This is a study of Russian ethnic organizations in the Greater Vancouver area of British Columbia. These ethnics in total include an official population of 9,324. More specifically, this is a study of "joiners" in fourteen "existent" and seven "non-existent" organizations. Bata were gathered over an eighteen month period mainly by participant observation and interviews. The findings may be summarized as follows: 1. There are relatively few "joiners" as compared to "non-joiners" in the ethnic sub-community. 2. Those that join do so for a variety of reasons, including religious, ideological, cultural and/or personal reasons. 3. Turning from the individual to the voluntary association or organization, we find certain characteristics of growth which we have described in eight sections: origin, formal structure and membership, internal differentiation, cooperation with other groups, conflict with other groups, internal strains, actual splits and termination (if any), 4. The dominant theme which evolves from the study is that one's perception of Communism (together with the "cold war" atmosphere) greatly affects organizational behavior. Thus we find a whole series of symbolic magic-like words used to pave the way on one hand or to hinder the spread of Communism on the other—or else to maintain a "neutral" position. 5. Other factors which affect organizational behavior in the Russian community have been included under seven sub-categories: social class, kinship, jurisdictional conflict, effective leadership, ecological factors, common interest, and place of birth and time of arrival in Canada. 6. Certain queries arise concerning the actual acceptance of "unpopular" ideas in a society which theoretically glorifies "diversity". This, in turn, affects the rate of integration of such minority opinions into society. In brief, then, the study of Russian ethnic organizations shows that there are certain things which bring people together and other things which split them apart; this whole process, in turn, is largely related to the national policy and its role in the "cold war" atmosphere. / Arts, Faculty of / Sociology, Department of / Graduate

The master thesis deals with the fenomenon of integration of 1,5. generation of immigrants from the coutries of former USSR. Czech researchers devote to this topic relatively little attention, so that it remains in seclusion. At present, there are only partial and incidental findings about integration of children with origins in the former USSR. Based on the current level of knowledge it seeks to grasp the phenomenon of the integration of those children in all its complexity, and therefore focuses on the different dimensions of integration - structural, social and cultural including language. In examining all the mentioned integration dimensions in tracks how the immigrant children handle the cultural heritage of their country of origin, but also how the adopt Czech culture in its broader sense. To get the deepest understanding of their integration - within each dimension, and within the overall integration process - and also to find out the problems they face on their way to successful integration, it explores this phenomenon from the perspective of those children's mothers. Through in-depth interviews with women-immigrants who come from the post-Soviet region, the work reveals meanings that they attach to different aspects of their children's integration into the Czech hosting society. Finally, the work...

The focus of interest in this thesis is the social and personal trajectories of men and women who were born in the Soviet Union in the 1970-1980s and then, after growing up in post-Soviet Russia in the 1990s in an atmosphere of change and uncertainty, decided to exploit the opportunities to go abroad to study and work that started opening up in the early and mid-1990s. The thesis analyses these moves as the individual strategies of either escaping or waiting on the career insecurities in Russia, or consciously enhancing one's social standing and professional and educational capital. It traces their social and professional trajectories, showing that, apart from developing the desired expertise and gaining experience, these Russians went through intensive changes in their self-identifications and senses of belonging, including the acquisition of new habits of mobility, international social networks and cosmopolitan dispositions. This thesis argues that, while their Soviet-Russian cultural past and their belonging to a particular social group of 'Soviet intelligentsia' was still important to them, they continuously acquired new social, cultural and cosmopolitan forms of capital that influenced their coming back to Russia as different persons from their contemporaries who had stayed in the country. They brought with them new dispositions and new social practices resulting from their active comparisons of their lives in Russia and Britain, and in many respects they actively maintained their differences in creating clubs for returnees. While able to integrate successfully into the emerging Russian middle classes, they still expressed the cultural and intellectual heritage of the past Soviet intelligentsia, now reborn in the guise of Westernizing attitudes and practices, different degrees of cosmopolitan patriotism, intellectual pursuits, a quest for education and self-development, interest in world travel, an ethical concern for sustainability, opposition to excessive consumerism in Russia and conspicuous practices of status performance. The materials for this research were mainly gathered through the use of semi-structured in-depth interviews, one third of them longitudinal, with informants talking to the researcher several times during the course of fieldwork between 2007 and 2012. Some additional participant observation has been conducted in informal Russian circles in the UK and among returnees from Britain in Russia. This research consists of an ethnography with elements of a biographical approach. This has made the researcher attentive to the inclusion of a certain event within a person's whole biography, aimed at putting the period researched within the context of the past and future lives of the informant. The participants of this research were aged between 22 and 40 and belonged to a transition cohort generation (Miller 2000), as they had all passed their childhoods in the Soviet Union, their adolescence and teenage years coinciding with the period of dissolution of the USSR, with the transitional break up of one system and the formation of another, while their young adulthood developed in post-Soviet Russia. They were mainly single when they initiated their move to Britain, and had various professional profiles within the broadly defined groups of 'highly skilled' and 'highly educated', the latter term being preferred in this research. The dissertation includes an introduction, four ethnographic chapters, a conclusion and one appendix. The introduction presents the historical and research context, the methodology and the design of the study. The first chapter traces the professional and educational trajectories of participants, while the second chapter focuses on informants' spatial mobility and habits of extensive travel acquired during the move to Britain. The third chapter deals with the negotiation of informants' belonging to a particular cultural and social past, which is associated both with Russian-Soviet culture and with their social status as the children of Soviet-era intelligentsia. The fourth chapter argues that, while belonging to Soviet intelligentsia families was still important for informants' self-identifications in Britain, new social, cultural and cosmopolitan forms of capital were acquired during this period, resulting in new cosmopolitan dispositions, ethics and moral values, and new practices socially remitted (Levitt 2001) from Britain. The conclusion places this ethnography within the state-of-the-art research on the mobilities of Russians to the UK.

