Class 3: Geography and Ancient History (2)
was a real place either.
And then, one day it ceased to exist.
No one ever questions that Russia is a real place.
There's a non-zero chance that the Russian Federation,
as we know it, will cease to exist.
In fact, there's a 100% chance that every place,
I mean, that's, that shouldn't...
Know there's a 100% chance
the Russian Federation will cease to exist.
All states that have ever existed have ceased to exist.
There's also a 100% chance
the United States of America will cease to exist.
Probably not before you graduate, don't worry.
(class laughs)
Unless you're freshmen, in which case, eh, I'm not so sure.
(class laughs)
But all states cease to exist.
So any narrative about
how something's gonna be around forever
is obviously going to be wrong.
But my point here is that as I was sitting
with my fellow Americans and thinking this over,
it kind of seemed clear that the reason why they,
Americans, people generally, have trouble imagining
that Russia could lose this war to Ukraine
has something to do with the fact that
Ukraine isn't quite real in their minds and Russia is real.
And they wouldn't say that directly,
but the narrative which you're taught when you're younger
is gonna be there for you always.
We live in time in one direction.
Our history education happens in only one direction.
And the things that get in first tend to stay.
Now, we don't have to spend a lot of time
challenging that narrative.
That's not really the point here.
The point though, is that, just if you believe,
if this is your deep geography,
that this was always Russia,
and then if it wasn't Russia,
that was some kind of divergence.
If that's the way you see it, then naturally your brain,
when you get to thinking about the war,
of course, you're gonna think Russia's gonna win.
Because this was always Russia,
and Ukraine is some kind of exception.
Yeah, do you have a question?
Oh, sorry. Okay.
And, "always" is a very powerful word,
but it's also a very comfortable word.
We really like "always".
We really like for things
to have a kind of durability, continuity.
We like for there to be something in the world
where we know its shape, and we know its shape is permanent.
And it is a little disturbing
when it turns out that none of these things
that we think are permanent actually are.
That's a little disturbing.
And so Russia has made it into the level,
I think it's fair to say,
you can correct me, I mean,
I realize you guys are young,
you're from a different century and all that,
but Russia has made it into the realm
of the kind of calmly permanent.
It's up there with, I don't know what, Star Trek, hydrogen,
it's like things that have always been there.
Whereas Ukraine has not.
Whether that's fair or not, it's probably unfair.
But I think that's the case.
And we just don't like it
when something which is "always" is called into question.
So, "always" is very comforting.
And of course, Russia itself, that word "Russia",
in a deep geography,
it's not clear where the borders of that Russia are.
I mean during this war, there's been a lot of really, quite,
let's call it ambitious Russian propaganda.
There are now placate, what do we call placate?
- [Student] Posters.
- No, wrong.
Billboards. (snaps fingers) There are now billboards.
I mean, that's true, but like billboards.
You get points for speed though, both of you.
And it wasn't wrong, I was just thinking of a different-
Like billboards in Russia, which say Russia has no borders.
Which is one way to think about it.
No borders at all.
But my point is that, when we think of Russia,
we could be thinking of the Soviet Union,
we could be thinking of the Russian Empire,
we could be thinking of a lot of different things
with very different borders.
And since the borders change, it's a big place,
we're not surprised to learn
that a lot of things are Russia.
A lot of things turn out to be Russia.
So you get my point.
There is a reason why
basically everybody except the military historians
kept saying Ukraine is gonna lose.
And one of the puzzles of this class, if you want,
is to think about why that is.
Why would everyone be wrong?
And the suggestion that I'm making
is that this thing that I'm calling deep geography
has something to do with it,
with the words, the spellings, the narratives
that indicate to us what is real and what is not real,
before we get into the empirical world.
Because as I suggested before, if you read,
there aren't that many military historians left,
but if you read them
and their boring threads about logistics and all this stuff,
they don't know anything about Russia or Ukraine,
but they know where the rivers are,
and they know where the bridges are and so on.
And they've done a much, much better job
than the people who are supposed to be Russia specialists.
Why is that?
Why is it that not knowing anything about Russia
seems to be an advantage
in predicting who's gonna win this war?
And so you see what I'm trying to suggest,
that if what you know about Russia
has this kind of metaphysical underlay,
which is actually, then,
pushing the empirical evidence around,
that's going to be a problem for you.
So basically what I've done so far-
Yeah, go for it.
- [Student] Is there something distinctive about America
that makes our narrative wrong?
Like, is there a different European,
because of the proximity to the area,
that the predictor-
- Well, in Poland, there is, yeah. (laughs)
In Poland, there is.
