In the first issue of the journal in 2006, we offered and substantiated Ab Imperio’s new annual program: “Anthropology of Languages of Self-Description in Empire and Nation.” The second issue of the journal builds upon the first and approaches “homeland” as a space of immediate personal experience, on the one hand, and as a language in which metaphors such as immediacy, locality, and territoriality are used for the description of group unity, on the other. We have consciously broadened the framework of this issue, which we had initially envisioned as focused on anthropology of languages of (self-)description of “homeland” as part of the experience of transition from the “imperial” to the “national.” Although some of the articles contain interesting perspectives on the latter problem (most clearly Bradley Woodworth’s article, which explores the Estonization of Revel in the Russian Empire and the transformation of Revel into an Estonian “homeland”), other texts remind us that between the local, “anthropological” definition of “homeland” and the political use of categories that define “homeland” is an extremely porous and flexible border. Very rarely do we meet abstract definitions of “homeland” in the languages of self-description of nationalism and imperial patriotism: these definitions are more often local, particular, and idiosyncratic. The anthropological aspect of this approach consists in that social practices and roles of people are problematized and perceived as “text” and not as semantically fixed elements of an “alphabet.”
The authors of this issue suggest yet another unidentified aspect of the problem and approach, which has turned out to be an interesting additional line of inquiry in this issue. They point to the very category of “space” as a fundamental dimension of thinking and description. This dimension underpins the language of description of social reality and at the same time is subject to historical changes in spatial imagination. Ann Stoler and Carole McGranahan, whose article appears in our methodological section, speak of the necessity of a full-scale reflection on spatial axioms that condition how scholars approach empire. These axioms bring about Eurocentric concepts of core and periphery, colony and colonized, and so forth. By historicizing these concepts, Stoler and McGranahan show how the logic of European imperialism led to a spatialization of thinking, because there was a need in modern categories to order “new” and “unstructured” spaces. The authors plea for a return to the genealogy of these concepts and to demonstrate what the function of these simple spatial dichotomies was and how they ordered (rather than reflected) the reality of dynamically developing empires. Stoler and McGranahan illustrated the opportunities offered by this approach by analyzing the etymology and the historical semantics of the terms “colony” and “colonist.”
Similar to the newest revision of the category of “identity,” the study of genealogy of mental spatial “texts” of empire’s diverse elements, from local “homelands” to a synthetic representation of empire as patria, makes us revisit our stereotypes and advances the idea of plural and situational “homelands.” Petr Meilakh’s article on the discourses of homeland among contemporary Meskheti Turks is a good example of this type of analysis. The article by Kelly O’Neill represents another approach to spatial categories of “homeland,” native land, or historical territory in the context of imperial expansion. Exploring the incorporation of the Crimea into the space of the Russian Empire through the “politics of landscape,” the author suggests the presence of three patterns of integration for different layers of historical legacy: the Classic Greek, Genovese, and Muslim (the latter layer is the subject of her detailed analysis). Each of the cultural texts of the Crimean landscape interacted differently with the logic of empire as a common civilizing home and later with the logic of the nationalizing empire. That the Crimea preserved its multicultural identity even against the background of the Russification of imperial discourses and practices in the nineteenth century makes us reflect upon the relativity of the opposition between empire and nation and suggests the need to continue reflecting upon that opposition in the framework of nationalism studies, despite the wide-spread belief in the end of the era of the nation-state. In this respect the article by Rogers Brubaker in the methodological section is especially important, as it brings back one of the most crucial semantic dimensions of nationalism and homeland: the discourse of patriotism. Brubaker proceeds from the assumption that the nation-state, having been transformed in today’s world, retains its function as the basic frame of political experience. Brubaker sees an important normative element in the discourse of patriotism, an element that allows one to think in terms of a socially oriented state, a participatory political regime, and a multipolar system of international relations.
The “territorialization” of the symbolic geography of groupness, with the help of the discourses of “homeland,” suggests a revision of the seemingly homogeneous space of the “nation” or the seemingly well structured administration of “empire.” The impact of the territorial logic is very well illustrated in the article about the legendary hero Babek, by Sergey Rumiantsev and Ilgam Abbasov. By re-inventing the territory upon which Babek had operated in the beginning of the ninth century as part of the contemporary Azerbaijani homeland, one could write Babek into the pantheon of the great national Azerbaijani heroes, despite his non-Turkic origin and militant anti-Islamism. Thus, two key criteria in the national identity of contemporary Azerbaijan give ground to the principle of territoriality (even if the latter is mythical).
Thus “homeland” appears not only as the initial level of socialization into “large” society but as a special perspective that allows us to single out territories and categories of population from seemingly homogeneous, imagined structures and societies. Besides, “homeland” emerges as an element of very different political discourses: nationalist and patriotic, religious and modernizing, and it signals of the ties between these discourses and the local experience of homeland. The territorialization of social experience in historical dynamics described in the articles by Christian Noack and Walter Sperling suggests interesting outcomes not only regarding the specifics of languages of self-description but also with respect to the mechanisms of such “extra-territorial” global institutions as religion or industrialization. Finally, the homeland of the new Soviet man in the article by Monica Rьthers appears to be connected with the imperial colonial text on the level of representation and, at the same time, turns out to be a space of modernized urban culture and social mobilization.
The category of “Homeland,” quite legitimate both in imperial and in national narratives, has the potential to help deconstruct the myth of the homogeneity of “nations” and of the integral administrative structure in “empire.” The anthropological level of perceiving society through the focus of homeland separates a part of citizens and localities as more of related to each other among the supposedly equal members of the nation. Among the “equally distanced” provinces of the empire there is always one province that is in a special, incomparable situation; at the political level there are different, often hierarchical concepts of “homeland.” Thus, in imperial and national narratives, they bring elements of evaluating and drawing boundaries of solidarity and dissociation. It appears that the experience of using social practices by political structures and the individual’s interaction with those structures are always local and subject to historical time. Time and space are connected in the discourse of homeland and in this sense one can speak of the chronotope of homeland as a potentially fruitful direction for studying the languages of self-description of empire and nation.

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