Journal of Siberian Federal University. Humanities & Social Sciences / Flow Community, or Why Nobody Speaks “About Migrants” in the Khabarovsk Krai

Full text (.pdf)
Issue
Journal of Siberian Federal University. Humanities & Social Sciences. 2020 13 (5)
Authors
Bliakher, Leonid E.; Ivanova, Alina P.
Contact information
Bliakher, Leonid E.: Pacific National University Khabarovsk, Russian Federation; ; ORCID: 0000-0002-0610-9395; Ivanova, Alina P.: Pacific National University Khabarovsk, Russian Federation
Keywords
migrant; migration; flow culture; discourse; host community; Russian Far East
Abstract

One of the specific features of most Far Eastern territories is the extremely poor (at least in comparison with the European areas of Russia) development of the discourse “about migrants”. It remains an element of narrow professional reasoning about migration as a phenomenon. Moreover, it most often refers not to a person who has arrived in the Far East (Khabarovsk Krai), but to a former resident of the region who has left for other places. In relation to people arriving in the region, much more “partitive” terminology is used, in addition, this terminology often does not have an evaluative connotation, in contrast to the concept of “illegal migrant”. In our opinion, the reason for this word usage, which is not quite usual for the whole country, is some peculiarities accompanying creation of a regional community. For the most part of the 20th century and up to now, the region’s population enlarged thanks to migrants. Moreover, due to the multi-ethnic nature of the USSR, these newcomers belonged to very different ethnic groups. Meanwhile, the outflow of the population, which did not stop even in the most prosperous years, led to the fact that every approximately 20 years the composition of the population changed very significantly. As a result, the concepts of discourse “about migrants” have acquired much more complex and differentiated semantics. This article is focused precisely on this very semantics based on a discourse analysis of the local press and interviews with the residents of the Khabarovsk Krai

Pages
639–649
DOI
10.17516/1997-1370-0595
Paper at repository of SibFU
https://elib.sfu-kras.ru/handle/2311/135295

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