Nancy Ries | Colgate University (original) (raw)
Papers by Nancy Ries
Ethnologia Polona, 2023
This paper interrogates the official purveyance of exterminist rhetoric in Russia's war on Ukrain... more This paper interrogates the official purveyance of exterminist rhetoric in Russia's war on Ukraine, with a particular focus on state media discourse. Over decades, the Putin regime has constructed an overarching system of intertwined narratives about Ukraine, centred on historical and geopolitical fables and exhortations to violence, and conveyed via repetitive tropes and tones of speech. These are ritualistic semi-scripted televised discussions ("agitainment") featuring state officials, hack journalists, and prowar scholars. This elaborate discursive spectacle models a sadistic affect and seems designed to crush empathy towards Ukrainian civilians and among Russia's own citizens. Anthropological and critical discursive approaches to the circulation of utterance suggest avenues for analysing the impacts, obvious and subtle, of these rhetorical and aesthetic devices in the context of terror directed both internationally and domestically.
Leviathan (U. of Edinburgh), 2016
There are few remaining barriers to nuclear war.
Safundi, 2020
In this paper I analyze the Trump, Putin, and Zuma regimes as “thugocracies”: projects of sophist... more In this paper I analyze the Trump, Putin, and Zuma regimes as “thugocracies”: projects of sophisticated state capture, through organized crime networks at every level of scale, and utilizing complex arrays of mafia tactics, personnel, and practices. With a basis in first-hand ethnography on the modalities of the mafia in Russia in the 1990s, I delineate critical interconnections between thugocrats operating in South Africa, the Russian Federation, and the United States, arguing that their networks are simultaneously local, extensively transnational, and closely intertwined. Though thugocratic regimes target the rule of law and civil society in order to “make crime legal,” I conclude that inquiries like the South African Zondo Commission help create public outrage and awareness of the threat thugocracy poses to democracy.
The formerly socialist world represents one of the fastest-growing and theoretically challenging ... more The formerly socialist world represents one of the fastest-growing and theoretically challenging areas in the humanities and social sciences. With perestroika and its legacies, the very contours of field studies after socialism are being fundamentally reshaped. In anthropology, for example, where fieldwork has always been the flagship, the former Soviet Union was all but closed to ethnographic research and regular scholarly exchanges from the early 1930s onward. The opening of borders in the 1990s brought a heady atmosphere of new possibilities: sustained conversations with specialists from across the socialist world, a return to more engaged field studies, and new access to archives. But the very drama of events also created a certain breathlessness, as the challenges of mapping such change overwhelmed more traditionally grounded historical and cultural analysis. Over a decade later, we can begin to chart the topography of a diverse realm of new scholarship, built on the theoretical and methodological foundations of cross-disciplinary work. "Culture and Society after Socialism" looks to present the very best of this body of writing. Providing close-up perspectives on the lived experience of socialism and its aftermath, this series advances innovative work that fundamentally rethinks the cultural projects of socialist states and their outcomes. Through detailed readings of historical and cultural contexts, these works bridge the study of power systems and cosmologies, material practices and social meanings, political economies and the mythic forces that sustain them. We see new work in and about the formerly socialist world as a vital opportunity to reconsider the analytical boundaries of area studies and their respective scholarly traditions. For example, whether Russia and its eastern European neighbors may one day be reclassified as "Western" seems less
The Anthropology of East Europe Review, 1991
... Michael Rywkin, Armonk, New York: ME Sharpe, Inc., 1989. xii + 242 pp. Nancy Ries, Department... more ... Michael Rywkin, Armonk, New York: ME Sharpe, Inc., 1989. xii + 242 pp. Nancy Ries, Department of Anthropology, Cornell University Soviet Society Today is a book with two possible uses, but whether it is the best resource for these two situations is debatable. ...
Current History
In authoritarian countries, jokes can allow citizens to mock the system’s absurdities, but they a... more In authoritarian countries, jokes can allow citizens to mock the system’s absurdities, but they also reinforce the boundaries of speech and thought. A study of humor in Belarus puts the country’s current protests in a new light, just as the old quiescent mentality may be changing.
Current History
A definitive history of organized crime in Russia shows how political leaders have long used gang... more A definitive history of organized crime in Russia shows how political leaders have long used gangsters to serve the state's purposes.
