CANCELED - Suffering, Sovereignty, and Soviet Terror in Lithuania

We regret to inform you that due to inclement weather, Professor Neringa Klumbyte’s trip to Stanford this week has had to be cancelled.  This event will not be held this week.

In this seminar, Professor Klumbytė will present her recent article Suffering, Sovereignty, and Soviet Terror in Lithuania (under review by Cultural Anthropology), in which she draws on theories on sovereignty and violence and argue that suffering like violence can be a foundation of sovereignty. Far beyond a Hobbesian state in which a sovereign emerges as an evil actor, sovereigns cast themselves as humanistic leaders through recognition of suffering. They engage suffering discourse to claim recognition and legitimacy for their sovereignty projects and pronounce judgments, attribute blame and accountability. Ethnographically, her article explores suffering as an affective political rationality in post-Soviet Lithuania’s sovereignty politics. It discusses how suffering based on memories of Lithuanian exiles, who were forcefully deported to the depth Siberia during WWII and in the post-WWII period, is constituted in public spaces, such as commemoration events, and negotiated by local communities, where memories of Soviet terror are shared and disputed by villagers. In the seminar she will present her research for this project, major findings, and conclusions.

Neringa Klumbytė is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Miami University, Ohio. Her research has focused on political regimes and ideologies, social and political change, sovereignty, nationalism, and ethnicity, and memory and sovereignty in Soviet and post-Soviet Lithuania. Her articles have appeared inAmerican Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Slavic Review, East European Politics and Societies, and other journals. She is a coeditor of Soviet Society in the Era of Late Socialism, 1964-85 (with Gulnaz Sharafutdinova), 2012.