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Not Soft Power, But Speaking Softly
‘Everyday Diplomacy’ in Field Relations during the Russia-Ukraine Conflict
in The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology
Based on long-term fieldwork in Russia, but focusing mainly on the aftermath of the 2014 Malaysian airliner downing in Ukraine, this article examines the individual ethnographer and informants alike as unwilling ‘diplomatic’ representatives in the field. Firstly, I discuss the authoritarian political context in Russia and how it affects the notion of ‘soft power’ and ‘public’ discourse. Then I relate the familiar ‘political testing’ experience of researchers by informants, and ‘neutrality’ in field relations (Ergun and Erdemir 2010). Next, I draw on the anthropology of indirect communication to characterize ‘everyday diplomacy’ after the event as a particular kind of civility. I go on to examine attendant affective states of ‘tension, disturbance, or jarring’ (Navaro-Yashin 2012) that both threaten civility and enable it. Finally, I argue that classic ethnographic rapport-building deserves further examination in the light of the porosity of politics, the social environment and the field.
Contributor Notes
Jeremy Morris is Co-director of the Centre for Russian, European and Eurasian Studies (CREES) at the University of Birmingham. A disciplinary pluralist, his research aims to capture the actually lived experience of neoliberal and post-socialist transformation in Russia. He is co-editor of The Informal Postsocialist Economy: Embedded Practices and Livelihoods (Routledge, 2014) and Everyday Postsocialism: Working-class Life Strategies in the Russian Margins (Palgrave, 2016).