Slavic Review
Frontiers are locations of geopolitical assertion, reification, definition, and experiment, wheth... more Frontiers are locations of geopolitical assertion, reification, definition, and experiment, whether physical or symbolic, spatial or temporal. The papers for this special Slavic Review Forum examine important linked and parallel frontier-forming practices. These practices span the postsocialist space yet also, as several authors argue, negate that chronotopic and sociopolitical identifier. Frontier-reformulation practices include ideological constructions of emergent, yet familiar, enemies, new and refurbished commemorative rites and installations, mediated threat prediction, and discourses about undeclared wars that seem to promise to eventuate into future declared or at least named wars. As Neringa Klumbytė tells us in her introduction to this Forum, these practices both point to and produce “eventfulness.”
Slavic Review
of qualitative research methods enables the scholars to uncover different dimensions of citizens&... more of qualitative research methods enables the scholars to uncover different dimensions of citizens' motivations for engagement in political action. What remains somewhat unclear in the volume is whether Russian scholars encountered any difficulty in securing interviews and asking politically sensitive questions in a repressive political regime. One of the main findings to be gleaned from this study is that Russian citizens are torn between their longing for social solidarity and their yearning for individual autonomy. This tension is seen as a product of the Soviet experience, wherein citizens rejected the ideology-laden public sphere as a false reality and withdrew into the private sphere. It must also be noted that the book challenges a popular assumption that Za chestnye vybory has since its inception called for dismantling the political regime installed by Vladimir Putin. Erpyleva and Kulaev find that the majority of protesters did not see themselves as anti-Putinists. That personification of the regime was found to be uncommon among participants in the protests against electoral malpractice during the 2011 parliamentary elections and began to emerge only in the aftermath of Putin's re-election for a third term in office, in March 2012. Analysis of citizens' motivations for participating in pro-government rallies might be an area for future research. The organization of regime-friendly public rallies is a common state countermove in Putin's Russia. The oft-cited reason for citizens' involvement in such rallies is fear of loss of employment or expulsion from university. Further research needs to be done to unravel the logic of compliant activism. In sum, Politika apolitichnykh presents a masterful analysis of citizens' motivations for engaging in contentious collective action in Russia. Given the multidisciplinary nature of this research, the book will appeal to a wide audience, including political scientists and sociologists.
Anthropology of East Europe Review, 1999
The extent of corruption in Russian government and society is well known. This paper explores the... more The extent of corruption in Russian government and society is well known. This paper explores the attitudes of Russian businesspeople-both owners and executive level employees-to corruption, and discusses the ways in which they tailor their financial and other business practices to fit the overall political-economic situation in Russia as they perceive it. This specifically involves concealing income (both corporate and personal) in order to avoid paying taxes. The key objective in this paper is to illustrate the particular cultural logic through which businesspeople justify their financial practices: they almost universally represent their non-disclosure of income as a virtue, rather than a moral or social offense, although with some irony. This ultimately relates to their overall conceptions of social responsibility and philanthropy.
Anthropology of East Europe Review, 2000
As post-socialist polities careen along in the often jarring throes of transformation, ethnograph... more As post-socialist polities careen along in the often jarring throes of transformation, ethnographers witness (alongside "their" people) various forms of power, capital and meaning emerging, competing, and retracting in a complex, almost organic dance. 1 Some of these forms seem altogether new and unexpected-so we see a novel "mode of production" emerge in the Ukraine, a whole bureaucracy and social practice organized around Chernobyl suffering (Petryna). Some forms seem like revitalizations of the old-as in a resurfacing of indigenous legal systems in Abkhazia (Garb). Some forms seem to be desperate attempts to sustain or call back the structures and comforts of the recent past as in the Russian village (Miller). Some strike us as moving in contrary ways at once, progressively and regressively, as in the pluralist essentializing of identity in Istria (Ballinger). Tracking such post-socialist phenomena, ethnographers provide compelling cases for anthropologycases where people and institutions and states are conjoined in both struggle and mutual accommodation-and all this in a context of massive regional and global shifts.
History, Culture, Politics, 2009
New Literary History, Jan 1, 2002
Cultural Anthropology, Jan 1, 2009
Ethnography in Unstable Places: Everyday Lives in …, Jan 1, 2002
Ethnologia Polona, 2023
This paper interrogates the official purveyance of exterminist rhetoric in Russia's war on Ukrain... more This paper interrogates the official purveyance of exterminist rhetoric in Russia's war on Ukraine, with a particular focus on state media discourse. Over decades, the Putin regime has constructed an overarching system of intertwined narratives about Ukraine, centred on historical and geopolitical fables and exhortations to violence, and conveyed via repetitive tropes and tones of speech. These are ritualistic semi-scripted televised discussions ("agitainment") featuring state officials, hack journalists, and prowar scholars. This elaborate discursive spectacle models a sadistic affect and seems designed to crush empathy towards Ukrainian civilians and among Russia's own citizens. Anthropological and critical discursive approaches to the circulation of utterance suggest avenues for analysing the impacts, obvious and subtle, of these rhetorical and aesthetic devices in the context of terror directed both internationally and domestically.
