Ilya Utekhin Toward a Semiotic Analysis of "Dwelling Place Paranoids" Some Cultural Determinants of a Psychopathology The term "dwelling place paranoids" was recently proposed by the Russian psy- chiatrist A. Medvedev to denote a special case of paranoid disorders belonging to the group of so-called "involutionary psychoses", that is, psychotic disorders observed in elderly people (Medvedev 1990). The delirious verbal and non- verbal behaviour of such paranoid subjects is related to their dwelling place: they accuse neighbours of systematically stealing and damaging their things, and believe that their neighbours are persecuting them in order to inflict material and moral damage. At the same time, such paranoid people retain good memory function and continue to perform normally all the usual activities of everyday life. Their intellectual abilities are not affected. Disorders of this sort may have different etiologies, some of them unrelated to schizophrenia. Typically, people who suffer from dwelling-place paranoia, and who receive psychiatric treatment for that disorder, reside almost exclusively in so-called "communal apartments" (CAs). Communal apartments are a type of housing common in large Soviet cities. There, several families live in one big apartment, with each family having its own room, but sharing facilities such as kitchen, toilet, bathroom, telephone, and so on. When clinical phenomena observed in cases of dwelling place paranoids are put into a broader perspective, then one can view systematic patterns between the normal daily activities and attitudes of healthy neighbours, on the one hand, and the content of delirious behaviours, on the other. My observations are based on ethnographic fieldwork that I conducted in big CAs in St. Petersburg in 1997-98, as well as on par- ticipant observation for more than three decades (for details, see Utekhin 2001; see also, http://www.kommunalka.spb.ru, where a virtual museum of communal apartment is located). '\?? Toward a Semiotic Analysis of "Dwelling Place Paranoids" Some readers might remember the following episode from the classic Ernst Lubitsch film Ninochka (1939), in which Greta Garbo plays the role of a Soviet foreign trade employee. After a series of comic adventures, she is returning from Paris to her humble room, which she shares with two neighbours in a densely populated, communal apartment building in Moscow. The term "com- munal apartment" initially meant simply a state-owned apartment, which oper- ated without a building manager and in which order was maintained by the tenants themselves. In fact, however, this self-organisation turned out to reveal the worse moral qualities of people involved in a struggle for survival in dire circumstances of over-population, and the order usually came from an outside authority such as a housing administration, militia, or People's Court. To repre- sent the voice of authorities, official instructions were issued aimed at the regu- lating internal order in the apartments. However, people used to add their own handwritten, local instructions, with detailed prescriptions concerning poten- tially controversial issues that might arise in everyday CA life. Living together in CAs gave birth to the characteristic features of what we may call traditional "communal" mentality. In the first place, the latter is a par- ticular organisation of privacy: lack of space usually led to a situation in which several people- usually, though not always, belonging to the same family -lived in the same room. In addition to a life in which one is constantly observed by one's family members, CA living also takes place under the watchful eye of neighbours, since all everyday practices, concerns. and events are perceived by other tenants as well, who see, hear, and even smell what all the other tenants do or have. Lack of privacy leads to an oversensitivity to violations of privacy and its symbolic substitutes. A continuous being "on stage", because of sharing the same space, combines in CAs with specific practices of hygiene and pri- vacy, because tenants share the same toilet, bathroom, and kitchen facilities. No one takes personal interest in, nor responsibility for, properly maintaining public spaces. Hence, cleaning and repairs, if performed, follow the principle of mini- mally sufficient effort. Due to lack of resources, on the one hand, and to necessary expenses and efforts, on the other, the fair sharing of goods and costs is implied in most CA activities. Queueing is an important dimension of everyday relations among neighbours. It is often institutionalised through written schedules of activities. These schedules are intended to control bathroom usage as well as the order in which apartments are to be cleaned. The sharing of costs and resources is heavily emotionally charged with envy, and people are extremely sensitive to the fairness of the distribution. The idea of "Limited Good" - which represents the notion that all goods come from one source and are therefore subject to strictly control- led distribution -proves useful in conceptualizing some aspects of the mentality 523