Past Fellows at the Institute of International Studies

Alan Sharlin Memorial Award Fellow, 2003-2004

Diana Blank, Anthropology: Voices from Elsewhere: An Ethnography of Place in Mogilev-Podolsky, Ukraine. This dissertation takes up the question of what life has become for those who have remained in the southwestern Ukrainian border town of Mogilev-Podolsky, where the collapse of the Soviet system has served as the catalyst for the disintegration of the political, economic, and physical infrastructure of the town, as well as for the concomitant departure of almost all those Mogilevchanye who have been able to obtain visas to emigrate elsewhere. This project seeks to understand and articulate the distinctive sense of place that has subsequently developed in the town, whose consciousness is now both extensively transnational and intensively local, and where place is made palpable as much through what is absent there as through what is present. It is in large part through discourse that these presences and absences are reflected, and Ms. Blank's dissertation explores a rich and diverse collection of discursive utterances -- drawn from conversations, videos, letters, diaries, poems, jokes, and other locally-produced cultural artifacts, in addition to traditional participant observation -- through which Mogilevchanye conceptualize and represent their town and its place in the world. These utterances articulate at once a shifting virtual community that spans borders, and a physical place -- with an attendant set of social and existential realities -- delimited by those borders.

The dissertation is based on field research carried out between July of 1998 and August of 2002 over ten cumulative months in Mogilev-Podolsky and eight months among émigré Mogilevchanye now residing in New York City. Its first two chapters will draw broadly from conversations and encounters that occurred during those ten months in Mogilev, and will seek to articulate a certain ethos or mood that is expressed through a non-unified, but commonly intelligible, constellation of references through which Mogilevchanye give voice to the experience of being in the town. The later chapters draw from materials gathered in both New York and Mogilev-Podolsky, and hone in more closely on particular discourses, exploring a range of genres and idioms in which these experiences of Mogilev are diversely expressed, and the audiences to whom they are addressed.

Chapter One will situate the question of sense of place in Mogilev-Podolsky in the context of the central philosophical and anthropological debates on "being-in-place." Chapter Two will focus on the various ways Mogilevchanye create verbal maps of their town, maps that encode the post-Soviet oligarchic entrenchment of power and popular powerlessness in the very landscape itself. Chapters Three and Four will examine emigrations and peregrinations emanating from the town, exploring the differential ways that two sets of mobile Mogilevchanye conceptualize their relationships to the town. The first set consists of those who (largely as a result of Jewish ethnicity) have been able to emigrate to the West, and the second, of those who have not been able to legally emigrate, and have consequently engaged in a range of illegal or semi-legal migrations. Chapters Five and Six will analyze two genres to which Mogilevchanye divided by diaspora have appealed to speak across the barriers of space and time. They will examine poetry and videos in which Mogilevchanye document their dispersals, narrating the town that was as it slips over the horizon, and communicating beyond that horizon. Some of these creations have been composed from the diaspora, and others, to it. Chapters Seven and Eight will meander through the streets and gravesites of the town, as various local informants lead spontaneous walking tours before the ethnographer's camera, calling up some of the ghosts of town memory at the sites where they haunt, and tying the town's social history to particular places on the landscape. Chapters Nine and Ten will interrogate the two masks -- of tragedy and of comedy -- that narratives of Mogilev wear, and a third -- one that merges the features of the two -- so often donned in portrayals of the town.