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EthnoScripts
ZEITSCHRIFT FÜR AKTUELLE
ETHNOLOGISCHE STUDIEN
Angst in the City?
eISSN: 2199-7942
Jahrgang 18 Heft 1 I 2016
Joachim Otto Habeck and Philipp Schröder
From Siberia with Love or Angst in the City?
On the Idea of Merging Research Projects in Novosibirsk
and Co-Teaching in Hamburg and Berlin
Ethnoscripts 2016 18 (1): 5-24
eISSN 2199-7942
Universität Hamburg
Institut für Ethnologie
Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1 (West)
D-20146 Hamburg
Tel.: 040 42838 4182
E-Mail: IfE@uni-hamburg.de
http://www.ethnologie.uni-hamburg.de
Dieses Werk ist lizenziert unter einer Creative Commons Licence 4.0
International: Namensnennung - Weitergabe unter gleichen Bedingungen.
Herausgeber:
5
EthnoScripts
From Siberia with Love or Angst in the City?
On the Idea of Merging Research Projects in Novosibirsk
and Co-Teaching in Hamburg and Berlin
Angst in the City is the title that the authors of these lines chose for a joint
research project and seminar looking into expressions of emotion and social
exclusion in diverse urban environments. The title serves as a shorthand for
apprehensive feelings that individuals or groups perceive when physically or
imaginarily nding themselves in certain spaces in the fabric of the city that
they inhabit. The concept of fear will be discussed in more detail below (pp.
7-9). This article has four goals: rst, to lay out how this research coopera-
tion on the perception of urban space came into being; second, how it pro-
ceeded and what initial results emerged from it; and third, how the research
generated the idea of jointly organized teaching. Students who participated
in Angst in the City conducted small research projects on their own in Ham-
burg, Schwerin and Berlin, and four of their essays have been adopted for
publication in this special issue of Ethnoscripts. To prepare the conceptual
ground for these four contributions is the fourth goal of this article. It closes
with a remark on how the students’ projects feed back into our own plans for
further research.
Beginnings: Two Separate Research Projects in Novosibirsk
Lifestyle Plurality in Siberia
An initial step towards investigating perceptions of self and urban space in
Siberian cities and villages was taken by Habeck and colleagues in a previous
research project, on the Conditions and Limitations of Lifestyle Plurality in
Siberia (Habeck, 2008; in prep.) at the Max Planck Institute for Social An-
thropology. Within this framework, Habeck conducted interviews in Novosi-
birsk with a variety of groups, among them with ve members of the local gay
scene. In line with the Lifestyle Plurality project’s overall research design,
the task was twofold: (i) Travel-biography interviews with each informant
were to explore the individual’s familial background, his or her action space
and mobility at different stages in life, work routines and leisure-time prefer-
ences; (ii) Additionally, photo elicitation interviews would reveal individual
approaches to self-formation and (visual) self-presentation, aesthetic prefer-
ences, personal values and life projects.
Joachim Otto Habeck and Philipp Schröder
Habeck and Schröder From Siberia with Love or Angst in the City?
6
Theoretically, the project departed from the concept of lifestyle as used in So-
ciology (Bourdieu 1984; Chaney 1996; Otte and Rössel 2011). This is a concept
which – for reasons to be explained elsewhere – has rarely been employed
in Social Anthropology. It has, however, occasionally been applied in social-
scientic studies on everyday life in Russia or the Soviet Union (Dittrich and
Hölscher 2001; Sokhan’ and Tikhonovich 1982; and a few publications by
Russian sociologists between 2000 and 2007). Lifestyle Plurality project
members developed the denition: ‘Lifestyle is what one does in order to be
what one thinks one should be’ (for a similar denition, see Chaney 1996:
37). Clearly, lifestyle is not the same as identity. Rather, lifestyle describes a
certain mode of identication; more precisely: an expressive and simultane-
ously routinized mode of identication (Habeck, in prep.). To be Kyrgyz can
be a relevant category of ethnic identity, yet it is not a lifestyle. But if a young
resident of Novosibirsk emphasises her Kyrgyz background, her preference
of living in a large city, and her predilection for Novosibirsk Kyrgyz ‘diaspora’
pop music, then it becomes possible to discern a certain lifestyle.
The importance of the concept of lifestyle for the research and teaching
effort presented here – Angst in the City – lies in the fact that life projects
and aesthetic predilections also translate into spatial preferences, including
avoidance of certain places and regular visits to others, and that places are
fraught emotionally: personal tastes, ambitions and apprehensions articu-
late with the ways in which urban environments are constructed and per-
ceived. Certain places hold the promise of happiness or integrity (‘home’, for
example, but also, and more often, some magic ‘elsewhere’). In Novosibirsk,
desires and hopes connect with the names of clubs, streets, dacha plots, sub-
urban landscapes and holiday destinations – increasingly also with shopping
malls (Habeck 2014). Reversely, notions of fear and insecurity create imagi-
nations of urban peripheries, empty spaces and no-go areas.
