In 2006, the Ab Imperio editorial team decided to continue and further develop the thematic focus on languages of description and self-description launched as the annual theme in 2005. The annual program of four thematic issues in 2006 will be framed around “Anthropological Reflections on Languages of Self-Description of Empire and Nation.” The reason for this “anthropological turn” was manifold. First, the journal’s publications in 2005 revealed the novelty of the focus on languages of self-description. The ideological construction and semantics of imperial experience have remained under-researched and under-discussed in the current burgeoning literature on empire and nationalism studies. Thus the research on languages of self-description was conceived as a timely supplement to existing studies of imperial rule (government), social structures (especially, the imperial elite), and geography. Needless to say, studies of languages of self-description depart from the ossified notion of imperial ideology that betrays the largely misleading rationalistic and pragmatic assumption. This assumption leads to the conception of imperial agency that directs imperial power and acts in a rational way upon the empire. Contrary to that assumption, the present program focuses on historically constituted meanings, shifts the attention to the multiplicity of imperial agents and modes of legitimation, and brings to the fore the function of language in making sense of experience.
The second reason for the editorial decision to continue the exploration of languages of self-description was the development of a controversial trend (in terms of its implications) in the field of empire studies. This trend may be characterized as a sort of revisionism that seeks to refocus the attention of the social sciences on empire as a way of avoiding the much criticized master narrative of the nation state and the pervasive discourse of modern nationalism.^[1] True, the studies of empire written in this revisionist mode and following the logic and enstrangement have made a significant contribution to our understanding of the logic of the social sciences and the modern world. However, one of the dangers of this revisionism remains an uncritical construction of empire as an ideological alternative to the sovereign state, democratic government, and international law. Another danger is the obliteration of the rich legacy of the theory of nationalism and nationalism studies, including the departure from the essentialism of the social sciences and opened new opportunities for understanding modern nationalism as a cognitive frame of human experience. Paradoxically, cutting edge research in the field of empire studies often tends to limit the definition of empire to a structure of power relations or to a social and cultural constellation (a multiethnic polity or system of estates).^[2] The suggested research agenda of languages of self-description helps to overcome this popular essentialist view of empire and allows us to ask the question of how empire was conceived as a space of experience, discovery, and encounter. In other words, it places a premium on the historically constituted and changeable meaning of imperial experience in the study of empire.
The focus on historical dynamics is revealed in the fluctuation of key terms of the suggested research agenda: languages of description and self-description. Languages of self-description stand for original, sometimes archaic, words and concepts (motherland, Vatan, subjecthood, etc.), the multiplicity of imperial actors, and those cognitive frames (modes of cognition) that lacked the secular and rationalized nature of modern social knowledge. Languages of description stand for what Max Weber called the “rationalization” of the modern world. They reflect the process of making sense of empire from the view point of modern, rational, often professional discourse, be it eighteenth-century cameralism, or nineteenth-century professional historiography and statistics
Languages of description encapsulate another important feature of the suggested research agenda. They stand for genealogy in a Foucauldian sense, i.e., they call for a critical reflection on the dependence of the modern scholarly apparatus (“continental” versus “colonial” empires, “civic” versus “ethnic” nationalism, to take just a few examples) upon the languages of description that were born as political tools in concrete historical experience and, much more importantly, were discrete manifestations of the process of legitimizing, de-legitimizing, and making sense of empire.
The editors believe that the most fruitful way to explore these problems lies in an anthropological perspective, for it was anthropology that was to a significant extent responsible for the epistemological breakthrough which allowed us to de-essentialize social-scientific categories, as well as to work with such categories as local knowledge and experience. By suggesting “Anthropology of Languages of Self-Description” as the journal’s annual theme, we are undertaking a large attempt to expand cultural and anthropological approaches to all aspects of imperial and national history. We also propose that scholars take into account the rationalization of imperial and national experience by historical actors. We utilize anthropology not so much as a discipline but as a method, clearly recognizing that on the level of method anthropology continues to face problems, such as the generalization of local anthropological findings and the interaction between the languages of research and of the studied culture. We conceive our annual theme as an experiment of applied anthropological method, which might help us see empire in specific experiences and interpretations of groups and cultures that formed imperial or national societies. The upshot of this experiment will lead to a demonstration of whether the anthropological study of multiple imperial and national languages of (self-) description can lead to the accumulation of new knowledge about empire and nation, and can help to break through to the original and by far not self-evident imperial semantics.
