Abstract
In this final chapter, I explore the schoolchildren’s processes of identity negotiation, which unfold amid the competing projects of regionalization and centralization. School is an important social scene for children and young people to negotiate, enact and stage their identities. This chapter shows how pupils perceive, articulate and negotiate their belonging and gives some examples of strategies used to circumvent stigmatized identities. This is done through individual portraits of selected schoolchildren and ethnographic vignettes from classroom interactions. This chapter uses the conceptual framework of Goffman’s “impression management” and uncovers the tensions between institutional dynamics of categorization and social dynamics of identification, revealing that pupils both internalize and challenge essentializing discourses they are confronted with at school.
This chapter was published in a modified form in the edited volume Informal Nationalism After Communism: The Everyday Construction of Post-Socialist Identities, edited by A. Polese et al. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018.
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Notes
- 1.
There are other views on this system of “institutionalized ethnicity”. Thus, Zaslavsky, for example, regards the practice of indicating ethnicity on passports as the prime instrument of Russification (Zaslavsky, 1982).
- 2.
One of the reasons for this—it was explained to me in the local education department—is that the Ministry of Education of Tatarstan needs information on the ethnic composition of schools in order to devise policy on native-language education and the teaching of native languages.
- 3.
Russian birth certificates contain information on the ethnicity of both parents (but not the child).
- 4.
According to teachers, there is no official regulation governing this practice. This was just the way they used to do it.
- 5.
Some researchers go as far as to say that, above all, peer circles and not the family exert a crucial influence on the socialization of adolescents. See Harris (1995).
- 6.
Here, I talk only about federal textbooks, which are used for the overwhelming majority of school subjects. In the respective “ethnic” republics, textbooks are produced in native languages (mostly primary school textbooks); still in these textbooks these ethnic groups are represented mostly as village residents. See the case of the Udmurt Republic (Vlasova & Plotnikova, 2014).
- 7.
Accusations of Udmurts performing human sacrifices go back to the so-called Multan case when, in nineteenth-century Russia, residents of an Udmurt village were accused of performing human sacrifices (Geraci, 2000).
- 8.
Ar is a rather derogative term used in Tatar to refer to the Udmurts. The teacher used it towards a pupil of Tatar ethnicity.
- 9.
Translation from Tatar. In Tatar, there is no distinction between the female and male forms. The third person is indicated by a neutral ul.
- 10.
A ritual reading of the Quran accompanied by the collective meal.
- 11.
Only his language competence could expose him as a non-Russian, as the comment of his classmate demonstrates. At the same time, this comment also reveals the perception of Russians as lacking any proficiency in the Tatar language.
- 12.
Two of his best friends have also chosen the strategy of bypassing the “true” ethnic identity. One of them had an Udmurt background and preferred to identify as Russian, and the other was of mixed Tatar-Kriashen descent and identified as Tatar.
- 13.
The grandfather on his mother’s side.
- 14.
In this conversation, she used the word “Tatar”.
- 15.
It is important to note that he used the term kreshchenyi tatarin (Christianized Tatar) and not kriashen (Kriashen). The term “Kriashen” is often used by more self-conscious Kriashen who regard themselves as a separate ethnic group.
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Suleymanova, D. (2020). “I’m only half!”: Negotiating Identities at School. In: Pedagogies of Culture. Anthropological Studies of Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27245-6_6
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