Dear colleagues,

My name is Evgeni Varshaver, I’m currently based in Moscow (Russia) and lead the Group for Ethnicity and Migration Research. For many years, our research has been mostly concentrated on integration of migrants in Russia. We’ve researched ‘ethnic enclaves’ in big Russian cities, ethnic cafes as spaces of migrants’ integration, migrants’ tie composition and its influence on their integration. We also held wide scale online surveys of migrants and even launched integration events to measure their effectiveness. The results of these efforts have been published in high-profile international scholarly journals (see hyperlinks above). All the way, however, theoretically-wise we’ve been interested in broader issues, such as ethnicity per se, how it manifests itself in different contexts, what is common/different across contexts and why. Lately we’ve – step by step – started re-directing the main stream of our research to the topics related to ethnicity on the intersection between sociology/anthropology, history and cognitive sciences.  As it is a very recent effort, the papers we’ve written on ethnicity are currently published only as pre-prints, but can be downloaded here.

So, what do we do? Working within the constructivist framework, on the one hand, we agree with Andreas Wimmer and Kanchan Chandra, when they say that the more different are versions of constructivism and constructivist research agendas—the faster constructivism develops and we move forward. On the other hand, we attempt to fulfill Rogers Brubaker’s agenda, best of all vocalized in ‘Ethnicity as Cognition’, and our big task is to produce a real synergy of social and cognitive sciences by making up innovative research designs and producing explanations which combine ideas from both disciplines. We have two ‘labs’ – locations where we test our ideas and do research. The first is Moscow, which is a big megalopolis and a former imperial capital (some would say it never ceased being one). The second is Dagestan, a comparatively poor, ‘ethnic’ periphery of Russia, which, according to the dominant narrative, is a very ‘polyethnic’ location. Indeed, there are about 40 official autochthonous ‘nationalities’ (the word referring to an ethnic group in Russian context). These two labs help us produce more general theories of ethnicity as both a social and a cognitive phenomenon, which stretches from the past to the future. Let’s briefly go through the variety of our projects and papers.

First, some theory

Constructivism doesn’t have a single proper conceptual language, which is necessary, however, for doing empirical research. So, my recent article not only suggests such a language, but also shows (basing on our empirical research), how different phenomena, conceptualized within this language, can be ‘seen’ and researched. The title of the article speaks for itself, it is called “What Exactly is Studied When Ethnicity is Researched?”.

What Exactly is Studied When Ethnicity is Researched? A Descriptive Model for Constructivist Studies of Ethnicity in the Context of the Cognitive Turn (.pdf)

Second, a block of articles related to Dagestan

In Dagestan our general goal is to show, how an official classification by nationalities, introduced by the Soviet authorities in 1920-s currently functions and how this functioning changed through time. For that reason – as a framework – I wrote a really brief ‘Brief History of Dagestani Nationalities’, which turned out to be an interesting task as I attempted to create a proper historical narrative about ethnicity while sticking to the constructivist framework. Then there are articles with the results of our empirical research. The first one is devoted to marital attitudes and how ethnicity shapes them (spoiler: not that much). The second one addresses the descent ‘rules’, according to which ethnic belonging is defined: we show that Dagestan is an arena of competition between patrilineal and ambilineal descent rules and explain how the occurring switch from the first to the second rule ‘wipes out’ classification by nationalities altogether. The third one is devoted to folk concepts of ethnicity, showing that some Dagestanis believe that ethnic belonging is just a mark in an id-document (we call that documentary constructivism) and revealing that this attitude is more common in those villages that were officially re-classified from one nationality to another. The fourth article, as ethnicity has been, to a great degree, produced by the state in the course of a variety of formalized interactions, is our participant observation of census procedures during the 2020 census round. The fifth one is the result of our recent extensive fieldwork, where we addressed the ways ethnicity is habitualized by people and showed typical interactions, within which ethnicity is ‘reproduced’ in Dagestan throughout lives of people from early childhood and further.

Brief History of Dagestani Nationalities (.pdf)

What Role do Soviet Nationalities Play in Regulatingthe Marital Behavior in Dagestan? (.pdf)

“From Father” or “From Both Parents”? Variations of the Descent Classificatory Rule Regulating Membership in Ethnic Categories in Modern Dagestan (.pdf)

Documentary Constructivism as a Special Form of Constructivist Folk Sociology: Evidence from Dagestan (.pdf)

How is Ethnicity Constructed in Interactions between Census Takers and Their Respondents? (Results of Observations during 2021 All-Russian Census in Dagestan) (.pdf)

The Role of Nationalities in Dagestan: A Perspective from the Cognitive Turn in Constructivist Ethnicity Studies (.pdf)

Third, a research on mundane classifications practiced by people in Moscow

In order to understand how these classifications actually occur and what categories they’re based on, we applied the video-elicitation method. We shot some videos in Moscow mundane contexts (malls, metro, etc.), showed them to people of different background and asked to define ‘ethnic belonging’ of people on videos. We saw that, while categorizing other people spontaneously, people are ‘sandwiched’ between two classifications – by official nationalities and the vernacular one, which distinguished between ‘Slavs’ and ‘Southerners’. The text is a research report and it contains some other interesting and potentially insightful methodological and substantial things.

Are there Only Two Ethnic Groups in Moscow: “Slavs” and “Southerners”? Research on Vernacular Categorization Using Elicitation Methods (.pdf)

***

Well, that’s basically all we have in English so far. It should be said that we research and write much more (but in Russian). Moreover, we have a number of on-going projects on ethnicity within the described agenda. In one of them, which is based on a widescale all-Russian online survey, we show respondents some pictures, ask to describe them in one phrase, code the answers on the basis of whether ethnic category was mentioned in the description, and then run a regression, explaining why people ethnicise. In another project, we run an ML semantic analysis of Dagestani newspapers of 1939-1944 and by comparing them to the corresponding current time newspapers we explore the changing role of ethnic categories in Dagestani society. This summer we’ll be concentrating on Bashkortostan, a new for us Russian region, in attempt to explain psycho-social mechanisms of relevantization of ethnic categories.

That’s our agenda but what we lack is good conversations about all the above and ethnicity in general. In case you’ve got interested in something mentioned above – get in touch with us, we’ll be really happy to discuss it. Moreover, we are open to collaboration including the one which stretches beyond disciplines. You can reach me here: varshavere@gmail.com or let’s catch up on telegram (@EAV747).

Sincerely,
Evgeni A. Varshaver, Ph.D.
Head of the Group for Migration and Ethnicity Research