Project blog - Institute of Slavic Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences

Why this research is important (context)

The proposed research takes a broader perspective to understand Belarus from within, from a study of day-to-day activities and interactions. Through this, the project examines how Belarusians create and communicate meanings about their identities, relationships, actions, feelings, and dwelling in the culture they share. By studying the meanings generated by and about political activities and events, the research team hopes to gain insights into the cultural complexity that is not evident in macro, top-down approaches to culture and society.

While acknowledging the opposing cultures and discourse within Belarusian society, points of connection can also be found. Therefore, the purpose of this research project is to find out how the people from distinct cultural groups of the Belarusian society discursively construct social, cultural, and political concepts, such as “freedom,” “state,” “government,” “president,” “politics,” “leadership,” “violence,” “law,” “order,” “peace,” “stability,” and “change.”

Knowing how the people of Belarus describe the social, cultural, and political realities they experience, allows a path for potentially building a strategy for inclusive dialogue, that can be a way to bridge Belarusian society, and, possibly, other post-Soviet cultural spaces where similar social and cultural disparities and oppositions are found.

Methodology: Why Cultural Discourse Analysis (CuDA)

This research project uses a mixture of ethnographic and discourse analytic methods to extract local cultural meaning about politics and the political process from the public discourse and everyday communication. It draws upon the analytic tool of Cultural Discourse Analysis (CuDA) to analyze Belarusian public political discourse and everyday interactions about politics. CuDA is a form of analysis developed by Carbaugh (2005, 2007, 2017), that follows from work in sociolinguistics (e.g. Hymes, 1972), cultural communication (e.g. Philipsen, 2002), and speech codes theory (Philipsen, 1997).

These lines of research provide a framework for studying communication in socio-cultural contexts, with implications for identity formation on the group and individual levels. CuDA begins with the premise that “communication presumes and creates a rich meta-cultural commentary through socially situated, culturally named practices” (Carbaugh, 2017, p. 19). That is, communication can be studied not only for how speakers convey messages, but also for “saying things culturally, about who they are, how they are related, what they are doing together” (Carbaugh, 2007, p. 174).

This analytic tool is useful for examining how politics is constructed and recreated in Belarusian public discourse and everyday communication. Specifically, the focus is on the discursive hubs of identity expressed through the radiants of acting and relating found in public political commentary both by the Belarusian officials and regular citizens when they touch upon political topics. CuDA focuses on elucidating how judgments of belief or value (explicit and implicit) are expressed in the form of cultural propositions and premises in meta-cultural commentary during or about an activity or practice (Carbaugh, 2007).

References:

Carbaugh, D. (2005). Cultures in conversation. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Carbaugh, D. (2007). Cultural discourse analysis: Communication practices and intercultural encounters. Journal of Intercultural Communication Research, 36(3), 167–182.
Carbaugh, D. (2017). “Terms for Talk, Take 2: Theorizing Communication through its Cultural Terms and Practices.” In D. Carbaugh (Ed.), The handbook of communication in cross-cultural perspective (pp. 15–28). New York: Routledge.
Hymes, D. (1972). Models of the interaction of language and social life. In J. Gumperz & D. Hymes (Eds.), Directions in sociolinguistics: The ethnography of communication (pp. 35–71). New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
Philipsen, G. (1997). A theory of speech codes. In G. Philipsen & T. Albrecht (Eds.), Developing communication theories (pp. 119–156). Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Philipsen, G. (2002). Cultural communication. In W. Gudykunst & B. Mody (Eds.), Handbook of international and intercultural communication (pp. 51–67). London: Sage.

Data collection

To locate the cultural key terms about identity and forms of relating in local political discourse, the data from participant observation, public discussions, and media accounts about political topics is used.

Initial field observations took place between May 2020 (when pre-election activities in Belarus started) and February 2022 (when the referendum offering the changes to the current Belarusian Constitution took place). The current data corpus extracted from the ethnographic observation consists of a collection of video and photo materials (a total of approximately 500 items) and a number of field reflection papers (approximately 20,000 words in total).

Additionally, the PI followed local news about the ongoing political situation that was published by both independent and state media to select the most prominent examples of the political discourse for preliminary analysis of political terms. PI also followed public discussions of this news on Facebook and Telegram to see how both the supporters and the opponents of the current political authorities talk about politics in the context of this news. This preliminary analysis allowed to spot the most prominent political terms that were used by journalists, political figures, activists, protesters, and other groups of Belarusians when discussing politics.

