Russia, Anthropology in SERGEI ALYMOV AND SERGEI SOKOLOVSKIY Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia Eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries Although travelogues as well as information about exotic peoples existed in the medieval Russian state, the beginning of scientific systematic collection of this information can be traced back to the establishment of the Academy of Sciences by Peter the Great in 1725. The most noteworthy Muscovite precursors of academic ethnography in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were the cartographer Semen Remezov and the nobleman Grigorii Novitskii, with their Brief Description of the Ostiak People (1715). The age of Enlightenment, ushered in by Peter, was also a period of great academic expeditions which carried on throughout the eighteenth century. The most well known of these were the expedition of Daniel Gottlieb Messerschmidt to Siberia (1720–27) and the Great Northern Expedition, led by naval explorer Vitus Jonassen Bering and with an “academic troop” including Gerhard Friedrich Müller and Johann Georg Gmelin (1733–43). The “Physical Expedition” headed by Peter Simon Pallas, which also featured the famous Russian historian Vasilii Tatishchev among its organizers, traversed southern Russia and Siberia from the Orenburg Steppe to the Transbaikal region (1768–74) and studied the southern borders of the empire. These expeditions were aimed at collecting mainly knowledge about the natural resources of the empire’s vast periphery. They studied mineral, botanical, and water resources; made geographical maps; and discovered new routes. The works that were published as a result of these expeditions also depicted the diversity of peoples and the languages they encountered. The findings were conveyed to the imperial authorities in numerous maps and memos. The scientific results were also published in German, Russian, and French. According to Vermeulen (2015), one of the main outcomes of these expeditions was the genesis of ethnography or ethnology as “research programs” which later resulted in the inception of the term “ethnology.” The German historian Gerhard Friedrich Müller (1705–83) joined the Academy in St. Petersburg in 1725 and was enlisted in the Bering expedition to study Siberia’s history and geography. He collected a huge amount of information about the peoples of this land, only part of which was published in his History of Siberia (1750, 1761–63, etc.). Müller also suggested terms for a new scientific field such as “history of peoples” (historia gentium) and “description of peoples” (Völker-Beschreibung). These terms were probably the prototypes for the term “ethnographia,” coined by Müller’s associate August Ludwig Schlözer (1735–1809) and his colleagues at Göttingen in the 1760s and 1770s. One of the major influences behind this development was philosopher G. W. Leibniz’s idea of historical linguistics as evidence for the “origins of nations,” applied by Müller to his Siberian material. The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Edited by Hilary Callan. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. DOI: 10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea2360 2 R U SSI A , A NT HR OP OL OGY IN Apart from Müller’s conceptualizations, the age of great expeditions yielded the first systematic ethnographic description of the peoples of the empire. Its author, the doctor and naturalist Johann Gottlieb Georgi (1729–77) took part in the Physical Expedition and published his Description of All Peoples Living in the Russian State in St. Petersburg in 1776–77, based on both his own field observations and the works of his predecessors. He also personally consulted Müller and other academics. The book was a series of essays on the peoples of European Russia, Siberia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, classified according to their linguistic affinity. Each essay was organized in a similar way and contained information on a people’s name, territory, history, physical type, laws, way of life, material culture, mores, and so on. The first half of the nineteenth century saw the continuation of geographical explorations—broadened to include the Americas, the Pacific, and the Far East. The influence of Romanticism contributed to the development of folklore collection and interest in the life of the Russian peasantry. Scholars such as Ivan Snegirev (1797–1868), Ivan Sakharov (1807–63), and Aleksandr Tereshchenko (1806–65) published collections and analyses of songs, proverbs, and so on. First institutions The institutionalization of ethnography as a discipline in Russia is usually dated back to 1845, when the Imperial Russian Geographical Society (IRGO), with a department of statistics and ethnography, was established. This took place amid the struggle between two factions: academics and naval officers mostly of German origin and the “Russian faction,” supported by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. In the first years of its existence the Department of Statistics and Ethnography was controlled by the naturalist Karl von Baer (1792–1876), who established its aims in terms of the study of human “races” with a focus on the non-Russian periphery. Baer was also the first Russian