What is Nostalgia?
Nostalgia is a banner of belonging to the “imagined community” (Anderson, 1991). In uncovering the history of nostalgia, Dodman (2013) and Boym (2007) trace it back to the times when it was considered a deadly malady, which could kill French soldiers in Algeria and had physical symptoms such as diarrhea. With disappearance from the medical rotation, nostalgia was superseded by the circulation of the notion of “acclimatization,” while nostalgia was reborn as a feeling of melancholic pensiveness not altogether unpleasant. I am interested in what kind of nostalgia, or “acclimatization” to the changed environment, emerges in the Siberian “zones of social abandonment” (Beihl, 2013). The individual living in conditions of malfunctioning infrastructure means actively participating in the designing of a community characterized by a “dreamy” nationalism, which uncritically accepts propaganda while simultaneously retaining a brutal realism of understanding that there will be no help from the state no matter what catastrophe erupts. The feeling of national pride, mental affiliation with the paternal power figure (Putin, Stalin), carefully conducted performances of masculinity, saturation of imagination with everyday images of ruins, and a feeling of nostalgia—all this constitutes the sense of belonging to what some people in Siberia still perceive as the “soundest of Empires” (Foucault, 1995)—the Soviet state.
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The individual living in conditions of malfunctioning infrastructure means actively participating in the designing of a community characterized by a 'dreamy' nationalism, which uncritically accepts propaganda while simultaneously retaining a brutal realism of understanding that there will be no help from the state no matter what catastrophe erupts.” |
I would argue that disrupted infrastructures do not only create affect and contribute to building of the socio-political identities, collective as well as individual, but participate in the process resulting in the emergence of “mutant” sensibilities, which shift the very understanding of the human (Masco, 2004). For example, in the town of Bratsk, Siberia, during my preliminary summer fieldwork of 2016, I learned that people believe that they regularly should be subjected to the exhaust of the aluminum manufacturer in order to remain healthy. They cast their opponents, those who express negative emotions regarding another instance of odorous exhaust, as hysterical female / effeminate bodies. It speaks directly to the construction of “toxic sovereignties” (Povinelli, 2016) emerging in dilapidated environments. People find themselves living on the brink of the ruination of the world, the collapse which would define the future, full of material sediments of broken structures, and they are “ready” for it, insisting that they might need exposure to harmful effects, about which they were hearing from their early childhood, to retain their identities.
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In the picture: one of my great-grandmothers,
Kapitolina Travina -- Kapka, as she was called, somewhat dismissively, in the family. She had an unlucky life and died early. Her only son hang himself in a boarding school where she put him |