Into the ‘Near Abroad’: Kyrgyz Traders in Novosibirsk’s Barakholka Bazaar
and Beyond
In Russia’s political language, the term ‘near abroad’ commonly refers to those
countries which after the Soviet Union’s dissolution in 1991 have emerged as
‘newly independent states’ (NIS). Among these states is Kyrgyzstan, a land-
locked and comparatively small country in Central Asia. In multiple ways,
the dialectic of simultaneous proximity and distance that is captured in the
term ‘near abroad’ carries further into the relatedness of ethnic Kyrgyz and
Russians in both countries.
Basics such as a shared history or language are what, in short, may be re-
garded as familiar or ‘near’ between them: during their 70-years of co-mem-
bership in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Russian used to be the
empire’s lingua franca, and until today it remains a ‘second mother tongue’
7
EthnoScripts
to many ethnic Kyrgyz. What, on the other hand, could be considered foreign
or ‘abroad’ refers to aspects of religious belief, with Islam predominating in
Kyrgyzstan and Christian Orthodoxy in Russia, or to phenotype, where the
Kyrgyz self-depict as ‘Asians’ and the Russians as ‘Europeans’.
For Schröder’s current research project, which focuses on post-socialist
business-making all over Eurasia, the bazaar of Novosibirsk has been among
the most crucial locations (Schröder, forthcoming). Locally known as the
barakholka, this site has emerged as a prime hub for regional Siberian whole-
sale trading from the early 1990s on. Economic matters aside, Schröder’s
‘being around’ in the barakholka has as well allowed him to observe how
representatives of the various ethnic groups assembled there – as buyers or
sellers, as security personnel or food service providers – publicly negotiate
and utilize the perceptions of their respective separation or closeness.
In the bazaar and other urban spaces of Novosibirsk, the ethnic Kyr-
gyz have in the course of time developed a sizeable local presence, and their
ethnic diaspora is estimated to have reached more than 20,000 members.
Among these, some few had already studied in the city during the Soviet era
and simply stayed on after the Union’s demise. Most others, however, relo-
cated to Russia only during the 1990s or early 2000s as they tried to escape
the comparably harsher economic situation that Kyrgyzstan was experienc-
ing during post-socialist transformation.
In Schröder’s eldwork with Kyrgyz migrants who had relocated into the
‘near abroad’ of Novosibirsk, he looks as well beyond trade or entrepreneur-
ship, and aims to understand how these professional activities merge with
aspects of social integration and – plainly speaking – culture. For example,
this entails the ritual economy of weddings and other lifecycle events that
are celebrated at particular ethnic Kyrgyz restaurants, or it concerns ‘special
Asian parties’ and other leisure events that are popular among second-gen-
eration Kyrgyz in Novosibirsk.
In these and other regards, the Kyrgyz who Schröder has encountered
in Siberia and other regions of the Russian Federation are an identiable and
signicant diaspora group. As will be discussed later on in more detail, this
status marked one of the beginnings why we started developing a common
interest for comparing the urban lifeworlds of different minority groups, eth-
nic or other, as regards the ways in which they perceive the city of Novosi-
birsk and (vice versa) how other inhabitants perceive them.
A Climate of Fear? Researching Minorities in Contemporary Russia
Recent political and public debates in Russia have been marked by a strong
rhetoric of ‘social order’ and ‘moral values’. Inspired by a mix of Orthodox
religious views, Soviet imperial nostalgia and ‘everyday nationalism’ (Kos-
marskaya and Savin 2016) these notions contribute to the shaping and main-
Habeck and Schröder From Siberia with Love or Angst in the City?
8
tenance of a rather narrow ideal of Russian mainstream society. Among the
repercussions are various ‘conservative’ agendas. One example is the Russian
legislation against the ‘propaganda of non-traditional sexual orientation’ (see
pp. 10-12), which can be utilized for prosecuting outspoken gay and lesbian
activists.
Legal considerations and practices of law enforcement aside, multiple
incidents have been reported in recent years of violence by self-acclaimed
Russian ‘vigilante’ movements against allegedly gay or pedophile men. But
also immigrants from former Soviet Republics are targeted by ‘patriotic’ or
‘skinhead’ groups. Since 2007 more than 200 individuals of Central Asian
origin (but potentially holding a Russian citizenship) have fallen victim to
racially motivated murder in Russia (SOVA 2016). In light of these politicized
‘-phobias’ and attempts for moral hegemony some observers argue that a
‘generalized climate of fear’ (Coalson 2013) has emerged in contemporary
Russia.
For us, the fact that these momentous trends equally concerned the
minorities that we had already been working with as part of our individual
researches prompted the interest for a common project: Habeck’s previous
research on lifestyle plurality in Siberia included interviews in Novosibirsk
with men who identied as gay and/or who engaged in homosexual relations;
Schröder had examined ethnic Kyrgyz in Novosibirsk since 2013, which in-
cluded various self- and outside-perceptions of this diaspora community
within this city’s social fabric. Consequently, Novosibirsk emerged as the
most suitable site for our eldwork. This, however, extended beyond the con-
venience that both of us were already familiar with the city (and thus could
build on previous eldwork relations to nd respondents for this new topic
of social exclusion and urban emotionalities). Importantly, Novosibirsk is of
particular signicance within Russia, being its third largest city by popula-
tion and the prime metropole in the vast Siberian region. Furthermore, our
comparative interest was stimulated because Novosibirsk is not located in
‘Western’ or ‘European’ Russia, but in the country’s ‘North Asian’ region and
has received much less academic interest than Moscow or Saint Petersburg.
