On Common Sense: Lessons on Starting Over from Post-Soviet Ukraine

Abstract

Based on fieldwork in post-Soviet Ukraine, this study examines how people generate or re-generate common understandings, or "common sense," when a frame of reference such as the Soviet Union has disappeared. The fieldwork specifically undertook to study law-makers in parliament and those directly affected by post-Soviet reform legislation, attempting to follow Nader's call to study "up, down, and sideways." The chapter presents three problems encountered in attempting to "study up" in this context: 1) misrecognition of the seemingly familiar; 2) discerning which way is "up" in a context of fundamental disorientation, a metaphorical "suspension of the laws of gravity"; and 3) facing a polyphony of competing (or wholly unrelated) discourses. The study suggests a reconsideration of some of the distinctions between epistemology and phenomenology.

Keywords: Ukraine, law, parliament, rupture, anthropology, ethnography, post-Soviet, discourse, heteroglossia, performativity, Bakhtin, Nader, Austin