy putevoditel po vystavke ‘Evenki v proshlom i nastoyashchem’ [A Brief
Guide to the Exhibition ‘The Evenks Then and Now’]. Leningrad:
State Museum of Ethnography, 1939, 22 pp. (In Russian).
Stalin I. V., Sochineniya [Works]. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatelstvo
politicheskoy literatury, 1951, vol. 13, 423 pp. (In Russian).
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179 A rticles
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183 A rticles
Dmitriy Timoshkin, Konstantin Grigorichev

‘Non-Place’ outside Time:
Indeterminacy as the Specificity
of the Existence of Localities
in a Post-Soviet City (The Case of Irkutsk)
The article considers the condition of one of the quarters in the centre of Irkutsk that can be called a ‘time frontier’. This
refers to the exclusion of this urban locality from the present time. The place in question has ended up on the border
between various projects of the future and the past. This affects not only its architectural appearance, but also its social
content. The authors seek to understand whether this situation is reported in the stories told by people who find themselves
in the context of the ‘border’ locality, and whether this affects the architectural and social appearance of the post-Soviet
city. The study is based on materials of participant observation – the results of ‘strolling’ in Walter Benjamin’s interpretation
of that term — and nonformalised interviews. Michel de Certeau’s dichotomy of ‘strategy-tactics’ and Henri Lefebvre’s
concept of spatiality have been employed in the processing and conceptualisation of the data. The authors conclude that
the ‘time frontier’ situation implies the same set of characteristics as a ‘physical’ frontier: nonlinearity, mobility, and
a superabundance of projects for reformatting the ‘frontier’ locality. For people and places caught up in the situation
of this time frontier, not only the future but also the past becomes a project, thus both categories become equally
pluralistic. As a result, the location lives ‘outside the present’, outside the projects actually in process, forming a social
vacuum: weak ties are destroyed, the resulting vacuum is filled with third-party projects that compete to offer a definition
of the locality’s meaning.
Keywords: open market, informal economy, post-Soviet city, ‘ethnic’ marking, time frontier, urban space.
Change is an integral part of urban life, but in

a situation of social crisis changes manifest
themselves more evidently and dynamically.
The transformations of Russian post-Soviet
cities took place against a background of the
disappearance of the state monopoly on physical
Dmitriy Timoshkin
Irkutsk State University, and symbolic violence [Volkov 2012: 12], which
Laboratory for Historical led to the appearance of a large number of new
and Political Demography operators who could project and bring about
1 Karla Marksa Str.,
Irkutsk, Russia / their own ideas of the past, present and future
National Research Tomsk State of one or another urban locality. Whereas
University, Laboratory for Social changes in Soviet cities had been limited
and Anthropological Research
34 Lenina Av., by the central planning authorities and by ideo
Tomsk, Russia logically imposed notions of what the past and
dmtrtim@gmail.com future ‘ought to be’, now these limits had been
Konstantin Grigorichev largely removed. In the ‘memory wars’ that took
Irkutsk State University, place as a result, processes that had previously
Laboratory for Historical gone on secretly or had been regarded as evident
and Political Demography
1 Karla Marksa Str., norms rose to the surface.
Irkutsk, Russia /
National Research Tomsk State In Soviet cities swift changes had taken place
University, Laboratory for Social when for one reason or another whole districts
and Anthropological Research were rebuilt. The difference is that the ‘hard
34 Lenina Av.,
Tomsk, Russia history’ of Soviet towns existed in a context
grigoritchev@yandex.ru of denied histories, whose marginal status
was maintained by the state, and of the only possible ‘correct’
future. While the changes in a Soviet town took place within
the framework of the realisation of a state-supported project,
in the post-Soviet period there was a whole range of ‘correct’
histories, and the realisation of one or another future was basically
limited by the capabilities of the persons or groups interested
in it.
The changes that happened to Soviet cities were regularly reflected
in their visual and social content [Lefebvre 1991: 62] the architecture
changed in parallel with the transformation of the social structure,
the habitual trajectories of everyday routes were abolished and new
ones created. Changes in a Soviet city followed Bauman’s pre-
modern logic [Bauman 2000: 4–5]: changes from state to state,
the time each change took being more or less limited and
corresponding to the moment of a rise in the historical dynamic,
the ‘tide’ in Braudel’s terminology [Braudel 1985: 31]. As the range
of possible futures widened, change became more or less the only
constant in the city space, introducing liquid modernity into it
[Bauman 2000: 119–20].
Changes are visualised through the appearance of new city localities
or the radical change of old ones. At first sight this seems like a new
state of the locality, whereas in fact we are dealing not with a state,
but with a process. In other words, here we can discover what lies
between states, a continual ‘liquidity of modernity’, a sort of ‘temporal
frontier’. In this case the past and future of the place and its
inhabitants are blurred and obscured because of the number
of competing projects. One key characteristic that defined and
limited the transformation of a Soviet city was the quite strict
regulation of space and time. The situation of a temporal frontier
appears at the point when the function of time as a mechanism
of social control [Giddens 1984: 17] breaks down, or rather when
the monopoly on its realisation does. The removal of these limitations
leads to the simultaneous co-existence of many social times and
spaces, which may be completely unconnected with each other, and
may contradict each other. The result is what John Urry has called
the compression of time and space [Urry 2000: 127].
We shall examine the moment of acceleration of change at
the micro-level: how an unstable social state [Blyakher 2005]
manifests itself in the form and content of an urban locality using
a small district in the middle of Irkutsk as an example. Assuming
that the social crisis in the post-socialist city was one of the most
important reasons for ‘liquid modernity’ [Bauman 2000], we would
like to find out how the situation of the temporal frontier manifests
itself in the visual appearance of space and people’s movement
trajectories.
185 A rticles
Our task was to describe the changes taking place in the district
Dmitriy Timoshkin, Konstantin Grigorichev. ‘Non-Place’ outside Time: Indeterminacy as the Specificity of the Existence of Localities in a Post-Soviet City (The Case of Irkutsk)
and understand the inner logic of these processes until the situation

of indeterminacy was over. In practice it is another attempt to
answer Lefebvre’s question about the nature of space as such and
urban space in particular. Accepting the assertion that a space,
including an urban space, is also the subjective experience and
representation of it [Lefebvre 1991: 298], we suggest that it is also
the statement that pins down that experience. Let us consider
the situation when change is characterised as the essence of urban
space. In describing our case, we proffer the idea of a temporal
frontier as a viewpoint for examining change as the modus vivendi
of the post-Soviet city.
The research was carried out using the method of participant
observation, flânerie in Walter Benjamin’s sense [Benjamin 1968].
In addition, we make use of twenty informal interviews collected
in the course of three projects. The first of these (2014–8) was on
the open markets of Irkutsk, some of which are situated near
the district that interests us. We talked to stallholders and shoppers,
asked them about the origin of their wares, the social structure of the
market, the ordinary routes through it, and the interaction of groups.
The second project (2017) was organised by the Centre
for Independent Social Research and Education (Irkutsk). One of the
authors, who took part in it, conducted unstructured interviews with
residents of districts next to the open markets. The subject
of the interviews was the social and infrastructure problems and
potential of the territory and its interaction with the neighbouring
market. The third project (2017) was devoted to an analysis of the
survival practices of communities of street children at the Irkutsk
open market and was not directly connected to the subject of this
article. However, a number of subjects in the interviews are also
relevant to the problem being examined. For processing and
conceptualising the material we used Michel de Certeau’s dichotomy
between strategy and tactics and Henri Lefebvre’s understanding
of space.
From a Soviet suburb to the ‘memory wars’

We chose for our research a small district in the middle of Irkutsk,
which is next to the ‘Shanghai’ market, which came into being
spontaneously. The district is situated between two streets,
Kommunarov Str. and Podgornaya Str., and the buildings are living
accommodation, most of them examples of the architecture of the
end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries.
On the third side it is bounded by the precincts of the Church
of the Elevation of the Holy Cross, on the other side of which is
one of the largest social spaces in Irkutsk, the ‘130th District’ with
its concentration of restaurants and cafés and a large shopping

centre.
The district’s other neighbour is the Central Park of Culture and
Rest (Russian TsPKiO). Before the revolution this was a cemetery,
but then it was closed and the park was built, as they say, ‘on
the bones’. Alongside the old gravestones there were a small zoo,
kebab stalls, and the ‘Cipollino’ funfair. The rides were later removed,
and what we have now is a rather neglected park with gravel paths,
rusty lamps that do not work, partly cleaned gravestones and
the remains of the funfair. Beside the park fence there is the recently
restored cemetery church and a half-demolished monument to
the heroes of the revolution.
Despite the high value of land and the attractiveness of a place in
the city centre for developers, the district is derelict. Many of the
houses here are abandoned or burnt, and there is no sewerage or
piped water. The fences that surround it are cluttered with rubbish
thrown from passing cars. The place has a reputation of being
marginal and dangerous, and people avoid it even in daylight.
This district has been at the centre of attention for several urban
renewal projects at once. Each has had an immediate effect on
the visual aspect and social structure of the space described. At
present not one of the projects has been brought to completion,
and their promoters are in competition with each other, arguing
over the place’s possible future and past. The district is effectively
‘stuck’ between several projects, and it is a matter of time when one
of the variants of past and future will finally be realised and
the situation of indeterminacy will end. This locality has for its
whole history been in a way a borderland separating several
functional zones in the central part of the city. In pre-Soviet times
it separated the Soldatskaya sloboda [Soldiers’ Quarter], with its
motley population (the urban lower middle class, ex-servicemen,
boy soldiers), public houses and maisons de tolérance from
the territory of the Church of the Elevation of the Holy Cross and
the cemetery. In Soviet times the place became the border between
the ‘clean’ central districts, the slum areas of badly run-down
privately-owned housing, and the public space of the TsPKiO. The
frontier situation of the locality was emphasised by its topography:
its properties were situated on a hillside, with the cemetery at
the top and the residential and business districts of the city centre
beginning at the bottom.
One important peculiarity of the place is the way its space is
organised so as to permit forms of co-existence more typical of the
countryside than of urban districts with their many-storeyed
buildings. Formerly there used to be large properties here with both
houses and domestic offices. This is still reflected in the locals’
187 A rticles
vocabulary: the unit of space here is not called a house or a flat, but

an enclosure. In the 1920s the properties began to change: several

families were housed within a single ‘enclosure’, and new houses
were built. The result was the appearance of improvised fenced-in
‘mini-quarters’, with several householders living in each. At the same
time, the district did not reproduce a proper rural environment, but
remained closer to the suburbanised space of a Soviet city [Glazychev
1995].
In the interviews, the district was described as having been until
the beginning of the 1990s a peaceful, patriarchal place with a system
of stable social relationships and family ties. This system was fixed
in the district’s spatial organisation, with a network of paths that cut
across the formal boundaries of properties and households.
Neighbouring families moved around the district along these paths,
and children from different ‘enclosures’ played on common football
pitches, and, in other words, the ‘enclosures’ were united by many
social and spatial routes.
The new neighbour of the district was the ‘Chinese’ market, which
came into being at the beginning of the 1990s, and grew rapidly,
forming a space that is designated in urban narratives and academic
texts by the collective name of ‘Shankhayka’.1 This name did not
mean so much a particular locality in the centre of Irkutsk as its
special condition: respondents might mention other ‘shankhayki’ in
other cities and even other countries, having in mind the exoticism
of a chaotic social condition.2 Gradually there appeared an infra
structure to serve the many informal networks that provide
for the market’s uninterrupted functioning [Dyatlov, Kuznetsov
2004]. The market became a magnet for the urban communities,
and, as one of the respondents said, ‘Everyone in Irkutsk got their
food there.’ ‘Shankhayka’ is an integral part of the idea of ‘post-
Soviet’ Irkutsk, one of its exotic sights and to a significant extent
a mechanism of its transformation into a ‘post-Soviet’ city.
The appearance of the ‘Chinese’ market was one or the reasons why
the situation of a temporal frontier came about beside it. The district
began to be directly and indirectly included in the orbit of the
activities of ‘Shankhayka’. Houses and properties were rented out
to accommodate the market infrastructure — containers, storehouses,
hostels, illegal restaurants. For almost twenty years the district’s
space was overflowing with people and incidents connected with
the ‘Chinese’ market. In 2014 the market was closed and transferred
1
‘Shankhayka’ is ‘Shanghai’ with a Russian suffix that forms both feminine and diminutive derivative
[Eds.].
2
Cf. locals’ reference to the run-down and disreputable Apraksin Dvor / Aprashka in St Petersburg as
a ‘Shanghai’ [Eds.].
to the edge of the city, which led to the ‘market’ infrastructure’s
leaving the district and which, in fact, determined the frontier
situation. The district was deserted, and various renewal projects
constructing its past and future attempted to fill the void.
Here one can observe a situation which is the opposite of that
described by Pierre Nora: ‘Accélération de l’histoire. Au-delà de la
métaphore, il faut prendre la mesure de ce que l’expression signifie:
un basculement de plus en plus rapide dans un passé définitivement
mort, la perception globale de toute chose comme disparue — une
rupture d’équilibre’ [Acceleration of history. Over and above
the metaphorical status of the phrase, one must assess what it actually
means: a more and more rapid retreat to a past that is definitively
dead, a global perception of everything as vanished — a rupture
of equilibrium] [Nora 1997: 23]. The past becomes a pretext
for choosing one variant of the future. Since land in this area is quite
highly priced, the district, like the open market beside it, inevitably
attracts the attention of the ‘strategists’ [de Certeau 1990: 59] —
the different groups who have the ability to define the content
of urban space.
Among these may be included religious activists, who see the place
as a continuation of the memorial cemetery and the approach to
religious buildings. They connect all the positive changes that have
taken place in the district over recent years (primarily the asphalting
of Kommunarov Str.) with the restoration of the church and
the renewal of its activity. Another group represent the ‘Irkutskie
kvartaly’ project, linked to the city authorities [Kozmin 2015;
Mayarenkov 2015], who want to see a combination of an open-air
museum and a residential quarter. Other ‘strategists’ include
the businessmen who want to acquire the land with a view to
subsequent resale. Another group whose presence — and to no lesser
extent, whose absence — has determined the content of the space
of the district are those who are interested in the functioning of the
market. And finally there is a group which is also at the centre
of events but, unlike the others, has had hardly any means of
constructing the district’s everyday life — the residents.
It should be said that all these groups are identified in an extremely
provisional manner. It is quite hard to identify the subjects who
influence the territory at all clearly, because of their informal status
and the multitude of illegal practices: every group has its secret and
conflicting interests. A large part of the district was used to service
the neighbouring market, but it is practically impossible to determine
who exactly the subject influencing that process was. Moreover, it
is sometimes hard to understand the consequences that a particular
group or individual’s realisation of their project will lead to. Thus
when the group connected to the city administration announced
189 A rticles
that the district would be reconstructed preserving its ‘historical’

