an Anthropology of Time

Ssorin-Chaikov, Nikolai.

Two Lenins: A Brief Anthropology of Time. 

The Malinowski Monographs.Chicago: HAU books, 2017. ix + 153 pp. $25.00 (paper). ISBN 978-0-9973675-3-9.

For an anthropologist who writes about time, everything is a potential manifestation of temporality. But Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov takes this fascination with time even further by (basically) telling us that temporality never comes alone. In fact, any temporal modality could be seen as “temporal multiplicity,” as an assemblage of differently structured and differently directed orientations in time and, occasionally, space. This approach opens up a dizzying yet undoubtedly exciting perspective on historical events and ethnographic practices. For instance, this is how Ssorin-Chaikov sums up his discussion of a shipment of grain that young Armand Hammer brought to Russia to alleviate the famine of 1921: “First, the matter that was being given is time. Second, this time was simultaneously many different times. It was the time of the gift, but also the time of credit, the time of the market in the United States, and the time of possible Soviet future. ... But this identity of different times also happened in the context of multiple temporalities in the aftermath of the Russian Civil War, and the ecological time of peasant agriculture, caught by drought. Other factors to consider are the ecological and market time of the Soviet New Economic Policies” (p. 43).

Two Lenins does mention that Hammer’s gift of grain was a commercial transaction properly compensated, but this precise historical characteristic does not really upset the author’s overall argument since the main contribution of the book has little to do with the detailed unfolding of these different times and temporalities. Instead, the primary concern in this and other cases is “What is the time in which these different times exist at the same time?” (p. 11). The author unpacks this problem of simultaneity by linking the concept of
gift with the concept of modernity. Again, the story about Hammer’s visits to Russia is paradigmatic here: through multiple readings of the same historical episode, the author passionately argues that what actually matters is not the transaction itself but its spirit, or, to use Ssorin-Chaikov’s description, the gift/ness of the transaction. It is precisely these long-term relations of relatedness, reciprocity, and, often, dependency generated by the gift/ness that allows Ssorin-Chaikov to detect different rhythms, chronotopes, and time categories that participants of the gift exchange bring with them. The gift/ness, then, emerges as a structuring structure, as a tool for organizing experiences and expressions. Together with time, it functions as a metaphor of modernity, too, and the book’s overall goal seems to be in exploring how modernity understood as “a form of time” coincides with modernity understood as “a gift form” (pp. 122, 98).

The emphasis on the form is not accidental; the book is an exploration of formal affinities and distinctions, and it is perhaps hardly surprising, then, that Two Lenins is not really about two Lenins.The double-figure (or is it a spirit?) of Lenin is a narrative ploy, a formal pretext that gives the author a narrative backbone for stringing together a series of vignettes about Hammer’s visits to Vladimir Lenin’s Russia and Ssorin-Chaikov’s own ethnographic visits to an Evenki settlement in Siberia, where he met another “Lenin,” a local man whose mimetic reproductions of Lenin’s gestures earned him his nickname. Using these ethnographic and historical materials as a springboard for his conceptual analysis of change and exchange, Ssorin-Chaikov offers an intense and informative engagement with mostly Anglophone theoretical scholarship on gift, time, and modernity.

In his introduction, the author warns the reader that the book is a “thought experiment.” Thisis certainly true. Two Lenins is a good example of the experimental anthropological research that was pioneered almost thirty years ago by the contributors to Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (1986). Abandoning the Geertzian “thick description” of ethnographic encounters, this form of anthropological scholarship usually forefronts the self-reflexivity of the ethnographer, ever so careful about documenting his own intellectual genealogy and epistemological embeddedness. In a few cases, Ssorin-Chaikov offers nuanced and creative ethnographic accounts of the time he was given and the time that was taken away from him in the field. Yet predominantly,his interests are elsewhere: he warns the reader a couple of times that his main preoccupation is methodology. Indeed, in Two Lenins, Ssorin-Chaikov is more concerned with mapping the intellectual belonging of his analytical categories. A proper classification of the gift of (Soviet) modernity—is it Maussian or Hobbesian?—appears to be more pertinent than an explanation of how exactly “gift forms” became the privileged conceptual tool for framing, say, Hammer’s commercial transactions, or the Evenki’s experience of the Soviet government’s modernization programs. 

It appears that this penchant for a formalist exploration of temporalities is driven—at least to some degree—by the timing of the author’s ethnography. The field-based research among the Evenkiwas done 25–30 years ago (in 1988–89 and 1993–94), and the latest ethnographic materials come from 2006 when the author co-organized a museum exhibit on gifts to Stalin in Moscow. No doubt, the archival nature of these materials encourages the author’s retrospective look, interested in seeing larger historical trends and bigger ethnographic outlines. It pushes toward a very particular form of narration, too. As Ssorin-Chaikov mentions at some point, “to see the speed of anything” one has toslow down: moving in the same speed with the objects that we study would be nothing but stillness(p. 76). This observation could be applied to the book as a whole: Two Lenins is a slow book. Theauthor takes time to re-turn and re-visit the already discussed places, events, and dialogues in order to re-frame and re-consider them, producing in the end discursive “assemblages of repetition anddifference” (p. 82). There is a certain serenity to these cycles of ruminations, though. There is evena certain disarming irony of misrecognition that they exhibit, too: Despite being decidedly archival,the author concludes the book by situating his research within the anthropology of the contemporary,that is, within the anthropology that turns “toward the study of ‘here and now’ rather than ‘far-away’and ‘timeless’” (p. 126).

So, what do we learn in the end from this incessant striving to temporalize recent and distantSoviet experience vis-à-vis anthropological theories of gift and time? Ssorin-Chaikov’s overallconclusion is solid, if not surprising. Like other scholars of modernity before him, he convincinglyclaims that “modernity as time” helps to avoid the usual hierarchicality of development: the operatingcategories are not  modern vs. premodern anymore, but  modern vs. modern (p. 128). “Modernity astime” ends up being modernity as a sequence of times. A linear progression from one stage of socialdevelopment to another is replaced here by a “movement from one form of alternative and truemodernity to another” (p. 128). To put it simply, Soviets were modern, too. 

While sharing this uncompromising passion for multiple modernities and temporalities, I do want to point out at least one instance of stability in this sea of temporal changes: the storming of the Winter Palace, which marked the start of Bolshevik Revolution, did not happen on October 23 1917, as the book claims (p. 3). This “turning point of the turning point”—to use Ssorin-Chaikov’s own expression—was reached two days later, on October 25; in spite all the attempts to temporal zeit otherwise.

Serguei Alex. Oushakine, Princeton University