The Crimea, Ukraine
Monday, September 26, 2005
Recently, I traveled to the Crimea in Ukraine to present a workshop at the 2005 International Summer Institute on Gender Studies in Foros, entitled, "Qualitative inquiry into the (im)possibilities of dialogue between East and West.” The purpose of this workshop was to introduce to emerging gender studies scholars in post-Soviet countries how qualitative research methods may be employed to study gender in national context, for the purpose of furthering scholarly dialogue about gender studies across national borders. The institute is highly selective, and drew 20 advanced graduate students and young professors from Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. In addition to the workshops presented each morning by experienced scholars in research methods, philosophy, and cultural studies, participants met nightly for lectures and scholarly discussions. On weekends and some afternoons, many in the group participated in historical sightseeing trips around the Crimea.
My travel was supported by the U.S. State Department under an Educational Partnership Grant received by Iowa State University Women's Studies Program and Kharkiv National University Center for Gender Studies. My accommodations were paid for by the MacArthur Foundation, which has sponsored the Summer Institute for 9 years.
The Institute is held at the Foros Sanatorium Complex, a health resort on the Black Sea that originated in Soviet times for mid-level Party members. Since the resort was privatized, it has become much more expensive and typically is no longer financially accessible to most Ukrainians professionals. In addition to seaside rooms, the resort offers dining service and medical treatments ranging from baths and massages to more serious tests and treatments, including blood tests and EKGs. Out of curiosity, I visited the doctor while there, but did not accept or receive any treatments. It is unclear to me whether any of the staff are trained medical professionals. Regardless, it seemed that many guests use the services while there, since there is no health insurance in Ukraine and there is little opportunity for the typical Ukrainian to obtain a battery of medical tests otherwise.
After a long trip, I arrived in Foros on Saturday afternoon, and joined a bus tour on Sunday. The tour was arranged for guests at the resort, and many were attendees of the Institute. Our first stop was the town of Bakhchisarai, where we had a Tatar breakfast and visited the palace of the Tatar Khans who once ruled the Crimea.
The Crimean Tatars are a Turkic ethnic group descended from the Tatars who moved west with the Mongols. the Crimean Khanate ruled much of Crimea and what is now Southern Ukraine from 1441-1773. The capital, Bakchisarai, was founded in 1532. The Crimean Khanate was aligned with the Ottoman empire, but the Russians exerted increasing influence by attacking it. Eventually a treaty aligning the Crimean Khanate with the Russian Empire was signed in 1774. Crimea was annexed by Russia in 1783 in violation of the treaty (this summary is based on my own recollections of what I learned at the palace as well as the entries from wikipedia.net).
We walked through town and up the hill to the Uspensky Monastery, an active cave monastery. I wore my headscarf and a wraparound skirt to enter the sanctuary where a service was being held.
We continued up a steep hill until we arrived at Chufut-Kale, a mountain with a cave town cut into it. Translated, Chufut-Kale means "Jewish fortress," and this cave town had been inhabited by the Karaim, members of one of the Tartar tribes who were converted to Karaism, a form of Judaism originating in Mesopotamia in the 8th century that rejects rabbinism and talmudism and bases its tenets on scripture.
We continued up the hill past Chufut-Kale to a large Jewish cemetery with stones in both Hebrew and Aramaic. We joined a tour group of descendants of the Karaim. The tour guide said the oldest stone found thus far in the cemetery dated back to 406 BC.
At this point, the tour got interesting, to say the least. I was accompanied by my friend, Lena Prykhodko, who speaks 5 languages and was able to translate quite a bit for me, but I was working under the misconception that the tour was to be a relatively comfortable tourist activity. As it happened, our tour guide Viktor was in charge of physical education at Sanatorium Foros, and this was to be a hiking trip. I thanked my lucky stars that I'd worn my tennis shoes instead of the sandals I'd considered that morning, and the bottled water I'd brought was so inconveniently large. Barking in Russian all the way to the top, Viktor led us up Tepe-Kermen.
