in ways that conveyed opinions about motives or goals. Others have since agreed that people may well wonder what someone else is thinking, yet refrain from speculating out loud,17 in deference to ethical and hierarchical sensibilities about good and appropriate ways to speak and to be silent.
Imperatives to read or to avoid reading others’ minds divide along with other communicative and emotional labors: some people are charged to represent the thoughts or emotions or motives of certain others, exhorted to aspire to do so; others are not. Some face consequences for misreading the boss’s wishes; others do not. Talk about others’ minds emerges in historical, social, and geopolitical conditions that figure such talk as dangerous and strange, or as important and coherent.
Anthropologists have long attended to the ways people take interest in others’ perspectives, minds, and judgments. Nancy Munn, in The Fame of Gawa (1986) theorized chains of labors through which Gawans invested in being well-thought-of as a collective, in trying to shape others’ future memories and return words and actions. It troubled people that despite all their labor, they might yet be unsure about others’ present and future judgments, whether they would value and remember the luster of gifts or heartiness of meals. Similar uncertainty plays out in American advertising and election campaigns—similar but not the same, for the creative ad maker works in a world in which fame and accumulation and hierarchy connect differently than they did in 1970s Gawa.
Feminist, postcolonial, and race-critical scholarship is useful here. Histories of race and class inequalities and violence set material infrastructure and social conditions for the situational politics that hinder or encourage speaking at all, let alone speaking about others’ communications or thoughts. Scholars such as Henry Louis Gates, for example, theorize how people “signify on” others’ unstated purposes or assumptions indirectly, through verbal style, prosody, and other means (see Morgan 2002), and link this indirectness to histories of slavery. Scholars of gender have outlined social institutions that discourage men from wondering what others are thinking even as they press women with the imperative to anticipate others’ thoughts or feelings (Hochschild 1983; Ochs and Taylor 1996). In this light, we can begin to ask what conditions motivate searching for others’ “Theory of Mind” or that find that they lack one. To understand this would require some sociohistorical accounting for how theories are made.18
The linguistic anthropologists and other scholars I have just cited arrived at many of their insights about the ways social and political relationships condition the possibilities of speaking through analytical tools developed by Russian scholars—specifically Valentin Voloshinov and Mikhail Bakhtin in 1920s Moscow. That they were empowered to do so just as the twentieth-century Cold War peaked and waned tells us something about the politics of translation, conversation, and connection across rival borders that we have yet to understand.
POINT TO LINE
Our starting point in this chapter, from which we trace further circles and rays, was the Russian Academy for Theatrical Arts. Established in 1878 as the Shestakovsky Music School, it was renamed the Musico-Dramatic School of the Moscow Philharmonic Society in 1883, becoming a conservatory in 1886. In 1934 it reformed as the Lunacharsky State Institute for Theatrical Arts (GITIS). Renamed after 1991 the Russian Academy for Theatrical Arts (RATI), it remains known as GITIS. The largest and oldest theatrical arts academy in Russia, with a student body of about fifteen hundred, GITIS competes with a handful of academies in other cities and teaching studios affiliated with theaters, such as the studio at the Moscow Art Theater (MKhAT), the Schepkina (Maly Theater), and the Schukina (Vakhtangov). GITIS was the first to devote training to stage directors after the Revolution, and in the 1960s it began training special actor groups within each directing cohort, giving them acting students with whom to practice communication. Each cohort now brings together eight to ten aspiring directors with about twenty actors and actresses. I conducted fieldwork in that department from 2002 to 2003 and in 2005.
GITIS aspires to combine styles, to draw teachers and directors from across the country’s theaters: Maria Knebel’, for example, directed at the Children’s Theater in Moscow. Even under the hegemony of socialist realism, each school was said to develop a trademark style: the studio at the Kamerny began with principles of ballet, the Maly with mimetic etudes. GITIS stands apart also through breadth: it encompasses all aspects of stage work, accommodating faculty in choreography, stage diction, circus management, variety production, dramatic criticism, theatrical history, costuming, set design, and so forth. The faculty for stage movement occupy their own low building, furnished with a magnificent, polished hardwood and a sprung dance floor, surrounded by risers and gymnastics equipment, where one can learn everything necessary to choreograph and perform elaborate combat scenes without leaving campus (since 2009 the campus has expanded to include a grand new facility across town). By the time students leave, they are expected to have forged enduring professional contacts—and later to find just the person to create the effect of soft rain on moss, or to play a theremin.
GITIS is a dense node of cultural and social production, condensing and concentrating resources and networks, admitting some while evicting others. In coldest winter at GITIS, someone had opened the fortochka to release excess heat. Such steady delivery of heat is not always the case across Russian territory,19 but we were in the center of the center, near the avenue carrying government cavalcades each morning to the Kremlin. Few in the room were native to this place; more than half had come from afar, thousands of kilometers away, from Irkutsk, Ekaterinburg, Rzan’, Surgut … and a handful from still other, farther cosmopolitan centers—Doha, Seoul, Paris, Stockholm. Small groups from America visited for a week or so. Many teachers hailed from the provinces, having settled in Moscow decades before. Now the cohort I know best has dispersed, working in Vladivostok and Riga, on film sets in ja Siberia or in South America; some return triumphantly to Moscow openings. Several have become stars, gone to Cannes or Broadway, choreographed in Hollywood. Some are not (yet) famous, but work steadily in television and theater, and some supplement this work with acting lessons for businessmen. A few have left the profession. But back then, in that studio, biographies from beyond the moment submerged, reemerging only in short bursts as we focused on making contact with each other here and now.
A fortochka works with a building’s system of kommunikatsija, its networks of cables, pipes, and wires carrying water, electricity, sound, and data (the analogous English usage of “communications” can be found among U.S. building professionals). The Russian word kommunikatsija can be used to talk about human communication,20 and metaphors about communication as infrastructure abound (Stalin likened language to railway tracks), to inflect the ways material conditions in Russia are ideologically burdened.21 Russian pipes built above summer bog and winter ice, over and under streets, come under foreign critique as ugly, too visceral. Such criticism demonstrates disregard for sound reasons to build above marsh and permafrost; fuel and water pipes rupture underground, as America is learning, and we might learn better. Russian communication, too, comes under too quick criticism. In this light, a telepathy lesson that opens a fortochka is bound to be misread unless we cross borders drawn during the Cold War.
1.Do We Have Contact?
INTERSECTIONS: ACTORS AND PSYCHICS
This book connects and contrasts hitherto separately treated places, practices, and situations, following actors and psychics and those who cross their paths. Others have written about Soviet theater or about telepathy science as distinct topics, and in rich and insightful ways. This project instead sniffs along the edges where fields of expertise converge and diverge. Some of these overlaps are easy to see, such as when American security forces hire psychologists like Paul Ekman or when Russian detectives quote Constantine Stanislavsky.
In 1996 I started to collect books from street vendors near Moscow metro stations, books that forged hybrids of theatrical and criminological knowledge, branding technologies for intuition, like What Is in His Subconscious? Twelve Lessons in the Psychotechnology of Penetrating the Subconscious of Your Interlocutor (A chto