appearance, the place proved attractive to business. It is already

possible to see how huge buildings built according to the tastes
of private persons and not reflecting the architectural appearance
of the district supported by the promoters of the project are replacing
the old wooden houses.
In this way the interests of many groups with different ideas
of what the past and future of this place should be, and very
unequal opportunities for realising their ideas, have come together
at this place. The district has become a debatable space, the status
of which is determined by a vision of the ‘genuine’ past and
the ‘right’ future. But in the process it has lost its present. Each
of the neighbouring territories, as an ongoing or completed project,
is expanding into the space we have described, the content of which
remains indeterminate. Several probable projects of the future
are proposed for the district: a site of memory, a closed elite
residential estate, a public space, a continuation of the Jerusalem
cemetery park — and the ‘memory wars’ are declared in this empty
space.
The problem is complicated by the collision here of two hardly
compatible circumstances: the city authorities’ aim to ‘preserve its
history’ and the proximity of the market, which came into being
spontaneously and is permeated by a multitude of informal networks.
In reality the market introduced — or at least intensified —
the conflict between the stasis of the suburb, reinforced by the
municipal project for the preservation of the city’s history, and
spontaneity, the chaotic movement of the open market. This conflict
is manifesting itself even now in the district’s external appearance,
and noticeably accelerating the process of the demolition of old
houses. The appearance of the open market beside it gave many
of the local residents the long-awaited opportunity to leave
the insalubrious private sector (even if it was in the city centre), and
turn their property, burdened with the status of a listed building,
into money.
The district began to turn into a temporary car park, into an
extension of the market both for the traders, who rented the old
wooden houses as storehouses or temporary accommodation, and
for the few local residents who were left. The appearance of big
business here meant that any house, particularly one belonging to
residents who had not yet managed to privatise their property, could
be burnt down, and the residents themselves were constantly being
approached by speculators offering to buy their house and land.
However, among the long-established residents there are some who
are trying to resist the present state of affairs, and continue to live
in the district on principle. They are few in number; the rest are
simply those who are unable to move. Among those who remain
here of their own free will, there are some who refuse to move even
when they are given housing in another district. Among the reasons
that move them to cling to this rather neglected spot they allege
the memory of the past, good conditions for horticulture, reluctance
to leave the land, and also the district’s convenient location. It may
be supposed that it is nevertheless the memory that comes first.
Practically everyone who has remained told his / her story about
his / her ancestors who lived here, the legend that connects him /
her to this place.
Fires between past and future

The situation of the district is distantly reminiscent of the dichotomy
between the ‘White City’ of settler-built Tel Aviv and the ‘Black City’
of working-class / Palestinian Jaffa which Sharon Rotbard evoked
in a recent study [Rotbard 2015]. The city authorities create and
maintain the myth that the space is marginal, and thereby justify
the harsh methods they use to effect the forcible transformation and
subordination of this space to the interests of those groups who have
sufficient resources to reshape it. One may suppose that for almost
three decades this mechanism of justification has also been used
in respect of the ‘Chinese’ market [Timoshkin 2017], inevitably
affecting the district.
The appearance of the ‘Chinese’ market, as a number of interviews
testify, changed the locality noticeably. The district had always lacked
such essential elements of modern infrastructure as a centralised
water supply and sewerage, which, to put it mildly, made permanent
residence here uncomfortable. Therefore many of the local residents
were not averse to moving, but only those of them who had managed
to register their right of ownership to their house and land were able
to do so. The traders often rented houses from the locals together
with their land and put up tall fences around them. This blocked
the pedestrian routes that had previously connected separate
‘enclosures’ and parallel streets. The space was changing for
the outside observer too: the streets began to resemble tunnels made
out of whitish-green corrugated iron, and the territory between them
became inaccessible and dropped out of the general context of the
district.
The inclusion of the district in the market infrastructure led to
the emergence of peculiar social spaces there — illegal restaurants
and shops with authentic ‘Chinese’ food, which became attractions
for both tourists and locals. The district was visited by ‘tourists’ not
only from out of town, but from other parts of Irkutsk, attracted
by the strikingly different social environment and the aesthetics
of an ‘abandoned’, ‘forbidden’, ‘closed’ place.
191 A rticles
The appearance of the infrastructure connected with the market

made the position of the district unstable. Ever since it first appeared,

the market had been an object of constant displeasure to the city
authorities. The basic argument in favour of getting rid of it was that
it did not correspond to the way the city centre ‘ought to look’. The
problem is not only the projectors’ aesthetic preferences: there are
quite a lot of unattractive, neglected places in the middle of Irkutsk,
‘slums’ that look no better than ‘Shankhayka’, if not worse. In
addition, the market inevitably gave rise to conflicts between dif
ferent criminal groups who wanted to control the flow of money.
This opposition was another reason for drawing up projects for its
reconfiguration. It is possible that the ‘ethnic’ markedness of the
place also had an effect (‘slums’ were bad enough, but these were
‘not even ours’). A combination of these factors seems the most
likely reason for the constant attacks on ‘Shankhayka’. After many
fruitless attempts, these attacks were finally crowned with partial
success in 2014. The market trading was transferred to the edge
of the city, and the areas where it had taken place were left empty,
and became a battlefield between the partisans of the various projects
for rebuilding the place.
The transfer of the ‘Chinese’ market had an immediate effect on
the district’s fate. The entrepreneurs who used to rent whole
‘enclosures’ as storehouses abandoned them as useless. The many
underground restaurants also disappeared. High land values meant
that business, the centre for the preservation of the architectural
heritage, and the city authorities, who included it in one regeneration
project after another, all tried to monopolise the right to determine
the district’s future. At the same time they were in no hurry to take
the opportunity to construct its present, and so it was deferred
indefinitely.
One has the impression that the district began to die along with
the market. The illegal cafés were the only reason the tourists came,
and the traders and seasonal migrant workers provided the house
holders with a regular monthly income. Because of difficulties
connected with the regulations for using listed buildings, it proved
difficult to rent out the properties or sell them. It was similarly
hard to repair them and give them a marketable appearance
(it required considerable expense), and so most of the houses are
now empty. The locals have also noticed a drop in the flow
of traffic.
Changes in the quality of the space led to its further marginalisation.
In the city narratives the district already figured as a continuation
of the open market, an ‘alien’ space that was dangerous for the chance
passer-by. Now the local residents perceive it in the same way and
feel like ‘foreigners’. The dark, narrow, dirty streets repel not only
residents in other districts, who avoid the district, but even the locals,

who shelter in their fenced-off houses.
The empty houses are the haunt of homeless people and drug
dealers, and some of them have simply burnt down. Fires occur
not only because in the cold weather the homeless light bonfires
inside wooden houses, but also because of arson. Some local
residents who are anxious to move away see insuring the house
and then burning it down as their only way out. The announcement
of yet another municipal project for restoring the place accelerated
this process, and houses began to burn more often. The prospect
of profit encourages estate agents and builders (and even some
employees of the mayor’s office) to put pressure on the local
residents and make them move. When they refuse, it sometimes
happens that their house ‘accidentally’ burns down. The respondents
complain that they cannot get a good night’s sleep for fear of arson.
And the people from the city administration are no less feared than
the speculators: some of the neighbours who had not managed to
privatise their house and land have already been evicted and moved
to small, cheap flats on the edge of the city. Many of the houses
are surrounded by surveillance cameras and have guard dogs in
the yard.
The prices offered persistently by speculators for a house are not
enough to buy a house or flat in the centre: the minimal price offered
here for a house and its land is 900,000 roubles. If the respondents
are to be believed, a new log house with a plot of land in the same
locality was on the market for 17,000,000 roubles. One hears other
figures too: a wooden house where there had been ten fires in
the past ten years was restored, painted, provided with all the essential
conveniences and offered for sale at over 40,000,000 roubles.
One way or another, the fires have led to the disappearance
of some of the open homesteads that were left here. Large private
detached houses or office blocks have risen from the ashes.
‘Enclosures’ that have been burnt down and rebuilt drop out of the
context of the district: the new buildings are surrounded by high
fences and barbed wire, blocking the usual routes by which people
moved about. The rumour of a renewal project in preparation
makes it impossible to carry it out: new buildings erected with
a view to resale do not fit into the concept of projects supposed
to ‘restore the historic appearance’ of the district. And today, even
though ‘Shankhayka’ has gone, most of the district is still
surrounded by solid fences. Behind them, against a background
of abandoned and burnt-out houses, washing is drying on the
branches and children are playing. Here and there building work
is going on. It is easy to trace visually which parts of the district
were ‘assimilated’ by the market: there are the former cafés,
193 A rticles
warehouses and ‘chufanki’1 — small and often illegal ‘Chinese’

snack bars [Dyatlova 2015].

The departure of the market has also affected the density of traffic.
Respondents most often associated the district’s past with
the excessive numbers of cars and pedestrians, unlike today, when
there are only cars. The attempts to achieve a monopoly on
the place’s future have perhaps had an even greater effect on
the district’s fate than the proximity of the market. Despite the large
number of projects for regenerating the place (according to our
respondents, about once every five or six years sociologists go over
the district with a fine toothcomb), not one of them has so far gone
beyond the stage of planning, nice pictures, and fires.
When one reconstructs the history of the district from the
respondents’ stories, one can see how the local community fell apart
(if there ever was one here). People who were used to living on
the land and knowing many of their neighbours by sight were
relocated to newly-built high-rise flats on the edge of the city at
Novolenino and Lugovoe. As a result some families, relocated from
a ‘border’ district marked as marginal, found themselves surrounded
by other ‘marginal’ people relocated from other ‘insalubrious’
neighbourhoods. At present the actual future that is coming into
being in the district seems to be transforming it even more into an
excluded space. Against a background of gradually increasing
corrugated iron fences and tall detached houses faced with cellular
concrete, many projects for the ‘right’ past of this place come into
being and into conflict with each other. Projects for the transformation
of the district rely on the ‘historic evidence’ of what the city centre
‘really’ used to be, at the same time as it is turning into something
completely different.
The variability of the past:

A ‘border’ district as a place of the construction of memory
As stated above, the district borders on several localities, each with
its own meanings, the present of which is indeterminate, and the past
and future of which may have a substantial effect on the material
and social content of the district. This refers above all to the Jerusalem
Cemetery. Even though there are several groups in the city who have
different ideas about the semantic content of this place, the people
of the city use it, as before, as a park.
There is a continuing debate in the city community about what
the territory next to the district should be called — a memorial park
1
‘Chufanka’, pl. ‘chufanki’ is a feminine and diminutive derivative formed from ‘chu fang’ with the same
Russian suffix as in ‘Shankhayka’ above [Eds.].
or a memorial cemetery. Churchmen insist that the place should be

called the Jerusalem Cemetery, while the experts of ‘Irkutskie
kvartaly’ see it as a park. A cemetery does not fit in well with
the Irkutsk Commercial Axis project promoted by ‘Irkutskie
kvartaly’, which aims to create a single pedestrian zone including
many of the commercial and entertainment premises situated in
the centre. The group of religious activists sees using a cemetery
for any kind of entertainment purposes at all as sacrilege. At
the same time it is one of the few places in the centre of Irkutsk
where one can take a walk at a distance from the noise of the city.
This is what most of the people in the city use it for.
The quarrel between the ‘churchmen’ and the ‘projectors’ may have
a direct effect on the content of the district under examination. One
of the main entrances to the park is situated in immediate proximity
to it. Here there is a small square with several memorial objects. On
one side there is the cemetery church, and on the other the base
of the monument to the fighters of the revolution (recently sent away
for restoration) and a few memorial burials. All this is next to
a children’s playground situated between the cemetery / park fence
and some houses. Until recently, when the cemetery was called
the Funfair, the church building contained a place for hiring skis,
a storeroom and a hostel. Then it was fenced off and one fine day
reopened as a church.
In parallel with the restoration of the church, on the centenary of the
October Revolution, the monument to those who had fought
for Revolution was dismantled. But the memorial burials of the
leaders of the Red partisan squads known in the city are still in place
next to the church. The dismantling of the monument took place
peacefully; only representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church
expressed the hope that ‘the sculpture of red fighters’ would not
return to its previous place. Since the restored church was opened
and the steps leading from the park / cemetery towards ‘Shankhayka’
were brought back into use, the people of the city have begun to
recover the marginal territory of the district. Now at the weekends
one can see expensive cars parked by the church where the monument
used to be. The local priest lays a certain reanimation of the district
to the church’s credit, remarking that Kommunarov Str., which
bounds it to the south, would hardly have got asphalt and street
lighting if it had not been for the Metropolitan, who came to
consecrate the church.
Despite the very substantial disagreements between the two projects
for renewing the place, they have much more in common that might
appear at first sight. The group of religious activists proposes turning
the territory into an open-air museum. The park should be
a memorial cemetery again, there should be no commercial activities
195 A rticles
there, and the visual markers of a cemetery — gravestones and

crosses — should reappear.