Among the research questions we have set out to investigate since 2014
are: How do ethnic Kyrgyz or men engaging in same-sex relationships per-
ceive, construct and express their belonging in Novosibirsk? While dwelling
and moving in this city, which spaces, situations and times of the day do
members of these ‘minority groups’ associate with fear, joy or other emo-
tional states? And how do these urban emotionalities relate to the aforemen-
tioned neo-national and neo-traditional tendencies in contemporary Russia?
The purpose of our research thus is to understand more about how ethnic
and sexual diversity is negotiated among different residents of Novosibirsk,
and in which ways minorities might (feel the need to) resist, adapt or with-
draw from particular urban environments. Eventually, this may allow us to
9
EthnoScripts
provide an answer to the question indicated in the title – to what extent there
is in fact Angst in the city of Novosibirsk?
Common Research: Angst in the Urban Space of Novosibirsk
The City of Novosibirsk
With approximately 1.5 million inhabitants, Novosibirsk is the largest city
of Siberia, and it has seen periods of rapid growth in its relatively short his-
tory, which spans 125 years. Having emerged as a railway station and bridge
construction site, former Novonikolaevsk (nowadays Novosibirsk) attracted
wave after wave of migrants from the closer and farther surroundings. It un-
derwent rapid industrialisation in the 1930s (cf. Rolf 2006) and during the
early 1940s, when Germany waged war against the Soviet Union, became
the site of relocation of large factories from the western part of the country.
German war prisoners in the late 1940s and early 1950s; Soviet academic
elites, for whom a comfortable suburb was created in the 1960s; and work-
ers from the Central Asian Soviet republics were among the multiple groups
of migrants that made up the population of Novosibirsk in the mid and late
Soviet era. The growth of the city did not cease after the end of the Soviet
Union (1991). After a few years of standstill and downturn, the attractiveness
of the city increased again, owing to its even more important administrative
and commercial functions in a more centralised and yet outspokenly market-
oriented Russia. A palpable effect of this growth is the replacement of old
wooden houses in the city centre by architecturally imposing condominiums
and tower blocks.
From both Schröder’s and Habeck’s experience, almost all interlocutors
describe the city as a very dynamic place. Our interviewees are aware of the
migratory background of virtually everybody in the city. Few inhabitants can
name ancestors in Novosibirsk beyond two generations and altogether, the
city has an ambience of a young, promising, even prosperous place, though
not without conicts. Generally, our interviewees emphasised the rather
open and tolerant atmosphere of the city (see p. 15).
Interview Guideline for Joint Research
For Angst in the City, the authors designed and carried out eldwork in No-
vosibirsk in summer 2014. In preparation, we developed a guideline of shared
questions, which then each of us could rely on during the conversation with
respondents. This was of particular importance, because due to diverging
schedules we could not travel to Novosibirsk at the same time. Therefore,
these interviews (with members of either the Kyrgyz diaspora or the group
of men engaging in same-sex relations) needed to be conducted separately.
Habeck and Schröder From Siberia with Love or Angst in the City?
10
The questions of our guideline were divided into three major themes. The
rst theme focused on the perception and use of different urban spaces in
light of the respondents’ personal mobility and biography. As part of this,
we were interested to gather narratives about someone’s memories of his or
her rst arrival at Novosibirsk, the impression of different neighbourhoods
where someone used to live or spends free time, and also how in the inter-
locutor’s eyes the city has changed in the course of time. The second theme
aimed at a better understanding of certain key terms of our research. This in-
cluded subjective denitions of what ‘fear’ is (also using Russian and Kyrgyz
terminology) and how it is (supposed to be) handled and expressed. Further-
more, we asked our respondents to re-tell certain situations when in the past
they had experienced fear or other strong emotions while being somewhere
in Novosibirsk. The third theme then addressed some more detailed aspects
of the link between urbanity and negative or positive emotionality. For ex-
ample, we inquired what our respondents associated with swearwords of city
slang or how they saw certain groups within the urban environment, such as
skinkhedy (skinheads).
Male-To-Male Relations and Homophobia
This section will rst address public perceptions of homosexuality and inci-
dents of homophobic attacks in Novosibirsk, then describe clandestine and
open spaces in the city where men can date men, and nally identify poten-
tially risky urban spaces in more general terms.
On the basis of his research data collected for the Lifestyles Project,
Habeck conducted eight more interviews in Novosibirsk in August 2014, us-
ing the guideline of questions that he and Schröder had formulated jointly.
The interviews were with men who would self-identify as gay and others who
would not, rather seeing themselves as men occasionally having sex with
other men. Labelling LBGT identities is a complex issue in a society in which,
on the one hand, sexual encounters between men occur – and did occur in
the Soviet and pre-Soviet past (Baer 2015; Essig 1999; Healey 2001); and
in which, on the other hand, the notions of goluboi (‘gay’) or worse, pider
(‘pederast’), have always carried a derogatory sense. Sexual orientation as a
category of identity – in particular if openly acknowledged – is of rather re-
cent emergence, and arguably perceived by many Russians as a bad example
of Western individualism and hedonism.
