CaMP Anthropology

Communication, Media and Performance

Category: Page 99 for CaMP Dissertations

Hyemin Lee takes the page 99 test

December 1st, 2025

Page 99 of my dissertation appears in a section exploring how immunity is communicated and understood across different domains of the Korean ginseng industry. The page opens with two revealing excerpts: one from a ginseng farmer and another from an agri-tech expert. Each excerpt offers distinct perspectives on what immunity means and why it matters for both cultivating and consuming this prized root.

In South Korea, immunity operates simultaneously as a folk concept and a scientific technology. For scientists, it serves as shorthand for the clinically validated health benefits attributed to Korean ginseng, backed by peer-reviewed research and laboratory data. For farmers, immunity represents not only the plant’s medicinal efficacy but also the embodied agricultural knowledge necessary to raise robust crops through careful attention to plants, seasonal timing, and cultivation techniques. For branding managers and marketing professionals, immunity becomes a culturally resonant concept that bridges traditional Korean medicine and modern wellness trends, making ginseng legible and desirable to diverse consumer audiences.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in South Korea between 2021 and 2023, my dissertation traces how various actors in the Korean ginseng industry, including government officials, scientists, farmers, and branding/marketing managers, translate scientific evidence of ginseng’s efficacy across different linguistic registers, professional contexts, and communicative modalities. These acts of translation, I argue, reveal shifting language ideologies that fundamentally shape how health, agriculture, and what is understood as Korean tradition are conceptualized and, crucially, made meaningful and communicable to both domestic and global publics.

Page 99 captures one essential piece of this larger analytical puzzle: the complex pathways through which immunity travels between scientific discourse, agricultural practice, and commercial branding. While this single page cannot represent the dissertation’s full scope, it exemplifies the productive tensions and unexpected overlaps that animate my broader analysis of ideologies of communicability, both expressed and implicit, in the Korean ginseng industry.

Lee, Hyemin. 2025. Evidence Doesn’t Speak For Itself: Translation, Communicability, and Scientization in the South Korean Ginseng Industry. New York University, Ph.D.
Dozandri Mendoza takes the pg. 99 test

November 10th, 2025

“This exhibition was not aimed at inviting people into the Ballroom space as that’s not my responsibility, but to share some of the aesthetic tools from the culture and teach folks how to ethically engage with Ballroom from the community understandings of interaction I had come to learn through my own engagement.”

This quote is from a longer vignette that spills onto page 99 of the dissertation, right in the middle of an outlined genealogy of artistic experimentation and training that led me develop a method for my dissertation I call the ethnographic kiki — an emergent performance-based ethnographic method that became crucial to my dissertation’s focus on genre, the semiotic meaning-capacity of the dancing body, and anti-colonial discourses in Puerto Rico’s queer/trans Ballroom scene. In Ballroom, kikis or kiki balls are smaller, intimate performance and competition spaces, made to have a low-pressure environment for people to explore their artistic skills and cultural socialization.

As someone who became a performer-participant in Puerto Rico’s Ballroom scene as I began to explore the category Face after encouragement from friends and members of the scene, this quote reflects the type of ethnographic refusal (Simpson 2009) that I tried to curate through the writing of the larger project. How could one write about a space they were invited into without subjecting it to the violent colonial optics of capture and recording that are so often part of the ethnographic method – especially in discourse-oriented sociocultural linguistic traditions? I was inspired by Vidali (2020)’s work on ethnographic theater, where I could adapt a performance-based approach to the kiki format of Ballroom culture, where knowledge production lied in the outcomes of dancing and interacting with the audience that could not be easily replicated on the page. What results is a method of data collection in my writing where I patchworked together vignettes and journal notes of my reflections on proprioception in dance, interactions during battle rounds of Ballroom categories, discussions on Puerto Rican diaspora in Ballroom, and just a few pictures and curated moments that my interlocutors allowed me to share.

Despite the profound theorization the kiki allowed me to exercise, the ball and Puerto Rican Ballroom themselves remain relatively opaque (Glissant 1997) in the dissertation, honoring a type of commitment to Ballroom’s call to not continue the widespread appropriation of its semiotic repertoire without ethical engagement with its artistic and political traditions on its own terms. I can tell you a lot about my own experience learning to perform cuntiness, but to truly be cunty you will have to find a Ballroom scene, build those relationships, and do the historical and kinesthetic homework to let it transform your understanding of gender, the body, and trans diasporic cultural production.