This would not mean that the cemetery would be a closed area: they
plan to lay out pedestrian paths, public spaces for relaxation, and
information stands about the lives of the people buried there.
Moreover, both ‘Irkutskie kvartaly’ and ‘Irkutskiy nekropol’ are
agreed in not regarding the Soviet period, nor the more recent time
when there was an open market there, as ‘history’. These stages are
omitted from both projects. For their authors what happened on
this territory after 1917 practically does not exist.
For example, in the interview with the priest of the cemetery church,
‘the post-Soviet past’ clearly resounds with life ‘before’ and ‘after’
the project. Talking of his experience of visiting the park, he admits
that ‘then’ he saw nothing wrong with taking a ride on the observation
wheel or having a kebab, not knowing that it was ‘really’ a cemetery.
Now the priest views such activities in that place as unacceptable
and is engaging in a polemic with those citizens who prefer to use
the park in its ‘former’ sense as a place of relaxation. In essence,
the physical content of the park is the same as it was, but now it is
supposed to serve as a place that reminds us of death and the vanity
of existence, in counterbalance to the neighbouring localities such
as the open market and its ‘sales’. The priest sees the removal of the
monument to the revolutionaries as a symbolic act which underlines
the fact of the redefinition of the place’s semantic content. For him
this redefinition means a certain renaissance after the Soviet period
of ‘destruction’, which led to disownment and marginalisation.
Now, after the ‘restoration’ of its ‘historical meaning’, the place is
beginning to live again: the flow of parishioners comes to the church,
women and children go for walks along the asphalted Kommunarov
Str., and townsfolk gather every day on the restored steps. In this
logic the previous period of history is practically effaced, since it
does not fit in with the project for the future.
Both projects are directed towards the creation of a simulacrum
derived from a generalised notion of the ‘proper’ content of the city
centre. A mass of historical evidence is urged in support of both, in
the form of photographs and the words of eye-witnesses. However,
at present the projects are far from being realised: the park, and
the neighbourhood next to it, and the territory of ‘Shankhayka’ are
still used for purposes other than those ascribed to them in
the projects. Instead of restoration there are fires, instead of the
renewal of the architectural heritage private houses are being erected,
and the local residents are sometimes unable to repair the fence
round their property because it is listed.
The main reasons why the townsfolk come to this district are cheap
eating places, groceries and household goods, and easy accessibility.
The territory’s ‘ethnic’ marking makes the stratification of projects

visible. The former association of the brand and toponym
‘Shankhayka’ with all things Chinese is principally in evidence in
the name of the big new shopping centre, to which part of the street
trade has been transferred — ‘Shanghai City Mall’. On a high metal
fence hangs a banner inviting people to travel to shop at another
shopping centre — ‘Chinatown’. Beside these signs there are dozens
of smaller ones belonging to small restaurants, cafés, and tea-houses,
which are generally designated as ‘Muslim’: they use the colour
green, have signs saying ‘100 % halal’, are named after places in
Central Asia, etc. The ethnically marked food court has become
the ‘third place’ for immigrants, who relax here in the tea-houses
with their whole families on their days off, and for occasional tourists
who enter the cafés for a taste of the ‘exotic’, and for the rest of the
townsfolk, lured by good, cheap food.
The only past that legitimises this ‘immigrant’ / ‘ethnic’ food court
are the post-Soviet projects of the 1990s, embodied in Irkutsk as
the ‘big Shanghai’. Outside the context of this short period, of which
the city strategists take no notice when they construct the ‘right’
past, all this exoticism is nothing more than a symbol of the
‘occupation’ of the historic centre by migrants from other countries.
The expulsion of the immigrant market and its infrastructure to
the edge of the city requires the expulsion of the corresponding
section of the past from the memory.
The experience of the realisation of other urban projects (such as
the ‘130th District’ [Grigoryeva, Meerovich 2013]) allows it to be
supposed that in future there will be no room for the ‘immigrant’
food court between the park / cemetery and the elite commercial
district that may later come into being. Thereby those meanings that
have existed since the beginning of the market — low prices,
exoticism, a mechanism for overcoming the social crisis — will be
excluded from the urban context. The process of their exclusion is
already visible through the layering of contexts: alongside the tea-
houses and amateur museums there are fashionable hairdressing
salons, hostels and glass-and-concrete commercial centres, brightly
and tastelessly decorated. The new spaces of ‘modernity’ infringe
upon the borders of the district, destroying the fences that used
to separate the pedestrian zone from the market infrastructure,
which was by and large illegal. In this way ‘modernity’ expels
the chaos and constant change of the market, replacing the trading
grounds with static buildings and thereby doing away with the place’s
recent past.
Whichever project wins, the district will become an extension either
of the park / cemetery, or of the elite commercial zone, or of both.
However, at present none of the existing projects for regenerating
197 A rticles
the territory of the market and the neighbouring district takes
account of the last thirty years’ histories of the place, which appear
as something shameful, or at least not worth mentioning. The
restoration only of the pre-Soviet context means a rejection
of a whole block of memory connected with Soviet and post-Soviet
times.
The narratives of the local residents, from which the category of the
‘here and now’ is practically absent (as is any future) are telling. The
past remains the only more or less stable structure. Their own ‘past’
is used as an argument to resist the administration and the speculators:
‘We’ve been living here since [19]73;’ ‘my grandmother lived here.’
The historical ‘past’ as a means of underlining the significance of the
place’s content: ‘This is a historic building, a merchant used to live
here, and just look what an awful state it’s in;’ ‘we’re not leaving
here, it’s our history, we’ve even found shrapnel from Kolchak’s
shells here, Kolchak has been here.’1
It is through the past that the old inhabitants construct their
connection with the place. A knowledge of local legends and ‘history’
presupposes their privileged position in comparison with other
groups who dispute their right to ownership of this territory.
This right, judging by the interviews, also exists only in the past.
Some of the respondents, despite not wanting to leave, stress
the hopelessness of attempts to remain. Even though the house and
the land formally belong to them, people do not regard the land as
‘theirs’. It was in the past, when previous generations of their families
lived here. Most of the respondents find it hard to describe
the project for the future; as one of them put it, ‘What sort of future
can there be here, if there is no present?’
The district’s past, like its future, is variable. On the one hand,
the space is obviously connected with the ‘Soviet’ period: this is
evinced by the local legends, and by the street names, and even by
the way it looks (rusty Soviet cars abandoned by the roadside or
standing in the ‘enclosures’). The territory ends at the burial place
of the ‘heroes of the revolution’ and the square named after them.
On the other hand, elements of pre-Soviet history are represented,
mostly in the local legends. Like ‘Shankhayka’, the district’s post-
Soviet past is ignored by the projects for its future and preserved
only in the stories its people tell, included in the context of the space.
The processes of change of the meanings of the space and the
construction of its past and future have led to the frontier position
of the district and of ‘Shankhayka’ being visualised through
1
Admiral Alexander Kolchak (1874–1920) was leader of the anti-Bolshevik forces in Siberia, and acting
head of state for the Provisional Government in 1918–20. Vilified in the Soviet period, he has been
promoted since the late 1980s as a national hero [Eds.].
the contrasting proximity of Cadillacs and burnt-out wooden hostels,

new detached houses surrounded by barbed wire and those
enclosures that remain, ‘100 % halal’ and ‘Shanghai’. The borderland
is embodied in huge fences that conceal emptiness, concrete areas
and waste ground on which a future so far uncontrolled by
the municipality is gradually growing up. Even the most deep-rooted
of the local residents are prepared to be forced to move by
the realisation of one or another of the projects. Long years of war
with the authorities, with the heritage preservation agencies, and
with enterprising dealers have accustomed them to the thought that
their future does not depend on them, and even that this place has
no future. Instead of a present they have found themselves in
a borderland situation between a multiple past and an indefinite
future.
Conclusion
The position described in this article of an urban district could be
viewed through the idea of a temporal frontier — as the exclusion
of an urban locality from the present. The district has proved a space
in which different projects for the future and constructs of the past
are in competition, and this is expressed in its architectural
appearance, the means of constructing its images, and the trajectories
of people’s movement.
The situation of a temporal frontier, in our opinion, presupposes
the same set of characteristics as a ‘physical’ borderland, for example
that between town and country. ‘The frontier is understood as a non-
linear, moveable border, a zone of assimilation, of a reformatting by
the town “in its own image” of the economic and socio-cultural
space of the country, replacing the former strict demarcation
between these spaces’ [Grigorichev 2013: 431]. In this case the
situation is more involved: since there is no single point of departure
(a generally accepted understanding of the past and future),
the frontier’s motion is along many vectors. For a space in the
situation of a temporal frontier, it is not only the future, but the past
that becomes a project, and thus both categories prove equally
pluralistic: there may be as many projects for the past as there are
for the future, and one project may be based on another.
The trouble is that in a situation of timelessness both the object and
subject are fugitive. The locality itself remains unstructured, or rather
it starts living in many structures at the same time, some of them
already demolished, as in our case the infrastructure of the open
market, and some existing only as projects. The locality includes
some spaces with a limited set of functions, like a private kinder
garten or a huge residential ‘palace’, but these are clearly separated
from the rest of the district, and only emphasise its chaotic nature.
199 A rticles
The space for realising private projects is inexorably shrinking, and

this can clearly be traced in interviews with people who are

experiencing this sort of state here and now. The range of projects
for transforming the space is not limited by ideological frameworks,
but is determined by the existence of the resources for carrying them
out — connections with the city administration and the agencies
of power, and money.
Respondents who live in this borderland speak of the impossibility
of realising individual projects for lack of the necessary resources.
This makes them the hostages of those projects whose promoters
have such resources. In such a situation of sharply increasing
complexity and speed of change, the local residents are deprived
of the right to have their say. Their past and future become variable,
and they cannot influence them, and are left paralysed. At the same
time collective projects also turn out to be fragmented and their
consequences unpredictable. In the context of one project a number
of others may arise, but their development and possible results are
not examined by the creators of the first project. In a certain sense
it is the frontier situation itself that becomes the subject.
The case described offers in our opinion considerable interest as
a clear example of the transformation and redefinition of urban
space — a process which in most cases can only be considered in
the conditional mood. This transformation is taking place so quickly
that visible changes happen over a few years, months, even weeks.
The processes of forming the urban space in the opposition
of strategies and tactics, the production of space, the destruction
and formation of communities described by Henri Lefebvre
[Lefebvre 1991], Michel de Certeau [de Certeau 1990] and Jane
Jacobs [Jacobs 1961] are embodied in the logic of the frontier here
and now. The present of the urban space turns from the ‘hard
body’ of history into the ‘liquidity of modernity’ [Bauman 2000]:
motion and change here are not mechanisms for the replacement
of conditions, but stable values.
It may be observed how the discussion about the content of the
territory of an urban district affects its physical content, and the fates
of the people connected with it. One of the markers of the ‘extra-
temporal’ condition of space is that the local inhabitants have
become accustomed to the regular visits of sociologists and to
persistent proposals to buy their land and threats to burn their
houses down. Interviews with them allow the formation of an idea
of life between unrealised projects for the future and a dying past,
and visual observation an understanding of how this process
influences the ‘scenery’: the buildings and the streets. The competition
between the projects for developing the city centre demonstrates
an undeclared ‘memory war’ [Shnirelman 2003] for the right
to determine the content of urban locations and the layer of the
city’s history which will be represented there.
The case analysed allows us to see the interconnection between
the transformation of urban space and the competition between
projects for the past and future. The town planners’ projects
for transforming urban spaces prove to be closely linked to the
conflicts which arise between the proposed variants of the future
of those places and the constructs of the past that legitimise them.
An ‘inconvenient’ or ‘incorrect’ semantic load and the architectural
landscape that provides for it are expelled to the edge of the town,
and the history that legitimises it to the edge of memory. In turn,
the expulsion of significant circumstances and sections of history
from legitimate memory entails a loss of the contexts of existence
of some or other urban spaces, which leads to their gradual
disappearance. In the case when the excluded spaces and memory
are connected with trauma (like the 1990s for Russian society),
the situation of the temporal frontier becomes particularly dramatic
and dynamic.
Another thing that seems important is that the case that we have
described is not unique. Even a cursory glance at the territory
of Irkutsk from the proposed viewpoint will reveal many localities
which have ‘fallen out’ of the present and exist on the border between
projects for the future and constructs of the past. There are also such
cases, to judge by material from the media, in other cities. It is
enough to remember the ‘explosive’ news events connected with
the renovation of Moscow or the whole districts that have burnt
down in other towns in western Russia. Markets appear and
disappear, new actors come and go to determine the city space. Each
such episode leads to a change of the trajectories, fates and visual
components of Russian cities. And each can produce an analogous
situation of timelessness.
Acknowledgments
The study was carried out within the main part of the state assignment
of the Ministry of Education and Science of Russia (the project ‘Discursive
Mechanisms of Border Design in the Heterogeneous Society of Eastern
Russia’, task no. 28.9753.2017 / 8.9) and partially (analysis of migrant
settlement practices in the area of influence of ‘ethnic’ markets) was
supported by a grant of the Russian Science Foundation (project no. 18-
18-00293).
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Reviews
205 R eviews
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Grib na krayu sveta: o vozmozhnosti

zhizni na ruinakh kapitalizma. Moscow: Ad Marginem
Press, 2017, 376 pp. (Russian transl. of Anna
Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the
World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015, 352 pp.)
Anna Tsing’s study, The Mushroom at the End of the World, is written in
the spirit of posthumanist and feminist anthropology. Identifying
serious flaws in the Russian translation of the book, the reviewer still
admits its high importance for anthropology in general and Russian-
speaking researchers in particular. In her exploration of the social life
of a Japanese delicacy, the author offers a valuable response to the
challenges that social sciences and humanities face in the age of
globalisation and the failure of welfare state projects. The weaknesses
of the book noted in the review can from this point of view be seen as
strengths, especially if the book is regarded not only as a piece of
scholarly research, but also as a work of art that employs literary
resources to persuade the reader.
Keywords: posthumanism, feminist anthropology, multi-sited

ethnography, matsutake, history of capitalism, environmental history.
Translations at the End of the World

The Mushroom at the End of the World is the
first substantial, book-length swallow of spring
from the ‘Matsutake Worlds’ research project.
Besides the author, Anna Tsing, the research
group consists of Timothy Choy, Lieba Faier,
Michael Hathaway, Miyako Inoue and Shiho
Satsuka — American anthropologists, mostly of
Japanese or Chinese origin, from leading
universities in the USA and Canada, and also
Elaine Gan, an anthropologist and specialist in
digital humanities from the University of
Aarhus in Denmark. Their common interest is
focused on the matsutake mushroom (Tri
choloma matsutake), a Japanese delicacy and
traditional gift, which has disappeared from the
woods of Japan, where it is now imported from
Alexandra Kasatkina the USA, Finland and China. This unassuming,
Peter the Great Museum but very fragrant (and expensive) mushroom
of Anthropology and Ethnography forms global networks of interaction and
(Kunstkamera),
Russian Academy of Sciences co‑operation, and, therefore, is a remarkably
3 Universitetskaya Emb., appropriate subject for a multi-sited ethnography
St Petersburg, Russia / of the global world [Marcus 1995].
National Research University
Higher School of Economics The ‘Matsutake Worlds’ project, begun in 2007,
16 Soyuza Pechatnikov Str.,
St Petersburg, Russia proclaims various forms of co-operation not
kasatkina@kunstkamera.ru only in the subject of its research, but also in its
basic methodological principle [Choy et al. 2009a; 2009b]. The

division of labour in the project is based on the regional principle:
some of the people are doing research in Japan, and others in China.
Anna Tsing, who has field experience in Borneo [Tsing 1993; 2011],
has taken on the task of working with immigrants from South-East
Asia (Laos and Cambodia) who pick matsutake on the Pacific Coast
of the USA, and as a result has become a real ‘multilocal ethnographer’.
Following the mushroom supply chains, she has been in Finnish
Lapland, the Chinese province of Yunnan and in Japan itself. It is
not surprising that her book, that includes all the project’s main
locales, is the first in its series of publications. The project is
extending into other media like a rhizome, including the Internet1
and cinema,2 and is thus experimenting not only with multiple sites,
but also with multiple modalities — which may be the two main
tendencies in current ethnographical experimentation.
The book under review is one of those still rare cases when the latest
developments in world social anthropology reach the Russian-
speaking reader with very little delay (the book was published by
Princeton UP in 2015). However, the author has not been very
fortunate in her Russian translation. But who would have known?
The person responsible is Shashi Martynova, a translator, editor and
publisher with experience of translating popular scientific works in
the exact and natural sciences. However, the book on matsutake
engages in dialogue with current tendencies of thought in the
humanities (Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour, John Law, Donna
Haraway, and others), and this dialogue is carried on first and
foremost through the use of terms which are only occasionally
explained. Thus Tsing mentions that she does not derive her term
assemblage from Latour (p. 41), but she does not write anything, for
example about the term encounter (soprikosnovenie ‘contact’ in
Martynova’s translation), which in English has resonances both of
Goffman’s ‘encounters’ (cf. [Korbut 2017: 358]) and of the colonial
contacts that formed the science of anthropology (cf. the influential
collection Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, ed. by T. Asad,
1995). A reader who is familiar with the literature must recognise
these terms, and others, for himself / herself. Unfortunately, reading
the Russian translation affords no such possibility: many important
terms have been lost in translation.3
At the same time the translator demonstrates her love for an effective
phrase and carefully transplants the text into her native soil with
1
Matsutake Worlds Live. <https://people.ucsc.edu/~atsing/migrated/matsutake/index.html>.
2
Sara Dosa’s film The Last Season (2014) was shot using material from the project participants’ research.
3
There is a detailed critical examination of fragments of the translation by the anonymous creator of
the webpage <http://themushroom-endoftheworld.surge.sh/>.
207 R eviews
the help of expressions such as kavardak and derzhatsya naosobitsu.1

