Family Life in the Field and Across the Border
In a telling moment in his conclusion to Shock Therapy, Thomas Matza describes crossing back between Russia and Finland with his toddler son as a passenger in his vehicle, stuck in a queue at the border post. The child is tired, fractious, and tearful. Matza and his wife watch with envy as the black Land Rovers of the new nomenklatura, “oligarchs and mafiosi” (227) fly past, prioritized within a system of biopolitics which seems rigid, even ossified. Yet as the ethnographic narrative progresses, Matza highlights other travelers ceding their place in the line to speed the tired child through, and even the border guards making a point of ensuring the child is protected from the harsh elements. The Matza family group crosses quickly and safely.
Alexia Bloch conducts fieldwork throughout southern Russia, Turkey, and Moldova accompanied by her young daughter, sometimes supported by her stepmother, who provides child care in an apposite reflection of the “other-mothering” which is one of the central premises of the argument of Sex, Love and Migration. Bloch asserts that conducting fieldwork with a young child has positive implications for how she was received, how she attended to and appreciated transnational nurturing practices, and for the daily rhythm of doing fieldwork. Being immediately identified as a daughter as well as a mother significantly helped her to build rapport.
Both parent/authors of these estimable monographs on postsocialist space reflect upon the plight of families as they seek ethical and economic identities and develop care-giving practices and strategies in landscapes haunted by globalization, where socialist paradigms and forms of governance have not been entirely or uniformly displaced, and where some people who lived under state socialism have continued to reflect on a sense of a derailed socialist modernity. Bloch explores, with deep sympathy, the creativity and resilience with which women from former Soviet communities, many of them mothers, negotiate governmental, familial, and gendered challenges in order to migrate in search of economic opportunities in Turkey. Matza conducts a scrupulous and highly-theorized analysis of the emergence of psychological therapeutics as they affect Russian children, parents, wider society, and very specifically mental health professionals. Each anthropologist reports on contexts that enable the creation of new forms of neo-liberal subjectivity; ones, however, which do not exclude, but in fact depend upon, the fashioning of ethical selfhood.
Matza's title, Shock Therapy, plays upon the deeply traumatic experience of many citizens who lived through the years of the unmaking of Soviet life. The last days of the USSR saw the emergence of psychological practices that Matza identifies as symptomatic of a discursive shift in Soviet biopolitics, specifically a loosening of the grip of biomedical approaches previously held in mental health care. This psychotherapeutic turn entailed the “humanization” (gumanizatsiia) of the discipline.
These developments were not exclusively a response to malady. Economic stagnation had prompted Mikhail Gorbachev to call for institutions to attend to the “human factor of production.” A more proactive focus upon emotions, capabilities, and wellbeing, as opposed to pathologically-inclined reactive responses resulted in what Matza playfully dubs as the “psy-ences” (64) moving into much greater prominence. His fieldwork sites are contrasted: one is a commercially-oriented self-motivation and development service primarily aimed at wealthier families, the other a state-run service targeted at troubled and troublesome children and young people. He finds that by pathologizing social suffering, the public service providing psychotherapeutic care to the vulnerable tended to reinforce rather than mitigate social inequality, whereas de-pathologizing forms of care focused on well-being were generally much more available to the better-off. Rather than pathology, these forms promoted highly market-oriented and gendered concepts of personal success and advancement.
In Sex, Love and Migration, Alexia Bloch encounters a cohort of female migrants from southern Russia, Ukraine, and Moldova who actively pursue a life of separation from family: husbands and children; wider kinship and community, in order to access the commercial opportunities afforded in Turkey. Through remittances and ongoing oversight of and participation in the care of their children, they are forging a sustainable and to some extent liberating identity both at home and in Turkey where they thrive as entrepreneurs, making economic and erotic alliances, and creating themselves as neo-liberal subjects at home on both sides of the border. Some of the younger women are active in the sex industry, albeit at its softest core, as dancers and hostesses. They have embraced a decentered “plastic” sexuality. These entertainers wield their sexuality “without hang-ups” (bez kompleksov) (131) as a sign of their modernity, but also as a sort of intimate currency that facilitates their mobility. They seek to benefit from men's financial expenditures, and make strategic use of the forms of power they embody by presenting themselves as sexually “liberated,” relatively well educated, and phenotypically “white” in urban centers where these qualities are in demand. These dancers pursue their own aspirations, realizing a cherished dream of mobility that they frequently see as a first step to modern subjectivities, but nevertheless traveling distinct routes deeply rooted in home communities where their children are cared for by grandparents.
The conditions of transnational mobility inhabited by these migrant women are forging new ways of connecting between parents and children, building on practices that were already in circulation prior to the collapse of socialism and the rise of an intensified global economy. Bloch emphasizes the role of biological mothers as the “other mothers”—not primary caregivers but still taking part in a transnational nurturing nexus in a different, or “other” way that involves channeling resources in the form of remittances without being physically present. A key technology of modernity, the mobile phone, has further facilitated and enhanced this type of family formation which Bloch convinces the reader is not just a desperate attempt to provide care for children. Instead it is a dynamic, historically-based practice that enables women to become long-term labor migrants and provide substantially for their households.
Matza rounds off his powerful analysis by quoting James Laidlaw: “the freedom of the ethical subject, for Foucault, consists in the possibility of choosing the kind of self one wishes to be—choosing that, of course, takes place within constraints” (“For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8(2): 324). The border guard who makes a choice to allow the tired child priority alongside the SUVs of the élite, and the nightclub hostess in Istanbul speaking to her daughter back in Moldova on Skype both share that freedom and those constraints.