Édouard Glissant. 1997. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Audra Simpson. 2007. “On ethnographic refusal: Indigeneity, ‘voice’ and colonial citizenship.” Junctures: the journal for thematic dialogue.

Debra Vidali. 2020. “Ethnographic theater making: Multimodal alchemy, knowledge, and invention.” American Anthropologist, 122, no. 2: 394-409.

Dozandri Mendoza. 2025. Dando Cunt and Walking with the Transcestrxs: The Semiotics of Puerto Rican Ballroom Performance. University of California, Santa Barbara, PhD.
Ben Ale-Ebrahim takes the page 99 test

October 6th, 2025

My dissertation, Being Both: Negotiating Identity, Surveillance, and Belonging within Queer Middle Eastern and Queer Muslim Communities in the United States, explores how queer Muslims and queer Middle Eastern people in the U.S. navigate overlapping systems of Islamophobia, racialization, and homotransphobia. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in New York City and in digital spaces between 2020 and 2022, I analyze how surveillance and social scrutiny shape how people express identity and belonging across different audiences—family, friends, lovers, and online publics.

Page 99 captures the fraught intimacy of recognition online. I describe how a simple greeting—“I’m a Muslim too”—on a gay dating app can evoke both connection and fear. For queer Muslim men, such moments are charged with risk: being identified as Muslim might affirm kinship, but it can also expose them to outing, gossip, or familial shame. As one passage reads,

“Even though the risk may be small that screenshots of their Grindr profile and photos could be seen by family and friends, queer Muslim and Middle Eastern men are highly concerned about proactively managing the consequences if such a data breach were to occur. This anxiety about data insecurity shapes decisions they make about expressing ethnic and religious identity on gay dating apps and often limits their willingness to share personal information with other men who look like them until they know their interlocutor can be trusted.”

This moment distills a central theme of my project: the tension between visibility and safety. I call this dynamic observational discipline—the anticipatory awareness of being seen and the strategic effort to manage that gaze. Page 99 shows how technological infrastructures of dating and surveillance intersect with cultural and moral frameworks, producing a distinct affective terrain of cautious desire and mediated belonging.

Across the dissertation, queer Muslim and Middle Eastern participants navigate which versions of themselves can be legible and to whom. Through these micro-practices of watching and withholding, they create new possibilities for being both—queer and Muslim, Middle Eastern and American—within social worlds that often render such coexistence impossible.

Since completing the dissertation, I have been teaching business communication at Indiana University, where questions of identity, audience, and representation remain central to my work. Returning to page 99 reminds me that every act of communication, however brief, is also a negotiation of risk, recognition, and belonging.
Davine A. Sorapuru-Mitchell takes the page 99 test

September 1st, 2025

My dissertation, With Other Men: Love, Narrative, and Belonging Among Same-Sex Attracted Men in New Orleans, is an ethnographic study of how love narratives—structured around the phrase “I love you”—are interdiscursively linked to broader histories of racialized exclusion, public health discourse, and queer social life. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with same-sex attracted men in monogamous, polyamorous, and open relationships, the project traces how “I love you” is used at four key relational moments: its first utterance, after an argument, in times of joy, and at the end of a relationship.

Page 99 is in the second chapter, “‘I Love You’ After an Argument,” and begins midway through a paragraph in which I write:

[For the men in this study] repair is not just about resolving a linguistic misunderstanding—it is about re-establishing affective alignment, reaffirming commitment, and negotiating belonging within intimate relationships. This process of attunement is dynamic rather than linear, meaning that repair does not necessarily mean returning to a previous state, but rather constructing a new relational equilibrium. In this sense, misunderstanding is not merely a failure of communication, but a pivotal site where love, trust, and intimacy are tested and reconfigured.

For my interlocutors, especially those navigating intersectional histories of racial and sexual marginalization, repair becomes a moral and affective process through which belonging is reframed and love is sustained.

Page 99, therefore, does not capture the full scope of the dissertation, but it does highlight a central insight: that love and belonging are as fragile as they are enduring, and that it is through practices of repair, intersubjective attunement, and the ongoing efforts of choosing to remain with one’s partner(s) that new forms of intimacy, deeper connections, and new futures are made possible.

