From Words to Voids : Absencing and Haunting in Crimean Semiotic Landscapes

Sammanfattning: This thesis seeks to contribute to the body of ethnographically-oriented semiotic landscape research by addressing linguistic and non-linguistic signs in the landscapes of contemporary Crimea. It is based on research conducted in the region back in 2017 and 2019 after the Russian annexation but before the full-scale war against Ukraine, which started on 24 February 2022. It illuminates the ways in which the complex histories of conflict over the Crimean Peninsula are materialized in ‘absenced’ semiotic landscapes, both in the form of material effects in landscapes and as discursively realized in the narrated memories of the study participants. In this way, through a close theoretically informed analysis of absence in semiotic landscapes, this thesis illuminates the interrelationships between overwritten, erased and invisibilized voices.Each of the four studies in this thesis addresses the effects of different acts of dispossession which have led to the absencing of ethnic, linguistic and national differences in Crimea across time and space. Study I engages with multilingual representations displayed in the city of Sevastopol, illustrating the dominance of Russian discourses of nation and nationalism. Moving beyond the focus on visible signs, Study II sheds light on the invisibilized histories of Crimean Tatar territorial dispossession and displacement. By engaging with the participants’ voices, it illustrates the constructions of a space of otherwise, an indeterminate space full of potentiality and marginality that remains hidden yet persistent in Crimean landscapes. Study III engages to a greater extent with acts of struggle for voice and visibility by attending to memories of citizens’ resistance through the lens of turbulence. Finally, Study IV attempts to disentangle the materially manifested effects of absence in the landscapes. This interrogation goes beyond words and captures voids and their haunting effects on the researcher’s subjectivities. Overall, this thesis contributes to the study of absencing and haunting in Crimean semiotic landscapes, understanding them as a historically layered and yet temporally dynamic, affective and vibrant social phenomenon. As evident from the emic perspectives presented in the thesis, absenced semiotic landscapes are intricately tied to people and events, and can therefore be treated as manifestations of human displacement and dispossession. Further, an (auto)-ethnographic account shows how embodied experiences of absenced semiotic landscapes matter as they further allow the illumination of memory, space and the production of situated knowledge woven into the individual’s body and subjectivity. In sum, the thesis offers a new lens on semiotic landscapes, one that explores the mutual co-constitution of material-discursive processes hidden behind words and voids. In this way, it opens up an endless web of interconnections that informs the ways in which we make sense of social life.