This is also true for Novosibirsk, which occasionally saw lesbian and gay
activism in the public as well as in-door ‘pride’ parties from the late 1990s
to the mid-2000s. But in most recent years, public or political appearance
of lesbians or gays has effectively vanished. Being ‘out and proud’ in Novosi-
birsk was an option for a short period, but is no longer.
11
EthnoScripts
Clearly, public opinion with regard to homosexuality has become more hos-
tile in connection with regulations that forbid ‘propaganda of homosexualism
among minors’, approved by the Legislative Assembly of Novosibirsk Oblast’
already in 2012 as part of the Law on the Protection of Rights of Children
(Belov and Ianushkevich 2012) and introduced into different documents of
federal, i.e. all-Russian, legislation in 2013 (Federal’nyi Zakon 2013). Wheth-
er intended or not, this legislation contributes to the overall level of homo-
phobia and thus to the perception of risk among lesbians and gays.
What comes to the fore in Habeck’s set of interviews is a peak of homo-
phobia in 2013, when right-wing vigilante groups literally went on raids, or
‘safaris’, on individuals whom they had identied as ‘pedophiles’. This sort-
of social movement advertised itself under the slogan ‘Occupy Pedophilia’
on the Internet (Figure 1; Podgornova 2014: 27-29). The business of hunting
‘pedophiles’ – in fact homosexual men – started in Moscow and from there
spread to other cities in Russia, including Novosibirsk. The strategy of the
hunt consisted of creating a bogus prole of a young man in a social net-
work, starting online conversations with interested men, arranging a date
and place, awaiting the victim, encircling him as a group, abusing and forcing
the victim to confess his being a pider, recording the scene, and then posting
the video on the Internet.
Figure 1: Youtube showing results for the search term ‘Occupy Pedophilia’. Search and
Screenshot: J. Otto Habeck, 16 March 2015.
Incidents of this kind occurred over the period of a few mont hs, up to the mo-
ment when police could identify the leaders of this ‘movement’ and when the
videos disappeared from the Internet. These events denitely augmented the
perception of risk in urban space among men dating men. Two of Habeck’s
Habeck and Schröder From Siberia with Love or Angst in the City?
12
interviewees reported they were victims of assaults, though the focus was not
on video ‘documentation’, but rather on mugging (reportedly, money, car keys
and personal documents).
Such attacks are contextualized within a more general notion of risk –
and risk-taking behaviour – connected with practices of dating and cottag-
ing, i.e. strolling around at certain places with the intention to nd a same-
sex partner for sexual intercourse. In times before the Internet and social
networking sites, cottaging was much more widespread. Local lore knows
at least three such so-called pleshka places (cf. Essig 1999) in Novosibirsk,
which already existed in Soviet times. Such places of both desire and risk are
‘operating’ also at present, although less frequented than in the past.
Other, less clandestine meeting points for men who want to get to know
men are the nudist beach 40 km away from the city centre and the occasional
gay night club in the city centre. The existence of gay night clubs in Novosi-
birsk is generally short-lived, which means that venues change from year to
year. Interviewees often rate clubs on the basis of personal security – if the
club has bouncers, that’s a good thing.
While for Habeck’s interlocutors, the risk of homophobic attacks is de-
nitely part and parcel of the emotional experience of urban space, it is not the
only risk, and not necessarily the most immediate one. One can get mugged
or bashed or abused for a wide array of reasons – or for no obvious reason at
all, as some of the interviewees pointed out repeatedly.
Several of them claimed that it is impossible to identify areas of high
risk, simply because one may run into trouble potentially everywhere, just by
coincidence. However, the majority of the interlocutors was ready to identify
areas of increased danger. Apart from mentioning two suburbs of the city
which are notoriously known to be shady,1 there is agreement on the equation
‘the further away from the centre, the less street lights, and the less people in
the street, the greater is the risk of being attacked’. While this may seem ob-
vious, it entails that tower-block areas are considered to be safer than those
parts of the city with detached houses – the so-called chastnyi sektor (pri-
vate sector areas). In this respect, the way in which the built environment
shapes the impression of personal security is markedly different from cities
in western or central parts of Europe (cf. the reputation of the tower-block
areas of Schwerin mentioned by Ziegler, this volume).
‘Blacks’, churki and Kyrgyz Migrants: Xenophobia in Russia and Novosibirsk
Soviet ideological policies envisioned an advancement towards social harmo-
ny between members of the Union’s different ‘nationalities’, up to the point
1 These two suburbs are Pervomaika, approximately 15 km southeast of the city
centre, and Zatulinka, on the western or ‘left’ side of River Ob’, about 10 km
south of the city centre. Interviewees also mentioned other suburbs, though
less frequently.