As the next step, PI performs a more focused analysis of news and social media accounts to extract the most prominent themes about politics found in public commentary by state officials and regular citizens when they discuss political topics. The idea of this analysis is not to quantify the existing political topics and themes but to check whether and to what extent the political argumentation made with the same political vocabulary is consistent across the variety of political topics and themes, and across a variety of actors who discuss politics in general.

Cultural Discourse Theory (CDT) and Cultural Dicoruse Analysis (CuDA)

The CDT framework treats communication both as its primary data and theoretical concern and is a way to implement an analysis based on the theory of communication codes (Carbaugh, 2007, p. 167). Specifically, it proposes to base an investigative procedure on the theoretical, descriptive, interpretive, comparative, and critical analytical modes (p. 167).

CDT and CuDA claim that culture is a dynamic, creative, and transformative process. Whenever people engage in communication, they produce a meta-cultural commentary about their identities, relationships, feelings, acting, and dwelling (Carbaugh, 2007, p. 168), which may provide valuable insights into the ways culture is practiced and becomes meaningful for the members of a given speech community.

As a method, CuDA analyzes two hubs of communicative practice: a discursive hub and radiant of meaning. The former is analyzed by looking at explicit items (e.g. words, gestures, phrasing), that index a communicative action. The latter are the implicit meanings that individuals and/or co-participants in a cultural community understand when uttering such items. For example, Blackfeet (a Native American tribe) will claim that it is important “to listen” in order to hear “the spirits” communicate. The explicit instruction “to listen” (a discursive hub) is then practiced socially (an implicit, radiant of meaning) through spending extended periods of time co-present with others, speaking minimally, and interacting nonverbally (Carbaugh, 2007). Together, these radiants point to a way of interacting, being, and communicating that is recognizable to Blackfeet, and has implications for how they discursively construct a cultural identity.

There are five major hubs and radiants of meaning that CuDA makes available for analysis: being/identity, relationship, feeling, acting, and dwelling (p. 168). This study focuses on the hub of identity/being which is expressed and characterized in political discourse through the radiants of acting and relating. Combined with participant observation, CuDA explicates routine communication practices in their originating place, indigenous terms, and meanings for their participants (D. A. Carbaugh, 2017, pp. 15–17).

References:

Carbaugh, D. (2007). Cultural discourse analysis: Communication practices and intercultural encounters. Journal of Intercultural Communication Research, 36(3), 167–182.
Carbaugh, D. (2017). “Terms for Talk, Take 2: Theorizing Communication through its Cultural Terms and Practices.” In D. Carbaugh (Ed.), The handbook of communication in cross-cultural perspective (pp. 15–28). New York: Routledge.

Sociolinguistics and Ethnography of Communication (EOC)

EOC focuses on the ways culture is constructed and negotiated through various communicative means and meanings (Fitch, 2005, p. 323). To make sense of a culture, one should not simply document the behavior but also understand what meanings the people attribute to this behavior (Leeds-Hurwitz, 2005, p. 337).

Ideally, such an approach should combine the study of language and the study of culture; a sociolinguistic approach to ethnography, as Hymes (1962, 1972) suggested. To interpret an activity, to give it “deep” meaning, one must be familiar with the socially established code behind the situation (Geertz, 1973, p. 6). This means analyzing message contents in relation to social structures in which these messages and participants create a sense of their environments and activities (Hymes, 1964, p. 11).

References:

Geertz, C. (1973). Thick description: Toward an interpretive theory of culture. In The interpretation of cultures (pp. 3–16). New York: Basic Books.
Fitch, K. L. (2005). Preface to Section V: Ethnography of communication. In K. L. Fitch & R. E. Sanders (Eds.), Handbook of language and social interaction (pp. 253–255). Lawrence Erlbaum.
Hymes, D. (1962). The ethnography of speaking. In T. Gladwin & W. Sturtevant (Eds.), Anthropology and human behavior (pp. 13–53). Washington, DC: Anthropological Society of Washington.
Hymes, D. (1964). Introduction: Toward ethnographies of communication. American Anthropologist, 66(6), 1–34.
Hymes, D. (1972). Models of the interaction of language and social life. In J. Gumperz & D. Hymes (Eds.), Directions in sociolinguistics: The ethnography of communication (pp. 35–71). New York: Holt, Rhinehart & Winston.
Leeds-Hurwitz, W. (2005). Ethnography. In K. L. Fitch & R. E. Sanders (Eds.), Handbook of language and social interaction (pp. 327–353). Lawrence Erlbaum.