biological anthropologist who classified crania in the Kunstkamera (Russia’s first museum, also established by Peter the Great) collection and published papers on craniology. Baer’s vision was challenged by the philologist and literary critic Nikolai Nadezhdin (1804–56), who took over as head of the department in 1848. In his first published statement of the goals of Russian ethnography, “About the Ethnographic Study of the Russian Nationality” (1847), Nadezhdin presented his view, based on the tradition of Johann Gottfried von Herder and Friedrich Schelling who considered humanity as divided into “distinct nations, each one animated by a unique and immutable essence which revealed itself in the creative expression of common folk” (Knight 1998, 120). His vision of Romantic nationalism combined with his belief in the ability of ethnography to reveal and present this “essence” in scientific terms. Under Nadezhdin the Department of Ethnography carried out a vast survey of Russian folklore and traditions based on questionnaires, completed by local correspondents. The most interesting answers were published by IRGO or were included in Aleksandr Afanasiev’s famous collection Russian Folktales (1855–63). The society also published the first ethnographical map of the Russian empire in 1851, prepared by Peter Köppen. R U SSI A , A NT HR OP OL OGY IN 3 The institutionalization of physical/biological anthropology in Russia also took place in a learned society—in this case, the Society of Amateurs of Natural Sciences, established in 1863 at Moscow University. In the following year a department of anthropology was created there, which was renamed the Imperial Society of Amateurs in Natural Science, Anthropology and Ethnography (OLEAE) in 1867. The driving force behind this institution for the first few decades was the professor of zoology at Moscow University, Anatolii Bogdanov (1834–96), whose specialism in anthropology was craniology. He organized systematic archaeological excavations of burial hills in the Moscow region and authored the first Russian monograph in biological anthropology titled The Materials for the Anthropology of the Burial Hills Period in the Moscow Region (1867). In 1879 the Society opened an international anthropological exhibition and congress in Moscow, which firmly placed Russia on the map of world anthropology. In 1889 OLEAE started the first Russian ethnographical journal Etnograficheskoe obozrenie (Ethnographical Review) to publish folklore and ethnographic materials collected by the intelligentsia in the provinces, including political exiles, along with the papers of famous scholars. In 1887 chairs in geography and ethnography were established in the natural sciences departments of Moscow and St. Petersburg universities. Although lectures in ethnography featured in the curriculum, it was oriented toward physical anthropology. Dmitrii Anuchin (1843–1923) held the chair in Moscow. A student of Bogdanov, he studied in the 1870s with Pierre-Paul Broca (1824–80), Paul Topinard (1830–1911), and Rudolf Virchow (1830–1902). During his long career Anuchin produced a range of anthropological studies, the most influential among them being About the Geographical Distribution of the Body Height of the Male Population of Russia (1889). Anuchin taught the next generation of Moscow anthropologists and ethnographers (Vladimir Bogdanov, Viktor Bunak, and Boris Kuftin among others). The first lecturer of anthropology at St. Petersburg University was Eduard Gottlieb Petri (1854–99), descended from a Livonian Swedish family, who received his medical education in Berne. His lectures on “Anthropology” were published in two volumes in 1890 and 1895 and became the first course book on the subject in Russian. In 1888 the Russian Anthropological Society at St. Petersburg University was established (Mogilner 2013). It became the mouthpiece of the school of anthropologists. From 1907 it was led by Fyodor Volkov (Vovk) (1847–1918), a Ukrainian national activist, anthropologist, archaeologist, and ethnographer, born in Poltava province in Small Russia/Ukraine. After twenty-five years of exile, which he spent mostly in Paris, he was allowed to return to the Russian empire and taught anthropology and ethnography at St. Petersburg University. In 1916 he published his essays on the anthropology and ethnography of Ukrainians, which became not only a valuable contribution to scholarship but also founding texts of the Ukrainian nationalist movement. His disciples Nikolai Mogilianskii (1871–1933) and Sergei Rudenko (1885–1969) introduced the term etnos as the core concept for the science of ethnography. Museums were important for the development of anthropology in Russia. The oldest, Kunstkamera (German Kunstkammer), was established in 1714 to hold collections of various “curiosities,” including those acquired by Peter the Great during his “Grand Embassy” to Europe. Over the following centuries it gathered valuable collections of 4 R U SSI A , A NT HR OP OL OGY IN artifacts from travelers and explorers. The Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography was established on the basis of these collections in 1879. In the early twentieth century Kunstkamera employed, among others, Vasilii Radlov (1837–1918), Lev Shternberg (1861–1927), and Vladimir Bogoraz (1865–1936). The ethnographic division of the Russian Museum of Emperor Alexander III, established in 1902, was a more nationally oriented institution. Under Dmitry Klements (1847–1914) and Nikolai Mogilianskii (1871–1933) the division amassed a valuable collection of artifacts of the peoples of the Russian empire. Ethnography/anthropology in the Russian empire was often produced by nonprofessional authors, including the local intelligentsia and military and civic officials. Fieldwork and theories If contemporary Russian anthropologists were confronted with the task to name a symbolic founding father of their discipline, it would be Nikolai Miklukho-Maclay (1846–88). Born to a family of engineers, Miklukho-Maclay studied zoology in Germany with the naturalist and Darwinist Ernst Haeckel. Nikolai’s first publications considered the problem of evolution in sponges and fish. Gradually his interests shifted toward anthropology. His expedition to Papua New Guinea was financed by IRGO and included naturalistic, anthropological, and ethnographic tasks, influenced by Karl Baer’s ideas on the origins of Papuans. Maclay spent about three years on the northwestern shore of New Guinea during his stays in 1871–72, 1876–77, and 1883. He kept a detailed diary and collected all kinds of information about the nature and natives of the place, including word lists and many drawings of their material culture. This was an early example of long-term participant observation fieldwork. Unfortunately, Miklukho-Maclay’s premature death prevented him from summarizing his findings. Apart from the information contained in the diaries, his main contribution to anthropology was refuting racist theories, which considered colored people as intermediate links between Europeans and their animal ancestors. He was also active in development schemes aimed at protecting Papuans from English and German colonialism. The scholar tried to convince the tsar and the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs to take these territories under Russian protection and even entertained a project of a Russian settlement modeled on socialist ideas (Tumarkin 1982). Long-term fieldwork, socialism, and exile are interconnected in the history of Russian anthropology. A number of future important figures in late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century anthropology were revolutionary socialists and Marxists, who turned to fieldwork in Siberia out of necessity or desire to find some intellectual occupation. Most of them (e.g., Vladimir Bogoraz, Vladimir Iokhelson (1855–1937), Dmitry Klements, and Lev Shternberg) were champions of peasant socialism (narodniki), and some were Marxists (e.g., Felix Kon). Populist convictions attracted political exiles to study the Russian peasant commune—the institution they tended to idealize in their political theory (Ssorin-Chaikov 2008). Most of the “political fieldworkers” were sent to Eastern Siberia, where they contributed to the study of Yakuts, Chukchi, and other Siberian peoples. Shternberg and Bogoraz were the founding fathers of R U SSI A , A NT HR OP OL OGY IN 5 the Leningrad school of ethnographers that emerged in the 1920s. Experienced fieldworkers themselves, they championed the long-term fieldwork method among their students who were supposed to spend at least a year among the people under study, usually combining this with teaching, compiling textbooks, organizing soviets and cooperatives, and other forms of Soviet political activism. At the turn of the century theoretically minded anthropologists in Russia inclined toward evolutionism. Shternberg is the best example of this trend. His first anthropological publication analyzed Gilyak (Nivkh) clan structure and presented it as a proof of Morgan’s idea of group marriage. As such it was noticed and praised by Friedrich Engels. Shternberg remained faithful to evolutionism throughout his life, although was open to new trends in anthropological theory, especially to Boas, with whom Shternberg, Bogoraz, and Iokhelson collaborated in the Jesup North Pacific Expedition (Kan 2009). Evolutionism was the guiding light of the lectures of Moscow ethnographer Nikolai Kharuzin (1865–1900), which were published in four volumes in 1901–5. Sociologist, historian, and liberal politician Maxim Kovalevskii (1851–1916) wrote influential evolutionist tracts on law and customs among Caucasus peoples, as well as on the origins of family and property. Among other theories, Ratzel’s anthropogeography was popularized by Dmitry Koropchevskii, who held the chair of geography and ethnography at St. Petersburg in the early years of the twentieth century. Diffusionism was popularized by Bogoraz in his Diffusion of Culture on Earth: The Basics of Ethno-geography (1928). The most consistent critique of evolutionism in Russian pre-revolutionary thought was presented by another former exile-turned-anthropologist, Aleksandr Maximov (1872–1941). The Soviet period There were a lot of former revolutionaries and liberals among anthropologists and the intelligentsia at large who, like Shternberg, hailed the February Revolution of 1917 but were rather skeptical about the October one. The most well-known anthropologists who left Soviet Russia were