In the present issue of Ab Imperio we finalize our annual program “Anthropology of Languages of Self-Description of Empire and Nation.” In the past three issues of the journal we discussed the problem of societal perception through the prism of individual experience and various approaches to the study of that perception; we analyzed categories of groupness based on immediate experiences (e.g., “Motherland” or “patriotism”) in the context of a heterogeneous society; finally, we explored an individual and personal dimension of the “nation” as a community of a mediated yet joint social action. In the current issue we explore the most de-personified form of societal organization, the state, and its perception in individual experience.
Generally, a hypertrophied perception of the state’s role is characteristic of East European (post-Soviet) space. However, contemporary historiography and social theory do not simply deconstruct this tradition, but offer new models for the study of those dynamic complexes of practices and relationships that we usually associate with the phenomenon of the “state.” This issue of Ab Imperio suggests that we look at these complexes from an anthropological point of view and in the context of studying national and imperial “statehoods.” We have already explained in previous issues that we understand this “anthropological” approach as an “anthropic” (that is, commeasurable with the individual human being) view of cultures and structures, which appear inseparable from humans as social actors and subjects creating meanings and establishing cognitive frames of perceptions of reality. From this point of view the “state” emerges as a sum total of projections by members of the polity, as a result of interactions between different societal groups, and as a hostage of the “human factor” of those who speak on its behalf.
Alexander Kamensky’s analysis of the historical semantics of the concept of “state” in Russian political language (published in the methodological section of this issue) maintains that the perception of the state as an independent phenomenon (separate both from the figure of the sovereign and from the private sphere and personal relations of subjugation) emerges in Russia in the early eighteenth century in the course of radical transformations of traditional political practices. Simultaneously in the eighteenth century, one encounters an intellectual capacity to think of the state as a political community. Its members are no longer just subjects, but also citizens who are enabled to construct mutual relations among themselves. The authors in this issue demonstrate that the regime of subjecthood, in fact, contained within itself a possibility of joint political action, of a legally regulated status, and of collective political imagination. One can theorize these possibilities in terms of “citizenhood” (grazhdanstvennost’). Moreover, by problematizing the very subject of citizenship, contributors to this issue of Ab Imperio make the general picture even more complex, as it becomes apparent that in some instances “subjects” acquired the status of “corporate citizenship” as members of social estates or regional elites. Hence an outcome crucial for the present issue: the opposition between subjecthood and citizenship, which seems to overlap so neatly with dichotomies such as traditionalism versus modernization, and empire versus nation, does not work well in studies focused on the analysis of individual and group perceptions of, and interactions with the “state.” This conclusion can be seen as a continuation of the discussion of subjecthood and citizenship in Russian and Soviet history initiated in Kritika (nos. 2 and 3 in 2006). One of the most significant outcomes of that discussion was the view of subjecthood as “deficient citizenship,” which allowed us to approach the problem of personal experience of the state on a new level and with a different research program.
The recent transformation in citizenship studies confirms the fruitfulness of this direction of historiographic discussions about practices and semantics of “subjecthood” and “citizenship.” This transformation, under the influence of an “anthropological turn,” departed from the formal institutional analysis characteristic of mid-twentieth century political science and moved towards studies of people’s relations with and within the state. At the same time, “citizenship” is increasingly viewed not as a static combination of status and rights, but as a dynamic system of inclusions and exclusions. In such studies one notes such a fundamental complication of the notion of the boundary between the “state” and “society” that it becomes impossible to unambiguously discriminate between societal and civic loyalties. One can find a brief review of the current state of citizenship studies in Rebecca Chamberlain-Creangг’s article in our section “Anthropology, Political Science, Sociology.” In her study of citizenship in the unrecognized Transnistrian Republic, the author even considered it necessary to partially “rehabilitate” the role of the state in the processes of shaping citizenhood, even if the state appears both as an independent agent and a product of the citizens’ ideological projections.
The article by Miron Aronoff on the emergence of political anthropology as a special field in contemporary social sciences may help contextualize this approach. As one of the founders of this field in the United States, Aronoff analyzes his personal experiences and tells the story of how political scientists arrived at an understanding that the “state” is a complex system of different interest groups and loyalties, and that personal and local experiences of living through the “state” also play a formative role in the shaping of the state as an institution.