Migration, ethnicity and cultural pattern are reviewed. The research questions how accurately the prehistoric archaeologist can interpret migration and ethnicity by means of a review of the modern migration of a group of Russian sectarians to Baja California, Mexico. Excavations undertaken in seven households at different levels of assimilation with their Mexican and Indian neighbors suggests that material culture does reflect ethnicity under these best of all archaeological circumstances. A methodology for the determination of prehistoric migrations is suggested. It concludes that "cultural pattern" is a more useful concept than "ethnicity" in the determination of archaeological migrations.

Résumé This diploma thesis under the title Linguistic Representation of National Stereotypes in Czech Media deals with which stereotypes about three chosen nationalities - Romani, Vietnamese and Russians - are present in the selected sample selected from Czech media and how they are linguistically represented. The paper is based on the presumption that despite the principle of political correctness present in most of the journalese code of ethics, it is not possible to avoid some manifestations of shared fixed images of nationalities (called stereotypes) in media. Next, we argue that the media image of the world is based on the Linguistic Image of the World. The theoretical basis of the cognitive linguistics, especially the Prototype/Stereotype Theory and categorization as the way of understanding and assorting the world, were the main methodological sources. There is a chapter on each analysed national group that depicts the means of its categorisation and lists the particular categories that ensued from the analysis as well as the stereotypes that were discovered in the surveyed sample. Key words: Romani, Vietnamese, Russians, stereotypes, categorization, cognitive linguistics, media

Since 1989, Czechia has undergone many changes. Increasingly important part of Czech society is represented by foreign inhabitants, who - most often - move to Prague. The capital city is target of economic migrants but also of those foreigners who seek a new home. The aim of the diploma thesis is to get to know spatial patterns of migration of population in Prague between 1992 and 2011 and to explain geographical causes of migration. The first part of the thesis discusses theoretical approaches dealing with mobility, especially with migration and residential mobility. Next chapter introduces development of migration of population in Prague and summarizes basic findings about the most numerous groups of foreigners living in the capital city. Based on data from registers of migration, general trends in population migration are identified, then, migration activity of Prague inhabitants by citizenship is analyzed. Case study of urbanistic district Nové Butovice-západ in the final part of the thesis verifies, by triangulation of research methods, the reliability of statistical data on numbers and movement of foreigners in Prague and analyzes the influence of immigration of Russian citizens on changing social environment of the studied locality.

