This talk is dedicated to the chain of multimedia historical parks “Russia – My History.” Initially the project of the Russian Orthodox Church, “Russia – My History” received a vast administrative and financial support from the state, and, in less than 6 years, had grown to become the lieu of the (re)production of the “official” historical narrative of Vladimir Putin’s regime. In the talk, I identify the origins of the project “Russia – My History.” I reconstruct the specific historical narrative (re)produced through it, and trace how this narrative changed over time. I focus on how the cyclical pattern is used in the parks to narrate the history of Russia and what role does the Russian Church play in this narrative. I demonstrate how Orthodox Christianity is employed in the parks to define the Russian nation, and show the ways in which the concept of martyrdom is used to answer the difficult questions of Russian history.

Can social identities ever be the source of normativity, obligation, and rule-following? Haslanger’s semantic externalism holds that the meaning of social groups depends on some social construction, the rules of which, when uncovered, could impossibly give rise to rule-following. Externalism has the somewhat preposterous consequence that individuals can never have authority over the content of their beliefs, given that meaning depends exclusively on the environment. Internalism, on the contrary, argues that individuals cannot but have self-knowledge of what social groups, of which they are members, stand for and represent. Individuals create themselves through autonomous acts of their will, self-interpretation, and commitments the very meaning of social groups, grounding thereby internal oughts. Hegel’s struggle for recognition, rather than liberal self-constitution, is the most plausible ground for making such commitments and establishing the constitutive character of social rules, roles, and responsibilities. However, Hegel’s communitarianism is based on a desire for recognition. And my argument is that there is no road that could lead from dispositions to commitments and normativity. Therefore, social groups and rule-following must have some other origin than social identity. The lecture concludes with a few provisional remarks on the importance of conventions.

The aim of this seminar is to analyze the destiny of the Roma and Sinti families who lived in the border regions between the Kingdom of Italy and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia between the two World Wars. Particular attention will be paid to the treatment of “Gypsies” by the fascist regime in the ex-Hapsburg territory named Venezia Giulia, the so-called province of Ljubljana annexed to the Kingdom of Italy in April 1941, as well as the period when those territories became a part of the Reich (September 1943 - May 1945). Given the wide-ranging overlap of political and border contexts, we need to carefully reconstruct local events and family histories through the bottom-up approach, based on an interdisciplinary perspective (connecting history and anthropology) and multi-situated research (in different national archives and between Roma families).