parameters can otherwise eclipse.
Over time both research and other collaborations can transcend original contexts and points of contact; after an interview, the interviewee and I might set out to undo a bureaucratic knot. Meeting someone in the metro for afternoon tea might involve a detour for an hour to stand in line to get on a waiting list for a sofa (that was in Soviet times—now it might mean a detour to compare new appliances). A ride from the train station could include turning down a side road to stop by the dentist or to drop off a little gift (or by 2014 to visit a new cat café). Such detours brought me to witness interactional struggles for attention and solutions to awkward requests as they arose, especially ways to make or avoid contact that interviews alone never can (Briggs 1986).
American military and soft power have framed many encounters overseas. I attribute some of people’s willingness to collaborate with me to my American passport, my access to dollars during a period of extreme ruble devaluation, and their own early optimism about changes promised by Western business and markets, but friends also recognize that I try to avoid measuring by American ideals. Three decades of birthdays and New Year’s eves, weddings, and funerals—with fireworks, herring, and vodka—and the relaxing labors of preparing ordinary dinners and companionable walks on errands have turned some of us into friends. As we become friends, we try to smooth channels: I decode the American “service smile”; they socialize me to serve politely at table. When we are together, we sometimes amplify each other’s familiar channels, so no one is homesick: in Moscow we saw Alice Cooper; near Detroit we turned up the volume for AuktsYon.
Some places in Moscow are set up to cater to tourists’ preferences or to seek foreign influence. The Russian State Theatrical Academy, even as an elite institution that accepts foreign students, is not one of them. There, I was accorded no authority to define encounters or determine the manner of my own participation. For example, I had planned to participate in acting lessons, to compare them to prior years of such experience, and stood ready with the class on September 1—but the master instructor walked over, took me by the elbow, and led me to sit in a chair by his side. I wanted to flout that bodily directive,17 but consider: these students had passed through several rounds of intense auditions, so who was I to poach on their instruction time? I was sometimes recruited to act or sing “as an American” in a few short projects, and I folded easily into classes like stage combat and vocals, in which students received collective rather than individual attention, and in which previous training in choral singing and martial arts gave me specific skills to contribute. With room to jump across the sprung wooden floor, to practice flips and kicks, we worked in small groups as teachers moved around us. My leaping shoulder rolls received the same range of critique as theirs, my favorite being a dry, “Ochen’ ne plokho” (“Very not bad”). As a result, I have full notebooks on acting classes and less on paper about stage combat. But my handstands are pretty good.
To define a field site or even a topic, scholars draw lines between selves and others, but some lines dissolve as social involvement stretches over time. We cannot put the entire world inside a lab or on a stage. Over the course of what anthropologists call events of participant observation, obligations arise and play out into friendships, rivalries, and other kinds of bonds. Even gifts change functions over time; what might originate in hopes for help surviving or material return can transform into promises to reunite, evoking different feelings than they once did; expectations of a return gift matter less than looking forward to coming together again. Memories of past aid or cheer attach fiercely to some gifted objects, and collecting gifts to give becomes part of the pleasure in planning a visit. Theories that emphasize the socially strategic functions of the gift may require revision to account for exchanges over periods longer than most rounds of fieldwork.
For example, from a longer perspective, we see that some gifts involve more than a single, dyadic axis of giver-receiver. One spring day in Michigan a box arrived at my house containing an Indiana Jones mask. Was this sent to harass me, perhaps by a disgruntled student of anthropology? I am not even an archaeologist, so, offended, I punched the thing before remembering that Moscow friends had ordered a toy online for their son. I forwarded it with a letter making fun of my forgetful reaction. A month later in Moscow, a small boy jumped out from behind the front door wearing this rubber face, after which for a good hour none of us could walk from laughing. Now he is taller than we are. And now we more often say “we.” We have hosted each other many times, a month here, two weeks there, have traveled together in other lands. The sense of being a foreign guest recedes not only when we channel gifts, but also whenever we arrange a table together to welcome still other guests, to my house or theirs. We have even mediated each others’ social networks: I introduced friends who later created a godparent relationship. Other friends introduced me to someone who ended up married to an in-law of mine in Nebraska. Such bonds and intimacies are not unique; similar stories enfold many scholars of Russia not born there, and some marry there. In the twenty-first century, bilingual families line up at the gates for flights to Moscow from Detroit, Atlanta, or New York. While our politicians and media work to define us as opponents, our communications continue through many types of relationships and collaborations. We are shaken each time our states sharpen conflict, but we do not let go.
The facts of such crossings and exchanges, however, do not often lead to depictions that include them as conditions for knowledge. Many beautiful, detailed representations of Russian life made both by Americans (diplomats, journalists, tourists, and scholars) and by émigrés to the United States mark out their topic by excluding such connections. When possible, This book aims to show how contacts influence research; for example, it was a Russian friend’s who urged me to study the reality show Battle of the Psychics. I could choose to absorb her questions, such as: “Battle always tests psychics in a tragic situation, but is there anything funny about being a psychic?”18 “Can psychics marry each other?” Doing so would negate the opportunity to compare and contrast perspectives. Instead I try, where I can, puzzle through ways we converge and diverge. The result, I hope, is a book that incorporates layers of conditions for contact into discussion of intuitions about contact. To convey and theorize these layers, the book chapters each shift screens and spaces in order to light up spirals of contrast-making, following Gregory Bateson’s (1936) insights about this reflexive process of differentiation, which he called shizmogenic.
ETHNOGRAPHY AS CONTACT
This book posits two additional, historically emergent, material and social conditions of the field. First, divisions of labor, even artistic and semiotic labors, are carved out not only within institutions but also across them—and across the territories that claim to encircle them. Second, while communication runs along habitual paths, channels, conduits, and infrastructures that enable contact, communicative engagements can hop such structures, sometimes violating familiar ways to conceptualize communication. To capture both possibilities, this book juxtaposes situations, genres, and venues that are usually analyzed as if they were separate, not just to set telepaths alongside film directors or to compare auditions to prison walls, but to be alert to moments when people jump lanes.
Comparing conditions for contact can be revealing. Making ethnographic contact during early fieldwork in Russia went more slowly than it did later, for instance, at one of the central sites this book draws upon, the Russian State Theatrical Academy. I conducted that fieldwork in the early to mid-1990s with Roma who were going through the regime changes alongside everyone else. I started in places such as the Moscow Romani Theater, where weekly rehearsals were just public enough that people might decide to ignore me or not, to invite me home or not, to introduce me to others or not. Those rehearsals were sporadic, however. The Theatrical Academy was quite a different site; it demanded full, daily immersion (only years later did students command chunks of time and space for home-style hospitality). We all spent all our waking hours there, from 9:00 A.M. to nearly midnight. Conversations begun in the courtyard continued on the metro and into the dormitory. Students both extolled these conditions and, especially in the first year, mourned being cut off from other relations for quite a long period, longer than any boot camp.
This mourning of lost contacts,
