Chechen women cry watching a performance about Stalin’s deportation of the Chechens to Central Asia, Grozny, 2013. Photo (c): Associated Press / Musa Sadulayev. All rights reserved.When I was offered to review Veiled and Unveiled in Chechnya and Dagestan, I was thrilled. The book is based on a decade of fieldwork and interviews with many people in Dagestan and Chechnya. And as a researcher of the North Caucasus, I know how rare up-to-date data from the region is — and how difficult it is for outsiders to conduct field work there.
Most universities refuse to sign off on ethical clearance to conduct fieldwork there, citing government warnings advising against all travel. Even if a researcher does make it there, a foreign passport can set off red flags, inviting unwanted government attention and harassment which can discourage even the most dogged investigator. Indeed, I’ve had my share of obstacles — I look somewhat local (Armenian), have a semi-local passport (Armenian), have family connections to the region and speak fluent Russian. I imagine the scrutiny the book’s authors, Polish researchers Iwona Kaliszewska and Maciej Falkowski, experienced over the course of ten years was much more invasive.
What piqued my interest further was the book’s presentation as a “portrait of life” that focuses on girls and women in the North Caucasus. With the bulk of popular and academic literature on the region focused on the macro-level dynamics of ethnicity, Islam, and war, I was looking forward to a book that would shift focus to women’s everyday lives.
