Deborah A Jones

It is common to define ‘absurdity’ as senselessness or meaninglessness. However, my interlocutors’ experiences and invocations of the absurd were not at all about accepting the arbitrariness and disorder of the world, but precisely about meaning-making. Absurdity, after all, is both a feeling and an ascription. As a sensation, it is sometimes a tingle, and often a gut-punch. As a linguistic act of evaluation – this is absurd! – it involves noticing, wincing, and perhaps, laughing at the incongruities between life as it would seem to make sense and life as it is actually experienced.

Observing the absurd requires a capacity for reflexivity, to understand that the world is now one way, but that it could have, perhaps should have, been another. But absurdity also presupposes congruities, for what makes absurd situations so startling is that they make the familiar, the very familiar, patently strange. This is particularly evident in wartime, when life’s most essential activities and relationships are upended, or simply seem impossible. Here, I give voice to Ukraine’s war-affected while offering two small hypotheses about war and the absurd: first, it is in the tension between the incongruous and the uncanny that absurdity is felt; second, my interlocutors experienced absurd circumstances in part because of how states and other bureaucracies delivered aid such as food and housing. I draw on fieldwork with war-affected populations in Ukraine and with Ukrainian refugees in Germany. I also reflect on my own disorienting, or even absurd, experience of becoming an ethnographer of war.

Human-to-insect comparisons turn the stomachs of scholars of language and discrimination, but do they incite violence? In the spring of 2014, some Ukrainians referred to people they suspected of separatist sympathies as kolorady, or Colorado potato beetles, a notorious invasive pest. But kolorad was also a response to a pro-Russian epithet for Ukrainians: fashist (fascist). This article traces the relationship between kolorad and fashist in the earliest days of the conflict, finding that this kind of language-which sorts people into producers and parasites, heroes and villains, human and not-is multilayered, interreferencing, and strikingly persistent. Along with dehumanizing language, "patriotic chronotopes" help explain how people perceive threats and why some people come to feel it their responsibility, even destiny, to take violent action.

Excerpt: What happens when flyover country is a war zone? Or when a war zone is flyover country? For nearly a century, airspace has been a critical part of battlefields. The vast majority of the time, commercial passengers float blissfully above or around the fighting. The MH17 disaster is one of a handful of incidents in which an airliner has been caught up in crossfire—eerily, in January of 2020, it was a Ukrainian plane that was shot down, its 176 passengers and crew casualties of a simmering conflict between Iran and the United States. But it is not only the jet set who remain aloft and aloof. Most of us only view war zones from great distances. Further, whether in media or in military actions, war zones are constantly depicted like flyover country: patchwork quilts of fields and forests; dots and lines on maps; spaces that are empty, or at least empty of people like ourselves. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/when-flyover-country-is-a-war-zone

Excerpt: I situate ghostwriting within the neoliberal economy and its burgeoning market for outsourced linguistic labor, showing how ghostwriters and their clients (who may or may not also be the named authors of texts) often find themselves in a symbiotic relationship. This symbiosis affects how ghostwriters perceive their work, and they can find ghosting collaborative, caring, personally fulfilling, and financially advantageous—even when they are not receiving credit for anything they write. I then provide an extended case study of the woman I call Erin. Erin’s story will both affirm and complicate some of what I lay out in the section prior. My objective is to capture the range of feelings that my ghostwriter interlocutors can and do have about what is, for most of them, an unex- pected career path, but one they often enjoy. Ultimately, I argue that we must be cautious about what we presume selling authorship or relinquish- ing credit actually represents to those who do it. This not to say that ghost- writing is never exploitative or alienating, nor that lack of credit is not a serious problem for some. However, when ghostwriters feel frustrated with their profession, it is not necessarily because they have been denied a byline.

Afterlives and Other Lives is an ethnography of Ukraine on the eve of the Maidan Revolution, and during the first several months following its climax, as the country descended into war (autumn 2012–autumn 2014). Grounded in a study of former collective farming communities, this dissertation demonstrates that many of the ideals of the Maidan movement—national sovereignty; government accountability; equality before the law; freedom of movement across borders; increased opportunity at home—not only reverberated in the countryside, but were deeply implicated in agrarian experience to begin with.

This dissertation shows how two powerful semiotic processes, iconicity and interdiscursivity, made linkages between certain rural things and particular political commitments or social types feel intuitive beyond the villages, propelling specific readings of the past, assessments of the present, and expectations for the future. Mapping how soil became tied to narratives of economic potential, and land deeds to dreams of “rule of law”, how invasive beetles were equated with separatists, and sunflowers with victims of a plane crash, the chapters cohere in a narrative of how Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution came to be, and why the violence that has erupted from it has been so difficult to contain.

This project, while focused on Ukraine, responds to the anthropological imperative to study how certain perspectives on the social world come to feel natural, legitimate, or inevitable. In tracing how some people, histories, and landscapes become cast as native, desirable, or heroic, while others are neglected, dismissed, or undermined, it speaks to more widespread struggles over historical memory and national identity. Finally, this dissertation offers insight into how the frontiers of war, and the afterlives they generate, are ever expanding, and unexpected.

Commons are often portrayed as sprawling natural or intellectual resources whose vastness defies ownership. However, the urban built environment contains many shared spaces – courtyards, hallways, or even the gaps between floors and ceilings – that function as very small commons.  In this essay I turn privatized, Soviet-era apartment blocks inside out to examine the shared spaces within them.  I conclude that rather than merely working as buffers between neatly delineated chunks of ‘the private,’ small commons serve as the glue that ensures the structural and social cohesion of the building, and the value of individual apartments.  This essay provides a mouse-sized counterpoint to the larger and more expansive commons discussed in literature on enclosure and access.  ‘Thinking small’ forces us to reimagine what a ‘common might look like, and focus on how people interact in or with commons, rather than merely take from them.