All of this sort of stuff
that I'm calling anti-colonial and so on,
like the Poles and the Ukrainians
have been making these arguments for a long time.
But as soon as you get west of Poland, no,
it's the basic, it's the same story dominates.
That Kievan Rus' somehow becomes Moscow,
somehow all the same place.
When Moscow takes over Ukraine
in the 17th century or in the 18th century,
that's somehow a fulfillment,
even though Kyiv and Moscow have been apart for 500 years,
even though Kyiv has never been ruled by Moscow before,
somehow that's a natural fulfillment of history.
500 years is a long time, by the way.
But that basic story is dominant in Germany and France,
and in England, it's not just us.
It's a story, I'll get to why it's an ironic story.
So, what I've been doing so far,
is I've been making a case
for how important literary history actually is.
Like how important culture actually is,
and how important cultural critique can be,
like being aware of the narratives and the words and so on
can help you to understand the politics,
or being aware of the culture can help you understand
political judgements.
What I want to move on to now,
is just a word about how you then address this.
How you begin to talk about it.
And one way that we'll be talking about it in this course
is the very broad approach of colonial history.
Where one of the first things that you do,
if you're doing colonial history,
is you question the neutral claims of knowledge.
You question, whether the things that have been laid down
might in some way have been laid down with an imperial spin,
which has to then be queried.
So if you're doing colonial history,
you're taking for granted that there's,
that the libraries have been organized the wrong way.
Or at least they've been, I won't say wrong,
but they've been organized a certain way,
that even the language has been organized a certain way,
so that you don't see some things
that you might otherwise see.
Now, these are arguments that many of you
might be more familiar with in an American context.
Where you would say that in American history,
one has to be very careful,
because American history has been laid down in such a way
that you might not see, for example,
the history of enslaved people.
That's probably a very familiar argument.
But that's a generic anti-colonial argument
that can be applied in lots of other settings
around the world, including in Russia and in Ukraine.
So in colonial history, you're asking yourself
to question the apparent neutrality of knowledge,
including the instruments of knowledge:
languages, spellings, maps, library organizations.
And you're also asking yourself,
"Can people change halfway?"
So if these concepts have been laid down into us
and we've accepted them as neutral,
are we actually capable of catching ourselves halfway?
Which is a very important history question.
Because if it's not possible,
then we might as well give up on history,
because we all have a lot of legends laid into us,
imperial and otherwise.
And getting to history is a matter of being able to say,
"Huh, well, maybe some of the things I'm committed to
maybe might not be correct."
So I want one of you to figure out
how many lecture classes there are on Ukraine,
on Ukrainian history right now in the US.
'Cause I'm gonna say one, and I want you guys to prove
that there's another lecture class going on on Ukraine
in the United States right now.
I'm gonna guess that,
despite the fact that it's in the news and so on,
I'm gonna guess there's only one.
And that's sort of, that would be weird, wouldn't it?
I mean, would you go that far with me?
I'm gonna say one, maybe two.
Like full-on lecture classes that are just about Ukraine.
Not classes where somebody mentions Ukraine,
or a Ukrainian poem is assigned,
but a full-on class about Ukraine.
In our country with 300 million people,
in our fantastic higher educational system,
I'm gonna go with one,
and I'm gonna be surprised if it's more than two.
So somebody figure that out by next class.
Because it's an example of what I'm talking about
with the institutions.
Because no one would disagree now with the proposition
that something important is going on in Ukraine.
If something important is going on in Ukraine,
that means something important could go on in Ukraine.
If something important could go on in Ukraine,
why are we so woefully unprepared for that?
There has to be an answer to that question.
It has to go somewhere,
it has to go somewhere deep.
So if you're doing colonial history,
you question the neutrality of knowledge,
you look for ways,
and one of your methods is you look for ways
for the colonized to talk back.
Not that they're right, by the way.
It's not about how one is right and the other is wrong.
That would be oh, too simple, right?
But rather, when you hear how the colonized talk back,
then it shakes you a little bit and gets you thinking
about how you might do things another way.
So I was in Kyiv for several days
and I stayed up late watching,
'cause I didn't anything else to do,
actually, I had a lot of other stuff to do, (laughs)
but I stayed up late watching Ukrainian television
because I find it just really ethnographically interesting
to soak in the news in a country where something's going on.
And they have ways of talking back.
Later in the semester,
you're assigned an article about "ruscism," that I wrote.
Ruscism, to make it very simple,
is a kind of merger of the words "Russian" and "fascism".
And ruscism, or with the personal noun, Ruscisti,
has become a pretty standard way of referring
to Russians who are invading Ukraine.
So standard in the sense that the newscasters use it.