Alexandra Kasatkina. A Review of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Grib na krayu sveta: o vozmozhnosti zhizni na ruinakh kapitalizma
However, beside these colourful words there are plenty of frankly

lame translations, such as: ‘Here I wish to shed light on the question,
how great historical disturbances can open up possibilities for
comparatively stable ecosystems of evergreen extensive peasant
forests’ (p. 242)2 — one can just hear the voiceover on a blockbuster
from the video salons of the early 1990s. Smaller examples: mirovoy
sever (‘the world North’) (the accepted term is ‘the global North’),
mandarin (‘Mandarin’) (rendered literally for the language of
northern China [but the word usually means a mandarin orange in
Russian. — Trans.]), the rare porubki instead of the more usual
vyrubki ‘clearings’, etc. (pp. 16, 28 and elsewhere). Clumsy calques
are overgrown with flowery constructions like festoons of lichen on
a crooked stump, and in the end the boundaries of the genre of
the book are completely blurred in the translation. What is this?
Research at the cutting edge of scholarship that is feeling for a new
language to describe phenomena that are still not completely clear
and embedded in discourse, or simply a badly written popular book?
But one might still imagine that even this sort of translation strategy
might turn out well. There are two ways for new terms to cross
the language barrier. One is analytical, via a careful professional
translation, provided with academic commentaries and explanations
of the history of the words and ideas. The other is poetic, using
images that convey the meaning of the terms directly to the reader,
through the imagination, bypassing archaeological investigations
and intellectual understanding. And in the case of a book on
matsutake this is not such a bad thing. In English-language scholar
ship Anna Tsing’s book is part of the seething posthumanist
mainstream. Among us, however, recent translations of Latour and
Law notwithstanding, this book still seems isolated. Some works that
the author’s language evokes have not yet been translated into
Russian, and at best are known to Russian anthropologists in English
or French. The native Russian tradition of transplanting the ideas
of posthumanism into the soil of empirical social research is still at
a formative stage. And, most importantly, the material that Tsing is
working with does of itself create images which are exceptionally
convenient for explaining certain thoughts. Thus she has no need
to mention Deleuze and his rhizome, because her protagonist is
a fungus. Such an apprehension of philosophical language through
the gentle mediation of images is in some ways even more organic.
And perhaps, in our hurried, calculating age, when there is not much
1
Highly colloquial expressions meaning ‘confusion’ and ‘to keep one’s distance’ [Trans.].
2
Perhaps the translator is hardly to be blamed here, as the passage reads in the original ‘Here I want
to spotlight the question of how great historical disturbances may open possibilities for the com
paratively stable ecosystem of the ever-young and open peasant forest’ [Trans.].
hope of waiting for academically verified translations of the novelties

of philosophical and anthropological literature, a literary translation
is the best compromise.
It is a peculiarity of the protagonist of the book under review,
the matsutake mushroom, that it grows in places where forests have
been cleared by human activity, in exhausted soils where only
particular species of pine can survive, and with these the matsutake
has a symbiotic relationship. As the fungus digests its nutrients, it
forms a chemical environment which creates the soil; the pine tree
lives on this soil; the pine tree provides nutrients for the fungus;
people pick the fungus and put it into circulation in diverse exchange
relationships, some generalised, some balanced, where there are
mushroom-pickers, foresters, buyers, wholesalers, retailers, and
customers, and thereby the existence is maintained not only of
the forest ecosystem, but of the global capitalist economy. Thus
the matsutake (assisted, of course, by Tsing, who is the translator,
and it must be said that translation — in Latour’s sense — is the key
means of establishing connections in the book) shows people how
it is possible to survive on the ruins of capitalism, in conditions when
the utopia of progress has collapsed and vagueness, unreliability and
precarity have triumphed.
The viewpoint of posthumanist anthropology allows the researcher
to see in her global field not stable, isolated phenomena,
commonalities and biological species, but fluid alliances with blurred
and mobile boundaries, which change over time, and also depending
on the observer’s point of view. Therefore her mycorrhiza passes
freely between the fungal kingdom and human society, where, as
a metaphor, it helps us to see the social connections of the modern
world in a new way. And the confusion between species demonstrated
by fungi and bacteria reminds us of the conventional nature of all
other boundaries.
The structure of the book tries to avoid the hierarchical order of
a subject narration. The author calls her brainchild ‘a riot of short
chapters’: it is not just another rhizome connecting ‘a thousand
plateaus’ [Deleuze, Guattari 1987], but the fruiting bodies of fungi
that have appeared after rain and that the reader can collect in his /
her basket. True to the spirit of the postmodern ethnography of
the 1980s, Tsing has done her best to ensure that the form of her
book helps to convey its message, and the photographs and
illustrations (and here one must give the Russian publishers their
due, they have carefully preserved the layout of the text) create
atmosphere, add air and aromas (the mushroom, after all, is
recognised by its smell, and it is no accident that the prologue is
entitled ‘Autumn Aroma’, that is, the aroma of matsutake). The book
is made up of four parts, interspersed with interludes which are
209 R eviews
entitled ‘Smelling’, ‘Tracking’ and ‘Dancing’, and, as they address

different channels of perception, allow us to immerse ourselves in

different forms of experience and ways of understanding as an
alternative to analytical reading.
The title of the first part, ‘What’s left?’, is the question of what
remains to be done when the potential for ‘narrative progress’ has
dried up and the chaos of ruins and indefiniteness, which used to
be safely pushed to the margins, is approaching ever closer to
the well-regulated and orderly areas of the world. The author
addresses this question not only to humanity as a whole, but to
scholars in particular: what new forms of knowledge do we need in
order to get a grip on what is happening among the ruins of progress
and make sense of it? Her answer is that what we need are the ‘arts
of noticing’ for which anthropologists are celebrated, fond as they
are of making mountains out of molehills drawing grand conclusions
from small details. The book under review proposes re-loading social
anthropology, renewing the lost links between anthropologists and
natural scientists, this time on the basis of the stories (transformed
in the translation into mysterious skazy (‘tellings’)) that are told also
by non-human actors (fungi, bacteria, trees, etc.).
The majestic rhythms of the narratives of progress focus attention
on the natural line of evolution and distract it from the diversity of
subjects and temporalities. Tsing sees her book as a polyphonic story
where one may follow several lines at once and thus receive
multidimensional experience and understanding. It is from this
perspective, when particular value is set on polyphony, that
the author solves the problem of scale, which is as old as anthropology
itself. ‘Scaling’, the ability to retain properties while changing scale,
is a necessary condition for inclusion both in capitalist exchange
circulation and in the cycle of modern knowledge (p. 52). Modern
scholarship will only agree to pay attention to small details and
localities if this helps it to answer big questions.1 The question of
how it is possible to change the scale without losing sight of
the multiplicity of details is one that has occupied both anthropologists
and researchers in other branches of the humanities in recent
decades. Many of them have hoped to find the answer by using
digital technology (for a detailed survey of these attempts see:
[Orlova 2018]). Tsing does not look for digital panaceas or any
others against the reduction of scale, and gives no evaluations (p. 64).
As an attentive anthropologist, a collector and teller of stories, she
brings both these manners of thinking and existing to the surface
of her text, puts them side by side and shows what consequences
their interaction might lead to.
1
The title of Thomas H. Eriksen’s textbook of anthropology, Small Places, Large Issues, regularly reissued
since 1995, is typical.
One such consequence is that matsutake is the trigger of global chain

reactions in which different forms of labour and kinds of object co-
exist, both ‘scalable’ and ‘unscalable’. The second part of the book,
‘After Progress: Salvage Accumulation’ is devoted to these curious
chains that link the mushroom-pickers in the USA with the people
who eat the mushrooms in Japan. The word ‘salvage’ is translated
as utilizatsiya [which in Russian has connotations of ‘using up’
something that might otherwise go to waste. — Trans.], which seems
felicitous, despite the loss of the connotations of rescue and
shipwreck (and, probably, the concomitant shade of irony). For
Tsing salvage is also a kind of translation (of different forms of life,
economic activity and sociality) into unified capitalist objects
accessible to automated logistics and accounting and vice versa. The
translation of trophy mushrooms into goods and thence into gifts
(in Japan matsutake is above all an expensive gift, a mediator in
establishing a relationship) is undertaken by middlemen: buyers,
sorters, importers, wholesalers and commercial agents. While
describing the work of the chain of translation / salvage between
the USA and Japan that she has reconstructed, Tsing illuminates in
passing questions from the fields of the study of migration, gifts and
exchanges, and even the formation of modern global markets, in
which, as she believes, a crucial role was played by the activity of
Japanese entrepreneurs in the conditions of post-war sanctions.
It is in this section that the author displays her rich field material
about mushroom-pickers in Oregon, where she discovers an
astonishing variety of cultures and motivations: Yao, Hmong and
Lao who have fled the wars and disturbances in Indo-China, white
veterans in search of the forest romanticism of the frontier, Japanese
Americans carried away with the construction of their ‘Japaneseness’…
The third part is called ‘Disturbed Beginnings: Unintentional
Design’. At the beginning of the twentieth century J. von Uexküll
described how various non-human beings perceive the world [von
Uexküll 1909]. Starting with his discovery of multiple sensory worlds,
Tsing proposes examining the history of the destruction of
commercial forests (and the appearance of matsutake) in Japan,
the USA and China from the multiple perspectives of their diverse
participants (people, corporations and countries, but also trees,
insects and fungi) and puts this assemblage together on the basis of
the landscape. Taking the position of an ecologist for whom
disturbance is not harmful, but a neutral dynamic, change (pp. 207–
8), she expands the concept of history: every living being, engaged
in survival in its own sensory world, creates its own history in its
own rhythm. The great temporal cycles of the trees, for whom the Ice
Age in Lapland was not so long ago, like the irregular rhythms of
the matsutake harvests, come out in opposition to the short cycles
that people and foresters find convenient (pp. 227–8).
211 R eviews
Still, the possibilities for anthropologists to obtain information from

non-human beings are limited. The main sources used by the author

in this part of her book are publications and conversations with
those who are professionally educated in the techniques of reading
non-human worlds: foresters and biologists. But she has been able
to learn something directly from the trees: while human history is
at pains to stress the differences between the Meiji Period in Japan
and Chinese industrialisation in the 1950s and 60s, for the trees there
is no difference — in both countries during these periods trees were
cut down in vast numbers to meet the needs of the armed forces
and industry (p. 246).
The author describes the collapse of commercial forestry as a chain
of failed experiments with unplanned results. The short chapter
devoted to the misfortunes of the forests of Oregon is entitled
‘Serendipity’. This word, untranslatable into Russian, is derived from
an Old Persian toponym and means a particular epistemological
regime of chance, unplanned discovery in the course of dealing
with completely different tasks. This regime applies not only to
the foresters of Oregon, who, deprived of the lion’s share of their
federal funding and falling thus by the wayside of the narrative of
progress, unexpectedly noticed both the connection between Pinus
contorta and matsutake and the interests of the mushroom-pickers
(p. 262). Anna Tsing herself acts in the same way on her research
path, and so do all anthropologists who honestly watch and listen
to what the field is telling them.
The fourth part, ‘In the Middle of Things’, does not so much sum
up, as design the end of the book, which remains open to all winds
and all ways. Having dealt with the big stories, the author sketches
some more local assemblages in different countries where forests,
fungi and people come into contact, forming new commonalities.
The book under review begins and ends with quotations from
the recently deceased Ursula Le Guin. Unlike her father, A. L. Kroe
ber, Le Guin did not become an anthropologist, but a writer. In her
imaginary worlds she experimented with various ecological and
cultural models, and inspired many people, not only in the USA but
around the world, to choose anthropology as a profession. This
book’s title, The Mushroom at the End of the World, resonates with
that of Le Guin’s collection of essays Dancing at the Edge of
the World (1989). Changing ‘edge’ to ‘end’ introduces an ambiguity —
the ends of the earth or the end of the world? Space or time? The
apocalypse or the terra incognita of the periphery? There is room
for both in the book about matsutake.
It seems that it was ‘the carrier bag theory of fiction’ proposed
by Le Guin in her essay of the same name that inspired the author
of the book under review while she was working on it. In Le Guin’s
terms the world where the mushroom-pickers described by Tsing

live, is, of course, the feminine world of the shopping bag, and
not the masculine world of the spear and knife. This world is moved
not by the thunderous march of progress, nor by the struggle
for a better life, but by constant seekings in different directions,
contacts, the pulsations of incipient and decaying alliances.
Attention to different lines of movement and the refusal to divide
them into central and peripheral, openness to chance finds and
the assembling of ‘a riot of chapters’ in free contact with each other
without any sort of single subject, and even without a beginning
and an end — this all comes together as a particular sort of ‘carrier
bag ethnography’, ultimately derived from the research methods
of the feminist anthropologists Donna Haraway and Marilyn
Strathern (p. 43).
Tsing stresses that her book is not only about the theory and practice
of co-operation, it was created through co-operation. Six pages of
the prologue are taken up with describing networks of mutual
support and expressions of gratitude. This co-operation, however,
has specific and eloquent limits: there are only anthropologists in
the ‘Matsutake Worlds’ project, no mycologists, no foresters, no
ecologists. The voices of these last are heard at second hand in
the book, either from their publications or from the author’s
interviews with them. This means that, even riding the new wave of
interest in the natural sciences, anthropology remains on its home
turf. The anthropologist continues to work on meanings, inter
pretations and translations, and the biologist is more of a source
and ‘field partner’ (the result of the search for a politer term for an
‘informant’ in those new fields which are too close to the researcher)
than a colleague in the project. As in other, similar projects, the two-
sided nature of this collaboration is questionable: what do biologists
think when an anthropologist starts talking about forest landscapes,
species boundaries and the travels of fungus spores, and applies
biological metaphors to the description of a society? Do these
discussions give them anything new?
The book has had a mixed reception in the Western scholarly
community, and reviewers have engaged in polemic around it. Thus
one reviewer points out that Tsing justifies and naturalises precarity,
and so, without noticing, supports the neo-liberal rejection of
projects for universal wellbeing [Britton-Purdy 2015]. Another
replies that it is not a question of a new utopia of prosperity, but of
survival in the conditions that exist, that is, at least the author is not
glorifying precarity [Centemeri 2017]. I would also point out that
while she proposes recognising the state of precarity as an inevitability
of our modern life, Tsing sees the potential in it for a significant
epistemological and ethical leap, a transition to another regime
of contact with the world, based on attention to the possibilities
213 R eviews
for collaboration and commonality, a regime which she suggests that

we could learn from the matsutake and the people who gather it.

