Translartion. Region: Russians Fedetion –
Source: State University Higher School of Economics – State University Higher School of Economics –
Georgy Stalinov is engaged in field social research and created a video podcast in which guests talk about unusual social phenomena based on field materials. Episodes about garage workers, Anastasia residents, informal economy in the provinces, Orthodox parishes, and seasonal workers are already available. In an interview with the Young Scientists of the Higher School of Economics project, he told how he hitchhiked with truck drivers, why it is bad to work as a taxi driver, and whether poaching has been defeated in Kamchatka.
How I got into science
Our program “Public and Municipal Administration” has the strongest group of field workers at HSE, that is, people who do field social research. My teachers Simon Gdalevich Kordonsky And Yuri Mikhailovich Plyusnin have been taking students of public and municipal administration to the fields since the 2000s to show how local government (LGU) works in a broad sense. This tradition has grown into a program of student expeditions “Rediscovering Russia“, through which I came to science. At first I became interested in the field part, and then in the methodological, theoretical and fundamental.
In my second year, as part of a course on MSU, I went to Lipetsk Oblast for three days and then began signing up for two-week expeditions “Discovering Russia Again” with our teachers. I became interested in social anthropology and entered a master’s program, also in public administration.
How Public Administration Relates to Field Research
In the Russian Empire, field research was started by government officials – officials on special assignments. The first socio-anthropological report can be considered the book “Description of the Land of Kamchatka” by Stepan Krasheninnikov, written in the 18th century. And then, for various reasons and in various circumstances, people affiliated with government departments traveled to study different territories, social and ethnic groups, territorial communities.
What am I studying?
Communities, economic and labor practices, self-organization practices.
What was my first big study about?
A full-fledged social anthropologist/ethnographer/field researcher is someone who has implemented their own project. When I was a 4th-year student, the Khamovniki Social Research Support Foundation, which is closely connected to our Municipal Management Laboratory, was giving out grants to young researchers. Among the phenomena that interested the foundation were truck drivers. I chose this topic and received a grant.
Truckers in Russia are almost a blank spot. In the US, articles were written about truckers throughout the 20th century: about the problems of trade unions, the aging of the profession, self-organization, etc. We have all of this too, and it is also seasoned with a colorful story about the “Platon” toll collection system, but almost no one was interested in this topic.
To collect data, I started traveling with them. In total, I hitchhiked for about five weeks. I made arrangements on the road: at a truck stop, I approached people and asked them to take me with them. And in the cabin, I explained that I was conducting research, that I would write (at that time) a master’s thesis about truck drivers. We discussed their work, their lives, various things that happened around the road while we were driving. I would ride with one driver for a day or two and then transfer to the next one.
I also did research on the spot. For example, in Dagestan I studied truck drivers for three weeks. There are rural trucker communities there, there are funds from which they can help a trucker if he crashes, or help his family if he dies. And in one place we found that a lot of men leave the village during the period of active import of fruits from Azerbaijan and Iran, and the drivers pay for the work of the patrol service, which consists of their fellow villagers, so that everything is calm.
What interested me most
Informal self-organization. An example is the black market for fuel, which exists on almost all federal highways. Truckers who work for large transport companies have their fuel paid for by their employers. And they can carefully drain it and sell it to another trucker – an individual entrepreneur.
My postgraduate dissertation is devoted to those connections between drivers, invisible to an outside observer, which constitute their mobilization potential. When the Platon system was introduced in 2015, thousands of drivers were able to coordinate in a matter of days outside the trade union, after which they created an alternative association. Subsequently, the tariffs for travel on federal roads were reduced from 4 to 1.5 rubles per kilometer, and so far the tariff has only increased to 3.34 rubles.
It would seem that drivers are loners and do not belong to teams like office and factory workers, but they are all connected informally, interacting daily at parking lots and gas stations, communicating via radio, exchanging information. Due to weak connections, they very quickly organized their structure throughout the country.
What else am I studying?
I am quite closely involved in the study of nature management. This is everything related to fishing, gathering wild plants, and commercial hunting.
The largest commercial project I was involved in was researching fisheries in northern and western Kamchatka. We were looking into the issue of unaccounted salmon fishing (poaching) for domestic fishermen based in Kamchatka.
In total, we spent 3-4 months in Kamchatka in small villages, participated in fishing industries, lived in factories, interacted with fishery workers and those who prevent poaching. And traveled a little along the rivers. In particular, thanks to our research, industrial products received certification, and now they are exported abroad.