I must admit I was worried about this whole enterprise, mainly because I never knew what we were going to encounter next. I couldn't understand a word Viktor said, and I simply couldn't believe it when Lena told me he planned for us to hike 20 km! We began our hike in the woods beyond the cemetery, sometimes leaving the trail to wind our way over and under tree branches and other shrubs. Then, we seemed to rejoin the trail, which eventually became extremely steep. At the same time I was a little annoyed and scared, I was also extremely grateful for the opportunity to visit the cave town at the top of Tepe-Kermen, an elaborate cave monastery dating back as far as the 5th century.
This is a picture of a church dating from the 10th or 11th centuries. The way I understand it, the Christians who came to Tepe-Kermen were icon worshippers, fleeing persecution from Christians who weren't icon worshippers.
What a view!
Our group
Here is a shot of several of the participants, in the beautiful old library in which I conducted the workshop.
My interpreter, Olga, was excellent, and the discussion was lively. The participants all are able to read English and have varying abilities with respect to conversation. Everyone seemed to respond positively to my style of teaching. I tried to have one-on-one conversations with those who were best able to talk to me in English, to learn what was working and what wasn't. I learned that their instructors tend to be much more authoritative than I am, and this can cause difficulty when they try to follow more contemporary theoretical paths and/or conduct non-positivist research. Even their instructors who have more contemporary ideas are rather directive, and the workshop participants were especially impressed the few times I said I didn't know something. Go figure.
This came in handy, though, especially in our discussions about research ethics. I explained about our human subjects research protocols across disciplines in the U.S.: respect the autonomy of the research subject, do no harm, and do good. Then we got into more depth with respect to qualitative research ethics, talking about confidentiality issues and whether or not to intervene in a situation that is harmful to the research subject. Finally, we discussed feminist research ethics, especially notions of positionality, reflexivity, power, and reciprocity. I gave examples from my own and others' work to illustrate all of the issues we covered, and then the students presented me with a situation that one of their colleagues had faced. They asked me what I would do if I were the researcher in that case, and I said that I didn't know, that I didn't have enough information to make a decision. This led to a discussion about how it's difficult to make a policy in advance that provides complete guidance for ethical conduct. For example, most of the time, we take good care that research participants' confidentiality is protected, except sometimes we do not. Or, there are times when it seems right to intervene to protect a research subject, and other times when it is not a good idea. For the participants in the workshop, it was unusual to hear an instructor discuss research ethics in any greeat depth. They do not have any institutions for oversight in their countries, and we discussed the possibility of them organizing a peer network to develop and maintain a code of conduct, and provide peer review for one another.
Another interesting aspect of our discussion had to do with national context. In the U.S., as is regulated, I ask my research respondents to sign a consent form declaring they understand what the study is about and what their participation will entail. Some workshop participants pointed out that this would be difficult to do in post-Soviet countries where people are still fearful of being identified with their own true opinions.
As part of the workshop, the participants conducted their own mini-studies, focusing on gender and education in national context. There were 5 small groups who studied different aspects of the educational experience, and everyone chose to focus on higher education. Gender experiences were somewhat unsurprising, but some aspects of national context did emerge from these studies. First, for Ukraine and Belarus, the transition from Russian as the national language was having a significant impact on students. Ukrainian and Belarussian are both languages that until independence were mostly spoken by peasants in rural areas. Russian was more widespread, prestigious, and also was the language of scholarship. There were mixed opinions about the relative status of the languages at this time. Those who were more nationalistic claim that Ukrainian, for example, is gaining status all the time. Those who are more worried about nationalism were quiet about it.
The next interesting finding was the influence parents had on their children's educational decisions. More than one group noted that after social transition, parents had little confidence in their own opinions about what the future holds and what their children should study to best prepare themselves for the workplace and society. Parents' influence was considered less important to educational decision-making than it had been prior to transition.
Another topic of interest was the Bologna process, which is meant to unify Europe around certain standards of higher education, thus improving mobility and employability of European graduates. As graduates, the workshop participants are worried that their degrees will lose status once the Bologna process is fully realized. As young professors, the workshop participants are struggling to bring their institutions into compliance with little direction and few resources.
