Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 3 – An anecdote now
circulating in Ingushetia suggests just how much the protests since last fall
have changed the way people in that republic think. According to the story, one
young man, hit in the head with a club, starts speaking English; and his friend
wonders if he is clubbed, he’ll stop speaking Russian and use English too, Irina
Starodubrovskaya says.
The specialist on the North Caucasus
reproduces that story in a major study she and Konstantin Kazenin have prepared
on “how the protests are changing Ingush society.” She suggests that the
anecdote, as hyperbolic as it seems, calls attention to what is going on in
that North Caucasus republic (polit.ru/article/2019/03/28/ingushetia/).
As larger societal developments have
been exacerbated by the protests, Staordubrovskaya says, “the former norms of
life and ‘rules of the game’ are being destroyed. New ones have not yet been
formed … and people exist in a situation of indefiniteness which is extraordinarily
uncomfortable.”
There is a deep split among Ingush
as to how the protests have affected their nation. The leaders of the protest
say that the protests have united the nation to an unprecedented degree; their
opponents argue that the protests have had the effect of fragmenting Ingush
society. “Judging from everything,” the specialist says, “both sides are right.”
Anger about the border agreement
with Chechnya united Ingush society but in a new way, Starodubrovskaya says,
not along the lines of pre-existing structures but rather as a coming together
of people from these structures into a new community. That had the effect of
weakening the traditional divisions but strengthening the role of individual choice
and agency.
According to the scholar, it is “more
correct” to say that the formation of this new unity “was not simply the
intensification of unity or differentiation as its reconfiguration,” in which people
from many different categories self-consciously came together regardless of
where their structures were.
That has the biggest impact on
generational divides. In the past, young Ingush almost always deferred to their
elders in the teips. But now the young are acting far more on their own -- and
acting more radically because they are not constrained by traditional understandings
of what is permitted and what is not.
Gender hierarchies have been
affected somewhat less, but the prominent role of women in the protests has had
the effect of legitimating their independent and public action. Many Ingush women feel far more empowered to
act on their own now than they did earlier, the ethno-sociologist says.
But perhaps the biggest change of
all has occurred in the teips, the traditional social regulator of Ingush. Now,
they play a different role, smaller in terms of their past practice but more
public and more political than before because they are being driven to take
positions on things that they might not have earlier.
All these changes, the scholar suggests,
have already transformed Ingush society beyond recognition, and all of them are
likely to be both informed by and the structuring elements of protest and dissent
in Ingushetia in the weeks ahead.
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