The international certification company imposes a number of requirements on fishery industry companies, which they must comply with. To do this, they must conduct an audit at their enterprises, and socio-anthropological studies in the fishing zones, which will show that poaching does not pose a risk to the population.
The volume that a commercial fisher can catch is calculated by ecologists based on how much can be taken from the population so that enough fish reach the spawning grounds to continue the species. If a commercial fisher takes this fish to the sea, and then the remainder that should spawn is caught by poachers in the river, then there will be no reproduction of the population. Therefore, it is necessary to assess the volume of informal fishing.
Over the past 20 years, opportunities for poaching have significantly decreased. In the 2000s, poaching in Kamchatka reached half of the total. Including due to the fact that industrialists were engaged in poaching. And then they were completely legalized and allowed to catch all the fish they wanted.
There is currently no anthropogenic threat specifically from poaching in Kamchatka. There are threats associated with industrialists, because not everyone has established fishing and processing processes. And potential harm is also associated with ore mining. Gold and platinum mining pollutes rivers so much that fish cannot survive there.
What to see in Kamchatka
I am not going to leave Kamchatka, I will go there again. It is one of the exceptional regions on a global scale and the most unusual Russian region. I say this with knowledge of the matter, because I have been to many places: Altai, Yakutia, Primorye, the north of the European part of Russia.
Tourists who come to Kamchatka now don’t see much. Domestic flights in Kamchatka are very expensive. That’s why they are shown typical pictures: blue sky, green grass, volcano. They don’t know what the Koryak tundra and the raging April ocean, all in slush and ice floes, look like. Only rich tourist hunters and geologists who go on business trips see this.
For a mass tourist, visiting the agglomeration of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky will already be a stunning event. It is a small city surrounded by amazing nature. It is not necessary to go inland. You can surf the ocean, on Khalaktyrsky beach, famous for its volcanic black sand. Ride a snowboard from volcanoes, admiring Avacha Bay. See sea lions, which lie right in the center of the city. Go to Paratunka to swim in the equipped thermal springs.
What results I am proud of
My project on truck drivers, because I did it alone. I am also proud that our student reports on the HSE website attracted a cool project on Kamchatka to our team. I am proud that I started the channel “Anthropole“, which is interesting to a wide audience. In the popular science environment, sociology is very weak, losing out to economics, psychology, political science, history and all social sciences in general. Someone had to launch podcast about field research, and I did it.
I have a wide circle of colleagues. We all know each other well from conferences, and with some of them we worked together on expeditions. I invite them, they talk about their research. On camera, I mostly ask questions and rarely add anything from myself. But this is exactly what was needed so that people knew that we can also bring interesting and useful knowledge.
We can produce useful knowledge for business/the state. People often don’t understand what’s going on around them, but we can explain it — conduct ethnographic research and understand all the nuances. We are currently focused on applied projects. Last year, I did an autoethnography of a custom taxi: I registered on the platform, rented a car and worked as a taxi driver for several weeks, recording all my observations in a research diary.
What’s wrong with being a taxi driver
The aggregator encourages people to choose a specific schedule. To earn good money, a taxi driver must go to work at six in the morning, come home at noon, then go to work again at four in the afternoon and come home at night. Moscow rush hours are accompanied by high taxi prices, bonuses from the aggregator. Such a schedule implies life in the car. Despite the fact that you have four free hours during the day, you have nowhere to spend them. I was writing my research diary at this time. But what should an ordinary taxi driver do when his wife is at work and the children are at school or kindergarten?
He comes at night, goes to bed, gets up at 6am and doesn’t see his family either in the morning or in the evening. And the weekends are the busiest hours. And every day you have to pay the rent.
What I dream about
I am focused on applied projects. When you are commissioned to do a study, you clearly understand who needs it and why. The Faculty of Social Sciences is shifting its focus from fundamental to applied research. I would like our lab to compete with research agencies and take the most interesting studies for ourselves, while simultaneously training students, involving them in research in the classroom and beyond.
Another direction is creative activity, which now inseparably accompanies all my work. This is education, blogging, video podcasts and non-fiction literature. I will write a book about truckers in the style of travel notes.
Science for me is an increase in knowledge. And a system of knowledge that is not absolute. We learn about the world and let our students learn about it. This is our mission. But we are not always right.
Sociology has no basis like Linnaeus’s plant classification system or Mendeleev’s table. We are constantly moving, constantly discussing how society works and whether it exists at all. For us, it is a continuous process of learning.