—-

Citation:

Sorapuru-Mitchell, Davine A. (2025) With Other Men: Love, Narrative, and Belonging Among Same-Sex Attracted Men in New Orleans. CUNY Academic Works.
Rachel Howard takes the page 99 test

August 18th, 2025

“After one candidate, the only one in a suit, described the many virtues of community involvement, a heckler shouted, “Frank, what clubs are you part of in the community?” leading the candidate to admit that he hadn’t gotten the opportunity to join any clubs…yet. The other candidate ended up winning her seat, returning to work with the Board members who had deposed her over the issue of her pickleball involvement” (page 99).

There are the things you study and then there are the things you realize your work is actually about. My dissertation, titled The Ends of the American Dream, studied retirement in the Southwest, but it is also about many other things: it is about families that we originate and that we make; it is about aging and confronting sickness and death; and it is about the way certain landscapes are used for leisure at the expense of future environmental sustainability.

Page 99 of my dissertation is the final section before the conclusion of Chapter 2 and includes the last bit of an ethnographic anecdote about a contentious Homeowner’s Board election cycle. It includes a brief description of the way that two of the candidates fit into (or don’t) the acceptable personae in the neighborhood. That chapter is all about what it is like to age in a housing development that was built especially for older bodies…It is also about aging in the 21^st century, in a youth-oriented culture that often reviles the aging. The community where I did my research has worked hard to combat the assumption that it is “just for old people.” It has done this, in part, by creating an ideal-type retiree who fits into its unofficial tagline: “if you’re bored here, you’ll be bored anywhere.”

If my research and dissertation had turned out the way I thought it would when I planned it out, this point in this Chapter would have fulfilled Ford Madox Ford’s proposal. Instead, this moment acts as a jumping off point for some of the other concerns of the dissertation: namely, the historical, political-economic, and ecological backstories that provide some of the foundations—for some people—inhabiting a post-Covid, and (maybe) post-liberal world. Further in the dissertation, I ask who gets to belong in the U.S. and how and why that answer came to be. So I suppose that one thing Page 99 shows is that, without those who are willing to enact the boundaries and erasures of belongingness, even in one relatively small community, that answer could look very different.
Lara Mertens takes the Page 99 Test

August 11th, 2025

Page 99 of my dissertation drops the reader into what I call a “technological (dis)connective happening.” It captures a moment during the pandemic, when offline events moved online. In this scene—part of an Airbnb Online experience on Zoom—my internet connection cut out for two minutes:

We could not see the others’ responses to our absence, if they stopped the experience or simply continued on, and apparently on their side of things, our video frame was completely static. When we were able to rejoin, the host said, ‘You’re back! We thought for a while you were statues because you were frozen!’

We laugh, and I shrug—just another reminder of how unpredictable connectivity could be.

These moments were everywhere in my fieldwork. They weren’t mistakes; they were the material. Participants and hosts navigated them through mute and video buttons, sudden exits, and uncertain returns. These weren’t actions on or by technology, but co-constituted entanglements—emergent expressions of human-technology relations always in flux. Page 99 names “the glitch”—what Betti Marenko calls “glitch-events,” which bring forth the “uncertainty, contingency, and indeterminacy” of digital processes (2015: 111). Or as one interlocutor on this page put it: “You don’t lag in real life.” But of course, we do. The digital simply renders that latency legible. It’s the infrastructural version of “shit happens.”

Zooming out, my dissertation explores how connectivity isn’t a binary (connected/disconnected), but a process of emergence—what Karen Barad might call an “ongoing reconfiguration of the world,” or what Tim Ingold frames as agencing, a becoming-with rather than a doing-to (Barad 2003: 818; 2007; Ingold 2017, 2020). “Control”—by humans or machines—was never absolute. Uncertainty wasn’t a defect; it was the condition for relation.

While this material now feels contextually dated, revisiting this page made me reflect on today’s technological shifts. As AI systems strive for perfect coherence and uninterrupted flow, I find myself returning to the glitch—not because it’s nostalgic, but because it’s revealing. The fantasy of seamless AI rests on a premise my research disassembled: that connectivity is binary, expected, and ultimately controllable. Perhaps, like my work on connectivity, intelligence, too, may be reframed from something measured by output to something defined by relation.

Just as (dis)connection isn’t a switch, intelligence isn’t merely a smooth response or rational reply. It’s not necessarily about getting things “right,” but about the conditions of emergence–about being entangled in a world that is unpredictable and shared. As AI becomes part of our social worlds, we need a conceptual vocabulary beyond prediction and polish. Glitches aren’t just breakdowns to be fixed; they’re reminders. Page 99 doesn’t just describe relational uncertainty; it invites it.

