CREES Noon Lecture. Bending Not Breaking: Crimean Tatar Resilience in Ukraine and Russian-occupied Crimea

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in 2015 and 2016, this presentation explores the lived experience of Crimean Tatars in Ukraine, including Russian-occupied Crimea. While Ukraine has passed legislation recognizing the Crimean Tatars as an indigenous people, the Russian Federation rejects the validity of this status and clings to the minority label. There is a correspondingly sharp difference in the treatment the group has received in territory controlled by Ukraine and Russian Federation. On the Ukrainian side, a sense of political agency animates discourses of a common civic, as opposed to ethnic Ukrainian identity. On the Russian side, forced disappearances, searches, detentions, beatings, and surveillance suggest the genocidal policies begun by the Russian Empire in the eighteenth century continue. The common denominator under the sharp contrast is that neither government has truly defended the rights of the indigenous people. On both sides, creativity and resilience developed over three tumultuous centuries is evident among the Crimean Tatar people.

Greta Uehling received her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University of Michigan in 2000. In 2004, she completed a post-doctoral fellowship with the Solomon Asch Center for the Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict. Her first book, Beyond Memory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), provides the first comprehensive study of the Crimean Tatars’ 1944 deportation, and explores how memory and history facilitated repatriation to the historic homeland. Uehling is also the author of scholarly articles, book chapters, and blogs. Her 2013 fieldwork yielded “Genocide’s Aftermath: Neostalinism in Contemporary Crimea.” Uehling has contributed online articles to Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology News, Euromaidan Press, The Conversation, Antropoliteia, Dissident, and Savage Minds. A number of international organizations, including the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, have drawn upon Uehling’s expertise. In 2015, she was awarded a Fulbright scholar grant. Uehling currently teaches in the Program in International and Comparative Studies and is also a faculty associate of U-M’s Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies.

Part of the Minorities series which will focus on the fates and challenges various minorities face, from ethnic and racial groups to people with disabilities and members of LGBT communities. How do different political regimes come to define groups as minorities, and how do they engage with them as a result? What can the experience of minorities in the other parts of the world teach us?