If I hadn’t become a scientist
I would still be dealing with people. I worked in HR before I decided to stay at the university. But I didn’t really like it. I would probably end up becoming an entrepreneur because I value freedom and independence. Science and education give me a lot of free time that I can devote to my projects and initiatives. That’s what I like. I guess the only way to have that kind of freedom is in entrepreneurship. I could have become a writer. You can write not only books, but also scripts. I was always interested in cinema, but I somehow didn’t allow myself to step into that field at school. Maybe I would have decided to become a screenwriter or an actor.
If I hadn’t become a scientist
I would still deal with people. I worked in HR before I decided to stay at the university. But I didn’t really like it. I would probably end up in entrepreneurship because I value freedom and independence. Science and education give you a lot of free time that you can devote to your projects and initiatives. That’s what I like. I guess the only way to have that kind of freedom is in entrepreneurship.
I could have become a writer. You can write not only books, but also scripts. I was always interested in cinema, but at school I somehow did not allow myself to step into this field. Maybe in the end I would have decided to become a screenwriter or an actor.
Who would I like to meet?
With the greatest travelers, explorers and ethnographers – Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay, Fridtjof Nansen, Vladimir Arsenyev and others.
How my typical day is structured
My day starts with a walk with the dog. Then I can read, write something for the channel, organize a new video for the podcast. Luckily, I don’t have a routine, it would kill me.
Where will I go this year
I will have an expedition to the Arkhangelsk region, to the Pinezhsky district, to study wild plants. With my colleague Artemy Pozanenko We will go to the Irkutsk region to study a rural community that lives on fur trade. We will also go to Transbaikalia on a project of a colleague from the laboratory to find out how people surrounded by national parks interact with nature. In Yekaterinburg, we will shoot a video about the extraction of semi-precious stones in the Urals.
I also wanted to organize the shooting of a documentary film in Kamchatka for my blog, but have not found funding yet. On the west coast there lives a family that organized an enterprise for the collection and processing of fireweed, today every seventh Kamchatka resident drinks their tea. A very beautiful story: tea plantations, the perimeter of which is guarded by dogs and periodically drives away bears – I would like to film all of this.
There will be other trips for filming: Primorye, Vologda region, St. Petersburg, Kologriv, possibly Karelia. The project is financed by the Khamovniki Foundation, and we largely talk about the foundation’s projects.
Do I get burnout?
Sometimes, when something gets boring, you have to go on an expedition. When I earn money, burnout also goes away very quickly. In fact, I just try not to bother. There was never a time when I was lying around and couldn’t do anything. On the contrary, I constantly had the feeling: something else needs to be done, something else needs to be thought up. At first, I had to do what my senior colleagues were doing: finish my master’s degree, become a teacher, publish an article. Then came the blog, the video podcast, the trips associated with it, working with the audience. Now, most of my attention outside of my duties is directed at it.
What am I interested in besides science?
I love good cinema. Mass cinema, not arthouse. I want to take part in film production someday, maybe in a documentary.
What I read recently
“Debt: The First 5,000 Years of History” by David Graeber, “Life in the Void: Anthropological Essays on Social Space Beyond the Limits of Government Regulation” and “Love and Elections” by Lana Barsukova. The latter is a women’s novel, but it was written by a professor and doctor of sociological sciences, the book contains a lot of research material, although readers are unlikely to guess about it.
Advice to young scientists
I would advise not to waste your time on empty, useless work, but to do only things with the prospect of developing yourself and the team. If you are not in the mood, go for a walk: the burnout will go away, useful thoughts will come.
We need to understand the system. Combine science, work with students, prospects for large grants and custom projects in one project.
You have to be enterprising. Otherwise, you do what other people say, and in science, doing what other people say is boring.
Favorite place in Moscow
I love forests and parks. Once in Teply Stan I found a cow grazing with a calf in a field. And in Moscow I really like the nooks and crannies of Prechistenka. In general, I fell in love with Moscow after I moved there. I used to live in the Moscow region, and now I live on Vernadsky Avenue. When you can quickly get to the university and there is a park nearby, it is nice to live here.
The three most beautiful places I have seen on expeditions
The Vyvenka River, the third largest in Kamchatka. It is located in the north, where the Kamchatka Peninsula ends and the mainland begins. The Timan Ridge in northern Komi: hills, winding rivers and taiga. And also Podkamennaya Tunguska in Krasnoyarsk Krai.
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