Leviathan (U. of Edinburgh), 2016
There are few remaining barriers to nuclear war.
Safundi, 2020
In this paper I analyze the Trump, Putin, and Zuma regimes as “thugocracies”: projects of sophist... more In this paper I analyze the Trump, Putin, and Zuma regimes as “thugocracies”: projects of sophisticated state capture, through organized crime networks at every level of scale, and utilizing complex arrays of mafia tactics, personnel, and practices. With a basis in first-hand ethnography on the modalities of the mafia in Russia in the 1990s, I delineate critical interconnections between thugocrats operating in South Africa, the Russian Federation, and the United States, arguing that their networks are simultaneously local, extensively transnational, and closely intertwined. Though thugocratic regimes target the rule of law and civil society in order to “make crime legal,” I conclude that inquiries like the South African Zondo Commission help create public outrage and awareness of the threat thugocracy poses to democracy.
The formerly socialist world represents one of the fastest-growing and theoretically challenging ... more The formerly socialist world represents one of the fastest-growing and theoretically challenging areas in the humanities and social sciences. With perestroika and its legacies, the very contours of field studies after socialism are being fundamentally reshaped. In anthropology, for example, where fieldwork has always been the flagship, the former Soviet Union was all but closed to ethnographic research and regular scholarly exchanges from the early 1930s onward. The opening of borders in the 1990s brought a heady atmosphere of new possibilities: sustained conversations with specialists from across the socialist world, a return to more engaged field studies, and new access to archives. But the very drama of events also created a certain breathlessness, as the challenges of mapping such change overwhelmed more traditionally grounded historical and cultural analysis. Over a decade later, we can begin to chart the topography of a diverse realm of new scholarship, built on the theoretical and methodological foundations of cross-disciplinary work. "Culture and Society after Socialism" looks to present the very best of this body of writing. Providing close-up perspectives on the lived experience of socialism and its aftermath, this series advances innovative work that fundamentally rethinks the cultural projects of socialist states and their outcomes. Through detailed readings of historical and cultural contexts, these works bridge the study of power systems and cosmologies, material practices and social meanings, political economies and the mythic forces that sustain them. We see new work in and about the formerly socialist world as a vital opportunity to reconsider the analytical boundaries of area studies and their respective scholarly traditions. For example, whether Russia and its eastern European neighbors may one day be reclassified as "Western" seems less
The Anthropology of East Europe Review, 1991
... Michael Rywkin, Armonk, New York: ME Sharpe, Inc., 1989. xii + 242 pp. Nancy Ries, Department... more ... Michael Rywkin, Armonk, New York: ME Sharpe, Inc., 1989. xii + 242 pp. Nancy Ries, Department of Anthropology, Cornell University Soviet Society Today is a book with two possible uses, but whether it is the best resource for these two situations is debatable. ...
Current History
In authoritarian countries, jokes can allow citizens to mock the system’s absurdities, but they a... more In authoritarian countries, jokes can allow citizens to mock the system’s absurdities, but they also reinforce the boundaries of speech and thought. A study of humor in Belarus puts the country’s current protests in a new light, just as the old quiescent mentality may be changing.
Current History
A definitive history of organized crime in Russia shows how political leaders have long used gang... more A definitive history of organized crime in Russia shows how political leaders have long used gangsters to serve the state's purposes.
Slavic Review
Frontiers are locations of geopolitical assertion, reification, definition, and experiment, wheth... more Frontiers are locations of geopolitical assertion, reification, definition, and experiment, whether physical or symbolic, spatial or temporal. The papers for this special Slavic Review Forum examine important linked and parallel frontier-forming practices. These practices span the postsocialist space yet also, as several authors argue, negate that chronotopic and sociopolitical identifier. Frontier-reformulation practices include ideological constructions of emergent, yet familiar, enemies, new and refurbished commemorative rites and installations, mediated threat prediction, and discourses about undeclared wars that seem to promise to eventuate into future declared or at least named wars. As Neringa Klumbytė tells us in her introduction to this Forum, these practices both point to and produce “eventfulness.”
