pryazovian blue

Киев - родина нежная,

Although it was never stated explicitly in our anthropological methods classes, I was left with the vague understanding that the more cockroaches you had crawling around in your bed at night, the better fieldwork you would be able to conduct during the day. Undoubtedly, finding oneself in bed with a couple of irretrievable, scuttling cockroaches drives one quickly into that out-of-the-ordinary, despairing space where the question par excellence of modernist sensibility and ethnographic research becomes urgent: ‘How can things be this way?’ (Des Chene 1997:66). The discomfort of illness, the strangeness of a foreign place, the loneliness, the inability to communicate fluently: traditional fieldwork is designed to drive students into the state of mind that makes you lose the ground beneath your feet, and, hopefully, makes you susceptible to new impressions and alternative ways of seeing the world. The traditional hardships of fieldwork have the effect of making the anthropologist come to know herself better, and also to enable her to ‘go out of herself’, to push herself to new understanding.

The reason for what happened in the Donbass is that after the fall of communism, a spiritual vacuum was created there. I remember then a frantic stream of missionaries, a bunch of churches opened. But these religious organizations did not explain to people what was going on. Previously, this was done by the party and the director of the plant. And now there is no party, and the director says unclear things about "costs" and decentralization