On Friday after my workshop concluded, I chanced another trip with Viktor, this time with eyes wide open. We took the bus to the base of the Ai-Todor mountain, and wound our way through the woods to a trail leading to the Chalter Koba monastery at the summit. This monastery dates back at least to the 8th century and perhaps as early as the 5th. In the last two years, monks from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Moscow Patriarchate have lived and worked up there to restore this cave monastery. I must say I've never seen anything like it in my life, and my pictures don't do it justice.
Just so you have an idea of how high up this place is:
I don't have good pictures of the cave monastery itself, but I will try to describe it. The men were restoring the monastery using what appeared to be salvaged wood -- old frames from windows and doors, that sort of thing. So, there were a couple of small rooms built into the side of larger cave openings. Before we entered the cave that held the sanctuary, we were instructed to remove our shoes and put on head coverings and skirts. Inside, there were all kinds of icons hanging from the walls of the cave, and various brass lamps hanging from the roof. There were many rugs covering the cave floor, but the fact that it was a rough, cold, dark cave was quite apparent regardless of ornamentation.
The monastery was more isolated than any place I can remember and there were no amenities of any sort. One of the monks kept his 5 or 6 year old son there, and this boy's presence moved all of us in the tourist group. The others referred to him as "Mowgli" (Jungle Story). He was barefoot in a long t-shirt and underwear, and he ran about the cliffs with ease. I thought it was a terrible place to raise a child and said so, but one of my acquaintances explained that there was no alternative. Although I'm not absolutely certain, I think the men who were restoring the monastery really had no good alternative living arrangements themselves; even if they wanted to, they might not be able to choose a different life.
My final observation about The Crimea is its surprising poverty. It is a beautiful natural wonder, and much could and has been done to make it more attractive to tourists from all over the continent. However, I don't think the wealth is being distributed very well. There are many small, impoverished villages dotting the landscape, inhabited by subsistence farmers. Indeed, I have been told that the villages thrive to some extent because for some Ukrainians, subsistence farming is better for survival than moving to the city where there is high unemployment.
On another day, near to the end of my trip, I visited Yalta and the Lavidia Palace, where the Yalta conference between Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill was held.
It was a wonderful experience that I'll never forget. I am grateful for the opportunity both to give and receive knowledge, and to make the world a better place through dialogue and mutual education.
My travel was supported by the U.S. State Department under an Educational Partnership Grant received by Iowa State University Women's Studies Program and Kharkiv National University Center for Gender Studies. My accommodations were paid for by the MacArthur Foundation, which has sponsored the Summer Institute for 9 years.
The Institute is held at the Foros Sanatorium Complex, a health resort on the Black Sea that originated in Soviet times for mid-level Party members. Since the resort was privatized, it has become much more expensive and typically is no longer financially accessible to most Ukrainians professionals. In addition to seaside rooms, the resort offers dining service and medical treatments ranging from baths and massages to more serious tests and treatments, including blood tests and EKGs. Out of curiosity, I visited the doctor while there, but did not accept or receive any treatments. It is unclear to me whether any of the staff are trained medical professionals. Regardless, it seemed that many guests use the services while there, since there is no health insurance in Ukraine and there is little opportunity for the typical Ukrainian to obtain a battery of medical tests otherwise.
After a long trip, I arrived in Foros on Saturday afternoon, and joined a bus tour on Sunday. The tour was arranged for guests at the resort, and many were attendees of the Institute. Our first stop was the town of Bakhchisarai, where we had a Tatar breakfast and visited the palace of the Tatar Khans who once ruled the Crimea.
The Crimean Tatars are a Turkic ethnic group descended from the Tatars who moved west with the Mongols. the Crimean Khanate ruled much of Crimea and what is now Southern Ukraine from 1441-1773. The capital, Bakchisarai, was founded in 1532. The Crimean Khanate was aligned with the Ottoman empire, but the Russians exerted increasing influence by attacking it. Eventually a treaty aligning the Crimean Khanate with the Russian Empire was signed in 1774. Crimea was annexed by Russia in 1783 in violation of the treaty (this summary is based on my own recollections of what I learned at the palace as well as the entries from wikipedia.net).
We walked through town and up the hill to the Uspensky Monastery, an active cave monastery. I wore my headscarf and a wraparound skirt to enter the sanctuary where a service was being held.