References

Barad, Karen. 2003. “Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 (3): 801–831.

———. 2007. Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Ingold, Tim. 2017. “On human correspondence.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 23 (1): 9–27.

———. 2020. “In the gathering shadows of material things.” In Exploring materiality and connectivity in anthropology and beyond, edited by Philipp Schorch, Martin Saxer, and Marlen Elders, 17–35. London: UCL Press.

Marenko, Betti. 2015. “When making becomes divination: Uncertainty and contingency in computational glitch-events.“ Design Studies 41: 110–125.
Yasmine Lucas takes the page 99 test

July 28th, 2025

Page ninety-nine of my dissertation offers an end-of-section summary, in which I distill the analytic work undertaken over the preceding ninety-eight pages. In these pages, I draw on Immanuel Kant’s theory of the sublime to illuminate how, beginning in the early 1960s, representations of the Holocaust were experienced within North American Jewish communities and mobilized toward a range of political, cultural, and affective ends.

The core argument is that many people—from survivors to more acculturated Jews—encountered the Holocaust as an object that exceeded human comprehension. The Holocaust emerged as such through television broadcasts, such as the 1961 Eichmann trials and 1978 miniseries Holocaust, in popularized survivor memoirs, and through news reports of wars in the Middle East. Through these and other media events, the Holocaust appeared as an impossibly huge or powerful object that strained human faculties, triggering a kind of psycho-affective short-circuit—a sublime glimpse of infinity. This glimpse was not unmarked. What, after Zachary Braiterman (2000), I call “the Holocaust sublime,” was filtered through different cultural schemas, depending on the person and community.

So is it that on page ninety-nine I identify the Judeo-Christian sublime of acculturated North American Jews. To summarize a ninety-eight-page story: In the 1960s, acculturated North American Jews found themselves in a socially ambiguous and uncomfortable position. They were neither subjected to the racial exclusions imposed on Black Americans nor granted undifferentiated white (Christian) status. The Holocaust sublime allowed them to psychically transform Jewish ambiguity into strength and coherence; the movement from absolute horror to infinity mirrored their aspirations for Jewish-American empowerment. Overcoming the Impossible emerged as a synecdoche of Jewish-American achievement and integration.

Holocaust survivors’ cultural schemas bestowed somewhat different meanings upon the Holocaust sublime, as it emerged in memory and through media. Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, for example, understood the Holocaust sublime in conjunction with the Kabbalistic philosophies of his youth. The infinite he glimpsed in the experience of the sublime was not primarily social and North American in nature, but rather evoked the Jewish God—a God at once immanent and transcendent, accessed through the collective study of Talmud in the shtetl where he grew up.

Naomi Seidman’s (2006) seminal work shows how Night, Wiesel’s famous memoir-cum-novel, was de-Judaized by his French Catholic publisher. My dissertation extends this analysis through close readings of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s institutional archives. As Chair of the Memorial Council between 1978 to 1986, Wiesel presided over a process whereby acculturated North American Jews—eager to mitigate antisemitism and claim a place in the emerging neoliberal order—reinterpreted the Holocaust sublime. In this translation, infinite horror no longer indexed divine mystery or the promise of European Jewish spiritual renewal. Instead, it signified the triumph over Jewish ambiguity, and achievement in the (Christian) capitalist order.

On page ninety-nine, I recall the Wiesel example before turning to the creation of the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre (later renamed the Montreal Holocaust Museum), which vies for the title of first Holocaust museum in North America. Emil Fackenheim—a survivor, writer, and Reform rabbi—spoke at the 1976 grand opening. His understanding of the Holocaust sublime (discussed in previous pages of the dissertation) diverged significantly from Wiesel’s. Fackenheim saw the horror revealed at Auschwitz as a Call for Jews to militantly defend their existence as a people. He interpreted Zionism as a divine imperative—a rebirth of Jewish chosenness through socio-political sovereignty. The young founders of the Montreal museum, on the other hand—foremost among them my interlocutor Stephen Cummings—understood Zionism in tandem with their version of the Holocaust sublime, as an overcoming of North American ambiguity.

The chapter’s final thrust is a discovery I made through an archival field recording: “At the 1976 opening of the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre, survivors on the memorial committee handed over an urn containing ashes from Auschwitz to Cummings and the other young founders of the museum.”

