Круглый стол «Возможна ли «колонизация» пространства?»
The era of mobility erases territorial identity, but this does not diminish the relevance of its study, even if only as a historical phenomenon. For “regions of late development”, such as the Far East, identity is associated with the concepts of colonization / development, and, moreover, inherent in the name of the region. Our team has already addressed the problem of correlating the concepts of “colonization” and “development”; this time we decided to focus on the approach of Alexander Etkind, who published another book in the outgoing year. The purpose of our meeting was to discuss the system of Alexander Etkind’s views on the essence of coloniality, to analyze one of the central concepts used by Etkind in many studies, “internal colonization”, and to assess the limits of this concept’s applicability. Main issues for discussion: 1) in “The Nature of Evil: Raw Materials and the State” Etkind writes about natural resources as raw materials for production; are the author's categories suitable for analyzing space as a resource for development, space as such, without taking into account the raw materials available there? Can the Far East, for example, be interpreted as a “presence colony”? 2) the logic of the concept of internal colonization is based on the idea of exoticization of the outskirts by the center, commoners by the ruling class, society by the state; in this case, is it possible to interpret the toponyms “Russian Far East” and “Pacific Russia” used today as two images of the territory – traditional colonial (exoticizing and dividing) and modern non-colonial (normalizing and integrating)?