Afterlives & Other Lives: Semiosis & History in 21st Century Ukraine

Abstract

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.