The notion of hybridity is treated with suspicion in many political and academic circles. Anticolonial movements (and postcolonial scholars identifying with them) despised hybridity as trivializing colonial oppression and the insurmountable cultural and political distance from the colonizer. Nationalists – both those fighting for independence and those already in control of nation-states – consider hybridity the main threat to the national body’s wholesomeness. Historical empires relied on factual hybridization but refused to acknowledge its reality because their social order was built on the bases of hierarchically arranged races, confessions, legal estates, and other forms of groupness.
These political sensibilities and the biases of ideological discourses do not have to influence scholarly analysis, for this means streamlining the empirical reality. Regardless of one’s theoretical rendering of hybridity, there were about two million “Eurasians” (Anglo-Indians) in India in the first half of the twentieth century, ^[1] two-thirds of the registered Russian nationalists in the Russian Empire resided on non-“Russian” territories, ^[2] and the population of the empire was categorized by physical anthropologists in terms of “mixed racial types.” ^[3] These basic facts alone disqualify any dismissive attitudes to hybridity as manipulations of reality.
The relevance of hybridity as an analytical concept lies far beyond the affirmation of physical or cultural intermixtures of population groups. The concept is needed to account for transitional social formations and thus to overcome limitations of the structuralist analysis of society in terms of “pure forms” (or stages), which cannot be developed into a dynamic model of social transformation. It is no wonder that Max Weber identified pure forms as “ideal types,” that is, as “utopia[s]” that “cannot be found empirically anywhere in reality.”^[4] Most obviously, hybridity is an indispensable analytical category in discussing the situations that have been identified metaphorically by Richard White as “the middle ground” – the state of “mutual and creative misunderstanding.” ^[5]

“The middle ground is the place in between: in between cultures, peoples, and in between empires and the nonstate world of villages. … People try to persuade others who are different from themselves by appealing to what they perceive to be the values and the practices of those others. They often misinterpret and distort both the values and the practices of those they deal with, but from these misunderstandings arise new meanings and through them new practices – the shared meanings and practices of the middle ground.” ^[6]

Any history of globalization or global history, history of cultural transfers and mutual influences implies the situation of the middle ground and thus, the phenomenon of hybridity, whether it is a study of the twentieth century or the eighteenth century (the time frame of White’s original study). The histories of empires and anti-imperial resistance are inseparable from the history of hybridity not because of the actual intermixing of the population, but because people conceptualized a new reality simultaneously using the native and borrowed idioms and discourses. Any encounter with modernity is hybrid by default because it involves rejection and acceptance, the old and the new.
The omnipresence of hybridity does not make it any less ambivalent, thus partially substantiating the suspicions mentioned at the beginning of this essay. It can facilitate demobilization of the anticolonial protest – but it can also have an equally subversive effect on the metropole, imposing cultural norms and political views of the formerly colonized through “the shared meanings and practices of the middle ground” (White). Interest in hybridity can sideline the centrality of resistance to foreign domination, but it can also uncover historical subjectivities muted by hegemonic discourses of nationalist particularism. Obviously, the problem is not the analytical concept itself but its politically motivated applications.
This thematic issue of Ab Imperio develops the annual theme “Rethinking Hybridity and Purity in a Global Perspective,” and highlights two main aspects of hybridity as a concept: its ability to explain historical dynamics and the situation of contact in the middle ground.
The “Methodology and Theory” section features the forum “Political Imaginaries at the End of Empire” guest-edited by Karuna Mantena and Rama Sundari Mantena. An outgrowth of Ab Imperio’s seminar on the postimperial imagination, this forum focuses on forgotten alternatives to the emergence of nation-states. Historical articles are not rare publications in this section, if they can offer a new perspective or research questions to the field of new imperial history in general and its application to Northern Eurasia in particular. The articles by the late Kavita Saraswathi Datla, Rama Sundari Mantena, and Adom Getachew reconstruct a “political imaginary” that has been marginalized in subsequent hegemonic historical narratives of Indian and African decolonization, even though it had been mainstream early in the process. That was a federalist ideal as a desired arrangement for former colonies, which preceded the nation-state scenario that eventually prevailed. In the editorial introduction to the forum, Alexander Semyonov explicates the ambivalently hybrid nature of federalist projects as bridging the seemingly unsurmountable gap between imperial and national principles (with the effect of producing an original form of composite polity). Federalism historically precedes other postimperial arrangements and itself presents a full-scale alternative to them, undermining teleological schemes of development from empire to nation. Semyonov also points out problems in the reception of federalism citing the U.S. case, which is often viewed as paradigmatic, but obscures the fact that most of the world population now lives in federations created by the reformatting of formerly imperial spaces. Federal and quasi-federal arrangements of today are thus a direct consequence of imperial diversity and they often reveal the same challenges of ethnoterritorial nationalism, uneven development, and de facto layered citizenships. The forum materials raise the problem of long durée development of imperial spaces and suggest potentially productive research into the dynamics of postimperial projects.
The “History” section can be divided into two thematic blocs. One deals with the phenomenon of hybrid administrative culture in late imperial Russia on the example of two borderland regions. Stephen Badalyan Riegg shows how the neotraditionalist political style of Ilarion Vorontsov-Dashkov, the viceroy of the Caucasus, helped to stabilize this unruly region in the wake of the 1905 upheaval. Ulfat Abdurasulov presents the opposite case: the modernist policies of Colonel Vladimir Kolosovskii, in charge of Russia’s semiprotectorate, the khanate of Khiva, had provoked the horrible Turkmen revolt of 1916 that shocked all of Central Asia. Neither the performative imperial archaism of Vorontsov-Dashkov, pretending to be nationality-blind in the “age of nationalism,” nor manipulations by Kolosovskii, who behaved as a public politician while remaining a military officer, were quite typical for the time and place. Both men attempted to respond to pressing political challenges to their office and their regions by improvising along the divergent scenarios of power. Vorontsov’s version of hybridity reinterpreted prereform-era patterns of paternalist imperial rule, while Kolosovskii hybridized his office (to the effect of literal corruption) with practices of contested politics in democratic regimes. Once again defying teleological explanations, these cases demonstrate that old imperial practices of nonpartisan (and hence nonrepresentative) rule still proved to be efficient in the twentieth century, while formally modern forms of administration through political mobilization of various constituencies proved themselves disastrous in the complicated middle ground of Khiva.
