‘Ghost in the Shell’: Reflections on Fieldwork in Kazakhstan

After independence from the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan proclaimed Kazakhs the title ethnic group, and the Kazakh language the national language. This deprived the Russian-speaking population of its former dominant social position. Being a Russian-speaking citizen of Kazakhstan, the daughter of a half-Korean half-Russian father and a half-Kazakh half-German mother, I did my field work as a presumed ‘native’ anthropologist at Kazakhstan State University with linguistically divided groups of students. The relations between the field and the researcher disclosed different geopolitical realities of knowledge production and challenged the legacy of relativist methodology. I reflect on this experience and examine different conceptualisations of the native positionality in the post-Soviet context. Reflections in this paper raise new questions about nation-building in post-socialist states and about ‘nativeness’ itself, and contribute to the criticism of postmodern theory.     

伊拉克战后政治发展的三个纬度

伊拉克在战后启动了国家构建进程，建立了民主制度。然而，超越了伊拉克民族构建阶段的民主化进程，不利于民主化进程顺利发展，不但引发了教派冲突，而且对民族构建带来负面影响。只有推动民族构建进程，才能消除教派冲突的根源，使国家构建顺利开展，从而推动民主制度在伊可持续发展。