Viktoryia Kalesnikava


Viktoryia Kalesnikava Entered 2008 vk5b@virginia.edu
Linguistic and Socio-Cultural Regional focus: Eastern Europe, North America, United States. Topical interests: Language and politics, discourse analyses and politics, national identity and ideology, power and state, postcolonialism, social memory. Linguistic relativity, humor, game, body and language. Immigration and identity. Ritual and religion in healing, anthropology of experience, perception of self and other. My broad and somewhere contradictory interests reflect my background experience as well as my previous training in European philosophy, philosophy of language, cultural studies, visual and cultural anthropology. The experience of being a citizen of a postcolonial country Belarus showed me that language can play a significant role in political games (even though in Belarus for the time being Russian and Belarusian are rendered as state languages, Russian is used by the government, while Belarusian - by the opposition). It also encouraged my personal interest in postcolonial anthropology of protest and power, specifically in the relationship between language, social discourse, identity, and politics. I have been interested in studying language ideology and the formation of modern nation-states, and in the relationship between standard and marginalized languages, language extinction, and language-based discrimination. The latter is particularly relevant in regard to my native language, Belarusian, recently rendered a dead language but revived as a way of political opposition to the existing ruling power. There is also a slightly different interest - the intersection of philosophical anthropology and literature, or anthropology and language. I conducted a phenomeno-anthropological research of Dostoyevsky's text. I analyzed the text as an "experience" of self and other, which was a result of the live dialogue, or phenomenological encounter between the text as a body (the other) and the reader (self). The research "Dostoyevsky's Phenomenological Perception" came to be a logical result of such an experience representing an empirical manifestation of the event that took place. The research was published in a collection of essays "Europe-2004," following International Student Forum of Social Sciences. Lately, I have been interested in looking at traditional healing and its ritual implications in Eastern Europe and the way it is being transferred and shifted from rural onto urban context.

Entered 2008
vk5b@virginia.edu

Linguistic and Socio-Cultural

Regional focus: Eastern Europe, North America, United States.

Topical interests: Language and politics, discourse analyses and politics, national identity and ideology, power and state, postcolonialism, social memory. Linguistic relativity, humor, game, body and language. Immigration and identity. Ritual and religion in healing, anthropology of experience, perception of self and other.

My broad and somewhere contradictory interests reflect my background experience as well as my previous training in European philosophy, philosophy of language, cultural studies, visual and cultural anthropology.

The experience of being a citizen of a postcolonial country Belarus showed me that language can play a significant role in political games (even though in Belarus for the time being Russian and Belarusian are rendered as state languages, Russian is used by the government, while Belarusian - by the opposition). It also encouraged my personal interest in postcolonial anthropology of protest and power, specifically in the relationship between language, social discourse, identity, and politics.

I have been interested in studying language ideology and the formation of modern nation-states, and in the relationship between standard and marginalized languages, language extinction, and language-based discrimination. The latter is particularly relevant in regard to my native language, Belarusian, recently rendered a dead language but revived as a way of political opposition to the existing ruling power.

There is also a slightly different interest - the intersection of philosophical anthropology and literature, or anthropology and language. I conducted a phenomeno-anthropological research of Dostoyevsky's text. I analyzed the text as an "experience" of self and other, which was a result of the live dialogue, or phenomenological encounter between the text as a body (the other) and the reader (self). The research "Dostoyevsky's Phenomenological Perception" came to be a logical result of such an experience representing an empirical manifestation of the event that took place. The research was published in a collection of essays "Europe-2004," following International Student Forum of Social Sciences.

Lately, I have been interested in looking at traditional healing and its ritual implications in Eastern Europe and the way it is being transferred and shifted from rural onto urban context.