Kathryn Graber

My research on language and media in post-socialist Eurasia lies at the intersection of two clusters of problems. The first is the role of media in indigenous language shift, endangerment, and revitalization, which I have been studying in Russia’s Buryat territories, a multilingual region of eastern Siberia on the Mongolian border, since 2005. I am especially interested in the centrality of affect and emotion in language shift and revitalization, and in how affective senses of belonging are (or are not) enabled by mass-mediated interactions. Methodologically, I have a keen interest in advancing the ethnography of media, especially the ethnography of journalism, to bridge the traditional production/consumption divide. By examining the daily work of media makers, the actions and reactions of audiences, and the media themselves, I trace the movement of language produced in institutional settings backwards and forwards through other domains of daily practice. My work on minority-language media in Russia has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education Fulbright-Hays program, and the Social Science Research Council, among others.

This research was the basis for my first monograph, Mixed Messages: Mediating Native Belonging in Asian Russia (Cornell University Press, 2020). In the book, I argue that media and language are practices by which residents of the region perform and negotiate their citizenship on a daily basis within different scales of belonging: the federation, the republic, and the city or district, as well as clans, ancestral lineages, extended families, and Buryat- and Russian-speaking publics that are aligned with state borders unevenly at best. Massive social transformations over the 20th and 21st centuries have left many people in Buryatia with a sense of profound loss, and seeking reclamation. The specific media and linguistic resources available for performing this reclamation have been shaped, however, by major state-driven modernizing projects that were never felt to be complete, and that ironically prompted (or hastened) the very changes now being battled against. Mixed Messages shows the impacts of minority-language media on society as they actually unfold on a daily basis, including their unintended consequences.

The second, related cluster of problems includes materiality, technology, circulation, and notions of property. "Textures of Value: Embodiment and Experience in the Mongolian Cashmere Industry" explores the production and global circulation of Mongolian cashmere to determine how different forms of value—economic, social, linguistic, moral—accrue to material goods and subsequently transform society and culture through their transnational movement. While cashmere’s value may seem to derive exclusively from its physical characteristics, the Mongolian cashmere industry is also considered a major “success story” by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). WIPO highlights the protection of intellectual property rights as the key condition enabling goat herders, fiber brokers, fashion designers, artisans, and businesses alike to profit from cashmere fiber while simultaneously sustaining traditional knowledge and lifeways and protecting the natural environment. This research, funded by the Social Science Research Council's InterAsia Program, Indiana University, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, examines how the people involved in this complex social web treat, talk about, and value cashmere as it moves from the bellies of goats through its transformation into a luxury product.

I co-edited, with Elizabeth Falconi, the book Storytelling as Narrative Practice: Ethnographic Approaches to the Tales We Tell. Some of my other collaborative projects concern Orthodox missionary linguistics, shamanism, and infrastructure projects in Siberia.

Currently I am Associate Professor of Anthropology and Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. I received my doctorate from the University of Michigan in Anthropology (2012), M.A. degrees from the University of Michigan in Russian and East European Studies (2008) and Anthropology (2006), and A.B. from the University of Chicago in Anthropology and Linguistics (2002). I joined IU in 2012 as a postdoctoral teaching fellow from a Title VIII fellowship at the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

RECENT COURSES:
Language and Culture (undergrad lecture and grad proseminar)
Language in/of Media
Nomads, Networks & Communities
Language and Globalization
Seminar in the Ethnography of Communication
Property in Central Eurasia
Language and Society in Central Eurasia

Некоторые мои статьи на русском и бурятском языках можно найти под названием Грабер К. Э., Кэтрин Грабер или Кэтрин Гребер.
Phone: +1 812.856.3777 (direct)
Address: Indiana University, Student Building 130,
701 E. Kirkwood Avenue, Bloomington, IN 47405-7100 USA