This symbolic gesture encapsulates the central thesis of Holocaust Sublime: The Making of Neoliberal Affect. In North America, variegated understandings of the Holocaust sublime were conflated and homogenized from the 1970s onward to produce the version we find concretized in museums, and educational and memorial initiatives, today: one in which confronting “the Holocaust” functions as a synecdoche of triumphing over “all ambiguities of social existence” (Arendt 2017: 85), so as to assimilate into—and foster the creation of—the neoliberal order that took over the world during these same years.

Works Cited

Arendt, Hannah. 2017 (1951). The Origins of Totalitarianism. Penguin Classics.

Braiterman, Zachary. 2000. “Against Holocaust-Sublime: Naive Reference and the Generation of Memory.” History and Memory 12(1): 7–28.

Lucas, Yasmine E. 2024. “Holocaust Sublime: The Making of Neoliberal Affect.” Ph.D. diss., Toronto, ON: University of Toronto.

Seidman, Naomi. 2006. “The Holocaust in Every Tongue.” In Faithful Renderings, 199-242. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rachael Sebastian takes the page 99 test

July 21st, 2025

The 99^th page of my dissertation is nestled within Chapter 3: When Words Fail: Therapeutic Aspects of Visual Arts—my favorite chapter. Conveniently, by explaining this chapter, I also show what my dissertation is about overall. It is about the visual arts community in the Southern Tier of New York state, and the role of community spaces to do their thing, and the DIY (do-it-yourself) ethos of a particular subculture within the broader art scene of a now rustbelt town. It is about how these folks, through their artistic practices and the process of creating, are coping with, among other things, life in a de-industrialized town with limited economic opportunities.

Chapter 3 is where I present my data about the act of creating art in the “narrating moment” when the performance of visual storytelling occurs. How does the act of making self-portraits, and crafting a visual story in that way facilitate the embodiment and enactment of an identity, of a persona that is broadly therapeutic and cathartic? I love this chapter because it highlights their creativity and thoughtfulness and presents very real ways that art make life better.

However…. the 99^th page is the 5^th page of this chapter, void of the beautiful words shared with me during interviews. Rather it contains hedging and caveats, explaining that while Western psychological terminology appears, it does makes up part of the broader frameworks my participants operate within, along with therapy speak and wellness discourses. “This “therapy culture” and the broader discourses of mental health are similar to what Marsilli-Vargas (2016) noticed in Buenos Aires. She examined the unique way that discourses found in psychotherapy had permeated the broader culture to the point where discussions of projection and the psycho-somatic came up in everyday conversations.” I also draw inspiration from Grinker (2021), and wanted to make it clear that the diagnoses that came up in my work are in fact culturally and temporally mediated “idioms of distress” (Nichter 1981).

What is funny to me about the content of page 99, is that it is where I most explicitly did what ended up being a subject of critique in my defense. In my revisions, I went through the document to ensure that I took care to not accidentally naturalize these diagnoses and to be clear that these are “idioms of distress” (Nichter 1981) based in a Western psychological framework.

Sebastian, Rachael. 2025. “Sevastra—Art Saves:” Narratives of Trauma and Transformations Through Visual Arts. Binghamton University Ph.D. http://proxy.binghamton.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/sevastra-art-saves-narratives-trauma/docview/3212460241/se-2?accountid=14168

Grinker, Roy Richard. 2021. Nobody’s Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness. New York, USA: W.W. Norton and Company.

Marsilli-Vargas, Xochitl. 2016. “The Offline and Online Mediatization of Psychoanalysis in Buenos Aires.” Signs and Society 4 (1): 135–53.

Nichter, Mark. 1981. “Idioms of distress: Alternatives in the expression of psychosocial distress: A case study from South India.” Culture, medicine and psychiatry 5(4): 379-408.
Erin Mellett takes the page 99 test

April 7th, 2025

Page 99 of my dissertation, “Language, Identity, and Belonging: An Ethnography of Deaf Immigrants in the Northeast United States,” falls towards the end of its first ethnographic chapter. It is in this chapter that I detail some of the story of Isabel, a deaf woman and mother of three who was born and raised in the Dominican Republic and immigrated to the United States as an adult. Through a position in the Deaf Services department of an independent living center in a northeastern city of the U.S., I worked with Isabel as she navigated the U.S. naturalization process. Page 99 comes after my description of the day when Isabel, following years of paperwork, scheduling setbacks, preparation, and studying, successfully passed the naturalization interview/test to become a U.S. citizen.