An “anthropological’ approach to the state disentangles the indissociable connection between the concepts of “citizenship” and “nation,” especially since we think of institutions as created (or imagined) on the basis of more syncretic and more fundamental groups. “In the discussion of how far one can go in applying contemporary categories of analysis and description of society to the ancien rйgime, Peter Sahlins stresses the invariant character of nationality/subjecthood and citizenship understood as different aspects of belonging to the polity. Noting the unexpectedly widespread use of the term “citoyen” in pre-revolutionary France, Sahlins demonstrates both its partial overlapping with the concept of “subject” and the principal differences in semantics and application of these two notions.
The historical section of this issue continues the discussion of modern and pre-modern ways of use and experiencing of the categories of citizenship and political loyalty. This approach appears to be especially fruitful in empirical studies of the imperial situation, where archaic and local perceptions often survive next to modern and universal forms of belonging. For instance, the historical section is opened by Natalia Yakovenko’s article, which offers insight into a complex experience of group solidarity and belonging of a szlachta member in the seventeenth century. This complex experience is interpreted in accordance with categories of subjecthood, estate solidarity, local patriotism and confessional identification. A detailed reconstruction of the senatorial revision of the Kazan guberniia in 1819-1820 in Alsu Biktasheva’s article demonstrates the mechanisms of “personification” of state power in Alexander I’s era, and underscores the opposition between imperial subjecthood, citizenship in local society, and “state interests.” Mikhail Dolbilov shows that in particular circumstances (for example, when the imperial center fought for political control in the Western borderlands after the January uprising) confessional policies became the main factor in shaping political loyalty, which was grounded in membership in a confessional community (conversion to Orthodoxy) and the demonstration of allegiance to the sovereign through the titular confessional identity (“Tsar’s faith”). Olga Maiorova illustrates how after the Crimean war Russian intellectuals began to reconsider the historically shaped perceptions of political community and arrive at an understanding of the “nation” as a developing and dynamic unity, whose loyalty and sense of co-participaton in the state was not a given but required support, guidance and education.
Benno Gammerl’s article offers a comparative study of administrative practices and legal ideas regarding subjects residing outside of imperial borders in the British and the Habsburg empires. Gammerl not only rejects the division of Europe into “modern” and “archaic” regions but also demonstrates a variety of factors – racial, ethno-national, military – that had influenced the functioning of subjecthood/citizenship in the international arena. Echoing Peter Sahlins’ methodological insights, Gammerl shows how “subjecthood” survived in the modern British empire in a new, racial edition, and how citizenship emerged in an “archaic” and multiethnic Habsburg empire. Another important aspect of citizenship is underscored by James Kennedy and Liliana Riga’s article, which explores the role of American experts in the post World War I re-mapping of Central and Eastern Europe. The authors reconstruct the context of the liberal and assimilationist nationalism of the Progressive era in the United States. This vision of nationalism saw assimilation as a cultural and social phenomenon capable of leveling ethnic differences and creating preconditions for a developed citizenship. These very views developed under specific American conditions and inspired by American concerns made the expert advisors to President Wilson look for a connection between the imposition of self-determination and the arrival of political stability and developed civil society in the Central and East European region. This article also raises the question of possible limits to transfers of historically developed notions of statehood, and of political community as a socially rooted phenomenon from one historical and cultural-political context into another. Researching the process of such a transfer, the authors follow the transformation of the liberal impetus of the Progressive era into illiberal conceptions of state intervention and into private identities so characteristic of a nationalizing state.
As it follows from the scholarship in this issue, the state as the most formalized and institutionalized form of groupness does not cancel less official, local communities of solidarity, but rather absorbs them. “Subjecthood” and “citizenship” appear as situational categories without an unambiguous relation to the “modern” or “pre-modern” form of the polity. At the same time, the relationships between the society and the state emerge as a single dynamic system, which only in exceptional circumstances can be differentiated into ideal types. All of the above is particularly visible in an imperial situation, in a multicultural and heterogeneous society, whose unity is based on a complex balance of interests, cultures, local societies and dominations which together produce a single “state” as an outcome of a complex compromise.

Editors of Ab Imperio:

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