Vladimir Iokhelson and Sergei Shirokogorov (1887–1939). Shirokogorov settled in China and published all his works in English, including the monumental Psychomental complex of the Tungus (1935). While in the West he is mostly known as an expert in shamanism and Evenki culture, in Russia his theory of etnos has had a long history of suppression and revival. The nexus between anthropology and the new regime was provided by the Bolsheviks’ politics of affirmative action toward the former colonized and oppressed nationalities. The language for this politics developed within the Commission for the Study of Tribal Composition of Russia (KIPS) at the Russian Geographical Society. This commission grew out of the Commission for Ethnographic Maps of Russia at the IRGO, organized in 1910. The commission drew up an ambitious plan of compiling maps showing the distribution of elements of culture and of physical anthropological features for the whole empire. Fyodor Volkov (1847–1918) and his students David Zolotarev (1885–1935) and Sergei Rudenko played a leading part in the project. They were also active in the KIPS, which was instrumental in producing ethnic maps of the Soviet 6 R U SSI A , A NT HR OP OL OGY IN Union and in preparing lists of nationalities for censuses in the 1920s–1930s (Hirsh 2005). Another Soviet governing body that engaged ethnographers was the Committee of the North (1924–35), which developed numerous projects of modernization and of the Sovietization of the life of the peoples of the north (Slezkine 1996). The 1920s was a decade of comparable tolerance of the regime toward intellectual life. Anthropologists also benefited from an increasing number of jobs in academic and applied spheres. Ethnography finally institutionalized as an independent university discipline, with departments established in Moscow and Leningrad universities. The Faculty of Ethnology (1925–31) in Moscow was headed by the historian P. Preobrazhenskii (1894–1941), whose Course of Ethnology (1929) was critical of evolutionism and championed the historicizing of ethnology. The leading professors at the Department of Ethnography at Petrograd/Leningrad University were Shternberg, Bogoraz, and the expert in Slavic ethnography Dmitry Zelenin (1878–1954). The Cultural Revolution of the late 1920s to early 1930s left its mark on the history of Soviet anthropology. The introduction of Marxism into the discipline was dramatic. There was a period of ideological critique that stigmatized ethnology as a “bourgeois science” and its key concepts—culture and ethnos—as race thinly disguised. These accusations were especially pronounced in 1929 at the Conference of Ethnographers of Leningrad and Moscow. The leading critic was a proponent of the linguist Nikolai Marr’s (1865–1934) new theory of language and a lecturer in Marxist theory at Moscow State University, Valerian Aptekar (1899–1937). He called for the study of essentialized “timeless” cultures to be abandoned and for a turn to “actual societies,” with their class divisions and struggles. Another all-union meeting of ethnographers and archaeologists took place in 1932. This meeting proclaimed that the project of creating Marxist ethnography and archaeology had failed. The classification of disciplines according to the source data was labeled “bourgeois.” All former ethnographers were supposed to become historians of pre-class or early class formations who use fieldwork along with other sources. The purported “abolishment” of ethnography/anthropology did not hold. After a series of reorganizations, KIPS morphed into the Institute for Anthropology, Archaeology and Ethnography (IAAE), established in 1933. A new generation of ethnographers produced a series of Marxist studies of “actual societies” and their social stratification, using the theory of social strata as their main analytic tool (Alymov 2014). The Great Purge of the second half of the 1930s took its toll on Soviet anthropology. According to one account, up to 500 persons related to ethnography were repressed, including the leader of Marxist ethnography and director of the IAAE, Nikolai Matorin (1898–1936). Repressions applied both to old-school pre-revolutionary scholars and their Marxist critics. Proponents of ethnology abolishment such as Marrist–Marxist critics Valerian Aptekar and Sergei Bykovskii (1896–1936) were shot. Volkov’s students Sergei Rudenko and David Zolotarev were exiled. Rudenko survived the Gulag and later became famous for his archaeological findings in Altai and Chukotka. The university teaching of ethnography was abandoned, although postgraduate education at the institute, as well as museum ethnographic work, continued. The 1920s–1930s was also a period when innovative approaches such as structuralism emerged in the works of folklorist Vladimir Propp (1895–1970) and ethnographer Aleksandr Zolotarev (1907–43). R U SSI A , A NT HR OP OL OGY IN 7 Propp’s famous Morphology of the Tale (1928) and Historical Roots of the Fairy Tale (1946) identified the structure of the tales’ plots and offered interpretations about their roots in the primitive society. Aleksandr Zolotorev’s most important theoretical work, The Dual Organization of Primitive Peoples and the Origins of Dualistic Cosmogonies, was completed by 1941 but was