From the Editors

17 Ab Imperio, 4/2010 From the EDITORS In 1997, Stanley J. Tambiah, the Harvard social anthropologist specializing in SouthAsia, raised a question that very much resonates with the theme of this issue of Ab Imperio: “How do we understand the shift and dynamics by which friends and neighbors are ‘suddenly’transformed into enemies and aggressors?”1 Based on his extensive studies of several large-scale urban riots of the 1980s (he had just published a book on the topic2 ), Tambiah demonstrated that it was misleading to perceive parts in the interethnic conflict as homogeneous entities. Outside the situation of political mobilization of differences, the very same people could demonstrate solidarity and cooperate, despite ethnic, confessional, and social class divides. In this respect Tambiah, who relied on empirical microanalysis of case studies of urban riots in Sri Lanka or Delhi, corroborated critical and even skeptical theoretical approaches to the category of “ethnic violence” as demonstrated by sociologists and political scientists such as Rogers Brubaker, David Laitin, and James Fearon: “ethnic violence” is… a category of practice, produced and reproduced by social actors…, that should not be (but often is) taken over uncritically as a category of analysis by social scientists… Ethnicity is not the ultimate, irreducible source of violent conflict… Rather, conflicts driven by struggles for power between challengers and incumbents are newly ethnicized, newly framed in ethnic terms.3 1 Stanley J. Tambiah. Friends, Neighbors, Enemies, Starangers: Aggressor and Victim in Civilian Ethnic Riots // Social Science & Medicine. 1997. Vol. 45. No. 8. P. 1177. 2 Stanley J.Tambiah. Leveling Crowds: Ethnonationalist Conflicts and CollectiveViolence in South Asia. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1996. 3 Rogers Brubaker and David D. Laitin. Ethnic and Nationalist Violence //Annual Review of Sociology. 1998. Vol. 24. Pp. 446, 425. 18 From the Editors To explain how actual neighbors (not sociologically aggregated groups) begin killing each other, turning from “friends” into “enemies,” Tambiah found it necessary to introduce a fourth element into this social equation: “strangers.” Generally speaking, while “friends” become enemies during the conflict, it is not the immediate neighbors but the outsiders-strangers who actually set houses on fire, loot, and murder. In fact, students of Jewish pogroms in the Russian empire follow the very same logic when they insist that it was primarily peasants from the outside of shtetls and towns who arrived at the site of a pogrom to plunder and commit acts of violence. Sociologically speaking, they were “neighbors”-turned-enemies, but in each individual case they were strangers to their victims. Obviously, after Neighbors by Jan Gross, scholars can no longer entertain the illusion that outbursts of violence among former “friends” should be explained by a conspiracy of ominous “strangers” – and thus a convenient explanatory tool is discarded. The current issue of Ab Imperio “War and Imperial Society: Dynamics of ‘Friendship’ and ‘Hostility’” can be seen as an attempt to offer a different explanation for the ambiguous and fluid differentiation of society into “friends” and “neighbors.” In the imperial situation, it is difficult to clearly separate a civil war from war with foreign enemy, inasmuch as one’s self-identification with a group and group interests is not bound by political borders. How did Russian francophone aristocrats feel fighting Napoleon’s army? Was the Ottoman empire perceived as an enemy by Russian Muslim soldiers? As the articles published in this issue of the journal demonstrate, any military conflict results in complex social polarization: war with a foreign enemy generates mistrust of one’s own soldiers who became prisoners of war (POWs), and at the same time encourages the identification of a certain category of captured enemies as “friends” (to be used against their former comrades in arms). In the “Methodology” section, the Cambridge anthropologist, Caroline Humphrey, offers her solution to the dilemma formulated by Stanley J. Tambiah . She turns to the paradigmatic case of the late imperial city of Odessa, a bustling cosmopolitan port city but also the site of several large-scale Jewish pogroms, including the horrible one of October 1905. Drawing from her interpretation of Gabriel Tarde’s sociology to describe the dialectic connectedness of the seemingly contradictory phenomena of social solidarity and conflicting differentiation, Humphrey advances a...