SUMMARY:

Based on fieldwork conducted in Siberia in 2001-2004, this essay explores two intellectual/pedagogical movements that have developed in the Altai region since the 1990s. The first, “ethno-histories of trauma,” which was developed by the department of philosophy at a local pedagogical university, address current problems by rewriting Russia’s traumatic past in order to demonstrate the non-Russian character of its political institutions, and the anti-Russian nature of their policies. Used to “stir the memory of our feelings,” the trope of “Russian tragedy” inspired local scholars to examine “instincts that control the mechanisms of the ethnos’ self-preservation,” and to investigate the factors of the “ethnic viability” (zhiznesposobnost’) of the Russians. The second, “ethno-vitalism,” is less preoccupied with depicting the past harm and suffering of the nation. Developed by the department of sociology at Altai State University, this theoretical framework provides the analytical optics for discussion of ethnic survival and outlines methods that could “compensate for the loss of cultural genetic type” of the Russian nation. The article demonstrates how appeals to “psycho-energetic systems” and “socio-genetics” helped to destabilize the dominant Soviet paradigms of the social. At the same time, the article show how the deployment of this biosocial discourse restructured the school’s own understanding of the political and the ethnic: the “vital environment” gradually evolved into an excluding “ethno-sphere,” and into the site of a “global competition of ethnicities.” The school’s original concern with the ecological aspects of people’s existence has been transformed into a xenophobic “scientific field of social virology” aimed at preventing the Russian ethnos from “socio-psychological wars” inspired from abroad. Both examples demonstrate how nation and state have become fundamentally split in the post-socialist situation. Acting as a “technology of normalization” of sorts, these nationalist discourses are used first of all as a “weapon of the weak,” as a tool for restructuring national memory and for shaping the nation’s narrative in a situation of normative and epistemological flux.