published posthumously only in 1964. Drawing on wide comparative material, the author observed the universal character of dualistic myths and hypothesized “dual organization” as the earliest form of social life. The state–science nexus reemerged during the years of World War II. In the last days of 1942 the Moscow group of the Institute of Ethnography (IE) was created, headed by the ethnographer and archaeologist Sergei Tolstov (1907–76). A student of Preobrazhenskii and Kuftin, he became one of enthusiasts of Marxist ethnography in the late 1920s and early 1930s. His main scientific achievement was the Khorezm expedition to Central Asia, which yielded numerous archaeological findings. The volume Ancient Khorezm (1948), based on these findings, also contained anthropological interpretations of Central Asian myths and religion, which were in tune with Zolotorev’s views on dual organization. During World War II the work at the Moscow branch centered on the Department for Ethnic Statistics and Cartography. Its task was to provide memos and maps on ethnic composition and ethnic borders of the territories to the west of the Soviet border for the Red Army and the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. They were never published. The head of the department, Pavel Kushner (1889–1968), published his influential book Ethnic Territories and Ethnic Borders (1951) on the basis on this research. After the war the Moscow group was made the center of the Institute of Ethnography, and the Leningrad group, based in Kunstkamera—its branch. Departments of ethnography at Moscow and Leningrad universities resumed their activity. The head of the centralized institute Sergei Tolstov proclaimed a Soviet school of ethnography. In his formulation, ethnography was “a branch of history that studies cultural characteristics of various peoples in their historical development, problems of origins and cultural and historical relations of these peoples, and reconstructs the history of their geographical movements” (Tolstov 1946, 3, author’s translation). This formula foregrounded the study of “ethnogenesis” (the historical roots of peoples and nations) as the discipline’s principal task. In correlation with this task, the main form of fieldwork in the 1950s–1960s was the interdisciplinary complex expedition, which included ethnographical, biological anthropology, and archaeological “troops.” Another task was to study contemporary socialist culture, for example through producing monographs about a certain village or kolkhoz. A principal form of anthropological knowledge during the postwar period became a monograph about a certain people or etnos, which described its ethnogenesis and culture from archaeological prehistory up to the present. The IE’s activity and organization was structured around the project of a new synthesis of anthropological knowledge, which was conceived in the 1930s but realized only after the war. This was a series of thirteen volumes (in eighteen books) entitled The Peoples of the World. The first volume, The Peoples of Africa, was published in 1954 and the last one, The Peoples of South-eastern Asia, in 1966. The series was considered a major statement of Soviet ethnography, whose main features were Marxist analysis, antiracism, and anticolonialism. The series became part of the Cold War ideological 8 R U SSI A , A NT HR OP OL OGY IN struggle. While Soviet authors were proud of their attention to contemporary life and the processes of modernization, Western readers doubted their objectivity in portraying socialist achievements of the peoples of the Soviet Union (Anderson and Arzyutov 2016). An important synthesis of the study of traditional cultures by Soviet ethnographers was the theory of economic–cultural types and historical–ethnographic areas, formulated by Maxim Levin and Nikolai Cheboksarov in 1955. Their work offered an outline of the geographical classification of ways of subsistence and of cultural areas. The late 1960s saw the reemergence of ethnos thinking in Soviet ethnography. The new director of the IE, Yulian Bromley (1921–90), was initially a historian of medieval Croatia, but after his appointment he emerged as a theoretician of ethnography who established etnos as the main theoretical construct for the discipline. He defined ethnos as “historically constituted group of people with common and stable cultural characteristics (including language) and psychology and aware of their unity and distinction from other groups” (Bromley 1973, 37). Another branch of ethnos theory was developed by historian and orientologist Lev Gumilev (1912–92), who reclaimed the term “ethnology” for his theory of etnos as a biosocial organism, whose life circle is predetermined by natural laws. His main theoretical treatise, Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere of the Earth, was written in the late 1970s but published only in 1989. Gumilev’s biosocial theory was criticized by official ethnographers during the Soviet period but became highly popular among intelligentsia and general public, especially in the 1990s (Bassin 2016). Variants of the official theory of etnos were produced by Sergei Arutyunov and Nikolai Cheboksarov, Viktor Kozlov, Vladimir Pimenov, and others. According to Bromley, ethnography