Dignity, arbitrary rule, and emancipation in an authoritarian regime: ethnographic remarks on the uprising in Belarus

Abstract

ABSTRACT The protest movement in Belarus has been presented by some of its protagonists and analysts as a struggle for dignity, implying a contradiction between dignity and authoritarian rule. However, the author’s ethnographic work carried out between 1999 and 2013, which focused on the dachas of city dwellers on one hand and on everyday life in the kolkhozes and villages on the other, revealed examples of the attainment of dignity within the repressive system itself. Although the system is based on violence and arbitrary rule, it simultaneously generates means of establishing forms of dignity. Dachas enable the affirmation of an enhanced representation of oneself. In the collectivized countryside, certain moral qualities – endurance, resourcefulness, and self-reliance – can be manifested in daily activities and provide access to a sense of self-worth. Since 9 August 2020, these forms of dignity have been polarized into a form of defensive dignity, in which arbitrary rule and recognition are not antinomic and which is expressed as loyalty to the incumbent regime, and an offensive dignity, for which personal dignity can be complete only if the demonstrators’ demands for collective dignity are met.