We continued up a steep hill until we arrived at Chufut-Kale, a mountain with a cave town cut into it. Translated, Chufut-Kale means "Jewish fortress," and this cave town had been inhabited by the Karaim, members of one of the Tartar tribes who were converted to Karaism, a form of Judaism originating in Mesopotamia in the 8th century that rejects rabbinism and talmudism and bases its tenets on scripture.
We continued up the hill past Chufut-Kale to a large Jewish cemetery with stones in both Hebrew and Aramaic. We joined a tour group of descendants of the Karaim. The tour guide said the oldest stone found thus far in the cemetery dated back to 406 BC.
At this point, the tour got interesting, to say the least. I was accompanied by my friend, Lena Prykhodko, who speaks 5 languages and was able to translate quite a bit for me, but I was working under the misconception that the tour was to be a relatively comfortable tourist activity. As it happened, our tour guide Viktor was in charge of physical education at Sanatorium Foros, and this was to be a hiking trip. I thanked my lucky stars that I'd worn my tennis shoes instead of the sandals I'd considered that morning, and the bottled water I'd brought was so inconveniently large. Barking in Russian all the way to the top, Viktor led us up Tepe-Kermen.
I must admit I was worried about this whole enterprise, mainly because I never knew what we were going to encounter next. I couldn't understand a word Viktor said, and I simply couldn't believe it when Lena told me he planned for us to hike 20 km! We began our hike in the woods beyond the cemetery, sometimes leaving the trail to wind our way over and under tree branches and other shrubs. Then, we seemed to rejoin the trail, which eventually became extremely steep. At the same time I was a little annoyed and scared, I was also extremely grateful for the opportunity to visit the cave town at the top of Tepe-Kermen, an elaborate cave monastery dating back as far as the 5th century.
This is a picture of a church dating from the 10th or 11th centuries. The way I understand it, the Christians who came to Tepe-Kermen were icon worshippers, fleeing persecution from Christians who weren't icon worshippers.
What a view!
Our group
On Monday, my workshop began. The participants had received a basic introduction to fieldwork the week before, and were eager to consider advanced issues, such as the study of gender in particular, bringing the national context into clarity, data analysis methods, and especially research ethics. I organized the workshop from the ground up, with the following sections:
- Introduction to research methodologies for gender studies in national context.
- The feminist standpoint (in national context) and other ways of knowing. (How) Does difference matter?
- How do I know it’s any good? Reading qualitative research for trustworthiness.
- Entering the field.
- Interviewing, feminist research ethics.
- Making data make sense.
- Interpreting data, generating theory.
- Reporting interpretations, bringing knowledge into being.
Here is a shot of several of the participants, in the beautiful old library in which I conducted the workshop.
My interpreter, Olga, was excellent, and the discussion was lively. The participants all are able to read English and have varying abilities with respect to conversation. Everyone seemed to respond positively to my style of teaching. I tried to have one-on-one conversations with those who were best able to talk to me in English, to learn what was working and what wasn't. I learned that their instructors tend to be much more authoritative than I am, and this can cause difficulty when they try to follow more contemporary theoretical paths and/or conduct non-positivist research. Even their instructors who have more contemporary ideas are rather directive, and the workshop participants were especially impressed the few times I said I didn't know something. Go figure.
This came in handy, though, especially in our discussions about research ethics. I explained about our human subjects research protocols across disciplines in the U.S.: respect the autonomy of the research subject, do no harm, and do good. Then we got into more depth with respect to qualitative research ethics, talking about confidentiality issues and whether or not to intervene in a situation that is harmful to the research subject. Finally, we discussed feminist research ethics, especially notions of positionality, reflexivity, power, and reciprocity. I gave examples from my own and others' work to illustrate all of the issues we covered, and then the students presented me with a situation that one of their colleagues had faced. They asked me what I would do if I were the researcher in that case, and I said that I didn't know, that I didn't have enough information to make a decision. This led to a discussion about how it's difficult to make a policy in advance that provides complete guidance for ethical conduct. For example, most of the time, we take good care that research participants' confidentiality is protected, except sometimes we do not. Or, there are times when it seems right to intervene to protect a research subject, and other times when it is not a good idea. For the participants in the workshop, it was unusual to hear an instructor discuss research ethics in any greeat depth. They do not have any institutions for oversight in their countries, and we discussed the possibility of them organizing a peer network to develop and maintain a code of conduct, and provide peer review for one another.