O presente estudo enfoca os imigrantes russos que vieram para o Brasil e acabaram se concentrando na cidade de São Paulo e suas dificuldades para iniciar uma nova vida no país. Através dessa pesquisa, procuro entender os processos históricos que os trouxeram para o país, como a comunidade russa se estruturou diante da nova realidade, assim como destacar os fatores que dão coesão ao grupo dentro da sociedade paulistana e brasileira. Outro objetivo é a construção da identidade da comunidade russa local, utilizando os relatos e memórias dos imigrantes russos. A importância dessa pesquisa está relacionada a diversos ramos da geografia, dentre as quais destacamos a geografia da população, a geografia urbana, a geografia política e a geografia cultural, entre outras áreas do conhecimento. Para realizarmos esta pesquisa, utilizamos o método fenomenológico, buscando através da análise dos depoimentos e outros documentos as principais características da alma russa, além de utilizar o conjunto de procedimentos conhecidos como História oral. A questão da coesão cultural dentro da comunidade russa local é muito forte, mesmo após décadas dos grandes fluxos imigratórios. Apesar da assimilação da cultura brasileira, muitos descendentes de russos, mantém suas tradições culturais e religiosas, como por exemplo, através da organização de grupos folclóricos de dança, como os conhecidos Volga, Troyka e Balalaica. A fé ortodoxa, apesar do reduzido número de fiéis, devido aos falecimentos de muitos imigrantes idosos ou pela mudanças de membros da comunidade para outros locais, todas as paróquias da cidade de São Paulo continuam ativas. A pesquisa revela um pouco da memória da comunidade russa que se instalou no Brasil, principalmente na cidade de São Paulo. / The present study it focuses the Russian immigrants who had come to Brazil andhad finished if concentrating in the city of São Paulo and its difficulties to initiate a new life in the country. Through this research, I look for to understand the processes historical that had brought them for the country, as the Russian community if structuralized ahead of the new reality, as well as detaching the factors that give cohesion inside to the group of the place and Brazilian society. Another objective is the construction of the identity of the local Russian community, using the stories and memories of the Russian immigrants. The importance of this research is related the diverse branches of the geography, amongst which we detach the geography of the population, urban geography, geography politics and cultural geography, among others areas of the knowledge. To carry through this research, we use the Phenomenological method, searching through the analysis of the depositions and other documents the main characteristics of the Russian soul, besides using the set of known procedures as verbal History. The question of the cultural cohesion inside of the local Russian community is very strong, exactly after decades of the great immigratory flows. Despite the assimilation of the Brazilian culture, many descendants of Russians, keep its cultural and religious traditions, as for example, through the organization of traditional groups of dance, as known the Volga, Troyka and Balalaica. The orthodox faith, despite the reduced number of fidiciary offices, had to the deaths of many aged immigrants or for the changes of members of the community for other places, all the parishes of the city of São Paulo continue active. The research discloses a little of the memory of the Russian community that if it installed in Brazil, mainly in the city of São Paulo.

A proposta desta dissertação é apresentar o histórico do processo imigratório da Rússia para o Brasil e discutir as imagens do Brasil criadas pela propaganda imigratória no início do século XX. Empreendi o estudo da história do surgimento da imagem do Brasil como Paraíso e como Inferno ou Purgatório para compreensão do papel que essa imagem dualista exerceu dentro do discurso relacionado ao processo e(i)migratório da Rússia. / The proposal of this dissertation is to present the history of the immigration process from Russia to Brazil and to discuss the images of Brazil created by the migration\'s propaganda in the beginning of the XX century. This is a study about the history of the appearance of the image of Brazil as Paradise and as Hell or Purgatory. It shows the role which this dualistic image played in the discussion related to the emigration process from Russia.

