From the Editors: “Conversations about Motherland:” In Search of the Chronotope of Empire and Nation

13 Ab Imperio, 2/2006 From the EDITORS In the first issue of the journal in 2006, we offered and substantiated Ab Imperio’s new annual program: “Anthropology of Languages of SelfDescription in Empire and Nation.” The second issue of the journal builds upon the first and approaches “homeland” as a space of immediate personal experience, on the one hand, and as a language in which metaphors such as immediacy, locality, and territoriality are used for the description of group unity, on the other. We have consciously broadened the framework of this issue, which we had initially envisioned as focused on anthropology of languages of (self-)description of “homeland” as part of the experience of transition from the “imperial” to the “national.” Although some of the articles contain interesting perspectives on the latter problem (most clearly Bradley Woodworth’s article, which explores the Estonization of Revel in the Russian Empire and the transformation of Revel into an Estonian “homeland”), other texts remind us that between the local, “anthropological ” definition of “homeland” and the political use of categories that define “homeland” is an extremely porous and flexible border. Very rarely do we meet abstract definitions of “homeland” in the languages of “CONVERSATIONS ABOUT MOTHERLAND:” IN SEARCH OF THE CHRONOTOPE OF EMPIRE AND NATION 14 From the Editors, In Search of the Chronotope of Empire and Nation self-description of nationalism and imperial patriotism: these definitions are more often local, particular, and idiosyncratic. The anthropological aspect of this approach consists in that social practices and roles of people are problematized and perceived as “text” and not as semantically fixed elements of an “alphabet.” The authors of this issue suggest yet another unidentified aspect of the problem and approach, which has turned out to be an interesting additional line of inquiry in this issue. They point to the very category of “space” as a fundamental dimension of thinking and description. This dimension underpins the language of description of social reality and at the same time is subject to historical changes in spatial imagination. Ann Stoler and Carole McGranahan, whose article appears in our methodological section, speak of the necessity of a full-scale reflection on spatial axioms that condition how scholars approach empire. These axioms bring about Eurocentric concepts of core and periphery, colony and colonized, and so forth. By historicizing these concepts, Stoler and McGranahan show how the logic of European imperialism led to a spatialization of thinking, because there was a need in modern categories to order “new” and “unstructured” spaces. The authors plea for a return to the genealogy of these concepts and to demonstrate what the function of these simple spatial dichotomies was and how they ordered (rather than reflected) the reality of dynamically developing empires. Stoler and McGranahan illustrated the opportunities offered by this approach by analyzing the etymology and the historical semantics of the terms “colony” and “colonist.” Similar to the newest revision of the category of “identity,” the study of genealogy of mental spatial “texts” of empire’s diverse elements, from local “homelands” to a synthetic representation of empire as patria, makes us revisit our stereotypes and advances the idea of plural and situational “homelands.” Petr Meilakh’s article on the discourses of homeland among contemporary Meskheti Turks is a good example of this type of analysis. The article by Kelly O’Neill represents another approach to spatial categories of “homeland,” native land, or historical territory in the context of imperial expansion. Exploring the incorporation of the Crimea into the space of the Russian Empire through the “politics of landscape,” the author suggests the presence of three patterns of integration for different layers of historical legacy: the Classic Greek, Genovese, and Muslim (the latter layer is the subject of her detailed analysis). Each of the cultural texts of the Crimean landscape interacted differently with the logic of empire as a common civilizing home and later with the logic of the nationalizing em- 15 Ab Imperio, 2/2006 pire. That the Crimea preserved its multicultural identity even against the background of the Russification of imperial discourses and practices in the nineteenth century makes us reflect upon the relativity of the opposition between empire and nation and suggests...