SUMMARY:

Elena Gapova explores the ways in which the politics of the national language in Belarus represents post-socialist structural change and is related to the interests of intellectuals. Though the language issue was first articulated during perestroika as a democratic cause, in fact it was not about giving a voice to the dominated groups, but about providing emerging elites with a noble national goal and bringing a different group of people to power. In Belarus, the language controversy (Belarusian versus Russian) is, in fact, a class struggle: one group with a definite set of economic and cultural assets (the language the intellectuals speak, the version of history they construct, i.e., the symbolic means they use, and the societal arrangement they promote) is interested in changing the economic and social status quo, while another one wants to preserve it. With time the language issue lost its democratic and political potential and became an intellectual project related to the interests and activism of intellectuals in their pursuit of moral and social capital. In this perspective, Gapova views the “national language” as a part of a particular market system and, using Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic capital and a new class theory that understands intellectuals as a distinct group involved in a self-sustaining process of production, dissemination, and exchange of symbolic goods, she explores how the group (class or “corporate”) interests of post-Soviet Belarusian intellectuals are vested in their academic and cultural projects. Intellectuals seem to substitute the imagined interests of the people with their own corporate interests. These are based on the intellectuals’ role as producers of knowledge and, though they are not directly of economic nature, are still tied up with economic opportunities, social capital, and power.