Commoning beyond ‘commons’: The case of the Russian ‘obshcheye’

Abstract

How do the semantic logics that different words accommodate in different languages map onto studies of social realities internationally and interdisciplinarily? This article is an ethnographic study of obshcheye – a corpus of phenomena pertaining to communal life in Russia. Similar to the English term ‘commons’, it marks the zone of the public – that which is shared and collective. In contrast to the commons, it displays greater semantic polyphony, bringing together social, discursive and affective qualities. Our analysis demonstrates that various semantic subsets of obshcheye sensitize research differently from the commons by indexing different societal concerns. They tune us into a wide set of concerns – with time (not wanting to be ‘Soviet’), ownership (worrying about what is ‘no one’s’), affective connectivity (one sits and waits for a conversation), and the act of caring for people and for spaces. Each word and each relationship in the semantic network reflects what is important to social actors as they go about ordering their lives together. The article concludes that obshcheye is so definitively a semantic network that expunging its conceptual heterogeneity and narrowing the multiple logics to encompass one in particular would amount to analytical reductionism and the impoverishment of social analysis.