Double exposure has often been used as a metaphor for the condition of emigration: of being between two places simultaneously, of layering the memory of one place onto another. To extend the metaphor of double exposure, this study turns to the medium of photography itself to explore how it functions within Russian émigré narratives of the self. I examine how Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Brodsky, Gary Shteyngart, and the visual artist Ilya Kabakov use photographs in their autobiographical works—from literary memoirs to art installations—as a device for representing the divided self in emigration. “Double exposure” works as a flexible concept in this dissertation: as a metaphor for exilic double consciousness; for the autobiographical tension between multiple selves; and as a model for the composite structure of these texts that join together word and image. Bringing together photography and autobiography in this study, I explore how the “objective” medium of photography offers these authors a version of the self as visual object to be used creatively within their own self-representations. Self-representation, after all, involves the transformation of one’s own subjectivity into an object of investigation. And the objectivity of the photograph cannot be divorced from the subjective experience of looking at and interpreting the sense data that the image supplies. The photograph’s uneasy relationship between objectivity and subjectivity makes it a rich source for autobiographical practices of self-creation and self-investigation. The photographs and their textual mediation work as visual metonyms that stand in for the larger project of self-representation; they picture the act of picturing the self. This dissertation charts the critical ambivalence to family photographs in these works, how they stage a back-and-forth between an affective or nostalgic attitude to images and a sharp awareness of the limits or dangers of such an attitude. The subjects of this dissertation reveal a divided attitude to the visual medium, both attracted and repelled by the promise of photographs. The divided attitude to photographs in these works, I argue, stems in part from a crisis in vision. From the semiotic appraisal of photographs to the disciplinary and propagandistic abuses of photography, to see the photograph as an uncomplicated restoration of the past is no longer possible by the second half of the twentieth century (if, indeed, it ever was). And yet, it is the very losses of the twentieth century that make urgent the need to collect and preserve the fragments that remain. These authors exhibit an ambivalence about how photographs preserve the past and what kind of information they provide us with, about how these images represent the self (and the family), and finally about how this form of representation compares with the written word. Each of my four chapters examines a different modality of this ambivalent approach to photographs as they intersect with narrating the self: Nabokov’s agonistic contest between photography and his visual memory; Brodsky’s resignation to the modern photographic condition that ruptures the continuity of memory and experience; Shteyngart’s divided reading of the self from a hyphenated Russian-American perspective; and Kabakov’s ironically sincere recuperation of an affective response after postmodernism. Considering photos as both indexical documents that provide evidence but also as indeterminate images that demand interpretation, I read the photographs as an integral component of self-construction in these works, rather than as transparent illustrations of the self. These photographs offer a productive site for representing the divided self in emigration, the experience of trauma, and the convergence of personal and social history.

O presente estudo enfoca os imigrantes russos que vieram para o Brasil e acabaram se concentrando na cidade de São Paulo e suas dificuldades para iniciar uma nova vida no país. Através dessa pesquisa, procuro entender os processos históricos que os trouxeram para o país, como a comunidade russa se estruturou diante da nova realidade, assim como destacar os fatores que dão coesão ao grupo dentro da sociedade paulistana e brasileira. Outro objetivo é a construção da identidade da comunidade russa local, utilizando os relatos e memórias dos imigrantes russos. A importância dessa pesquisa está relacionada a diversos ramos da geografia, dentre as quais destacamos a geografia da população, a geografia urbana, a geografia política e a geografia cultural, entre outras áreas do conhecimento. Para realizarmos esta pesquisa, utilizamos o método fenomenológico, buscando através da análise dos depoimentos e outros documentos as principais características da alma russa, além de utilizar o conjunto de procedimentos conhecidos como História oral. A questão da coesão cultural dentro da comunidade russa local é muito forte, mesmo após décadas dos grandes fluxos imigratórios. Apesar da assimilação da cultura brasileira, muitos descendentes de russos, mantém suas tradições culturais e religiosas, como por exemplo, através da organização de grupos folclóricos de dança, como os conhecidos Volga, Troyka e Balalaica. A fé ortodoxa, apesar do reduzido número de fiéis, devido aos falecimentos de muitos imigrantes idosos ou pela mudanças de membros da comunidade para outros locais, todas as paróquias da cidade de São Paulo continuam ativas. A pesquisa revela um pouco da memória da comunidade russa que se instalou no Brasil, principalmente na cidade de São Paulo. / The present study it focuses the Russian immigrants who had come to Brazil andhad finished if concentrating in the city of São Paulo and its difficulties to initiate a new life in the country. Through this research, I look for to understand the processes historical that had brought them for the country, as the Russian community if structuralized ahead of the new reality, as well as detaching the factors that give cohesion inside to the group of the place and Brazilian society. Another objective is the construction of the identity of the local Russian community, using the stories and memories of the Russian immigrants. The importance of this research is related the diverse branches of the geography, amongst which we detach the geography of the population, urban geography, geography politics and cultural geography, among others areas of the knowledge. To carry through this research, we use the Phenomenological method, searching through the analysis of the depositions and other documents the main characteristics of the Russian soul, besides using the set of known procedures as verbal History. The question of the cultural cohesion inside of the local Russian community is very strong, exactly after decades of the great immigratory flows. Despite the assimilation of the Brazilian culture, many descendants of Russians, keep its cultural and religious traditions, as for example, through the organization of traditional groups of dance, as known the Volga, Troyka and Balalaica. The orthodox faith, despite the reduced number of fidiciary offices, had to the deaths of many aged immigrants or for the changes of members of the community for other places, all the parishes of the city of São Paulo continue active. The research discloses a little of the memory of the Russian community that if it installed in Brazil, mainly in the city of São Paulo.