An Empire of Others. Creating Ethnographic Knowledge in Imperial Russia and the USSR

Ethnographers helped to perceive, to understand and also to shape imperial as well as Soviet Russia’s cultural diversity. This volume focuses on the contexts in which ethnographic knowledge was created. Usually, ethnographic findings were superseded by imperial discourse: Defining regions, connecting them with ethnic origins and conceiving national entities necessarily implied the mapping of political and historical hierarchies. But beyond these spatial conceptualizations the essays particularly address the specific conditions in which ethnographic knowledge appeared and changed. On the one hand, they turn to the several fields into which ethnographic knowledge poured and materialized, i.e., history, historiography, anthropology or ideology. On the other, they equally consider the impact of the specific formats, i.e., pictures, maps, atlases, lectures, songs, museums, and exhibitions, on academic as well as non-academic manifestations. Contents : 1. Introduction: On the Making of Ethnographic Knowledge in Russia 2. Imperial Case Studies: Russian and British Ethnographic Theory Part I: Paradigms 3. Russian Ethnography as a Science: Truths Claimed, Trails Followed 4. Beyond, Against, and with Ethnography: Physical Anthropology as a Science of Russian Modernity 5. Ethnography, Marxism and Soviet Ideology 6. Ethnogenesis and Historiography: Historical Narratives for Central Asia, 1940s–1950s Part II: Representations 7. Symbols, Conventions and Practices: Visual Representation of Ethnographic Knowledge on Siberia in Early Modern Maps and Reports 8. Empire Complex: Arrangements in the Russian Ethnographic Museum, 1910 9. Learning about the Nation: Ethnographical Representations of Children, Representations of Ethnography for Children Part III: Peoples 10. Siberian Ruptures: Dilemmas of Ethnography in Imperial Situation 11. Concepts of Ukrainian Folklore and the Transition from Imperial Russia to Stalin’s Soviet Empire 12. No Love Affair: Ingush and Chechen Imperial Ethnographies 13. National Inventions: The Imperial Emancipation of the Karaites from Jewishness 14. List of Contributors “The central contribution of this book is its detailed focus on the specific contexts that shaped the creation of ethnographic knowledge in modern Russia. When read together, the essays offer a revealing archeology of the discipline, showing readers how tsarist and Soviet ethnographers simultaneously defined both their subjects and their own expertise over a roughly three-hundred year period.”— Willard Sunderland , University of Cincinnati

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