From the Editors: Probing the Limits of Historical Metanarratives: Imperial Boundaries

17 Ab Imperio, 1/2003 From the EDITORS PROBING THE LIMITS OF HISTORICAL METANARRATIVES: IMPERIAL BOUNDARIES With this issue, Ab Imperio launches its thematic program for 2003, which is devoted to investigating problems of frontiers, boundaries, and zones of liminality that will be discussed in connection with the theory of nationalism , and the history of empire and nationalities in the Russian empire, the Soviet Union, and the post-Soviet states. The thematic program for 2003 follows the experiment in 2002, in which four issues of the journal were linked under the umbrella of a meta-theme. This was an experiment in the organization of academic media and an attempt to create a narrative-like structure for the evolving research program of the study of empire and nationalism. The introduction of the annual theme was also our modest contribution to the “return to narrative” movement in social sciences and history. We “returned” to the old grand-narrative of social sciences and historiography, the once influential narrative of modernization and modernity, but just in order to uncover, through critical examination, its newest facets. Among those the most important for us were the ones that emerged at the crossroads of modernity and modernization and empire and nationalism studies. When thinking about the annual theme for 2003, Ab Imperio’s editors faced a problem. How many metanarratives are scholars left with to critically revisit and to use to elucidate problems for their own research? With 18 From the Editors, Probing the Limits of Historical Metanarratives... this question the experiment with annual themes takes on a new stage. Focusing on frontiers, boundaries and zones of liminality, the journal invites its contributors and readers to explore the possibility of those problematic areas becoming a sort of metanarrative – conceptual mediators capable of meaningful and coherent organization of scholarly research of the diversity of human experience with a potential for creating new perspectives on that experience, and thus a more comprehensive representation of its complexity and diversity. The challenge, of course, is encapsulated in the fact that such concepts as frontier, boundary, liminality denote a certain degree of marginality and opposition to metanarratives. With the emergence and dissemination of the structuralist paradigm in social sciences and humanities, the picture of the world as consisting of monolithic blocks (referred to by Ernst Gellner in reference to the development of nation-building) became dominant. This structuralist paradigm has always privileged collective identities, such as class and nation. In this paradigm a special role is assumed by the notion of boundary, which serves as a system-founding category. Already in the definition of structure by de Saussure, the principal part was the relationship between elements, i.e. it was assumed that social blocks acquire their meaning only in relationship with one another. This makes the notion of difference central to the definition and, therefore, Fredrik Barth’s theory of symbolic boundary was a logical consequence of the structuralist approach to the concept of frontier. The emergence of post-structuralism exerted a significant influence on the prevailing visions of the concept of boundary and shifted the focus of research from the analysis of large social entities and identities to the scrutiny of individuals’ attitude to those social collectivities. The innovative work by Peter Sahlins1 demonstrated that nationbuilding in borderland regions is subject to the influence of multiple factors and that the concept of frontier as an impenetrable line is hardly applicable to even such linear processes as the formation of frontier between two nation-states. Consequently, more important in the understanding of frontier becomes the processes of social self-organization and crystallization of national and ethnic affiliations, e. g. the problems of historical agents’ participation in constituting, correcting and annihilating borders. As a result, the history of different “human” frontiers loses its predefined character and the question of frontier becomes the center of historical analysis for it reflects the nature of human activity aimed at constructing the social world and making sense of it. 1 Peter Sahlins. Boundaries: the Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees. Berkeley, 1989. 19 Ab Imperio, 1/2003 Whereas in social and political history the critique of structuralism introduced doubts about the validity of structuralist interpretations...