I thank first all of the people whose words, actions, or spaces are represented in this book. I have tried not to make you recognizable as individuals, following ethical practice in the discipline of anthropology, except when asked or where celebrity is inescapable. Thank you for your attention and care. The International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) provided funding for research at the Russian Academy for Theatrical Arts in 2002–2003 and in 2005. Enormous thanks to the administration of the academy for allowing me to enroll and for encouraging ethnography by settling me into the dormitory and introducing me to chief instructors. To the cohort with whom I was embedded and to their instructors: I admire your art, I am grateful for every word and gesture, and am not finished writing about your deeds and achievements.
I presented pieces that would evolve into this book over a long period, between 1998 and 2016. I am grateful to all the former graduate students who tolerated my seminar rants during those years. Immense thanks to all the participants in workshops and symposia who commented on drafts that made it into this book: Rethinking Cold War Paradigms, SOYUZ annual symposium (Yale, April 2009); the Michicagoan research group (May 2009); the symposium Disrupting Disciplines, Breaking Boundaries (Interdepartmental Program in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan, November 2009); The Uses of Performance in Russian Culture (Amherst, March 2010); Qualia (festschrift for Nancy Munn, University of Chicago, April 2010); Can I See Your ID: Personhood and Paperwork in and after the Soviet Union (Cambridge, U.K., September 2010); the conference Cold War Cultures: Transnational and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (University of Texas, Austin, October 2010); Linguagenesis (Brown University, May 2011); the panel Natureculture: Entangled Relations of Multiplicity (Society for Cultural Anthropology Spring 2010 Meeting, Santa Fe, NM, May 2010); the panel Personification: Conceptualizing the Agency of Things (AAA meetings, November 2011); Anthropological Turns in the Humanities (hosted by Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, XIX Bannye Chtenija, Moscow, April 2011); Medical Pluralism in Soviet and Post-Soviet Eurasia (Franke Institute for the Humanities, University of Chicago March 2012); Making Sense of Exceptionalism and Diversity in Composite Polities and Societies: Past and Present (The Ab Imperio annual seminar, Kazan, Russia, May 2012); and Romantic Subversions of Soviet Enlightenment: Questioning Socialism’s Reason (Princeton, May 2014).
I am deeply indebted to the University of Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities for a writing fellowship in 2010–2011 and to the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan for the opportunity to present drafts of chapters in the 2016 Rappaport lecture series.
Many individuals took the trouble to suggest useful angles. I am especially grateful to Shunsuke Nozawa and H. Paul Manning for recognizing my 2010 symposium paper on the qualia of communicative contact as a theorization of phaticity; special thanks to Lily Chumley and Nick Harkness for editorial comments on that work. For encouraging me to write this book instead of an easier one, for reading drafts, and for riffing with me along the way, huge thanks to Luciana Aenasoaie, Meghanne Barker, J. Bernard Bate, Richard Bauman, Anya Bernstein, Elizabeth Bishop, Summerson Carr, Lily Chumly, Susanne Cohen, Steve Coleman, Jason de Leon, Hilary Dick, Erika Hoffman-Dilloway, Paja Faudree, Krisztina Fehérváry, Susan Gal, Elena Gapova, Ilana Gershon, Alexej Golubev, Bruce Grant, Zeynup Gursel, and Nicholas Harkness, Matthew Hull, Judith Irvine, Graham Jones, Lavrentia Karamaniola, Webb Keane, John Kelly, Stuart Kirsch, Valeria Kivelson, Lara Kuznetsky, Mika LaVaque-Manty, Michael Lempert, Mark Lipovetsky, Sonja Luehrmann, Bruce Mannheim, Mike McGovern, Meg McLachan, James Meador, Barbra Meek, Marina Mogilner, Erik Mueggler, Constantine Nakassis, Serguei Oushakine, Susan Philips, Christian de Pee, Adela Pinch, Eugene Raikhel, Madeleine Reeves, Elana Resnick, Elizabeth Roberts, Daniel Segal, Perry Sherouse, Michael Silverstein, Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov, Katherine Verdery, Margaret Wiener, Susanna Weygandt, Kristina Wirtz, Boris Wolfson, and Alexei Yurchak. Special thanks to Anna Genina for helping me test translations of video material and to Perry Sherouse for a careful eye to the final edits.
At the University of California Press I thank Reed Malcolm and Zuha Khan for conversations and patience. For the sustenance of play and much more besides, I owe the members of the Ann Arbor roller derby league, the Ann Arbor Derby Dimes. For everything that matters most, all my thanks to Maria, to Lee, to Dean, to Rolin, to Alena, to Rhonda and Charlie, and most of all to Alex.
NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION
To make it easier for the reader, I use standard anglicizations of familiar surnames like Tolstoy or ethnonyms like Yakut and have dropped the extra “i” that strict transliterations can require in many first names like Maria. Otherwise I have followed Library of Congress rules, except that I substitute j for ĭ, jo for ë, ja for i͡a, and ju for i͡u.