Ethnography of Communication and The Theory of Cultural Communication

Ethnography of Communication (EOC) as an approach to study communication and culture has developed further drawing on Hymesian (1972) theoretical framework. Some of the major theoretical developments are probably The Theory of Cultural Communication (Philipsen, 1987; 2002), The Speech Codes Theory (Philipsen, Coutu & Covarrubias, 2005), and The Cultural Discourse Theory (CDT) and Cultural Discourse Analysis (CuDA) (Carbaugh, 2007).

Philipsen (1987) suggests three perspectives on describing culture: 1) culture as code – examining a system of beliefs, values, and images of the ideal where code is a source of social order and fixation; 2) culture as conversation – examining patterns of representation of the people’s lived experiences of work, play, and worship, where conversation is a source of dynamism and cultural creativity; 3) culture as community – examining human groupings based on shared identity which is drawn from the communal orderings of memories or the memory traces of the group past, where communities are seen as settings and scenes where the communal conversation occurs based on the codes that are learned (p. 249).

The general theoretical formulation of cultural communication can be summarized in three parts: 1) cultural communication performs the cultural function; 2) communication is a performative resource in doing cultural work in society; 3) cultural function is performed differently in different communal conversations (Philipsen, 2002, p. 60).

The main function of cultural communication is to maintain the balance between the forces of individualism and communality, which may be achieved by balancing between the sub-processes of 1) creation and 2) affirmation of shared identity (Philipsen, 1987, p. 249).

References:

Carbaugh, D. (2007). Cultural discourse analysis: Communication practices and intercultural encounters. Journal of Intercultural Communication Research, 36(3), 167–182.
Hymes, D. (1972). Models of the interaction of language and social life. In J. Gumperz & D. Hymes (Eds.), Directions in sociolinguistics: The ethnography of communication (pp. 35–71). New York: Holt, Rhinehart & Winston.
Philipsen, G. (1987). The prospect for cultural communication. Communication Theory: Eastern and Western Perspectives, 245–254.
Philipsen, G. (2002). Cultural communication. In W. Gudykunst, & B. Mody, (Eds.), Handbook of international and intercultural communication (pp. 51–67). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Philipsen, G., Coutu, L., & Covarrubias, P. (2005). Speech codes theory: Restatement, revisions, and response to criticisms. In W. Gudykunst, (Ed.), Theorizing about intercultural communication (pp. 55–68). Thousand Oaks, London, New Delhi: SAGE Publications.

Identity and culture

Approaching culture from the standpoint of communication means approaching culture as a dynamic, creative, and transformative process, where the meanings about belonging, identities, and relationships are constantly and continuously negotiated through various means.
Any culture involves participants with shared and distinct identities. However, the concept of identity is complex. Identity refers to something that lies at the core of everyone’s selfhood and at the same time may be seen as a dynamic and fragmented process, as an accomplishment that is performed or enacted by an individual or a group in each particular scene and setting (Tracy, 2002, p. 17). Identities are also created and maintained through local discourse contexts of interaction; they are discursive constructs that emerge from these interactions (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005, p. 585–586).

Social and cultural identities are situated communication practices (Carbaugh, 1996, p. 24). According to Carbaugh (1996), social and cultural identities, as well as their place within the social structure, can be found in discourse and cultural metacommentary that group members produce about their everyday practices as social and cultural agents (p. 29–30). Such cultural meta-commentaries bear the traces of meanings about the ways people in a given group or community relate to each other and the society at large through their acting, feeling, and dwelling within this community (Carbaugh, 1996, p. 28–29).

Such cultural discourses show what does it mean to belong to a particular group and what does it mean to have specific social and cultural identities in a given culture – this is a way for the group members to communicate the rules for maintaining and enacting identities through various communication forms to each other and outsiders (Carbaugh, 1996, p. 33–34).

References:

Bucholtz, M., & Hall, K. (2005). Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies, 7(4–5), 585–614.
Carbaugh, D. (1996). Situating selves: The communication of social identities in American scenes. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Tracy, K. (2002). Everyday talk: Building and reflecting identities. New York: Guilford Press.