It is not accidental, then, that this issue’s methodological section is dedicated to reflections on anthropology as a method and discipline. It takes seriously the anthropological claim of being the engine that can renew our conception of and approaches to the post-Soviet space. Carlo Ginzburg, one of the prominent historians working in an anthropological vein, speaks about the intellectual genealogy of his method. Ginzburg reflects on why history is possible for him only in its cultural and anthropological version, and to what extent that version is capable of describing modern societies and multi-level, multi-lingual (literally and anthropologically) entities. Katherine Verdery, a respected representative of the discipline, puts forward a program for the anthropological “conquest” of the space which in North American scholarship has until recently been perceived as “Slavic studies.” The discussion of Verdery’s propositions by representatives of Western and Russian anthropology touches on problems of the political neutrality of anthropological methods, the limits on generalizing anthropological findings, and the presence in the region of alternatives to “Western” cultural anthropology. Yet, all of the contributors to this exchange agree that without a cultural perspective, no understanding of the region’s past and present is possible.
The publications in the subsequent sections of the first issue demonstrate that “the anthropology of languages of self-description” is fruitful as a method and might apply to a variety of perspectives: from standard anthropological works to those of intellectual and social history, political science, and historiography. An anthropological perspective not only brings about a shift from value-loaded to analytical scholarship, but also sets up new frames and questions for research.
The article by Nikolai Kradin and Tatiana Skrynnikova opens up the history section in the first issue. The article problematizes the ostensibly self-evident perception of Chinggis Khan’s polity as empire. Though acknowledging the applicability of the conventional analytical concept of empire to the history of the Mongolian Ulus, the authors demonstrate that the genesis, development, political culture, and social organization of Chinggis Khan’s “empire” was linked to the traditional order of nomadic society. Their anthropological approach to the history of the Mongolian polity reveals its internal logic and leads to an important conclusion: whereas the analytical meta-language of historiography allows us to classify and describe the Mongolian polity as typologically similar to European empires, the reverse analytical operation (i.e., to describe European empires in the framework of the Mongolian polity) is impossible. The cumulative knowledge about European empires does not help us understand the logic of the Mongolian empire.
The article by Seymour Becker is also framed by the research agenda of “languages of description and self-description.” The author analyzes the process of redescription of the “Mongol Yoke period” by nineteenth-century Russian historians. The article demonstrates how this redescription has resulted in the inclusion of the “Mongol Yoke period” into the Russian national narrative and constitution of the common ground of the national historical memory.
Anatolii Remnev and Olesia Sukhikh explicate the optics of “languages of description and self-description” in their co-authored article on the two-century long relationship between the imperial center and the Kazakh population. The authors not only scrutinize the original semantics of political gesture and ritual, they also introduce a diachronic perspective that allows them to trace the changes in the meaning of imperial representations (as they deal with a planned representation of empire to the visiting Kazakh delegations). The article also demonstrates changes in the notion of ruler-subject relations, as these relations were understood differently in different ideological diachronic and synchronic contexts (from Enlightened Absolutism to Orientalism and then to the nationalizing state or Eurasian alternative).
Following the footsteps of the research paradigm of languages of description and self-description, other publications in the issue explore the complex and heterogeneous character of the imperial and the national, and reveal the situational applicability of these notions as analytical categories, as well as these categories’ changing meaning. In this context, the discussion of the Soviet “empire” has taken a new turn. The article by Jцrg Baberowski offers a description of the Soviet empire in which the meaning of empire is derived from the meta-language of historiography, whereas the article by Peter Blitstein uncovers the tension between the analytical concept of empire and the language of self-description of the Soviet Union. The review article by Wim van Meurs, as well as the review forum in the review section, demonstrates the tension between the grand and ideologically loaded concepts (such as “Stalinism” and “totalitarianism”) and their historiographic application after the fall of Communism.
The archival section features a memorandum written by a collaborator of Peter the Great, Heinrich Fick. This publication represents an attempt to reconstruct self-representations of the developing empire through the collision and cross influence of different modalities of description and perception of the political and social space. The collision and cross influence is documented in Fick’s memorandum by a combination of the cameralist theory of state and society, which became one of the central ideological forces behind the modernization of Russian political language in the eighteenth century, and the historically evolved social and administrative practices of extractive empire in Eastern Siberia. It is noteworthy that the published document was born as a result of Fick’s personal experience living in a remote and forsaken province in the empire. The memorandum combines a critique of provincial administration from the viewpoint of the rational economy of cameralism, concern about the well-being of imperial subjects, and the emerging sympathy on the side of the cast-off bureaucrat for subjugated peoples.
The editors hope that the “Anthropology of Languages of Description and Self Description” in empire and nation will evolve into a method that helps scholars to produce innovative scholarship, similar to the kind represented in the present issue of Ab Imperio.

Editors of Ab Imperio:

I. Gerasimov
S. Glebov
A. Kaplunovski
M. Mogilner
A. Semyonov