Final Report Summary - NEPHRITE BUSINESS (State, Power and Unaccountability in “Neo-Capitalist” East Russia: The Case of Nephrite Business)
Unaccountability in Russia comes about as a result of complex, entangled and self-contradicting accounting procedures and techniques. Although from an external and detached point of view these practices could be denounced as fraudulent and corrupt, such misrepresentations in accounts are not simply defensive and fraudulent mechanisms, but are also part of a broader “audit culture” that exists in Russia which seems to be compatible with global capitalism, despite the belief in the need for transparency as a condition for a successful market economy. Through the ethnographic study of an indigenous mining company that operated in Russia from 1990 to 2014, I show how accounting at shop-floor level is performed as a kind of artistic and experimental practice that relies on aesthetic principles, such as style, thresholds of applicable intensity, references to questions of life and death, and disruption of boundaries between the front and back stages of the performance. My conclusions pose a need to study the problem of accountability within a new critical perspective. This book will be of interest to social anthropologists and other social researchers interested in emerging variations of capitalist economies, processes of accounting, and the specifics of indigenous business.
One of the main results of this Marie Curie project is an article on the limits of accounting procedure. Anthropological research into accounting practices has shown that accounts never contain enough information to totally know and control business enterprises. But interpretation of the effects of this insight vary from the suggestion that accounts exist primarily as disciplining devices and not as forms of data collection to interpretations that highlight the weapons of the accounted weak, who resist the auditing authorities through false accounts. Our study of an indigenous Evenki jade-mining company in Baikal region, East Siberia, which operated successfully for more than fifteen years, shows that the procedures of accountability are enacted in accordance with aesthetics (“empathy toward pattern” in terms of A. Riles). People do not purposefully hide information but present it in ways that disclose aspects of reality and conceal others. On the basis of three cases – counting reindeer in a herd that belonged to the jade-mining company, avoiding counting jade, and failing to count food supplies – we show that accountability is a domain of aesthetic principles (and not only a form of responsibility) and an interface of the relation between order and chaos.
During this project was published the book: Culture Contact in Evenki Land: A Cybernetic Anthropology of Baikal Region. One of the main topics discussed in this book is the hunting style of business management among Evenki people. Here we gave a brief account of the history of the indigenous nephrite mining enterprise and the adaptation of ethos to local ecologies. The activities of hunting and business are studied in relation to the persistence in the ethos of an Evenki businessman. Another extract is a recent case: How do Evenki manage their business activities with those, who are not representatives of the Russian-soviet-Russian state. This chapter discusses cases of business and friendship between Evenki and local Chinese people, how this culture contact unfolds diachronically. We discuss how seemingly unsatisfactory series of interactions between Evenki and local Chinese ultimately produces stability in the whole system of relations over time. Finally the strategies of interaction with strangers are described. This is an analysis from a historical perspective: how did and do Evenkik manage and challenge their business activities with those, who are not representatives of the state.
Other direction of the project is the analysis of visual materials. It was important to find contexts for the description of emotional aspects, for the analysis of the interactions in micro level, and also to create space for an aesthetic approach in a social anthropological research. In this respect the photographic analysis is one of the key methodological approaches. So we tried to create an image-book about the atmosphere of life in the taiga. It is an anthropological account created in the tradition initiated by Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead with their seminal work Balinese Character, which was an important source of inspiration for other famous co-authors; namely, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. With these two books in mind, A Thousand Plateaus and Balinese Character, we dived into the world of the modern Siberian taiga, where the Evenki hunters live. During fieldwork conducted in 2008-2009 we amassed more than 17 thousand photos and all of them are visual documents of the atmosphere of Evenki life. Although most of anthropologists ignored the genre of Balinese Character, we argue that the form of photographic analysis it offered deserves to become an independent methodological approach. In this book we serendipitously rediscover such traditional anthropological topics as gathering, hunting, and reindeer herding through photographic analysis while reflecting on the way these practices fit with the designs of new technological devices and global infrastructures.
Multiplicity and anarchic uncertainty are the prevailing characteristics of the Evenki environment. The Evenki people hunt, drink, destroy their bodies and create new lives, earn millions of dollars in trading white jade to China as well as freeze themselves to become handicapped and eligible for disability benefits. Bipolar contrasts do not dominate the Evenki land. Enormous multiple possibilities in conjunction with the development of resource-based capitalism of modern Russia generate unpredictability and uncertainty. Here, it is not possible to distinguish between tradition and modernity; a caustic climate is no more an obstacle but to the contrary a possibility of invasion and colonization of resources; and the future is capricious not because of the complexity of the external influences (for example global market fluctuations), but because of the local seemingly inadequate reactions to external complexities. First, you realize the porous form of the infrastructure: wherever you go, you see the gaps and distortions ––roads do not complement bridges, fences have holes, satellite telephones that connect villages operate only several hours a day, when the village has electricity. These gaps in the networks of infrastructure create the special atmosphere of a place. And the main paradox of this place is that gaps and absences become the building blocks for the local infrastructure, they are visible, albeit contain voids, and this is why the visual methodology after “Balinese Character” is the most suitable approach to study the Evenki land.
In the respect of photographic analysis the nephrite infrastructure became one of the central topic. We propose to look at an indigenous business and the life of its main infrastructure, nephrite road. The infrastructure of the nephrite road is built and developed to sustain the flow of nephrite from the mine to the city warehouse, where it is sold to Chinese buyers. In the essay we describe it as a channel through which nephrite stones are delivered like messages. The description includes an attentive look at various noises that constitute this channel and the relationship between the channel and its environment.
Another direction of our visual anthropological approach is the analysis of video film materials. As the result of this analysis we found that Evenki as indigenous people need in their everyday life a mode of behavior unpredictable to others, which help them to hunt and spontaneously react to the situations of emergency. We suppose that they managed to use this culturally supported skill in their interactions with broader world, including hierarchical neighbors, in which they mostly act as a subordinated party. We tried to describe how Evenki way of unaccountability is constructed and how it works in the case of counting reindeer, extracted nephrite and food supply sent for them from the city.
We also montage another short anthropological film on dogs. Dogs are companion species to think with (D. Haraway). This type of relationship is also determinant among Evenki during hunting and mining jade. In this visual presentation we studied the role of aesthetics in the taiga environment.
This project was based on a social anthropological fieldwork conducted in 2008-9 in East Siberia among Evenki people in collaboration with Dr Tatiana Safonova similarly to the publication of the results in the frames of this project.