Belarus and cultural identity

Few studies tried to approach modern-day Belarus and Belarusian identity from the bottom-up. Nevertheless, such attempts have been made by Rohava (2017) where Belarusians reflect on the meaning of national identity, and in Rohava (2020) where modern-day Belarusians talk about the meaning of state celebrations and related forms of state-sponsored public life. Similarly, a study by Vasilyeva (2019) focuses on the ways Belarusian identity is enacted in everyday interactions where a choice of Russian or Belarusian language becomes an important identity marker for certain groups of Belarusians.

Among the multiple existing reports, there are few detailed accounts of Belarus as perceived and experienced by Belarusians themselves. Belarus is frequently portrayed by outsiders as “The last dictatorship in Europe,” where people are oppressed, where the public assembly is restricted, and where freedoms are violated on the daily basis.

However, a wide array of grassroots, public creative practices and gatherings have proliferated in Belarus in recent years – including prior to the 2020 elections – especially in urban areas; from these activities, Belarusians have learned how to collectively organize and address the challenges of everyday life without relying on the authorities. While some Belarusians were satisfied with the status quo, others chose to pursue social, cultural, and political changes: these then erupted in the massive nationwide protests that were seen following the 2020 presidential elections, and were accompanied by the violations of law and growing repression against the civilian population.

These events portend that the current protest movement is not simply a response to election fraud, law violations, and repressions, but is the outgrowth of cultural differences that permeate Belarusian society, or what can be called the collision of the “two parallel Belaruses,” representing “grassroots” and “state” cultures. This is what the PI of this project has found from previous research when participants in Belarus talked about their understandings of local identity (Dinerstein, 2020; Dinerstein, 2021; Dinerstein & Sandel, 2023).

This cultural dynamic suggests that the meaning of the political process in Belarus and, supposedly in other post-Soviet cultural spaces where the same political discourse is in use, has to be addressed in more detail in order to make sense of how the people who live in these cultural spaces perceive the political process and what they do discursively when they discuss political topics in these cultural spaces.

The proposed research takes a broader perspective to understand Belarus from within, from a study of day-to-day activities and interactions. Through this, this research project examines how Belarusians create and communicate meanings about their identities, relationships, actions, feelings, and dwelling in the culture they share. By studying the meanings generated by and about political activities and events, the research team hopes to gain insights into the cultural complexity that is not evident in macro, top-down approaches to culture and society.

References:

Dinerstein, A. (2020). The people who “burn”: “Communication,” unity, and change in Belarusian discourse on public creativity [Doctoral Dissertation]. https://doi.org/10.7275/xvb4-th95
Dinerstein, A. (2021). Cultural identity in modern-day Belarusian discourse on public creativity. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 14(1), 41–59. https://doi.org/10.1080/17513057.2019.1677934
Dinerstein, A., & Sandel, T. L. (2023). “We have a point on the map”: Discursive constructions of Belarusian identity during CreativeMornings Minsk. Journal of Intercultural Communication Research, 52(4), 440–460. https://doi.org/10.1080/17475759.2023.2223568
Rohava, T. (2017). Identity in a autocratic state or what Belarusians talk about when they talk about national identity. East European Politics and Societies: and Cultures, 32(3), 639–668.
Rohava, T. (2020). The politics of state celebrations in Belarus. Nations and Nationalism, 26(4), 883–901. https://doi.org/10.1111/nana.12653
Vasilyeva, A. L. (2019). Language ideology and identity construction in public educational meetings. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 12(2), 146–166.

Cultural creativity and Belarus

Turner (1980) and Philipsen (2002) suggest that culture possesses the potentiality to change and transformation. Turner (1980) argues that this transformation results from ritual and social-dramatic processes that happen through liminality. Philipsen (2002) suggests that communal conversation may be seen as a source of dynamism and cultural creativity. Since cultural practice is public and it serves both as a source of knowledge about the culture and as a means of creation of cultural knowledge, creativity and the emergence of new cultural forms is a natural process of cultural communication. Thus, looking at the juncture where old cultural forms start to be complemented or supplanted by the new cultural forms allows tracing the process of cultural creativity and social transformation, which is happening in a given community.