13
EthnoScripts
when homo sovieticus would leave behind his or her previous ethnic aflia-
tion. There is, however, ample evidence indicating that these grand ambitions
for cosmopolitanism and the ‘friendship of peoples’ did not fully materialize
in everyday realities, but rather that ethnic awareness and power misbalanc-
es remained vital throughout the Soviet period, usually with the Russians
as so-called ‘older brothers’ at the top (Grant 2010). In particular, following
Gorbachev’s attempts for inner reform, local ‘nationalisms’ and ethnic-based
political movements (with centrifugal consequences) gained further momen-
tum in different socialist republics from the mid-1980s onwards (e.g. Florin
2015).
As far as Kyrgyz and other Central Asian migrants to Russia are con-
cerned, these reported cases of racial discrimination and about being re-
ferred to as ‘blacks’ (chernye) already during the days of late Soviet Mos-
cow or Leningrad (Sahadeo 2012). Since then, the efforts of non-Russians at
place-making and integration in these and other cities have oftentimes been
associated with experiences of ofcial and informal stigmatization and un-
certainty (Reeves 2013). During his eldwork in Novosibirsk Schröder could
as well detect instances of publicly expressed xenophobia, both in the mate-
riality of urban space and during the interviews with Kyrgyz interlocutors.
Figure 2: Grafti on a factory’s perimeter fencing in Dzerzhinskii Raion, a district of Novosi-
birsk. Svastika and cross hairs are accompanied with the slogans ‘No churka’s’, ‘White Power
Rock’ and ‘Khachi – urody!’ (‘Hadjis are monsters!’). Photo: J. Otto Habeck, March 2012.
For example, this occurred by the term churka, which could be spotted in
wall-grafti (Figure 2) and apparently also was used during verbal confron-
tations between Kyrgyz or other Central Asians and local Russians. In fact,
Habeck and Schröder From Siberia with Love or Angst in the City?
14
churka translates as ‘tree stub’ (or ‘wooden block’) and meant to express that
someone would be ‘dull’ or ‘dumb’, or in any other way unsophisticated and
‘less civilized’. Some respondents imagined that churka could as well be used
because of its phonetic similarity to tiurki, which is Russian for ‘Turks’, and
in that way would aim to racially discriminate against migrants with origins
in Central Asia or the Caucasus.
On the other hand, Schröder’s Kyrgyz interlocutors in Novosibirsk pre-
sented a quite self-condent counter-discourse, which justies their belong-
ing in that region with their ancestors’ settlement history dating back to the
9th century (Dashkovskiy 2014). The ‘Yenisei Kyrgyz’ of those times have
thus come to serve as a rhetoric link between present-day Central Asia and
Siberia. In particular, this associates the Kyrgyz to the residents of the Rus-
sian Altai (not very far south of Novosibirsk) who share with them a Turkic
origin and further similarities in language and customs.
The next section will illustrate how these and other historic develop-
ments inuence the ways in which Kyrgyz appropriate, avoid and emotional-
ize urban spaces in contemporary Novosibirsk. For now, what is important is
the observation that the ‘Novosibirsk Kyrgyz’ may draw from a rhetoric rep-
ertoire of legitimate belonging that would not be available to their co-ethnics
residing in Moscow or elsewhere in Western Russia. This observation may
direct attention towards the potential for regional variation in matters of mi-
nority integration in different Russian cities. A recent study on the urban
lives of Central Asians in Kazan’ (Tatarstan) advances the same insight: It
argues that the historical co-residence of Tatar Muslims and Russian (Ortho-
dox) Christians since the mid-16th century has manifested in quite distinct
spatial identities to which contemporary resident groups can relate to and
orientate on when navigating the city (Nasritdinov 2016).
First Comparative Insights: Not a Risky, But Rather a ‘Quiet’ and ‘Cultured’
City?
So far the number of interviews we conducted in Novosibirsk certainly is
insufcient to draw rm conclusions. Still, the responses we did receive dur-
ing our formal and informal conversations and the observational data we
gathered while being in the city presented us with some early insights and
will give our future research direction. Conceptually, we could establish that
the management of ‘emotional economies’ (Stodulka 2014), i.e. the construc-
tion, expression or suppression of feelings such as fear, shame, hope or (self-)
condence, is a vital ingredient in processes of social inclusion or exclusion
in Novosibirsk.
Our empirical data show that most members of the ethnic Kyrgyz dias-
pora as well as men engaging in same-sex relationships generally depict the
city in a positive light. The latter cherish the ‘culturedness’, openness and
15
EthnoScripts
anonymity of the city in comparison to smaller settlements. Many of them
also identify the city centre as a space where displays of otherness are toler-
ated or even expected. Having said that, almost none of the men would dare
to be ‘out’ in the public space of Novosibirsk. In consequence, one can hardly
speak of a gay community in the city, but rather of patchy and clandestine
personal networks. In that sense they differ markedly from the ethnic Kyrgyz
of Novosibirsk, who openly and self-assuredly maintain expansive networks
with other Kyrgyz (which are clustered mainly around their regional origin
in Kyrgyzstan). They mention the ‘quietness’ of the city and claim that after
a period of ‘cultural adaptation’, which for them mostly entailed improving
Russian language skills and incorporating other elements of an urban habi-
tus, they would not be exposed to signicant xenophobic threats or excessive
public discrimination. On the contrary, the ways in which these Kyrgyz navi-
gate the city, recount personal conicts, and perceive of urban ‘dangers’ seem
to be more related to other groups of Central Asian migrants, mostly Uzbeks
and Tajiks, rather than to the ethnic Russian majority.
