Numerous attempts to produce an analytical model of “nation” gave birth to a number of well-known theories. Despite their variety, these theories may be classified according to several fundamental oppositions, such as an essentialist versus constructivist approach, or viewing the nation as a structure versus viewing it as a particular discourse or ideology. Regardless of the choice of any particular methodology, the arbitrariness of identifying the constituent boundaries of the analyzed object is a common predicament of all attempts to describe “nation” from the outside. The very formal criteria of designating a nation on the grounds of common language, ethnicity, territory, etc. impose a mono-causal mode of defining groupness. An alternative approach would be studying the language of self-description that is employed in the process of a social group’s formation. A group may not necessarily qualify as a “nation” according to a certain theoretical model, yet its members may perceive it as a community of solidarity and purposeful social action. This approach corresponds to the recent trend in social sciences, which advocates studying nation as a process, as a complex discursive field, and as a set of practices and competing social agendas rather than seeing nation as a structure, as a continuous historical self-conscious community, and a space of a homogeneous monological discourse. We suggest taking this trend to a further logical step by focusing on the languages of self-description that are being produced within the group in question but which are often lost or marginalized by the discriminative nation-centered perspective.
Looking into the semantics and practices of application of the languages of group self-description reveals historically predetermined differences. In different cases various criteria of groupness are marked as primary or fundamental: language, territory, common historical roots, confession, traditions of statehood. The problem is that our modern research optics, by default, interprets languages of territoriality, confession or historical origins as languages of “nationalism,” and automatically recognizes groups responsible for those languages as “national” (in one sense or another). That is why we see our task in this issue not to put forward some enhanced theory of nation or groupness, but to dissociate ourselves from the teleological research optics based on the nation-centered normative approach. It is in this context that we invite our readers to read this issue of AI “The Chorus of Nations: Constructing and Describing Group Unity,” within the annual program Languages of Self-Description of Empire and Nation: Anthropological Perspectives.

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Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?
Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.

Sir John Harrington (1561–1612)

