Life polyrhythm: Fear,anger,and gratitude surrounding a Russian military base in post-Soviet Armenia

Abstract

This article explores the tranquility, hangist-ness, and the simultaneous roar of the Russian military landscape in Gyumri, Armenia’s second-largest city. It specifically examines residents’ encounters with the Russian military base and how these interactions evoke feelings of fear and anger, as well as gratitude and security. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, the article argues that the affective negotiation of this foreign military presence creates a life polyrhythm in times of conflict. This polyrhythm brings into focus the social fabric surrounding the military base, an entity typically perceived as an entity of order. Yet this fabric reveals an affective messiness, that is strongly situated and often marked by contradictions and paradoxes. The aim of the article is to show how geopolitics are constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed in uneven ways. It highlights the complex effects of geopolitics on people’s lived realities and contributes to anthropological debates on order, risk, and uncertainty.