The second bloc of articles addresses various aspects of hybridity in the “Islamic juridical field” in Central Asia. This concept was coined by Paolo Sartori (whose recent book, Visions of Justice: Sharīʿa and Cultural Change in Russian Central Asia, is discussed by Pavel Shabley, Bakhtiyar Babadjanov, Sergei Abashin, and Alexander Morrison in the “Historiography” section in this issue). The notion of “Islamic juridical field” allows scholars to approach different sources of the Islamic law as elements of the same – hybrid – whole. Within the “Islamic juridical field,” the same sense of justice is communicated through various legal institutions. The “History” section features studies by historians who develop this approach. Kairat Balabiyev and Zhuldyz Turekulova reconstruct the performance of one institutional “element” of the “Islamic juridical field”– the Kazakh aqsaqal (elders) courts. Due to their high mobility and accessibility, the aqsaqal courts were popular and broadly used back in the day but remain all but ignored in modern historiography. Their predominantly oral procedures have left an insignificant paper trail, so the authors suggest that further studies of these popular courts will need to rely on unconventional historical sources, such as folklore. Another article in this bloc, by Bakhtiyar Babadjanov and Paolo Sartori, relativizes the established clear-cut binaries between the reformers-Jadids and traditionalists-Kadimists in Russia’s early twentieth-century Muslim communities. The authors analyzed publications in the journal al-Iṣlāḥ (Tashkent, 1915–1917) and concluded that the cohort of Muslim reformers can be described more accurately as a hybrid milieu rather than a consolidated party. Muslim intellectuals associated with al-Iṣlāḥ could hold various opinions on different religious and political matters (ranging from “conservative” to “radical”) and changed their views often, which problematizes their easy categorization in “progressive” or “conservative” camps. Moreover, later the alleged “traditionalists” would become leaders of the Spiritual Administration of the Muslims of Central Asia and Kazakhstan (SADUM) established by the Soviet regime in 1943. Not only did they find a common language with the Soviet government for promoting secular social reforms in Central Asia, but in their rulings on religious matters they heavily borrowed from the rhetoric and ideas of the prerevolutionary journal al-Iṣlāḥ.
The “Archive” section features Evgenii Akelev’s article telling the remarkable story of the mid-eighteenth-century criminal-turned-headhunter, Ivan (Van’ka) Kain, followed by archival documents related to this case. Akelev presents Kain as an ultimate hybrid in the structural situation of the middle ground. The Russian early imperial legal system did not know the modern practice of police detective work: crown officials became concerned in criminal offenses only when the offense involved a formal denunciation of the alleged perpetrator by the victim, who also had to sponsor the ensuing investigation. The authorities disregarded unreported crimes or crimes by unknown culprits. A petty criminal, Ivan Kain, surrendered himself to the Moscow police and proposed to denounce his fellow criminals to the authorities. This legal procedure fitted the established juridical protocol, but the role assumed by Kain was radically novel. Throughout the 1740s, he acted as a skillful police detective, identifying and apprehending hundreds of criminals. The authorities put a military taskforce under his command (at some point reaching two dozen troops), and he conducted searches and arrests on his own initiative. An illiterate peasant, Kain twice testified before the imperial Senate, and secured official immunity from denunciations by other criminals. Yet he never had the actual status of a government agent or a salary, and formally remained a private person. He thus had to cover his rising expenses by offering detective and collector services to Muscovites, which eventually got him involved in outright criminal business of racketeering and blackmailing. Kain’s hybrid official status as a private individual performing the functions of a government agent reflected the transitional character of the Russian imperial state. Kain’s supervisors in the government understood the efficiency of the new police detective work but they did not yet have the legal, institutional, and financial means to implement it as a government service. Therefore, they were willing to extend support to Kain’s activities despite their very unorthodox nature (to put it mildly). Thus, state officials co-opted a representative of the society to perform police functions rather than planting a government agent in the midst of the society to conduct the detective work.
A different case of the middle ground, during a very different age, is presented by Svetlana Malysheva in the “Newest Mythologies” section. She reads the semiotics of Soviet cemeteries in Moscow, Kazan, and (to a lesser extent) Leningrad from the 1920s to the 1980s as an evolving story of making sense of Soviet life through Soviet death. Cemeteries – their structural arrangements, the architectural styles of headstones, and the burial rituals – produce a profoundly hybrid text, blending cultures, ideological regimes, and artistic styles throughout the Soviet period. Malysheva argues that the Soviet popular culture of death succeeded where the official ideological machine had ultimately failed: it produced a coherent yet hybrid version of Soviet subjectivity that harmonized one’s ethnic, religious, and civic identities. The regime was never able to offer a positive scenario that would embrace all these aspects in a single narrative of Sovietness, without censoring one or another of its elements or producing potentially subversive ruptures.
All in all, the stories told in this issue of Ab Imperio underscore the ultimate reality of hybridity. It appears as more than a product of mind games surfacing under appropriately frivolous names, such as bricolage or a motley crew. If people were buried as hybrids, they must have experienced hybridity as a way of life.