Recent studies on public creative activities in Belarus conducted by the PI of this project (Dinerstein, 2020; Dinerstein, 2021; Dinerstein & Sandel, 2023) have shown how such transformative cultural processes originate from the grassroots and become the platforms for introduction of new collective routines across Belarus at large. At the same time, ongoing communication that happens on such grassroots levels becomes an inalienable part of this cultural creativity process that is ripe with conflicts, struggles, and oppositions that eventually becomes the drivers of public creativity.

That is why local political discourse is worthy of study, because it is a place where these struggles, conflicts, and oppositions are found in a concentrated form. By studying these instances, one could better understand the cultural origins of the ongoing struggles, conflicts, and oppositions and, hopefully, propose ways of addressing the current social and cultural divides.

References:

Dinerstein, A. (2020). The people who “burn”: “Communication,” unity, and change in Belarusian discourse on public creativity [Doctoral Dissertation]. https://doi.org/10.7275/xvb4-th95
Dinerstein, A. (2021). Cultural identity in modern-day Belarusian discourse on public creativity. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 14(1), 41–59. https://doi.org/10.1080/17513057.2019.1677934
Dinerstein, A., & Sandel, T. L. (2023). “We have a point on the map”: Discursive constructions of Belarusian identity during CreativeMornings Minsk. Journal of Intercultural Communication Research, 52(4), 440–460. https://doi.org/10.1080/17475759.2023.2223568
Philipsen, G. (2002). Cultural communication. In W. Gudykunst & B. Mody (Eds.), Handbook of international and intercultural communication (pp. 51–67). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Turner, V. (1980). Social dramas and stories about them. Critical Inquiry, 7(1), 141–168. https://doi.org/10.1086/448092

Project impact and goal

This project has several research goals:

To explain how politics is discursively constructed in Belarusian political discourse and everyday interactions about politics.
To explain how the understanding of politics may be shaped by the use of Russian-language political terms that are used to make political arguments both by officials and Belarusian citizens at large.
To show how the current understanding of politics extracted from the political discourse and everyday interactions about politics is related to the local historical and cultural context.
To propose adjustments to the ways political process in the Belarusian and post-Soviet societies is currently approached by both insiders and outsiders.
To contribute to the national and international dialogue related to Belarus and, possibly, to other post-Soviet spaces.

To this end, the project examines the political activities that took place in Belarus between May 2020, when the presidential election campaign started, and February 2022, when the referendum that suggested new constitutional changes was held. The main purpose of this research is to provide a detailed account of the modern-day Belarusian political culture as perceived and reflected in communication by both officials and regular Belarusians.

This study is aimed at generating knowledge about modern-day Belarus and could benefit the areas of Intercultural Communication, Cultural Anthropology, and Slavic and Eastern European Studies which are the focus of the Institute of Slavic Studies at the Polish Academy of Sciences.

Moreover, this research attempts to contribute to understanding and resolving the existing cultural, social, and political divides in the region. As a result, this is also a scholarly intervention with potential implications for regional policy and decision-making. This project is expected to provide regional activists, social entrepreneurs, policymakers, and decision-makers with important information and recommendations for cross-cultural dialogue and intercultural collaboration in the area.

Key cultural terms and their meaning in the Belarusian political discourse

The initial research allowed the research team to come up with a set of cultural key terms found in the Russian-language public discourse about politics in Belarus.

The key terms are as follows:

Власть (Vlast’) / “Power” (Rulers, owners)
Государство (Gosudarstvo) / “State” (Rulership, Sovereign)
Страна (Strana) / “Country” (Land, territory)
Народ (Narod) / “People” (Population, generative entity)
Люди (Liudi) / “People” (People as doers, actors)
Суверенитет (Suverenitet) / “Sovereignty” (The domain of the “state”)
Запад (Zapad) / “West” (Liberal capitalist states and their affiliate institutions: EU, UK, the USA, NATO, etc.)

What is so special about these terms?

It is the way these terms are used to construct meanings about politics. More specifically, when found in public discourse, these terms become central to enacting and maintaining specific identities that presume the corresponding forms of relating, acting, feeling, and dwelling in the shared cultural space (in Belarus in this case).

For example, the term “power,” when found in public discourse and everyday interactions presumes the following combination of meanings:

It refers to an ability to rule
It refers to the ownership of the territory
It refers to the specific entity

The analysis of modern-day Russian-language political discourse in Belarus should provide more details and insights based on the further study of these terms as used in public political discussions that are the focus of this research project.