It is harder to argue with the observation that the author exaggerates
her own originality and pays too little attention to her predecessors,
above all the well-established philosophical tradition of criticising
the rhetoric of progress and exaltation of man above nature
[Anderson 2015: 215]. And indeed, disdaining the ‘shoulders of
giants’ is a frequent feature of scholarly publications in an age when
the rules of the market have taken over the academic world, so that
innovation and breakthroughs have become a more or less com
pulsory trope even for established researchers. At the same time it
does happen that there are reasons for the absence of a literature
survey that have nothing to do with self-promotion. Behind every
idea or term there stretches a long train of meanings and connotations
from the previous contexts in which it was used. Sometimes this is
useful to both author and reader. But sometimes it is worth dragging
oneself away from the dusty shelves of the library and going out into
the fresh air, into the woods, for example, so as to see something
new (or see something old in a new way). The book under review
is not overloaded with theory, and in the Russian translation this
effect is even stronger. The narrative hardly deviates from the field,
and the material collected by the author is enmeshed in a fine but
firm net of metaphors where, as in the interspecies mass of the
mycelium, it is hard to separate scientific reasoning from ethno
graphic description. Whether this effect is worth risking the book’s
reputation for and deviating from the academic canon is up to
the reader to decide.
It is unlikely that anyone who remembers the chapter on fungi from
the school biology textbook will find anything new about mycology
in a book about matsutake on the ruins of capitalism. At the same
time specialists on forestry and Japanese history are sure to find
inaccuracies, if not errors, and might even be doubtful about some
of the author’s conclusions. But it still seems that this game of
juxtaposing stories from different ends of the earth and areas of
knowledge so as to follow the chains of co-operation and translation
that run through them is worth the candle. After all, it involves not
only risk, but also the refreshing attraction of working with multi-
sited processes in the modern global world, crossing the boundaries
of countries, disciplines and biological species. This work is never
finished: there will always be corrections to be made as new
information becomes available, the theory will be refined and
elaborated until, like Deleuze’s flower, which, because of its
relationships with the wasp, becomes something else.
In spite of the dubious quality of the translation, even in Russian
The Mushroom at the End of the World is an attractively made book
and a well-thought-out art object (a term that, with its ironic echo
of the ubiquitous fashion for conceptual art, is far more suitable here
than ‘work of art’ with its fundamental connotations). It is hard to
resist the charm of this text, and perhaps one should not. Especially
if, like the author, you like to wander through the forests with
a basket in autumn and breathe in the scents of decay.
References
Anderson E. N., ‘“The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility
of Life in Capitalist Ruins” by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, 2015,
Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. XII+331 pp.’, Ethnobiology
Letters, 2015, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 214–5.
Britton-Purdy J., ‘The Mushroom That Explains the World: An Anthro
pologist Tries to Understand Capitalism by Studying a Japanese
Delicacy’, The New Republic, 18 October 2015. <https://newrepublic.
com/article/123059/foraging-meaning>.
Centemeri L., ‘Review de Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at
the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins,
Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2015, pp. 331’, Tecnoscienza:
Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies, 2017, vol. 8, no. 1,
pp. 159–62.
Choy T. K., Faier L., Hathaway M. J., Inoue M., Shiho S., Tsing A., ‘A New
Form of Collaboration in Cultural Anthropology: Matsutake
Worlds’, American Ethnologist, 2009а, vol. 36, no. 2, pp. 380–403.
Choy T., Faier L., Hathaway M., Inoue M., Shiho S., Tsing A., ‘Strong
Collaboration as a Method for Multi-Sited Ethnography: On
Mycorrhizal Relations’, Falzon M.-A. (ed.), Multi-Sited Ethnography:
Theory, Praxis and Locality in Contemporary Research. Aldershot,
Hants, UK: Ashgate, 2009b, pp. 197–214.
Deleuze G., Guattari F., A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizo
phrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987,
XIX+610 pp.
Korbut A., ‘Ot perevodchika’ [From the Translator], Goffman E., Povedenie
v publichnykh mestakh: zametki o sotsialnoy organizatsii sborishch
[Behaviour in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organisation
of Gatherings]. Moscow: Elementarnye formy, 2017, рр. 355–64.
(In Russian).
Marcus G., ‘Ethnography in / of the World System: The Emergence of
Multi-Sited Ethnography’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 1995,
vol. 24, pp. 95–117.
Orlova G. A., ‘Vremya zummirovat: tsifrovoe chtenie v poiskakh masshtaba’
[Time to Zoom In / Zoom Out: Digital Reading in Search of Scale],
Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2018, no. 2(150). <https://www.
nlobooks.ru/magazines/novoe_literaturnoe_obozrenie/150_
nlo_2_2018/article/19564/>. (In Russian).
Tsing A. L., In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-
Of-The-Way Place. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993,
368 pp.
215 R eviews
Tsing A. L., Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press, 2011, 344 pp.

von Uexküll J., Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere. Berlin: Verlag von Julius
Springer, 1909, 264 SS.

Jan Hennings, Russia and Courtly Europe: Ritual and the

Culture of Diplomacy, 1648–1725. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2016, XII+297 pp. (New Studies in
European History)
Jan Hennings’ Russia and Courtly Europe is devoted to the diplomatic

culture of early modern Russia. Focusing on the symbolic language of
the diplomatic ceremonial, the author offers new answers to the central
questions of the Russian history of this period.
Keywords: early modern history, diplomacy, ceremonial, ritual, court

society.
The diplomatic history of the early modern

period is stitched together out of episodes which
it is difficult to integrate into the traditional
narratives of ‘international relations’ or ‘Russian
foreign policy’. Endless quarrels about the
rulers’ titles, the order in which people should
uncover their heads, or in which the ambassadors
should dismount, have for a long time only
made Russianists wish to move on as quickly
as possible from these idle ‘incidents’ to the
‘essence’ of the material — the Realpolitik of
past centuries, the distinction between reasons
and pretexts, and the various sides’ ‘objective’
conflicts and claims. Yet over the past decades,
a gradual change has begun in the historio
graphical situation: through the efforts of
specialists both here and abroad the diplomatic
ceremonial of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries has become a recognised and in
dependent field of research interest [Yuzefovich
1988; Ageeva 2013; Garnier 2014]. In particular,
this perspective has proved extremely fruitful in
examining bilateral relations, and has enabled
Ivan Kirpichnikov
the creation of intensive case studies [Tolstikov
Lomonosov Moscow 2013]. However, can the study of the problems
State University of ceremonial make a significant contribution
27-4 Lomonosovskiy Av.,
Moscow, Russia
towards solving the fundamental problems of
ivkirs@mail.ru early modern history?
217 R eviews
Since the publication of this book by Jan Hennings (currently

Ivan Kirpichnikov. A Review of Jan Hennings, Russia and Courtly Europe: Ritual and the Culture of Diplomacy, 1648–1725
Associate Professor at the Central European University in Budapest1)

the question should confidently be answered in the affirmative. The
object of his research was the diplomatic culture of early modern
Russia (the chronological frame of the work is the ‘Westphalian’
period up to the death of Peter I, 1648–1725). Hennings’ approach
is based on the modern understanding of symbolic communication
in early modern court culture, the fundamental values of which were
glory, honour, and prestige. Ceremonial was a very important means
of asserting the monarch’s status within the hierarchically organised
community of European rulers (société des princes). The ritual was
not only a projection of the existing political order, it continually
created that order (pp. 2, 23). Conflicts about ceremonies thus
represented political rivalry per se.
The central problem in Hennings’ research is the question of whether
the Russian tsars were participants in this incessant race for prestige
and glory; in other words, were they considered as equal members
of the community of European monarchs? In order to answer this,
researchers have usually had recourse to the notebooks of foreign
contemporaries — and found in them the classic image of the ‘Other’:
the ‘barbarous’ and ‘Asiatic’ land of the ‘Muscovites’, standing
alongside oriental tyrannies [Poe 2000; Filyushkin 2004]. Hennings
suggests reformulating the question in terms of ‘court rationality’
(Norbert Elias’s term), and in his first chapter he turns to texts of
a fundamentally different genre: the learned discourse of European
scholarship about ceremonies (Zeremonialwissenschaft). He
demonstrates that these works actively discussed the ceremonial
status of the rulers of Russia, while the rhetoric of ‘barbarity’ finds
no reflection in them at all. European sovereigns might be concerned
about the pretensions of the Romanovs to high status and consider
them their rivals, but in no way did they perceive the tsars’ envoys
as representatives of an ‘exotic’ state.
Each of the cases of Anglo-Russian relations from the middle and
second half of the seventeenth century examined in the third chapter
clearly shows that the two sides were operating within a single
framework of cultural praxis. The long argument between the Earl
of Carlisle and a Russian diplomatic official about which of them
should get out of the sledge first eventually brought the frozen
disputants to a compromise: they should get out simultaneously.
When the Englishman got out, he discovered to his indignation that
the official was hanging in the air in the arms of his servant — a trick
which would have been meaningless had both sides not been
1
About the author see: <https://history.ceu.edu/people/jan-hennings>. In 2017 Russia and Courtly
Europe was awarded the Early Slavic Studies Association prize.
using the same symbolic language. It is telling that, when attempting

to justify himself for his mission’s failure, in the course of which one
ceremonial defeat had followed another, Carlisle resorted to the
argument that the Muscovites were ‘uncivilised’ (pp. 145, 154).1
Hennings convincingly demonstrates that the conflicts that arose,
and the cooling in relations that followed, were not the result of
a failure of communication between cultures, but, on the contrary,
of the very logic of rivalry in the shared space of ritual (pp. 156–8).
‘Diplomatic custom’ is thus examined by Hennings not as ‘a peculiar
phenomenon of national culture’ [Yuzefovich 1988: 12] 2 but as
an organic element of common European diplomatic practice.
Certainly, its content on Russian soil was marked by certain specifics,
but the norms varied substantially between European courts too.
This sort of flexibility was predetermined by the very nature of
diplomatic ceremonial in the early modern period: its dependence
on context and the slow pace of standardisation in the course of
constant interaction. Besides, the use of a single ‘vocabulary’ did not
always necessarily imply common meanings. As an example of such
a divergence, Hennings examines in his second chapter the
differences in interpretation of diplomatic ranks. While in European
‘Westphalian’ practice only an ambassador represented his sovereign
in full measure, the Russian triad of posol (ambassador) — poslannik
(envoy) — gonets (courier) corresponded primarily to the social
status of a particular diplomat and the importance of his mission:
bearers of all three ranks were equal as representatives of their
emperor sovereign (pp. 102, 110). It should be noted that this is
a comparative observation, which requires to be interpreted in all
its aspects if it becomes the occasion for a separate discussion among
specialists.
The ‘normalisation’ of the experience of pre-Petrine Russia in the
common European space is one of the most topical questions for
Russian studies at the moment, and Hennings’ research has made
a new breach in the historiographical ‘Curzon Line’. Thanks to work
done over the last decades it is clear that the East-West dichotomy
is far less useful for understanding the experience of Muscovy than
the general context of early modern Europe. An outstanding example
of the fruitful use of the latter approach is provided by the works
of Nancy S. Kollmann on the culture of honour and the problem of
law [Kollmann 1999; 2012].
The borderland ‘between cultures’ is not the only classic watershed
that might appear to be an artificial construct in this light. Like
Kollmann [Kollmann 1999: 395–6], Hennings overcomes another

1
On this see also in the context of the exchange of diplomatic gifts: [Hennings 2016: 221].

2
Compare the new edition [Yuzefovich 2011: 11–2], where this passage is omitted.
219 R eviews
traditional frontier in his book (chapters 4 and 5), when he rejects

Ivan Kirpichnikov. A Review of Jan Hennings, Russia and Courtly Europe: Ritual and the Culture of Diplomacy, 1648–1725
the usual opposition between the ‘Petrine’ and ‘pre-Petrine’ periods.

The confederates of the great reformer themselves insisted that it
was in the sphere of foreign policy that the break with the past was
particularly clear and indisputable [Zakharov 2014: 176]. Before
trusting ‘Peter’s propagandists’ (p. 68), Hennings suggests that the
reader should take an excursion through the diplomatic practice of
the first half of the eighteenth century. The institutional innovations
of that period are beyond doubt, the most important being the mass
appearance of permanent diplomatic missions and the replacement
of cumbersome stateynye spiski [complete accounts of an embassy
compiled after its completion. — Trans.] with regular reports
[relyatsii]. However, the main concern of Peter’s diplomats was, as
before, the monarch’s honour. It is extremely telling that Peter I,
who is often portrayed as the enemy of ceremonial excesses, tried
to extract the greatest possible amount of symbolic advantages from
Queen Anne’s apology for A. A. Matveev’s arrest in London (p. 237).
Russian diplomats began to show an interest in Zeremonialwissen
schaft, but at the same time they had active recourse to the
precedents recorded in the ambassadorial books (posolskie knigi).
Hennings regards the Petrine period as one of dynamic transition,
combining both continuity and change.
Russia and Courtly Europe is an inspiring example of research into
the ‘ceremonial semiosphere’ of early modern European diplomacy,
that particular space for symbolic communication of which Muscovy,
and later the Russian Empire, were a part. The undoubted success
of the work shows how fruitful the description of the ‘international
relations’ of the period in their own terms can be. Besides that,
thanks to its geographical position Russia is the ideal starting-point
for a comparative study of ‘non-European’ practices and, beyond
that, for writing a ‘global history’ of early modern diplomacy
(p. 254). One may hope that Hennings’ research will be developed
in this promising direction.
References
Ageeva O. G., Diplomaticheskiy tseremonial imperatorskoy Rossii. XVIII vek
[The Diplomatic Ceremonial of the Russian Imperial Court.
The Eighteenth Century]. Moscow: Novyy khronograf, 2013, 891 pp.
(In Russian).
Filyushkin A. I., ‘Kak Rossiya stala dlya Evropy Aziey?’ [How Did Russia
Become Asia to Europe?], Ab Imperio, 2004, no. 1, pp. 191–228.
(In Russian).
Garnier C., ‘“Welcher massen die Potschafften emphangen und gehal
ten werden”. Diplomatisches Zeremoniell und Ritualpraxis am
Moskauer Hof aus der Perspektive westlicher Gesandter im 16. und
frühen 17. Jahrhundert’, Burschel P., Vogel C. (Hrsg.), Die Audienz.
Ritualisierter Kulturkontakt in der Frühen Neuzeit. Köln; Weimar;