Perhaps most strikingly, our preliminary nding that Novosibirsk is
considered a rather ‘quiet’ and ‘open’ city marks a considerable contrast to
what has been said before about the situation in major cities of Western Rus-
sia, such as Moscow or Saint Petersburg. To us, this illustrates the relevance
of particular ‘local features’ that need to be taken into account when examin-
ing spatial appropriations or avoidances, emotions and the social exclusion
of minority groups. In the case of Novosibirsk’s urbanity, some of this ‘local
colour’ emerges from the city’s short settlement history and its specic de-
mographic development that is tied to a high degree of mobility throughout
the Soviet period and that, to some extent, may also have been caused by a
signicant inux of members of the intelligentsia.
Transfer into a Student Seminar: From Siberia to Hamburg and Berlin
Seminar Themes: Fear, Exclusion and Urban Space
Our Berlin/Hamburg seminar picked up on some theoretical concepts of the
previous research in Novosibirsk, to then scrutinise, apply and extend them.
Clearly, and already stated by Simmel ([1903] 1957), the city is a place where
individual life projects can grow – at least, it nurtures hopes to that effect. Si-
multaneously, cities are sites of obvious economic inequalities and blatantly
exerted practices of exclusion. More than a century after Simmel, questions
of social exclusion and distinction in urban spaces and their embedding in
‘emotional economies’ remain relevant topics within Social and Cultural An-
thr opolog y.
To be sure, the trope of stigmatization and social exclusion is not new
in Urban Anthropology. Policies regulating access to urban space in tandem
with less ‘formal’ practices of social exclusion were characteristic for cen-
Habeck and Schröder From Siberia with Love or Angst in the City?
16
turies in cities of Europe (Raphael 2011) and elsewhere. What did change
over time, though, were the practices and instruments of exclusion (or car-
ceral inclusion), ideas of responsibility for urban welfare, and ways of dealing
with anonymity, contingency and unpredictability caused by the immediate
co-presence of ‘strangers’, as Bauman (2003) argues. He ponders about the
simultaneous desire for fuzziness, creativity and diversity (which he calls
mixophilia) and for predictable, ‘traditional’ social relations of sameness
(mixophobia), concluding that the balance between the two trends has lately
come to be tipped towards mixophobia. The effects of the fear of some ‘other’
will be discussed in more detail shortly.
Notwithstanding the long debate on stigma and exclusion in social
sciences, the aspect of fear (the Angst in our project title) is a very recent
strand in the now growing eld of Anthropology of Emotion (about the latter,
Ahmed 2004; Röttger-Rössler and Stodulka 2014). Not only but particularly
in scholarship on security, the concept of fear has mostly been treated as an
irrational phenomenon experienced by some anonymous crowd; however, as
Alexandra Schwell (2015: 97-101) argues, fears deserve more detailed atten-
tion as “bodily sensations that are experienced individually” (2015: 100) and
are deeply related to moral judgments. Schwell also alludes to the design of
urban spaces that may reduce or “increase the subjective feeling of security”
(2015: 108). This idea, which also came to the fore in Novosibirsk, informed
the students’ discussions and research projects in combination with the ob-
servation that some urban spaces are unpretentiously but very effectively de-
signed to deter people (about such ‘interdictory spaces’, see below).
To return to the effects of mixophobia, it is the very apprehension of
some citizens vis-à-vis unfamiliar, unconventional, undeserving or unruly
‘others’ that triggers various practices of social exclusion in the rst place.
We can discern two sets of practices of social exclusion: inward-turned seg-
regation and outward aggression. Setha Low vividly captures the rst in her
2014 overview of Urban Anthropology, making reference to the emergence
of gated communities in many parts of the world: ‘The fear of crime – com-
mon in local discussions by gated community residents – is a rationalization
of another kind of conversation about the inux of new people who are dif-
ferent, who do not hold the same values, and behave in unpredictable, often
unacceptable, ways’ (Low 2014: 23).2
The other set of practices of social exclusion is more offensive, i.e. more
directly targeting the ‘other’, as exemplied by voluntary security guards and
vigilante groups. Caroline Humphrey argues (2013: 301-303) that fear can
be understood as entitlement: while someone may ‘have’ fear in the sight of
some frightening character, the latter is not easily granted the quality of be-
2 Such processes of segregation and self-isolation are not limited to gated com-
munities; they also occur in more mundane ways, notably as demarcation of
private space by walls and fences. For a Siberian case study, see Habeck and
Belolyubskaya (2016).
