Publication Date

Spring 2021

Abstract

As a result of specific aspects of history, including historically complex diasporas, contemporary Ukrainian identities -- both socially normative and personal -- are subject to a transnational politics of recognition. Whereas Charles Taylor has done more than any other scholar to highlight obligatory and unavoidable character of the politics of identity today, his univocal approach to the relations among language, culture, and identity is inadequate for illuminating the Ukrainian situation. In this dissertation I show that Ukrainians of different sorts employ situational strategies for mobilizing a set of perspectively valid --though not always logically consistent -- historically based ontologies. I have identified the Toronto Ukrainian Festival as a key ethnographic site that foregrounds the historically prominent role of the Ukrainian - Canadian community in Canadian politics, positioned as the ‘fourth voice’ of Canada’s immigrant populations, in national deliberations over the Canadian policy of multiculturalism. I use ethnographic data to showcase the performative power of the festival space for voicing key issues in historical and current Russian-Ukrainian politics to (trans)national audiences. The ethnography is informed by a historical ontology of Ukrainian identities in the context of Polish and Russian nationalisms, competing empires and the fraught relationships between empire and nation(s). With this transnational historical approach I hope to illuminate some of the key issues regarding ethno-linguistic identities, the role of Ukraine in the various incarnations of the Russian empire, and implications for both historical and current ideas of ‘the West.’

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Anthropology

Level of Degree

Doctoral

Department Name

Anthropology

First Committee Member (Chair)

David Dinwoodie

Second Committee Member

Les Field

Third Committee Member

Suzanne Oakdale

Fourth Committee Member

Paul Robert Magocsi

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