The quoted wisdom that dates back to the cynical dictum by Seneca (Prosperum ac felix scelus virtus vocatur) may be successfully applied to any forms of collective social action. Scholars would call a group that successfully proved its viability a nation, recognizing the role of objective prerequisites and essential factors in its formation. Conversely, if a national project fails, there are always plausible explanations to be found in its inadequate nature. If only one could know in advance which group will manage to hold its coherency and get the status of a nation, and which will fail! What type of groupness is entitled to form a proper nation (a tribe, an overseas colony, a social estate, etc.)? And where does one look for a “nucleus of a nation,” when the very group capable of hosting and developing a national project is still absent? These questions are central for the publications in this issue of the journal.
The “Methodology” section features two very different articles that share an interest in the roots of collective solidarity preceding the emergence of a national or even a proto-national group. This problem cannot be solved within the opposition of constructivist or primordialist approaches, because the main question here is not to what degree a sense of (national) groupness is imagined, but how this sense is sustained in the absence of necessary social structures. In the early 1990s, the historian Serhy Yekelchyk published a pioneering article in which he demonstrated how the sense of group solidarity of Ukrainians manifested itself through body politics in the second half of the nineteenth century, before the era of “classical” national mobilization. The human body and clothes comprised the only public space available to people that differed in their perception of “Ukrainennes”, which itself did not have common cultural, let alone political, codes and forms yet. The Dutch anthropologist, Peter van der Veer, discusses the sense of groupness as communicated through the common language and practices of the emotional response to the outer world. By demonstrating how religious practices in India and China transform into the modern national identity, van der Veer introduces the theme of “variation nature” of national identity that is discussed at length in following sections.
The “History” section features a thematic forum, whose title can be translated from Latin as follows: “religion, not nation, is in our heart.” Irina Paert discusses the history of administrative and statistical control over Russian Old Believers; Paul Werth focuses on the imperial politics toward the spiritual head of the Armenian church, the Catholicos; Sergei Zhuk studies the outside perception of the South Russian Baptists Stundists, and their self-perception as a particular nation. From different vantage points, the authors of the articles in the forum reveal the function of religion as a nation. This is different from the concepts of nation as “a factor in national mobilization” or “a basis of national identity” that are well-known from theories of nationalism, as in this instance it is a confessional group functioning in the capacity of nation. The originally confessional form of nation-building was successful in the case of Armenians; it was not recognized as a national project in the case of Old Believers; and it was recognized as national but suppressed in the case of the Stundists. Yet the eventual “success” or “failure” cannot testify to the rightfulness of any attempt. As we can infer today from the examples of such movements as the Taliban, Hezbollah (in a way, “The Nation of Islam” in the United States is a case in point, too), a community undergoing religious mobilization can acquire all characteristics of a national group and even a nation-state. The process of crystallization of a “national” self-perception by a group that is being classified by outsiders as a religious sect is demonstrated in the section “Archive.” This section features documents pertaining to the movement of the followers of Bahaeddin Vaisi, a Muslim Sufi sect active among the Volga Tatars during the last decades of the Russian empire. The Vaisians not only rejected the social and political order of the empire, but offered their alternative vision of a community of solidarity, social action and collective loyalty. Rejecting their legal affiliation with the social estates of peasants or petty commoners (meshchane), they invented a special title of “sworn natural clerics” for themselves. Vehemently differentiating themselves from the Tatars as a nation-in-formation, the Vaisians proclaimed themselves the descendants of the ancient Bulgars. Finally, as if “real” subjects of the international law, they declared themselves subjects of the “Ottoman Porta” (while ritually emphasizing their loyalty to the Russian Emperor). These reactions were identical to those demonstrated by the Protestants-Stundists, who refused to be counted among the peasant social estate, or Ukrainian or Russian people, and who turned for the protection to the German Emperor. Both Vaisians and Stundists are remembered in history as extremist sectarians, yet it is easy to envision how under more conducive circumstances these groups might have evolved into compact “nations” with a developed sense of their distinctiveness and myth of origins.
The anthropological interest in the language and forms of group self description allows scholars to see that “nation” has no exclusive distinctions from other types of groupness. Moreover, as the article by Constantine Bolenko in the historical section suggests, a formal national affiliation in itself can neither be a self-sufficient factor in the individual or group politics of identity, nor a guarantee of intra-group solidarity and loyalty. The article is centered on the figure of the aristocrat Nikolai Yusupov, the heir to an ancient Tatar family and a prince of the Russian empire. The reassessment of the Orient by the European culture of the Enlightenment and Romanticism as a dramatically different and backward civilization made the cosmopolitan Yusupov and his acquaintances in Russia and abroad aware of his Tatar background. The private episode of one’s family history suddenly became a very important sign of belonging (or not belonging) to the European culture and Russian aristocracy. Yet the widely discussed “Tatarness” of Yusupov had nothing to do with the actual Tatar people, their language or territory. The “reality” of a Tatar nation and the “reality” of his belonging to it had virtually no impact on the actual situation of choosing loyalty or a cultural code by Yusupov.
Chia Yin Hsu studies a similar situation of incongruity between the formal boundaries of the Russian nation and the practices of the self-perception of “Russianness,” in the article about railway construction in the Far East at the turn of the twentieth century. Only a few years separated the completion of the Chinese Eastern Railroad and the building of the Amur Railroad, but the Russo-Japanese war that broke out during this interval had dramatically altered the public discourse and ideology accompanying railroad construction. For the architects of the new project, Russianness was no longer an embodiment of a pan-European modern and inclusive identity. Now they were preoccupied with the task of defending their exclusive Russianness from the alien racial threat on the outside.
The problematic interconnection of a formal “nationality” and the actual setup of group solidarity and loyalty is the central theme in the publications in the section “Sociology, Anthropology, and Political Science.” To what extent does Russian nationalism coincide with the social group of “Russians” as its basis (regardless of a preferred definition of this group)? To what extent does “Russian nationals” (rossiiane) include all the citizens of the Russian Federation? Ekaterina Panova studies the language of differentiation that structures the attitudes of St. Petersburg schoolteachers toward their ethnically non-Russian students. As she argues in the article, the language of ethnic stereotypes is often the language of ethnic frustration, resulting from the disintegration of old Soviet hierarchies of social prestige, high cultural status, etc. In this situation, “ethnicity” appears as a marker of cultural distance, as a variable only indirectly connected to the formal boundaries of groupness. The article by Raisa Akifeeva and Anna Tolkacheva describes the interchangeability of the discourses of regional and all-national identity in the publications of St. Petersburg state-controlled newspapers. In their pages, the all-national ideology is constructed using the tropes and symbols of regional solidarity and local patriotism. While serving the local community well, this version of all-national ideology would generate multiple conflicts if applied Russia-wide. Even the ultra-nationalist “New Right” intellectuals in Russia develop their group identity independently of the normative boundaries of Russianness. As Mikhail Sokolov demonstrates in his article, the main audience of the New Right is comprised of Europeanized intellectuals integrated in the postmodern global culture, who are anxious for a new exotic cultural product on the international intellectual market. As Oksana Morgunova suggests in her analysis of Russian-language Internet forums of immigrants to Britain, when Russians find themselves outside of Russia, they identify themselves with groups (denoted as “Russians,” “Europeans,” “people of civilized world” etc.) depending on the circumstances of communication, the topic of discussion, on the image of the Other, and on the success of integration into British society.
Thus, this issue of Ab Imperio is indeed about a “chorus of nations”: from the insider’s point of view, nation is seen as numerous communities of solidarity, social action and collective loyalty. From this vantage point, the questioning of the “quality” and “status” of one’s sense of collective belonging is meaningless, as there is nothing more authentic to a person than his or her individual experience. However, looking from the outside either by a contemporary observer or a historian, a social group is seen as a nation only when it successfully unites a diverse “chorus” of individual communities into a monologue language of collective unity. Perhaps, this is why a heterogeneous imperial space can be experienced as a shared community “from the inside,” but it is impossible to produce an equally unambiguous single metanarrative of imperial polity.

Editors of Ab Imperio:
I. Gerasimov
S. Glebov
A. Kaplunovski
M. Mogilner
A. Semyonov