17
EthnoScripts
ing anxious, of experiencing fear. Even though her argument for the possible
existence of a ‘perspectival switch’ does not make us inclined to feel sympa-
thy with members of vigilante groups, it does serve as a reminder that diffuse
feelings of fear – connected to a perceived inability to manage the advent of
new strangers and challenges – make some individuals believe in facile solu-
tions and take a more or less hostile attitude towards what they perceive as
‘trouble-makers’. Vigilante groups in Russia (Tsipurski 2013) and elsewhere
(Kirsch and Graetz 2010) actively pursue practices of social exclusion and
criminalization. Their often transgressive and physically threatening actions
create fear among those stigmatized (i.a. ethnic minorities, sexual minori-
ties, but also people with no formally registered place of residence) and call
forth counter-reactions, which may include escape, avoidance, or outspoken
opposition, depending not to the least on the ability of stigmatized groups
to nd allies and present themselves in local media. What comes to the fore
in our own research and our students’ studies are marginalized individu-
als carving out informal and temporary niches for themselves in the urban
space, but also activists who speak out on behalf of marginalized groups,
partly based on their own experiences of precariousness.
There is one nal aspect of Angst and urban space that should not go
unnoticed: It can best be dubbed as thrill, immanent in the possibility of
spontaneous encounters in the fuzziness and diversity of urban life, as dis-
cussed by Phil Hubbard (2007) in his essay on the more serendipitous and
also risky experience of an evening ‘out’ in a British city centre in contrast
to the more predictable (and, arguably, more consumerist) experience of an
evening ‘out’ in the leisure parks outside the centre. In many ways, the city
remains a space that engenders both emotions of curiosity and apprehension.
Practicalities of Teaching, of Designing and Conducting Research on Urban
Emotions
Our seminar Angst in the City was conducted both in Berlin and Hamburg.
Ideally, it would have brought together the students from these universities
into one classroom on a regular basis, for example biweekly. Such setup would
not only have established a positive (informal) group dynamic early on, but
also would have facilitated the general learning process. This again would
have been desirable due to the rather diverse scientic backgrounds that the
Hamburg and the Berlin students had: The students from Hamburg were
all Social/Cultural Anthropologists by training, whereas the Berlin students
were enrolled in an area-studies Master-program called ‘Global Studies’ and
before had predominantly completed degrees in Social Sciences other than
Anthropology. The two joint classroom sessions that we were able to conduct
towards the end of the semester in fact were characterized by lively discus-
Habeck and Schröder From Siberia with Love or Angst in the City?
18
sions covering multiple disciplinary and theoretical angles and thus support
this assumption.
Unfortunately, due to the students’ tight schedules and the budgetary
constraints that the seminar faced, at the beginning of the semester joint
sessions were not feasible. We adapted to that situation by ways of lecturer
mobility, meaning that on one weekday the same seminar session was rst
held in Berlin in the morning, and then – after a two-hour train ride – in
Hamburg in the afternoon. To us as lecturers, from this necessary change
emerged quite valuable insights into how the very same readings were re-
ceived, discussed and understood differently by these two audiences. At the
same time, it made us adjust our ways of moderating the texts and of setting
particular learning objectives. Furthermore, the intense co-teaching experi-
ence (three hours in Berlin and three hours in Hamburg on the same day) en-
abled us to closely observe each other’s didactic approach. Usually, the train
rides provided welcome opportunities to commonly reect on these matters.
One core component of our seminar was a ‘buddying system’ among
students. Quite similarly to how we ourselves have conducted research in
Novosibirsk, we wanted to establish pairs of students who would approach
compatible research themes together. In order not to impose our own previ-
ous ideas onto the group too forcefully, during the seminar’s rst sessions we
reserved considerable time for students to articulate their personal interests
and develop them further. Once these single projects had taken shape, we ag-
gregated them into larger themes, such as ‘Spaces and Spirituality’ or ‘Spaces
of Refuge’. Next, students were asked to indicate a rst and second priority
from among these research themes. Matching these across the whole group
allowed us to eventually identify four buddy-pairs, each with one participant
from Berlin and one from Hamburg.
In our view, this procedure kept a balance between what the students
considered ‘worthwhile’ for research individually, which oftentimes drew
from their own urban experiences in these cities, and the necessity to chan-
nel these preferences into a smaller number of clusters that would t with the
overall framework uniting aspects of exclusion, emotion and urban space. As
the overview of projects (below) will show in more detail, one such research
cluster, for example, compared aspects of ‘homelessness’ in Berlin and Ham-
burg. Ideally, ‘being buddied’ in that way offered each student a counterpart
in the other city to keep in touch and share empirical insights with and to
discuss research practicalities in an informal way. Accordingly, during the
nal joint sessions of our seminar, the buddies presented their research pro-
jects toget her.
For many of our students the seminar offered a whole range of new ex-
periences. Especially, this concerned their rst participation in a full-cycle
research that went from designing and conducting a project to analyzing its
data and publishing the insights. Furthermore, English was the language of
19
EthnoScripts
choice during the seminar discussions and also for the articles that have now
emerged from it. Many students also expressed that working in a team in-be-
tween cities was a valuable experience for them. Any scientic aspects aside
the team-aspect certainly offered practical insights as to the communication
and coordination of specic tasks, the negotiation of compromises for the
collective goal, and the management of time and efforts. In our seminar the
latter was a particular challenge given that the research was expected to be
nalized and presented within less than three months.