Wien: Böhlau, 2014, SS. 57–81.
Hennings J., ‘Neudachnyy podarok: kulturnyy shok ili politicheskaya
kultura? O funktsii i znachenii diplomaticheskogo dara v anglo-
russkikh otnosheniyakh XVII v.’ [The Failed Gift: Culture Shock or
Political Culture? On the Function and Meaning of a Diplomatic
Gift in Anglo-Russian Relations of the Seventeenth Century], Alt
hoff G., Boytsov M. (eds.), Na yazyke darov: pravila simvolicheskoy
kommunikatsii v Evrope 1000–1700 gg. [In the Language of Gifts.
The Rules of Symbolical Communication in Europe, 1000–700].
Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2016, pp. 202–25. (In Russian).
Kollmann N. S., By Honor Bound: State and Society in Early Modern Russia.
Ithaca, NY; London: Cornell University Press, 1999, XIII+296 pp.
Kollmann N., Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Russia. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2012, XVI+488 pp. (New Studies in
European History).
Poe M. T., ‘A People Born to Slavery’: Russia in Early Modern European
Ethnography, 1476–1748. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000,
XI+293 pp. (Studies of the Harriman Institute).
Tolstikov A. V., ‘Chest pokoynogo monarkha kak predmet diplomaticheskogo
spora: epizod iz istorii rossiysko-shvedskikh otnosheniy XVII v.’
[The Deceased Monarch’s Honour as the Subject of Diplomatic
Dispute: An Episode of the Seventeenth Century Russo-Swedish
Relations], Studia Humanitatis Borealis, 2013, no. 1, pp. 4–18.
(In Russian).
Yuzefovich L. A., ‘Kak v posolskikh obychayakh vedetsya...’: Russkiy posolskiy
obychay kontsa XV — nachala XVII v. [‘According to the Am
bassadorial Custom...’: The Russian Diplomatic Ceremonial from
the End of the Fifteenth to the Beginning of the Seventeenth
Century]. Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniya, 1988, 219 pp.
(In Russian).
Yuzefovich L. A., Put posla: russkiy posolskiy obychay. Obikhod. Etiket.
Tseremonial. Konets XV — pervaya polovina XVII v. [The Am
bassador’s Path: Russian Ambassadorial Custom. Practice. Etiquette.
Ceremonial. From the End of the Fifteenth to the First Half of the
Seventeenth Century]. St Petersburg: Ivan Limbakh Publishing
House, 2011, 340, [2] pp. (In Russian).
Zakharov A. V., ‘Rukopis “Dedikatsii” P. P. Shafirova i gosudarstvennaya
propaganda Petra I’ [The Manuscript of ‘Dedikatsiya’ by P. P. Sha
firov and the State Propaganda of the Petrine Epoch], Vestnik
Chelyabinskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, 2014, vol. 61, no. 22,

221 R eviews
Victor Shnirelman, Koleno Danovo: eskhatologiya

i antisemitizm v sovremennoy Rossii [The Tribe of Dan:
Eschatology and Anti-Semitism in Modern Russia].
Moscow: St Andrew’s Biblical Theological Institute Press,
2017, XIV+617 pp.
The new book by Victor Shnirelman is a very important contribution to

the studies of current Russian political eschatology. The author
proposes to discuss several very troublesome issues of the theory and
methodology of researching discursive practices of Orthodox political
radicals. The book should be regarded as an invitation to further analysis
of this social field using new methods and new sources.
Keywords: political eschatology, religious nationalism, Russian

orthodoxy, anti-Semitism, Antichrist.
The Catechon as a Category of Orthodox

Consciousness: Outlines of Russian
Political Eschatology
Last year yet another magnum opus by Victor
Shnirelman, the well-known Russian student of
xenophobia and anti-Semitism, was published.
This book, though not as voluminous as the
previous one, still gives the impression of
a substantial work, not only because of the
number of pages, but also because of the range
of questions considered. Indeed, the author
constructs his exposition in such a way that
there is room in it for a very wide range of
people’s views on the nature of the Antichrist,
from the early Christian theologian Irenaeus of
Lyons to our contemporary Ioann Bereslavskiy,
the ardent visionary and founder of one of the
new religious movements. However, both the
Sergei Shtyrkov early centuries of Christianity and contemporary
European University religious initiatives in the form of charismatic
at St Petersburg
6/1A Gagarinskaya Str., Orthodoxy are more of a background for the
St Petersburg, Russia / author’s fundamental research field. In this
Peter the Great Museum work he has decided to understand how anti-
of Anthropology and Ethnography
(Kunstkamera), Semitism (and more rarely philo-Semitism) and
Russian Academy of Sciences eschatology are correlated in the Russian Ortho
3 Universitetskaya Emb., dox tradition. The research is focused, moreover,
St Petersburg, Russia /
Institute of Russian Literature on Orthodox life in post-Soviet Russia. To put
(The Pushkin House), it as simply as possible, it is a question of who,
Russian Academy of Sciences among the people who call themselves Ortho
4 Makarova Emb.,
St Petersburg, Russia dox, does not like Jews and Judaism, how
shtyr@eu.spb.ru and why.
Shnirelman suggests that this work should be seen as the third and
final part of his trilogy about modern intellectual anti-Semitism,
which also contains his books about two ‘myths’ — the Khazar
myth [Shnirelman 2012] and the Aryan myth [Shnirelman 2015].
I must stress that this trilogy is about intellectuals (the less polite
among us might call some of them lumpen-intellectuals) and the
texts that they create for the public space. In The Tribe of Dan,
obviously, we shall not learn about all Orthodox people nor about
all their political eschatology, but about an important component
of it. The ‘silent majority’ (which is not all that silent nowadays,
thanks to social networks) remains out of play. This may be because
of an equally tacit assumption that in its everyday discourse this
majority reproduces simplified versions of the intellectuals’
opinions. We may doubt whether this is really the case, but one
way or another Victor Shnirelman prefers to work with open
written sources.
In other words, what is represented on the pages of this book is the
discursive activity of the Orthodox elite and, to an even greater
extent, counter-elite. That is, it is mostly about the leaders of the
Russian Orthodox Church or the Orthodox historians, jurists,
writers, publicists and political analysts who are actively writing in
various publications and meeting at numerous conferences. Even in
сhapter 8, ‘The “Last Times” and the Mobilisation of the Masses’, in
which we are promised an examination of ‘the mood and protest
activity of “church folk” and the wider masses of believers as studied
by specialists and journalists in the course of their personal obser
vations, and also via sociological surveys’ (p. 488), we do not find
all that much material about this topic. I understand that all research
has its methodological limits and that the author’s basic method is
to work with open sources: he has attained a well-deserved scholarly
reputation on this basis. But, overall, Internet sources — social
networks, and the numerous video recordings that are openly
available — could have extended the source base for this part of his
analysis. But let us leave that sort of research to others, and turn our
attention to the results of this particular case.
The subject of Shnirelman’s discussion is extremely politically
salient, even what one might call a plum topic in modern Russian
politics. The main players in this field — I mean not the researchers,
but the people who produce the texts that the author studies — have
established themselves as steadfast warriors against the wiles of the
Antichrist (steadfast in the sense that they are tireless in their search
for new arguments to confirm their opinions). Therefore the reader
who opens this book has a right to expect some entertaining
reading. But this calculation will only be partly justified. It turns
out that reading The Tribe of Dan demands serious intellectual
effort, which will not necessarily be fully rewarded. I shall indicate
223 R eviews
the four basic problems — which might at the same time be advan
Sergei Shtyrkov. A Review of Victor Shnirelman, Koleno Danovo: eskhatologiya i antisemitizm v sovremennoy Rossii
tages — that characterise the author’s argumentation and rhetorical

strategy.
Firstly, in his preface and introduction Shnirelman presents his
research questions to us several times, approaching the problem from
different angles. This gives volume to the problem posed, but
disorientates the reader somewhat, since (s)he gets lost in trying to
work out what the book will be about and how the author understands
his subject. I shall try to explain my objection a little further on. The
book’s second great intellectual challenge is that its basic material
(chapters 3–8) is set out in such detail and so scrupulously, that
because of the multitude of intersections in the opinions of dif
ferent people about world government, the Jews, and the ‘mystery of
iniquity’, that ineluctable part of Russian apocalyptics, reading these
hundreds of pages leaves the impression of travel through a dreary
and monotonous desert. To put it more simply, these chapters are
hard to read.
The third problem (which is also a merit) in the book is that the
author has decided to assist the reader in determining the socio-
historical context in which contemporary Russian eschatological
anti-Semitism is situated, and moreover in both its synchronic and
diachronic dimensions. Therefore the book contains several
fragments, some of them in the form of separate chapters, explaining
the state of eschatology — sometimes in its relation to the Jews —
among the leadership of the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian
Orthodox Church, in various Russian new religious movements, and
among conservative Protestants in America. But these parts are so
insignificant in extent, so schematic in argumentation and, one
might say, so provisional in terms of the material they draw on, that
they resemble pilot fish and remoras accompanying a huge and
dignified shark. Both the shark and its satellites, of course, come
into the frame of the Discovery Channel cameraman, but the latter
do so only on the strength of their proximity to the main object of
interest of the man who is making the film.
The fourth problem (for me, at least) is the way the book’s conclusion
is written. It contains so many fruitful and scintillating opinions,
albeit somewhat perfunctorily expressed, that the reader who is
pressed for time might be well advised to read only the conclusion
in order to understand what the book is about. But in itself this
conclusion exists independently of the basic contents and does not
look like an organic part of the greater text. Usually authors make
a greater effort to connect their empirical material with the general
conclusions placed at the end of the work. In this case the material
and the conclusions live separate lives, have their own value and,
if one may so express it, their own aesthetics.
Let us now turn to more detailed considerations on various scales,

following the logic of the overall narrative. As I have already said,
the introductory parts of the book (the preface and introduction),
give a many-sided, but at the same time somewhat disorientating
idea of the object of the author’s interest. This may partly be ex
plained by the discursive habits that have taken root in our academic
establishment. One of these is the desire to show the reader the social
significance of any research, and another is to present the alternative
ways of interpreting our subject in dramatic opposition, almost in
conflict, to demonstrate all the complexity of the intellectual voyage
which the author is proposing to the reader. Thus Shnirelman says
that there is ‘an urgent need to study the peculiarities of contemporary
xenophobia’. And to do this one has to find out what ‘makes up its
content, whether it is limited to fleeting everyday moods and popular
stereotypes or appeals to complex mythological schemas’ (p. IX).
Let us leave aside the question of how effectively we can answer the
acute challenges of our difficult age. But the problem of the cor
relation between passing discursive habits and stable interpretative
structures is an important one for the social sciences and the answer
to it is not so obvious. Will they prove to be mutually exclusive?
It seems that the author himself considers that this is not the case,
and everyday concerns are not able to find materials for their
embodiment in actual social activity outside relatively stable systems
for generating meaning (‘there is today a whole market of ideo
logemes and mythological schemes worked out in great detail at the
service of anti-Semitic attitudes,’ p. X). But in any case the research
question is formulated so broadly here that it is hard to imagine
what research needs to be done in order to answer it.
Another judgment of a general character, which seems incontro
vertible, but trips one up when one reads it, is to be found on the
same page: ‘[Anti-Semitism] today can be viewed as an archetype
which prepares the soil for all other forms of xenophobia and
provides them with arguments’ (p. X). Anti-Semitism does indeed
look archetypal nowadays, particularly since the West has assimilated
the Holocaust as one of the key points in world history and uses its
image as an ideal type in the interpretation of a series of other
instances of the mass murder of people chosen for annihilation
because of their ethnicity. But should we take anti-Semitism as our
starting point for understanding other forms of xenophobia? It may
be that anti-Semitism itself was in certain historical and national
contexts transformed under the influence of the application to the
Jews of stereotypes that had previously determined attitudes to other
ethnic or religious groups. And it may be that it had almost no
influence on some forms of the social imagination that stigmatised
people for one or another reason. All this needs to be sorted out
before one gives anti-Semitism the status of an ideal type.
225 R eviews
On p. XII the reader finds a whole list of questions which, it seems,

are research questions; but I am not entirely convinced of this,

particularly considering the first of them: ‘Will the end of the world
come in the near future? How do people understand the last times
and what do they expect of them? Why does this period horrify
people and what role do the ancient prophecies play in this? Why
do certain tendencies in the evolution of the modern world — and
which — cause eschatological anxiety?’, and so on. In the next part
of the book, the introduction, we find yet another list of research
questions (pp. 26–9). They are perfectly concrete, but there are so
many of them, and they differ so much in scale, that it looks more
like a project for a vast research programme than a list of what
might be touched on in a single study, highly ambitious though it
might be.
The introduction itself is in the main aimed at acquainting the reader
with the problems of eschatology and its connection with
Judaeophobia. Here the author touches on several questions which
seem to me to be extremely important. The first of them is: To what
extent do the contents of the texts that are represented in one or
another religious institution as the basis for doctrine determine the
emotional life and actual behaviour of believers? (p. 14). It seems
that the author himself is sure that this factor is not a decisive one.
Referring to the opinions of theologians, he notes that they find no
grounds ‘for seeking the roots of anti-Semitism in the Scriptures’.
But, as we know, there are references to the New Testament in the
anti-Semitic arguments of a number of Orthodox writers. That is, it
does not depend on the text itself, but on what people want to find
(and of course do find) in it. The eye of an emotional interpreter of
a sacred text, looking at it from a particular angle, concentrates on
certain passages and sees in them the promise of a particular future
and the confirmation of the ideas of the moment. This process,
naturally, ignores a huge amount of material that is not relevant
for the current agenda, which, moreover, may remain topical for
decades.
Sometimes the outside observer cannot fail to be struck by this
capacity for concentrating on the exegesis of a limited range of
quotations from the Bible and the Fathers of the Church. Thus with
a certain amount of exaggeration one might say that the whole
doctrine of political eschatology, vast as it is in volume and diversity,
of Orthodox writers on the apocalypse, from the time of Sergei Nilus
to the present, is concentrated around a somewhat cloudy sentence
from the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians (II Thess. 2:7): ‘For the
mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now letteth
[ὁ κατέχων] will let, until he be taken out of the way.’ This opaque
verse from the New Testament has lodged itself firmly in Russian
eschatological thought and, continually worrying the political
imagination of Orthodox statists, has been its cornerstone for many