Slavic Review
of qualitative research methods enables the scholars to uncover different dimensions of citizens&... more of qualitative research methods enables the scholars to uncover different dimensions of citizens' motivations for engagement in political action. What remains somewhat unclear in the volume is whether Russian scholars encountered any difficulty in securing interviews and asking politically sensitive questions in a repressive political regime. One of the main findings to be gleaned from this study is that Russian citizens are torn between their longing for social solidarity and their yearning for individual autonomy. This tension is seen as a product of the Soviet experience, wherein citizens rejected the ideology-laden public sphere as a false reality and withdrew into the private sphere. It must also be noted that the book challenges a popular assumption that Za chestnye vybory has since its inception called for dismantling the political regime installed by Vladimir Putin. Erpyleva and Kulaev find that the majority of protesters did not see themselves as anti-Putinists. That personification of the regime was found to be uncommon among participants in the protests against electoral malpractice during the 2011 parliamentary elections and began to emerge only in the aftermath of Putin's re-election for a third term in office, in March 2012. Analysis of citizens' motivations for participating in pro-government rallies might be an area for future research. The organization of regime-friendly public rallies is a common state countermove in Putin's Russia. The oft-cited reason for citizens' involvement in such rallies is fear of loss of employment or expulsion from university. Further research needs to be done to unravel the logic of compliant activism. In sum, Politika apolitichnykh presents a masterful analysis of citizens' motivations for engaging in contentious collective action in Russia. Given the multidisciplinary nature of this research, the book will appeal to a wide audience, including political scientists and sociologists.
Anthropology of East Europe Review, 1999
The extent of corruption in Russian government and society is well known. This paper explores the... more The extent of corruption in Russian government and society is well known. This paper explores the attitudes of Russian businesspeople-both owners and executive level employees-to corruption, and discusses the ways in which they tailor their financial and other business practices to fit the overall political-economic situation in Russia as they perceive it. This specifically involves concealing income (both corporate and personal) in order to avoid paying taxes. The key objective in this paper is to illustrate the particular cultural logic through which businesspeople justify their financial practices: they almost universally represent their non-disclosure of income as a virtue, rather than a moral or social offense, although with some irony. This ultimately relates to their overall conceptions of social responsibility and philanthropy.
Anthropology of East Europe Review, 2000
As post-socialist polities careen along in the often jarring throes of transformation, ethnograph... more As post-socialist polities careen along in the often jarring throes of transformation, ethnographers witness (alongside "their" people) various forms of power, capital and meaning emerging, competing, and retracting in a complex, almost organic dance. 1 Some of these forms seem altogether new and unexpected-so we see a novel "mode of production" emerge in the Ukraine, a whole bureaucracy and social practice organized around Chernobyl suffering (Petryna). Some forms seem like revitalizations of the old-as in a resurfacing of indigenous legal systems in Abkhazia (Garb). Some forms seem to be desperate attempts to sustain or call back the structures and comforts of the recent past as in the Russian village (Miller). Some strike us as moving in contrary ways at once, progressively and regressively, as in the pluralist essentializing of identity in Istria (Ballinger). Tracking such post-socialist phenomena, ethnographers provide compelling cases for anthropologycases where people and institutions and states are conjoined in both struggle and mutual accommodation-and all this in a context of massive regional and global shifts.
History, Culture, Politics, 2009
New Literary History, Jan 1, 2002
Cultural Anthropology, Jan 1, 2009
Ethnography in Unstable Places: Everyday Lives in …, Jan 1, 2002
This paper examines the key period in the 1990s and 2000s when the Russian state was intensively ... more This paper examines the key period in the 1990s and 2000s when the Russian state was intensively and deeply shaped by tactics and personnel from the force services and organized crime. Violent practices, from threat-making to assassination to mass bombings, were drawn into the regime of Vladimir Putin as critical and permanent modes of state terror.
“The Broken Nuclear Taboo.” Guest Commentary for the student journal Leviathan, University of Edi... more “The Broken Nuclear Taboo.” Guest Commentary for the student journal Leviathan, University of Edinburgh, April 2016 issue. This is a preview of a larger work in progress on the newest phase of nuclearism, and Russian and NATO mediated nuclear sabre-rattling. Working Title: Decade Eight: Mediated Strategic Interactive Nuclear Exterminism (aka Games with Nukes). Any thoughts or comments welcome (towards the full-length article).