Another interesting aspect of our discussion had to do with national context. In the U.S., as is regulated, I ask my research respondents to sign a consent form declaring they understand what the study is about and what their participation will entail. Some workshop participants pointed out that this would be difficult to do in post-Soviet countries where people are still fearful of being identified with their own true opinions.
As part of the workshop, the participants conducted their own mini-studies, focusing on gender and education in national context. There were 5 small groups who studied different aspects of the educational experience, and everyone chose to focus on higher education. Gender experiences were somewhat unsurprising, but some aspects of national context did emerge from these studies. First, for Ukraine and Belarus, the transition from Russian as the national language was having a significant impact on students. Ukrainian and Belarussian are both languages that until independence were mostly spoken by peasants in rural areas. Russian was more widespread, prestigious, and also was the language of scholarship. There were mixed opinions about the relative status of the languages at this time. Those who were more nationalistic claim that Ukrainian, for example, is gaining status all the time. Those who are more worried about nationalism were quiet about it.
The next interesting finding was the influence parents had on their children's educational decisions. More than one group noted that after social transition, parents had little confidence in their own opinions about what the future holds and what their children should study to best prepare themselves for the workplace and society. Parents' influence was considered less important to educational decision-making than it had been prior to transition.
Another topic of interest was the Bologna process, which is meant to unify Europe around certain standards of higher education, thus improving mobility and employability of European graduates. As graduates, the workshop participants are worried that their degrees will lose status once the Bologna process is fully realized. As young professors, the workshop participants are struggling to bring their institutions into compliance with little direction and few resources.
On Friday after my workshop concluded, I chanced another trip with Viktor, this time with eyes wide open. We took the bus to the base of the Ai-Todor mountain, and wound our way through the woods to a trail leading to the Chalter Koba monastery at the summit. This monastery dates back at least to the 8th century and perhaps as early as the 5th. In the last two years, monks from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Moscow Patriarchate have lived and worked up there to restore this cave monastery. I must say I've never seen anything like it in my life, and my pictures don't do it justice.
Just so you have an idea of how high up this place is:
I don't have good pictures of the cave monastery itself, but I will try to describe it. The men were restoring the monastery using what appeared to be salvaged wood -- old frames from windows and doors, that sort of thing. So, there were a couple of small rooms built into the side of larger cave openings. Before we entered the cave that held the sanctuary, we were instructed to remove our shoes and put on head coverings and skirts. Inside, there were all kinds of icons hanging from the walls of the cave, and various brass lamps hanging from the roof. There were many rugs covering the cave floor, but the fact that it was a rough, cold, dark cave was quite apparent regardless of ornamentation.
The monastery was more isolated than any place I can remember and there were no amenities of any sort. One of the monks kept his 5 or 6 year old son there, and this boy's presence moved all of us in the tourist group. The others referred to him as "Mowgli" (Jungle Story). He was barefoot in a long t-shirt and underwear, and he ran about the cliffs with ease. I thought it was a terrible place to raise a child and said so, but one of my acquaintances explained that there was no alternative. Although I'm not absolutely certain, I think the men who were restoring the monastery really had no good alternative living arrangements themselves; even if they wanted to, they might not be able to choose a different life.
My final observation about The Crimea is its surprising poverty. It is a beautiful natural wonder, and much could and has been done to make it more attractive to tourists from all over the continent. However, I don't think the wealth is being distributed very well. There are many small, impoverished villages dotting the landscape, inhabited by subsistence farmers. Indeed, I have been told that the villages thrive to some extent because for some Ukrainians, subsistence farming is better for survival than moving to the city where there is high unemployment.
On another day, near to the end of my trip, I visited Yalta and the Lavidia Palace, where the Yalta conference between Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill was held.
It was a wonderful experience that I'll never forget. I am grateful for the opportunity both to give and receive knowledge, and to make the world a better place through dialogue and mutual education.
