Reading Response || 2/9/25

There were a couple of takeaways I took from these pieces. With Ries I appreciated her “natural” sense for the anthropological methodology. Both in terms of how she integrated herself in Russian daily life and allowed for connections and conversations to snowball and lead to unexpected people/places. This led to her discovery of the real stuff people wanted to talk about. Her conceived research about the cold war/nuclear armament were not on the minds of residents, but rather domestic issues such as political and economic upheaval. She makes a good point though, as an anthropologist, in whatever she listens to or engages with, that she always has one ear to the broader issues. And there is always some kind of tie back even if it’s not mentioned directly. Although the individual perspectives are at the core and the way in which life is seen on the ground –she obviously met some interesting and disparate people like Masha and the mafioso– I thought that telling their stories and actions planted them quite securely in this time period and reflected a better understanding of it.

The Hankins piece helped establish an idea I thought a little bit about from Ries and made its presence felt more clearly here. It’s that the world reflects parts of yourself back on to you through people or experiences. By this I mean that Ries and Masha shared a kind of poetic/artist sensibility so found themselves connecting, and Hankins was in rural Japan yet found this connection back to his hometown in Texas. This is not necessarily an absolute truth, it’s just that I’ve had similar experiences abroad, so it was neat to hear that expressed. For example, in my post about meeting Richard in Taiwan. We randomly stumbled upon each other, and yet we shared this interest and bond over Buddhism and spirituality. I think that Hankins is very perceptive, aware, and questioning of his function and role as an anthropologist, perhaps overly so, and maybe that’s an academic thing I don’t entirely get; however, I thought his comment that one should  “challenge the empiricist tendency in anthropology to reduce the object of study to the thing observed” (Hankins, pdf. 7) was insightful. This follows along with what I talked about with Ries and that there is a broader story to everything. It’s just that making that claim is insufficient unless the individual stories and perspectives are first given.

I want to end on some thoughts about the role of anthropology in a period of economic and political isolationism wracking not only the U.S. but many other countries. I think that the Ries reading and podcast showed me how there’s no way of knowing what kind of value this work can turn into. I think she said something like her book was the second most cited source about that era because there were so few English language sources of daily life at the time. Her focus on talk, communication, and listening is simple but also an affront to a lot these miraged political/social understandings. By the very act there was another lane of understanding opened. And not to paint her as some “saving grace” which I think is the very thing her and Hankins want to push against, but this idea nonetheless feels more important than ever.