“Fraternal” nations and challenges to sovereignty in Ukraine: The politics of linguistic and religious ties

Abstract

Vladimir Putin's recent assertions that Russian “compatriots” were suffering in Ukraine contributed to a rapid escalation of instability and violence in this borderland country that defines the margins of Europe and the edge of Eurasia. After 23 years of independence, Ukraine retains significant regional diversity and strong local identities. At the same time, social differences understood in terms of ethnicity, language choice, and religious affiliation have become less defined, as Ukrainians have embraced fluid linguistic and religious practices that defy easy characterization. On the basis of long‐term fieldwork in Ukraine, I argue that “non‐accommodating bilingualism” and “ambient faith” characterize everyday linguistic and religious practices in this postcolonial, post‐Soviet‐socialist space. This flexibility is adaptive domestically. Paradoxically, it contributes to the vulnerability of Ukrainian sovereignty when polarizing, politicized categories based on supposedly identifiable cultural attributes inject a spurious precision into everyday practices with the aim of redefining state sovereignty.

The Ends of Anthropology: 2014 in U.S. Sociocultural Anthropology

“…Nicholas Copeland (2014) examined the continued life of indigenous sovereignty in postrevolutionary Guatemala, while Lucas Bessire (2014) likewise investigated the central role of indigeneity to the conduct of neoliberalism in South America. A cluster of articles in American Ethnologist examined the limits of national sovereignty, taking up the case of the Ukrainian crisis (Cullen Dunn and Bobick 2014;Phillips 2014;Wanner 2014) to examine what might be seen as "nested sovereignty," to here borrow a term Audra Simpson (2014) coined to describe the overlapping and hierarchical sovereignties within settler colonial states.…”

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Race, Media, and Postcoloniality: Ukraine Between Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism

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“…The historically dominant status and benefits associated with Russian led many urban Ukrainians to speak it in their everyday life, and so “beyond marking one as an urban person, it carries negligible political valence” (Wanner , 431). Language choice is often ignored and interactions carried out in both languages in a non‐accommodating linguistic regime (Bilaniuk ; Wanner ). Many Russophones participated in the 2013‐2014 Euromaidan protests, and many continue to fight against pro‐Russian separatists in the ongoing war in eastern Ukraine, undermining the Russian government's rhetoric that Russian speakers need its protection.…”