The chapter (and the dissertation as whole) are meant to emphasize a few things. First, the dense policies and procedures of the U.S. immigration/naturalization process are simply the newest in a longer legacy of policies that have excluded deaf and disabled people from the United States. Second, contrary to notions of deaf immigrants as linguistically impoverished, my interlocutors had varied and flexible semiotic repertoires and demonstrated an ability to navigate communicative encounters with an immense degree of proficiency. Third, and what the heart of Page 99 really entails, is that the social and interpersonal dimensions of communication are as significant, if not more so, than the linguistic dimensions. Working with emerging ASL-users, I found that the affordances of sign languages (such as their iconicity) enabled cross-linguistic communication in ways not possible through spoken language, but much more important to deaf immigrants’ capacity to navigate communicative encounters were collaborative language brokering practices and a moral orientation towards establishing understanding across and despite difference. Particularly in sites where the stakes for effective communication were high, like in encounters with the U.S. immigration regime, moments of language brokering or informal interpretation emerged as crucial enactments of a deaf solidarity and relationality that enabled my interlocutors to better navigate a system designed to exclude them.

I find myself feeling appreciative of the opportunity to revisit my dissertation in this current moment as I am reminded that practices of collaboration and intentional care work have been (and will continue to be) crucial in an age of increasing intolerance towards those whose bodies/minds have been deemed nonnormative.
James Meador takes the page 99 test

March 17th, 2025

My dissertation Making Chinese Orthodox explored the Chinese Orthodox Church as a site of interaction between Russian and Chinese states. Page 99 comes at the end of the first full chapter, which examined the entanglement of multilingualism and religious confession in the first contact between Russian and Qing Chinese empires (17th-18th centuries). After 1720, at the end of this opening era, Qing texts began to refer to Russian Orthodox priests as lamas, a term otherwise reserved for Tibetan or Mongolian Buddhist clerics. Prior to this, Orthodox Christianity was not distinguished from Catholicism. This change in nomenclature was never formally announced, but followed the conclusion of the Rites Controversy and its partial ban on Catholicism in Qing China. Russian Orthodox priests appear to have been quietly reclassified as lamas in order to exempt them from this ban. This special treatment emerged in the context of an emerging diplomatic system that provided for the regular rotation of Russians through Beijing. Page 99 elaborates what I argue is the reason for this shift:

a major motivation had to be the necessity of securing a renewable and controllable source of language contact to train interpreters and translators to work directly between Manchu and Russian. For the [1689 Treaty of] Nerchinsk generation, this work had been performed by native Russian speakers of the Russian Company.

The Russian Company in the Qing’s Eight Banners organization was introduced earlier in the chapter. Originally a group of Siberian Cossacks who left Russia to enter Qing service, they subsequently became low-ranking hereditary members of the Qing’s Manchu elite. The normalization of Russian-Qing relations after 1689 and the first attempt to create a territorial border meant that these kinds of transfers were no longer officially permitted by either side. The Russian Company members’ intermarriage with other Eight Banner families in Beijing led to rapid language shift. Within a generation, members of the Russian Company did not speak or read Russian, though they retained nominal adherence to Orthodox Christianity along their patriline (as was the custom for Manchu family religion). A handful of Orthodox priests were dispatched from Russia on 10 year tours of duties to provide pastoral care for these Russian Company families – primarily life cycle ritual and annual festivals like Pascha (Easter).

Much like their designation as lamas, this pastoral care was partly pretext. The driving motive appears to have been to engineer situations of language contact and socialization. Why was it necessary to work directly between Manchu and Russian? Why not communicate in Mongolian, for instance, which was spoken and written by subjects in both empires? Neither the Russian nor Qing elites trusted Mongols, who retained a great deal of autonomy in this period. Instead, agents of both states sought to rely on kinds of persons whose social reproduction and personal survival were both dependent upon the state. A key tool in this regard was neglect. The salaries given to the Russian visitors in Beijing were woefully insufficient, so over a decade of poverty, Russian priests often found themselves moonlighting as assistants to the Qing’s Russian translators, as the translators’ job required a competence in Russian they did not possess and had no means to acquire. Surprisingly, this system served for generations as the engine of linguistic expertise enabling high-level official communication between the Russian and Qing empires, a diplomatic system that preserved peace between the two empires for the better part of two centuries. The simultaneously ad-hoc and complexly institutionalized character of these practices offer a helpful illustration of the seemingly paradoxical nature of imperial rule—a mix of autocratic will, bureaucratic precedent, and spontaneous self-organization that could be both homogenizing and diversifying at the same time.