The Impossibility of Pure Forms: Normative Hybridities as a "Banality of Life"

In 2018, Ab Imperio's focus is on "Rethinking Hybridity and Purity in a Global Perspective" – a quintessential problem of social sciences and humanities. Explicitly or implicitly, every case study starts with mapping out the material and classifying the protagonists: are they representative of a particular group, and what are the criteria of groupness? The formulation of the "ideal type" concept in Weberian sociology and, in particular, the rise of constructivist methodologies after World War II have problematized the very notion of pure qualities of an object or a group. Yet, if our objects of study are all composite in nature, how do we define and analyze the building blocks from which they are "constructed?"

The materials published in issue 1/2018, "Hybridity and Pure Forms in the Sociopolitical Imagination," permit an inquiry into this problem from various vantage points. The "Methodology and Theory" section features a preprint of the introductory chapter of the book A Theory for Empire Written on Its Margins: Life Histories of the Etnos Concept in Eurasia, currently in preparation by a British press. Sergei S. Alymov, David G. Anderson, and Dmitry V. Arzyutov present a fascinating account of the genealogy of the concept of "etnos" and its multiple interpretations and applications from the early twentieth century to this day. The concept itself was a product of "etnos-thinking" – a distinct mindset shared by Russian scholars who tried to solve the task of describing composite objects using some pure elemental blocks. Unlike "ethnicity," the Greek neologism "etnos" reflected the hybridity of social objects by combining linguistic and biological kinship, cultural similarity, territorial proximity, and political affinity into a single all-embracing category. Defining etnos was like determining the integral for functions with several variables, thus ordering diversity and reducing it to a clear unambiguous formula. Driven by etnos-thinking, which acknowledged the fundamental diversity and hybridity of social groups, the practical application of the etnos concept has tended to essentialize human collectives. In the late Soviet and post-Soviet Russian social sciences and political thinking influenced by them, etnos was used as a synonym of race, an "objective" physical characteristic of a group. One could argue that this transformation was programmed by the very idea of deconstructing hybridity into pure elements (etnoses): the acceptance of pure forms defies the initial deconstructive impulse of etnos-thinking. The category that emerged as a reflection of diversity, in an act of refusal to accept nondifferentiated pure forms, was transformed into a pure form of its own. Repeating the fate of revolutionary categories like class or nation, etnos became a stultified expression of the drive to essentialize nationhood produced by the Soviet experience and exported globally. Even if some scholars suggested the death of etnos as a useful concept,¹ few categories of sociopolitical imagination in the post-Soviet space continue to hold such sway over the minds of social sciences and political entrepreneurs alike.

The articles published in the "History" section of the issue resonate with each other despite their very different topics and the approaches taken by their authors. All of them focus on what can be defined as "a pure embodiment of a heterogeneous group," and reveal the paradoxically marginal nature of what was perceived as normative symbols of national bodies. Zachary Hoffman studies the diaries of Aleksei Suvorin, a powerful press magnate in late imperial Russia, and the publications of his conservative and loyalist newspaper Novoe vremia during the first global conflict of the twentieth century, the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905. Suvorin and the newspaper promoted jingoist Russian nationalism to the extent of openly attacking the government for its incompetent war effort. Suvorin's political position was paradoxical in more ways than one. Not only was public bashing of the government during the war politically subversive and hence inconsistent with true loyalism. Suvorin placed all the blame for military losses not on the army command but on the top diplomats, who tried to avoid the war or end it. And while loudly promoting the war and praising the emperor, in private, Suvorin was hopeless about the...