decades. Near to it is another fragment of the New Testament, as the
final argument unmetaphorically treated as ontological invective
addressed to all Hebrews (Jews): ‘Ye are of your father the devil, and
the lusts of your father ye will do’ (John 8:44). All in all, this is the
set of arguments from Scripture for the treatment of all world history
and the current political (geopolitical) situation in this key. These
are the passages from the New Testament on which the eschatological
thought of ‘nationally thinking’ Orthodox writers expends its
labours, leaving aside the Revelation of St John the Divine, in which,
as we know, the Antichrist is not mentioned (see: I John 2:18–22,
I John 4:3, II John 1:7).
Another important question which arises when reading the
introduction concerns the modality in which we should receive
the apocalyptic utterances that can be encountered in abundance
on the pages of the works of political analysts who reveal the
‘spiritual meaning’ of the events that take place in the world. In this
connection we can ask a simple question: Are the authors of such
opinions really preparing for the coming of the end times, or do
they merely want the reader to take their entirely earthly alarmism
as seriously as possible? The question may seem unanswerable (one
cannot make windows into men’s souls) and even pointless if we
suppose that we should be interested in the meanings that readers
get out of the texts, and not those that the authors put into them.
It may nevertheless be important for the understanding of our
subject whether we are dealing (in the case of such utterances) with
the doctrine of the end of the world or with rhetorical lamentations
over the current socio-political situation.
Victor Shnirelman leaves both variants of the treatment of such
judgments open. On the one hand, he admits that eschatological
anxieties do exist and give rise to an aggressive ideology of religious
fundamentalism (we do not mean all cases of eschatologism, but
specific statements of a number of contemporary Orthodox political
analysts) (p. 26). On the other hand, remembering Damian Thomp
son’s book Waiting for Antichrist [Thompson 2005], he writes that
‘discussions of the end of the world may be perceived <…> as
a language for describing the surrounding misery and injustice, but
that does not mean that people seriously believe in the end of the
world’ (p. 26). It seems that the material out of which the book is
constructed suggests that practical politics uses the rhetoric of the
Apocalypse in particular situations, and lays it aside without much
regret when events make the authors change their alarmist warnings
to triumphal discourses. Then expectations of a last battle with the
forces of darkness recede into the background. However, the
aggressive ideology does not disappear along with them. Thus after
the beginning of the ‘Russian spring’ certain publicists of the
227 R eviews
Orthodox-patriotic circle (such as Konstantin Dushenov) easily left

behind their concern for the ultimate fate of a world that had fallen
under the sway of Antichrist and began to celebrate the victory of
the Russian State, so that it became more or less clear: they are more
concerned about the fate of the empire, and dream of the return of
that social order where they, Russian Orthodox statists, will have
more power over their ideological opponents and supposed ethnic
competitors in the struggle for the resources lost as a result of the
events of 1991–3.
The next chapters of The Tribe of Dan are devoted to the exposition
of the eschatological views and utterances of various authors. Some
subjects are represented briefly, others in great detail. Thus there is
a quite detailed description of the process of the formation of the
ideology of new Orthodox monarchism during the last years of the
USSR. Its proponents, having carefully acquainted themselves with
the heritage of the political thought of pre-revolutionary and émigré
Orthodox fundamentalism, and interpreting the events of perestroika
from this position, laid the foundations of modern political historio
sophy and eschatology (chapters 2, 3 and 4). The volume of the
sources used, the care with which the material on the questions
under examination is sifted, and the acuity of the author’s obser
vations on the most diverse occasions are truly striking.
As for the interpretation of sources, I would like to remark that there
is perhaps too little of it, as there is of an overall placing of highlights
in the sea of data that threatens to overwhelm the reader. All the
more valuable are those separate brief sententiae that reveal the
meaning of what the main heroes of the book — the authors writing
in the newspapers Zemshchina, Russkiy vestnik and Den, their
friends and ideological allies — have been trying, stubbornly and
unimaginatively, to bring home to their readers. For example,
characterising the historiosophical treatment of the above-mentioned
verse from St Paul’s epistles in Zemshchina, Shnirelman notes
‘It seems that it [Zemshchina] was prepared to allot the role of “him
who now letteth” not so much to the Tsar as to authoritarian political
power. Therefore it argued that the Soviet state order partly retained
the function of “him who letteth”’ (pp. 184–5). This statement could,
in my view, be used as the fundamental characteristic of the vector
along which Orthodox political eschatology has been evolving in
Russia since the end of the 1980s.
In this context I will permit myself to make a small correction.
It seems quite important from the point of view of the study of the
genesis of certain commonplaces in the discursive practices of
contemporary political eschatology. On p. 175 the author, following
the opinion of Peter Duncan [Duncan 2000], writes: ‘The metaphor
of the “Russian Golgotha”, which ascribes to Russia sufferings
comparable to the Passion of Christ, was first enunciated by

Fr Dmitri Dudko as early as 1977.’ In fact this is not so, and it would
be hard to expect that this metaphor would not have been used
before the end of the 1970s. And indeed, it appears in the context
of the interpretation of the events of the years of revolution no later
than 1918, when A. I. Verkhovskiy used images which are abundantly
represented in the historical publicist writings of all the subsequent
decades: ‘These dreadful years of the war and months of the
revolution were a death agony, unbearable suffering for all who loved
their native land. The Golgotha of the Russian army. The Golgotha
of the Russian land. Through great suffering the people’s soul is
being cleansed of its old sins’ [Verkhovskiy 1918: 141]. In 1919
a book of amateur verses by F. N. Kasatkin-Rostovskiy entitled
Golgofa Rossii ‘The Russian Golgotha’, the contents of which
correspond fully with its title, was published in Rostov-on-Don
[Kasatkin-Rostovskiy 1919]. From the very first years of the
emigration the image of crucified Russia is ever present on the pages
of émigré publications.1 This topos did not perhaps at first receive
any serious soteriological interpretation, but it certainly became one
of the main means of describing, and to a certain extent analysing
the events of the revolution and Civil War. For example, it was
fundamental in the work of Sergey Bekhteev, a poet who did a great
deal to develop the theme of the sufferings on the cross of Russia
and the Emperor Nicholas II, a theme which was so important for
émigré, and later also post-Soviet political eschatology.2

1
See for example: ‘The last four years in the life of Russia were one continuous Golgotha. The great
country has been crucified untiringly, unmercifully and unhesitatingly’ [Maslov 1922: 66].

2
I shall quote a poem in which the image of the crucified Russia is one element of a more general and
detailed picture of the Bolsheviks’ rise to power, represented as the beginning of the kingdom of
Antichrist. It is a clear illustration of the sort of heritage the post-Soviet political apocalyptics had
to do with.

The Russian Golgotha

The Jew and his qahal are just the
same as a conspiracy against Russia.

The Jews will ruin Russia.

F. M. Dostoevsky

The Messiah’s prophecy is fulfilled
And ‘darkness’ has overcome ‘light’.
Antichrist has appeared in Russia,
The bloody tyrant Baphomet.
The whole empire is full of sedition,
There is no end to disorders and conflicts;
Brother raises his hand against brother,
Son raises his sword against father.
Russian people are killing each other,
And two camps of enemies are fighting;
People are overcome with tears
Among little orphans and widows.
The devil sleeps not nor slumbers,
He is full of guile and wickedness;
He will raise his hand against the Church,
229 R eviews
In my opinion one of Victor Shnirelman’s most important obser

vations on the workings of post-Soviet political eschatology is his
indication of two fundamentally important aspects of its functioning.
The first aspect is that it began to use interpretative schemes
borrowed from émigré religious metahistory to interpret the change
of the political and ideological regime in the USSR (true, the author
reminds us several times about another tradition of native political
thought which influenced the new Russian eschatology, namely that
of late Soviet ‘anti-Zionism’ — see, for example, p. 265). The second
aspect is that one of the basic methods of ‘working with empirical
material’ in this context came to be the discovery of ‘spiritual
meanings’, which, however, could be reduced to the idea that an
authoritarian (ideally monarchical) form of governing Russia was
seen as an instrument of God’s care for the salvation of the elect in
conditions of the kingdom of Antichrist.
The return of Orthodoxy into the social discourse and the recourse
had to it by the national-patriots was accompanied by a growth of
interest in eschatology, which helped them to make sense of the
phenomena of the crisis that were unfolding before their eyes <…>
They were conscious of it [this discourse], moreover, on two levels,
the phenomenological and the metaphysical. On the first level it was
a matter of current events and their discussion in political, social and
economic terms. But on the second the traditional concept of
involution came into play, describing an inevitable movement from
the Golden Age to decline and dissolution, which Christian eschatology
And God’s throne will be overthrown.

The evildoer celebrates his holiday
Burning culture in the fire,
And the Jews prepare a new blow
For the land of Christ.
The people has turned to the lagoon,
It rushes on from the distant wilderness.
The Chinaman saves the commune,
Latvians feast in the Kremlin.
The dungeons are trembling with groaning,
Torture follows torture,
And the savage cry ‘Face the wall!’
Sounds from the maw of the devil.
Judas the Antichrist rejoices,
Happy with the success of his victories:
A universal marvel has happened:
The Christian empire is no more.
Satan is rattling his cudgels,
And dancing on a heap of coffins
He rewards his slaves
With a bloody star and horns.
And the soldiers with the ‘red star’,
Accepting the fatal seal,
With reviling nail to the cross
Their unhappy Mother Country.
(SS ‘Rumyantsev’, 6 September 1920, White Crimea) [Bekhteev 2004: 202–4]

explained as the activity of ‘Satanic forces’ clearing the way for the
Antichrist. Only ‘he that now letteth’ could oppose these forces, and
therefore, from this point of view, the basic conflict in the world was
between him and the ‘forces of evil’, whoever they were (p. 264).
Certain other topics which are important for understanding con
temporary political eschatology are mentioned in the main part of
the book and perhaps deserve closer analysis. Thus, several times,
when Jews and Jewishness in the social imagination of Orthodox
metahistorians are described, there appears the idea that some of
the Jews are the natural conductors of modernising tendencies in
that society which these authors, when discussing these subjects,
would like to keep in a pre-modern condition of Orthodox piety
and patriarchal way of life. For example, the Ashkenazim in this
capacity sometimes turn out to be the descendants of Turkic
Khazars, that is, not altogether Jewish. It evidently results from this
that they possess a particular inclination towards assimilation and
are contrasted with the traditionalist Sephardim (p. 348). These
qualities — an inclination towards assimilation and the capacity for
being practically the main agents of the destruction of the established
way of life of other peoples — seem to lie at the root of a significant
number of theories about the Jews’ national specificity, both anti-
Semitic and philo-Semitic. Being self-evident, this presupposition is
rarely the subject of anthropological reflection, which cannot but
produce a certain bewilderment, not to say regret. But we have no
right at all to reproach the author of the book because this work has
not been done.
However, the reproduction on the pages of this book of certain
opinions in the spirit of everyday common sense does require
commentary. On p. 350 we read: ‘The apocalyptic consciousness,
like any sort of traditionalist consciousness, is a pessimistic
consciousness. It inclines people towards a passive expectation of
the decline and complete collapse of human civilisation, as if these
were determined by God’s will.’ This is followed by a reference to
the discussion by the well-known traditionalist Deacon Andrey
Kuraev of the ‘ethics of defeat’, well known in certain circles. It seems
to me that it is hard to acknowledge this idea, expressed as a general
proposition, as correct. We know apocalyptics whose view of
the approaching end of times is full of a striking optimism, and
traditionalists who do not lapse into apathy but are, on the contrary,
ready to set about bringing their ideals into existence with great
energy.
Another stereotype that might possibly impede our understanding
of the nature of what is happening is the opposition between the
religious and the political as spheres of social experience, supposedly
existing independently of each other (p. 365). I am sure that there
231 R eviews
are many contexts where this opposition is a valuable tool for

analysis, but the subjects examined in this book are not among them.
Not only do the heroes of this book — contemporary Orthodox
apocalyptics — themselves live in a world of political categories (in
their consciousness and in ritual there are no other meanings besides
the changing and affirmation of the power relationships between
people, and therefore the murder of the imperial family must be
a ritual murder, in order to have any value). But something else is
important here: the background for the definition of our subject,
political eschatology, is created by a thesis from the arsenal of
everyday political philosophy, according to which in a normal society
genuine religion is naturally separated from the sphere of politics,
in the same way as the eternal is separated from the transient, and
the things that are Caesar’s from the things that are God’s. Moreover,
such a version of the normative approach, which has been dissected
and controverted more than once [Asad 1983], is itself a political
programme which is presented to the public by the leaders of the
dominant religious institutions with the aim of gaining serious
political power. The widespread thesis ‘The Church does not engage
in politics,’ promoted, for example, by representatives of the Russian
Orthodox Church, means, apart from anything else (and perhaps
before anything else), that religious institutions, whose axiological
foundations are fundamental and stable, should be the natural
arbiters in any political battles.
One other important principle for the articulation of the space in
which phenomena are observed, which determines our view of reality
and, accordingly, our choice of means to analyse it, is also connected
with the problem of the normative approach. I will say at once
that overall the work under review cannot be accused of having
a normative approach. But there are places where one may be
glimpsed. For example, many students of religious life have to answer
the question of where the boundaries of the religious group whose
life interests them are, and where something else begins. Many of
us will remember the discussions around the concept of ‘popular
religion’ and the methodology behind it. In our case the concept
that prompts us to define its boundaries is ‘Orthodoxy’. Let me give
an example: ‘As E. Levkievskaya has shown, many of the inter
pretations of the Apocalypse analysed above are in fact a “mimicry”
of Orthodoxy. For this reason some active members of the Russian
Orthodox Church are doing their best to refute the rumours of the
approach of the Antichrist and condemn the search for signs in
contemporary reality’ (pp. 566–7).
Indeed, some of the authors who position themselves as Orthodox
believers alarmed at the fate of the Russian people and state write
about historical and current events in a manner which may be con
sidered extremist. It is not in the interests of the Church establishment
for their institution to be associated in the eyes of the (secular)

