Abstract
Disgusted by political institutions, many activists around the world are rejecting normal politics in favor of hands-on, tangible local action. This looks similar all over the world, including in the two countries on which the paper focuses, Russia and the United States. Is it? Scholars and activists alike compare one society’s activism to another; this paper suggests ways of asking useful questions in cross-national ethnographic research. Controlling the variables of cultural, political/legal, social, and spatial conditions is impossible. With so many “out of control variables”, can comparison make any sense? Activists have varied “styles” (Lichterman & Eliasoph The American Journal of Sociology, 120(4): 798–863, 2014) of coordinating local activism in any country. Each style encounters different frictions, depending on a nation’s specific cultural, political, social, and spatial conditions. Local, interest-based, grassroot activism is a typical American “style” and is also venerated in American cultural narratives that celebrate local democracy. American activists encounter friction when trying to enact this style, when, for example, they realize that money brings power. For Russian activists, the very same style is a “surprising discovery”. Russians encounter different frictions when trying to enact this style. Examining continual, recursive pragmatic tests shows how activists move towards more, towards less, or towards different kinds of politicization.
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Notes
The list includes, among many others, the Varieties of Democracy Project (https://www.v-dem.net), Freedom House (https://freedomhouse.org), and the Global Democracy Project (http://democracyranking.org). These think tanks and academic collaborations vary in their political orientations. During the Cold War, Freedom House had US government officials on its board of directors, so it is no coincidence that it has always made American democracy look like the best in the world. Even Freedom House, though, has documented a steep decline in American democracy recently. The other survey databases have standards that are less specifically American (they include, for example, more emphasis on class inequality than Freedom House does).
Here arises a puzzle for anyone doing comparative research: we call these “civic styles” using the American definition of “civic”, which specifically refers to ordinary citizens’ local participation. The other influential definition of “civic” comes from France and refers to universal principles of solidarity — and definitely not to small, informal, possibly self-interested groups. This makes sense because in France, small associations were outlawed until 1901. They were considered to be too divisive and selfish. In comparing national styles, even the categories one uses for comparison come with their own presuppositions about what is normal, their own ways of imagining the connection between everyday life and politics. Cross-national research on how to measure volunteering (Dekker and Halman 2003) shows that not only is the word “volunteer” meaningless in some languages but also describes completely different activities in different societies. There is no neutral ground on which to establish the basic categories of investigation or to tell the story of the past. One way to avoid this argument is to drop the word civic, which is what we do here, but the point stands. It is the same with any object of study: if you ask a man, “How many children do you have?”, you might get an answer of one or ten, depending on whether he counts his biological children he never met — or who he knew for only a few years until his first wife left; his second wife’s children whom he knew for a few years when they were young but now no longer knows; or his current and adopted children.
This is a dilemma for identity politics. Saying “we all benefit” from a policy could be a way of asserting a false universalism, and erasing the inhumane conditions White America has forced on African Americans. But to many rural Whites, emphasizing the need to end the extreme injustice that African Americans face can sound like a trade-off (Cramer 2016): as if Blacks’ getting more rights has to mean that rural Whites get fewer; as if Blacks getting health care, vacation, maternity leave, clean water, and the rest means that rural Whites will not get them. The hegemonic understanding built in here is that only privileged, lucky people get these things in the US For more on this, see Eliasoph 2016.
Gates Foundation (2003). Press Release: https://www.gatesfoundation.org/Media-Center/Press-Releases/2003/11/Los-Angeles-High-Schools-Receive-Grant
This research, supervised by the “Russian” author, is entitled “Everyday Nationalism” (2016–2018) and consists of 237 interviews or informal conversations in everyday settings in 6 Russian regions. The research is supported by a grant from the Foundation for the Support of Liberal Education.
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Eliasoph, N., Clément, K. Doing Comparative Ethnography in Vastly Different National Conditions: the Case of Local Grassroot Activism in Russia and the United States. Int J Polit Cult Soc 33, 251–282 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-019-9325-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-019-9325-2