Angst in the City in Retrospect – and a Brief Summary of the Contri-
butions to This Volume
Looking back at the history of this special issue of Ethnoscripts, the pro-
ject attained its particular drive from three sorts of transfer: rstly, from a
shared perspective on urban spaces and lifestyles, but also on homophobia
and xenophobia between the two authors of this article. This led to jointly
coordinated eld research in the city of Novosibirsk, on the basis of shared
hypotheses and research instruments. Second, this experience triggered the
idea to share conceptual and methodological insights with students at the
universities with which the authors are afliated, and encourage students
to formulate their own ideas for a short research project, ideally in teams.
Third, what resulted from the studies fed back into and substantively modi-
ed the ways the authors of these lines now see micro-practices of urban
place-making.
What our case studies and the students’ researches have in common is a
certain notion of niche. Natascha Bregy and Claryce Lum pursue the strate-
gies that individuals employ when carving out a more or less temporary, un-
fenced space for themselves (admittedly, these strategies often fail because of
policies of control, surveillance and ‘interdictory spaces’, cf. Bauman 2003:
30 -31). Natascha Bregy describes the interplay of solidarity and segregation
among homeless people in the centre of Hamburg and provides detailed in-
sights into their ambit of mobility, action space and self-perceptions. She also
points to the persistence of social ills that cause homelessness in the rst
place. In this respect, Claryce Lum’s Berlin-based study is on a more positive
key, revealing how individuals who have ‘got out’ of the situation of home-
lessness convey to a broader public the problems, strategies and resources of
homeless people. Moreover, the articles in this volume illustrate the ways in
which individuals come to share niches, voluntarily or willy-nilly, in support
of others. Two papers that regrettably did not make it into this issue devel-
oped the difculties and intricacies of seeking, appropriating and providing
niches – in both cases, this concerned niches for refugees in Berlin and sur-
roundings.
Habeck and Schröder From Siberia with Love or Angst in the City?
20
Based on research in a tower-block suburb of her home town Schwerin in the
northeast of Germany, Carmen Ziegler explores what is colloquially called
the ‘Russian’ network, which comprises individuals of different ethnic back-
ground from the former Soviet Union. The Dreesch, as described by Ziegler,
is no longer a prestigious suburb as it once was during the times of the GDR;
rather, it has become a place where, for better or worse, individuals rely on
mutual support of an informal network, largely based on familial ties and a
common language, in this case Russian. This informal network has ultimate-
ly been creating educational self-help groups, i.e. new formal institutions of
mutual help.3
A different trope is rendered in Dumitriţa Luncă’s account of how the
residents of St Pauli – Hamburg’s most famous district – perceive their
neighbourhood and connect it with their biographies. The neighbourhood
constantly offers challenges and surprises. It shows down-to-earth realities
of life with no frills. Each generation of residents is experiencing St Pauli
anew, ‘young and wide-eyed’ (Luncă). Each generation takes the changes
that gradually occur in the neighbourhood as some sort of loss, ultimately
amounting to a certain level of fatigue with the built and social environment
around their place of living.
Notwithstanding the above interpretations, it is clear that niches are not
always cozy places. What they do is, at least, provide some sense of reliability
and sameness in an urban space that Bauman (2003) describes as fuzzy and
contingent, and as such they bear some resemblance to the niches and se-
cluded spaces of the elites, as discussed above with reference to Low (2014).
We conclude this introductory article with the assumption that in Russia
as much as in many other countries the current trends towards patriotism,
moral order and securitization will increase the need for niches and simulta-
neously will diminish these niches, making people’s existence in them more
precarious.
Moreover, in further pursuing our own research in Novosibirsk and oth-
er post-socialist cities, what we take with us is the array of ideas that our stu-
dents have put forward. Their ndings induce us to follow ‘our’ actors more
closely in their activities of networking; to consider conducting parallel stud-
ies on Angst in the City among other (stigmatized) groups, such as lone par-
ents or people with no formal residence; and also to take into account the ef-
fect of time and memory on how residents of cities, in Russia and elsewhere,
express their apprehensions and emotional attachments to urban spaces.
3 One reason, it seems to us, that the Dreesch has come to be ‘home’ for a large
number of migrants from the former Soviet Union lies in its architectural
similarity to tower-block areas in the USSR successor states, which are seen
as rather comfortable living space (cf. Habeck and Belolyubskaya 2016: 121)
– more so than in the former GDR. The Dreesch may thus be interpreted as a
niche that enables individuals to continue postsocialist ways of dwelling.
21
EthnoScripts
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Habeck and Schröder From Siberia with Love or Angst in the City?
24
Dr. Joachim Otto Habeck is full professor at the Institute of Social and
Cultural Anthropology, Universität Hamburg (UHH), since spring
2014. His research interests comprise the perception of space in ur-
ban and rural settings, social inclusion, exclusion and distinction. He
also conducted research on mobile pastoralism and land use in differ-
ent parts of Russia, including Siberia.
Dr. Philipp Schröder is Interim Professor of the cross section “Islam in
Asian and African Societies” and researcher at the Institute for Asian
and African Studies, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. His research
interests comprise mobility, identity, youth cultures, urban spaces
and economies in Central Asia, China, Russia and Western Europe.
The authors thank the bologna.lab of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
for supporting this teaching and research initiative.
(https://www.hu-Berlin.de/en/institutions/administration/bolognalab)