majority with calls to solve complex problems with simple coercive
methods. Some of the faithful, who are remote from political
eschatology, share this reluctance to appear brothers in religion of
those whom outsiders regard as breakers of certain shared con
ventions on what can be said in public about members of other social
groups. Furthermore, some people who are outside the Church may
for one reason or another not wish for it to be stigmatised.
One way out of this image problem is to define those who are
responsible for it as a kind of external force that is representing itself
illegitimately as a natural part of the great social body. This is
a perfectly comprehensible policy, but researchers are not obliged
to follow its cultural logic. We know that the people who represent
one group or another in the public space quite often strive to stress
its unity and solidarity by glossing over the divisions within the
group and excising (discursively at least, if not administratively)
those members that discredit it. But this does not give them the right
(automatically) to regard as a social pathology those phenomena
that do not, from the point of view of the ‘leadership’, correspond
to the norm, that is, to that image of the group that is being offered
to the public at large.
Incidentally, it is by this tacit assumption that there is a certain
correct knowledge of history, Orthodoxy, etc. that not everybody
shares that one can explain those passages where the author decides
to castigate his heroes for their lack of education or sufficient
information on the questions about which they express opinions.
Thus on p. 311 Shnirelman reproaches the authors of anti-Semitic
compositions that they do not want to go into the details of history.
One of them ‘has not even attempted either to discover the real
meaning of the Talmud, or to understand the motives of mediaeval
Jews, nor to sort out what the Talmud does in fact teach and how
it is applied today.’ On pp. 432–3, in the context of a description
of the ‘International Conference on Global Problems of World
History’ (2002), the ‘global’ in the title already indicating the range
of the participants, he remarks bitterly: ‘Positioning themselves as
“the bearers of the truth”, many of them not only failed to understand
what was happening in the modern world and had a poor knowledge
of history, but had not even a grasp of the rudiments of that
Christianity to which they were constantly appealing.’
It seems superfluous to rebuke nationalist historiosophists for not
knowing the subject sufficiently. Their interest is in metahistory,
which necessarily presupposes ‘a maximally general schematisation
of the past and its links to the present’ [Pigalev 2013: 63]. Besides,
the attitude of most of them towards Orthodoxy is utterly
instrumental. Therefore Christian doctrine is in itself of no interest
233 R eviews
at all to some of the orators who spoke at that forum. But something
else is interesting here: the ‘literate’ Christians who also take part in
such events are in no hurry to call out their fellow-travellers and
their temporary (situational) allies in the struggle for the triumph
of ‘a spiritual reading of history’. And in this they are pursuing their
own ends.
It is also naïve to reproach Orthodox activists, who make no secret
of their religious and political commitment, for interpreting history
‘only from a Christian viewpoint, that is taking account exclusively
of Christian (and often above all Orthodox) interests and completely
ignoring the history of other peoples or religious groups’ (p. 571).
From time to time the reader will discover penetrating sociological
observations in the boundless space of the text-centred and on the
whole descriptive narrative of this book. Thus, in determining
the ideological roots of the views of the philosopher A. S. Panarin,
Victor Shnirelman writes: ‘One had the impression that it was the
disa ppearing Soviet middle class speaking through Panarin’s
lips, discouraged by its unfulfilled hopes and the loss of its old
positions. Cruel disillusion with the liberal reforms made these
people look for salvation in identity and historico-cultural
uniqueness’ (p. 390). This remark, like many others that I have come
across in the book, requires further argumentation, but in its
lapidary form it indicates the direction in which the social origins
of modern political eschatology should be sought. And, on the
subject of the author’s tendency to express important opinions and
leave them without extensive argumentation, one must pay special
attention to the conclusion.
The conclusion begins by noting the variety of opinions on the
questions that we refer to the sphere of political eschatology.
[T]o serve the needs of the faithful a whole market of ideas evolved
in which everyone could find a version that was useful to him. In other
words, interpretations of the Apocalypse are by no means condemned
to Judaeophobia, and if it is the Judaeophobic version that particular
ideologues and propagandists choose, there must be reasons for this
which are to be sought not in the tradition, but in specific historical
circumstances (p. 581).
Further on, on pp. 583–4, the continuity between Soviet and post-
Soviet anti-Semitic ideology is described: ‘[T]he old struggle against
“international Zionism” <…> was transformed in the speech of the
new Orthodox into a struggle against “Talmudists” and “Freemasons”,
who were supposed to be clearing the way for the Antichrist;’ ‘It was
from this position that it was possible to represent Russia as the last
bulwark of “true Christianity”, and thus as “him who now letteth”
with the vocation of deferring the end of the world and saving
humanity from the advent of the Antichrist.’ We find another

important observation on p. 586:
Today the Apocalypse is treated by some authors as the ideology of
a marginal group which has not found a fitting place for itself in
society and is therefore experiencing frustration <…> The notions [of
the people who belong to this group] of a fitting existence are at
sharp variance with stern reality. This produces the hope of miraculous
changes which could change the world radically.
I would have put it differently: the hopes that the world would stop
changing and return to its natural condition, where these people
could expect the fitting existence promised to them by the logic of
the existence of the former order. These hopes do not even look like
hopes, since they are not the anticipation of a new, just world, but
an explanation for why the old, just world was destroyed, and a fear
that it will continue to disintegrate under pressure from globalisation
and the liberal axiological system.
In defining the limits of the social group in which such attitudes
gained ground, the author points to the ‘former Soviet middle class’
which had lost its position at the beginning of the 1990s. More
specifically, it is a matter of military personnel and engineers: ‘the
former lost the respect and status that they had enjoyed, and the
latter their employment at the vast works of the military-industrial
complex;’ ‘In democracy they saw anarchy, undermining the order
to which they were accustomed’ (p. 587). This led them to a protective
conservative ideology and a desire to return to an authoritarian
political system, and also, naturally, to the creation (or recreation)
of explanations for all the major upheavals in the history of Russia
by looking for a group the interests of which would be served
by these dramatic changes.
On p. 589 the author points out the similarity between the con
frontational ideology of Soviet foreign policy propaganda (strictly
speaking the propaganda itself was internal, but it offered an
interpretation of foreign policy) and contemporary religious
political eschatology. There is no doubt that ex-Soviet citizens
brought up in an atmosphere of suspicion if not hatred towards the
West habitually reproduce the image of the ‘natural enemy’ of the
motherland and the nation and expect misfortunes to come from
the same quarter from which they expected them for the several
decades after the war. But, it seems, here is the answer (or part of
the answer) to another important question: why many Russian
(post-)communists end up as effectively allies of the Orthodox
monarchists [Moroz 1992: 84–5]. It is obvious that both of them
see in the USSR the same ‘him that letteth’ — the power that
prevented America and its allies from introducing their own system
everywhere in the world. When Soviet citizens evaluated the
235 R eviews
competition between the two systems on the world arena, they did
not so much care about the wellbeing of the inhabitants of one or

another country on the road to the building of socialism, as enjoy
another defeat of the imperialist policies of the USA. Therefore the
crusades of a conservative Christian American president against
the Soviet system were perceived by some Russian patriots as the
same in principle as attempts to disseminate the principle of the
primacy of human rights over the interests of the state by the much
more liberal administrations that governed the same country in the
following decades.
Another important element which has been left in the form of a short
thesis but perhaps deserves a more detailed discussion in view of its
importance for understanding the situation is fear of globalisation.
The book mentions several times that according to contemporary
eschatological alarmists, the villains of the apocalypse are setting in
motion projects to create a single humanity in order to destroy
nation-states. This is also mentioned in the conclusion (p. 589). For
a social imagination founded on the proposition that nations exist
naturally, are formed on ethnic-genetic principles and as a result are
the fundamental movers of the historical process, such menaces
threaten to destroy the basic classificatory schemes (and how can
we help thinking of Durkheim’s categories of the collective con
sciousness here?). It is worth remarking that the fear of the neo-
liberal gender order is similar in character. The question of the
blurring of gender roles is, after all, not so much a problem of
affirming social justice, as of the destruction of a social classification
that has existed from time immemorial.
In this connection one may compare the eschatological opinions of
certain contemporary Orthodox political activists with the traditional
peasant accounts of the decay of the world, to take note of one
important (genetic?) similarity between them. The principle of
conceptualisation in village eschatology is often simple: the world,
characterised by the presence of clear boundaries between pheno
mena, is threatened by chaos. Once, in answer to my naïve question
on a demonological topic, an elderly peasant woman from Novgorod
spoke for a long time and with animation about how ‘people have
become like devils’ (cf. [Bessonov 2014: 131]), and then about how
nowadays you could not tell where the village was, and where the
forest, and in the end about the impossibility of determining from
the outward appearance of the young people of today ‘who they
are — lads or lasses’. In conclusion to this part of her reply I was
referred to the Scriptures: ‘It’s all going like it says in the Bible!’
It seems that many people who share this sort of logic, but with
regard to the present political world order, understand the expression
‘the mystery of iniquity’ as meaning ‘the destruction of the ac
customed social order’.
Returning to the conclusion of The Tribe of Dan, and continuing

to be surprised at the abundance of highly interesting observations
to which so little space is given, I shall point to the classification of
elements of the lexical arsenal of contemporary Russian conspiracy
theorists. These last are much given to euphemisms and allegories
(and, it seems, not only from fear of prosecution, as the author
believes, but also because of some other discursive habits), and also
to New Testament phraseology and the use of the names of the
powerful institutions that rule the world. The peculiarity of the use
of these lexemes and expressions (and not only their bare presence
in the spoken and written language of modern critics of the New
World Order) is that the modality of expression is consistently ‘stuck’
between the literal and metaphorical meaning of a given lexeme,
collocation or idiom. This peculiarity is a characteristic feature of
speech about some sort of covert activities which should be un
masked by the very act of speaking about them, but which at the
same time, even after having been unmasked, retain the status of
phenomena which have not entirely lost their mysteriousness, and,
therefore, cannot be understood by the uninitiated. Of course, not
all religious conspiracy theorists consistently avoid direct accusations
against specific groups and structures, but it is impossible not to
notice a certain reluctance to name names in their discursive
behaviour.
As I end this review, I wish to state again that Victor Shnirelman’s
new book is an exceptionally important step in the study of
contemporary Russian political eschatology. It is the work of an
experienced professional and deserves the highest estimation. At the
same time it should be seen as an invitation to further research on
the subject, using new methods and new materials, but certainly
continuing the discussion of those complex conceptual questions
of theory and methodology that have been raised or touched upon
by Victor Shnirelman in his analysis of the discursive practices
of Russian apocalyptics in these our, perhaps, last times.
Acknowledgments
This review was prepared with the support of the Russian Science
Foundation, project no. 14-18-02952-P (‘Conspiracy Narratives in Russian
Culture of the Nineteenth — Early Twenty-First Century: Genesis,
Evolution, Ideological and Social Contexts’).
Sources
Bekhteev S. S., Gryadushchee: stikhotvoreniya [The Future: Works in Verse].
St Petersburg: s.n., 2004, 448 pp. (In Russian).
Kasatkin-Rostovskiy F. N., Golgofa Rossii [The Russian Golgotha]. Rostov-
on-Don: s.n., 1919, 54 pp. (In Russian).
237 R eviews
Maslov S. S., Rossiya posle chetyrekh let revolyutsii [Russia after Four Years
of Revolution]. Paris: Russkaya pechat, 1922, 206 pp. (In Russian).

Verkhovskiy A. I., Rossiya na Golgofe: iz pokhodnogo dnevnika 1914–1918 g.
[Russia on Golgotha: From a Field Diary 1914–8]. Petrograd:
5-ya gosudarstvennaya tip., 1918, 141 pp. (In Russian).
References
Asad T., ‘Anthropological Conceptions of Religion: Reflections on Geertz’,
Man, 1983, vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 237–59.
Bessonov I. A., Russkaya narodnaya eskhatologiya: istoriya i sovremennost
[Russian Folk Eschatology: The Past and the Present]. Moscow:
Gnozis, 2014, 334 pp. (In Russian).
Duncan P., Russian Messianism: Third Rome, Holy Revolution, Communism,
and After. London: Routledge, 2000, XIII+235 pp. (Routledge
Advances in European Politics, vol. 1).
Moroz V. L., ‘Bortsy za “Svyatuyu Rus” i zashchitniki “Sovetskoy Rodiny”’
[Champions for the ‘Holy Russia’ and Defenders of the ‘Soviet
Motherland’], Ganelin R. Sh. (ed.), Natsionalnaya pravaya prezhde
i teper: Istoriko-sotsiologicheskie ocherki [National Right Past and
Present: Historical and Sociological Essays]. St Petersburg: s.n., 1992,
part 2: Rossiyskaya konservativnaya ideologiya i sovremennost
[Russian Conservative Ideology and Modernity], no. 1, pp. 68–96.
(In Russian).
Pigalev A. I., ‘Ezotericheskaya metaistoriya mezhdu sekretnostyu i razob
lacheniem illyuzornosti realnosti’ [The Esoteric Metahistory between
Secrecy and Disclosure of Reality Illusiveness], Voprosy filosofii,
2013, no. 9, pp. 63–74. (In Russian).
Shnirelman V. A., Khazarskiy mif: ideologiya politicheskogo radikalizma
v Rossii i ee istoki [The Khazar Myth: The Ideology of the Russian
Political Radicalism and Its Roots]. Moscow: Mosty kultury;
Jerusalem: Gesharim, 2012, 312 pp.
Shnirelman V. A., Ariyskiy mif v sovremennom mire [The Arian Myth
Today]: In 2 vols. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2015,
536 pp.; 440 pp. (In Russian).
Thompson D., Waiting for Antichrist: Charisma and Apocalypse in
a Pentecostal Church. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005,
224 pp.
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№ 15 2019

Body and Technology

© Peter the Great Museum of Anthro­pology

Copy Editor, Website Editor

Сopy Editor, Proofreader

Translator, Copy Editor

Founders and Publishers

Forum for Anthropology and Culture. 2019. No 15

From the Editors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Forum 38: Body and Technology

The Human in Techno-Media:

Ivan Kirpichnikov. A Review of Jan Hennings, Russia and Courtly

From the Editors

to the most superficial observer. Here the object, though, is not so

Participants in Forum 38:

Elena Gudova (National Research University Higher School

Forum 38: Body and Technology

Keywords: new technologies, techniques, body, corporeality, anthropology.

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.

was not only remarkably illustrative of the multiplicity of nature and

culture, but also demonstrated the significance of the link between

identifies three of them: between human and animal, organism and

and relation connects the boundary between human and animal

with that between organism and mechanism.1

potential and capacities of machines.1 The machines’ seeming

HRI and cyborg ontologies

Non-hierarchical alliances and symbiotic attachments give rise to

a new type of relations, ‘becoming’, which transforms types into

From cyborg ontologies to cyborg rights

Fuller’s ‘World Game’1 and Georgy Shchedrovitsky’s organisation

2. To remain neutral and require further investigations (how far the

Being was no different in appearance from a human being, was

capable of fellow-feeling, of behaving and thinking like a human

between human and animal, organism and mechanism, and physical

and Ethics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012, 272 pp.

in anthropology: until the 1990s it hardly appeared as an independent

Csordas T. J. (ed.), Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground

of Culture and Self. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University

and the evolved microbiota of bodies forces us to repeat, after Donna

Haraway, that ‘we have never been human’. Indeed, it is impossible

Human Corporeality and the Technologies

Questions of the connection between technology and human beings

to the negative ‘non-material’. ‘The immaterial’ is not anti-

Gourhan 1993]. His palaeontological perspective led him to imagine

technology as the collective name for everything that works by

Gesture is not a kind of language, but a part of every language. Our

Gourhan is inclined to think that these paintings were the graphic

representations of myths. They do not in the least resemble artistic

2. Image as artefact. From mythography to digital

by technological means, and a visual component of the cultural

3. The photographic camera.

Good photography is directing the camera and knowing how to obey

Favero P., ‘“The Transparent Photograph”: Reflections on the Ontology

I shall begin by saying that I do not think it

other, but presented as something combined, inseparable, as part

social / cultural dimensions of the body and concentrating on the

Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2008, XII+129 pp.

question of the anthropological logic that reconstructs that meta-

The basis of infection is the permeability of the body-as-thing

by other substances and the impossibility of controlling their

Secondly, the bio-technological product was noticed to lack ‘real’

Sociological Research Online, 2010, vol. 15, no. 3. <http://www.

(as a whole) using participant observation and applying other

donor. In the context of such an approach it is clearly visible that

© Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology

technologies were the historians of science and sociologists. Anthro

(University of Edinburgh, Social Sciences Research Centre Mono