Ghostly traces in occupied Crimea: an ethnography of semiotic landscapes

Lecture by Natalia Volvach, Centre for Research on Bilingualism, Stockholm University.

Feelings of isolation and loss, occasionally described in interviews as ‘cropping someone’s tail’ or ‘life in a shell’, characterize the taste of the realities in Crimea since its annexation by Russia in 2014. Deprivations of such fundamental human rights go hand in hand with the erasure of any material sign of belonging to Ukraine from the surface of Crimea.

This paper foregrounds absences in semiotic landscapes as they result from the processes of such material and discursive erasure (Irvine & Gal, 1995). Building on critical sociolinguistic research, it centres on non-representation as a semiotically rich and meaningful mode (Bennett, 2013; Perini, 2020). Absences animate ghosts, discharge positive pressure on human bodies and, most importantly, speak their own language. An analysis of the material effects of absence, that is, voids, holes, and blank walls in the semiotic landscape of Crimea, explicates the ways agentive absences reanimate the past of people and places. In sum, the paper seeks to show through the analysis of the photographic data collected in Crimea over September and October 2019, how an ontologically different view of semiotic landscapes, in which absences are agentive, enables richer perspectives on meaning and representation. Disentangling the absences in/of semiotic landscapes, we may come closer to the richness of the social phenomena hidden behind the deceptive nothingness and indicate new perspectives for understanding the afterlives of violence and destruction.

References

Bennett, J. (2013). Vibrant Matter. Durham: Duke University Press.

Gal, Susan, and Irvine, Judith T. (1995). “The Boundaries of Languages and Disciplines: How Ideologies Construct Difference.” Social Research 62/4 (1995): 967–1001.

Perini, I. E. M. (2020). “Affective Ecologies: Ghostly Presences and Memories in Territories of War in Colombia”. Brújula 13: 65–94.