was supposed to study the similarities and differences between peoples, etnoses, and the changes of these characteristics in time, that is, ethnic processes (Bromley and Kozlov 1989). The study of kolkhoz peasantry, which started in the late 1940s, developed into a full-fledged subdiscipline of ethnosociology whose task was to observe the transformations of traditional culture and the modernization of ways of life of ethnic groups, peoples, and nations. The prevailing view was that ethnic particularity was quickly giving way to a uniform way of life of the Soviet people. Ethnographers distinguished three major ethnic processes: ethnic consolidation, ethnic assimilation, and intraethnic integration. The Department for Concrete Social Research (later renamed Ethnosociology) emerged at the IE in 1966. For several decades the head of it was Yuri Arutyunian (1929–2016), one of the pioneers of sociological study of the Soviet village. The most famous result of the work of the department was the monograph The Social and the National (1973), which illustrated the process of homogenization of Soviet nations’ culture and social structure with the example of Tatars and Russians of the Tatar Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic. Another old, vast, and thriving research domain in Russian anthropology is the anthropology of religion, which overlaps with religious studies, especially in relation to regional specializations. For example, most anthropologists with area specializations in Caucasus, Volga, or Central Asian studies contribute to the study of Islam and pre-Islamic “survivals,” while many Siberianists pursue research on shamanism, and folklorists studying various local groups of Russians often have good knowledge of Orthodox rites. The discipline is not institutionalized in current Russian anthropology, R U SSI A , A NT HR OP OL OGY IN 9 except for regular publications and occasional university courses, but, as the study of rituals and customs continues to be the backbone of much field ethnography, the anthropology of religion remains a subject that many Russian anthropologists could claim as their own. Physical anthropology (the only subdiscipline in the Soviet academia that actually held the name of anthropology) was a small but thriving group of scholars. The most well known among them were Nikolai Cheboksarov, Mikhail Gerasimov, Maxim Levin, and Valerii Alekseev. Their main specializations were origins of ethnic groups (ethnogenesis) and race, and anthropogenesis. Soviet physical anthropologists accepted and defended the reality of racial differences but denied any social or cultural relevance of these differences and constantly proclaimed their opposition to racism. The 1970s and 1980s saw the expansion of subdisciplines with the prefix “ethno”: ethnosociology, ethnogeography, ethnolinguistics, ethnopsychology, ethnoecology, and so on. There were achievements in all of them. Thus, the linguist Yuri Knorozov from Kunstkamera deciphered Mayan script. Ethnoecologists carried out international multidisciplinary research into the causes of human longevity in the Caucasus. The characteristic feature of the period was the collective and interdisciplinary nature of research projects. The most ambitious and probably the most time-consuming project was ethnographic atlases, which had already reappeared in the 1950s. The work of whole departments at the IE and at institutes in the republics was guided by the task of collecting material (primarily traditional material culture) for cartography. Only the ethnographic atlases of Siberia and “the Russians” were finalized. There were collective research projects that resulted in a series of books on ethnic pedagogy and the anthropology of childhood, a traditional calendar of the peoples of the world, for example. The study of traditional culture and folklore in this period was also influenced by structuralism and Yuri Lotman’s (1922–93) semiotics in the works of Boris Putilov, Albert Baiburin, and others. Finally, the history of primitive society was a subfield that tried to integrate Marxist theory, paleoanthropology, and social/cultural anthropology to create a seamless narrative about the stages of physical and social development of humanity. The most noteworthy authors in this tradition were Valery Alekseev, Boris Porshnev, Yuri Semenov, and Abram Pershits. This field was an arena of intense discussion about clan structure and the mode of production in primitive society, which lasted throughout the 1970s. The group of “revisionists,” including Nikolai Butinov, Mikhail Chlenov, and Vladimir Kabo, opposed the orthodox Marxist narrative of the development of primitive society. In the post-Soviet period Semenov produced an all-encompassing theory of history, based on Marxism and world-systems theory. Post-Soviet developments The social turmoil of the decade 1986–95, with its radical changes, demanded a sharp turn in the social sciences and the humanities from Marxist dogma to more liberal approaches. In Soviet etnografia this demand brought about the birth of political anthropology (although politically applied research, such as the mapping and demography of ethnic groups had existed throughout the Soviet period) and ethnic 10 R U SSI A , A NT HR OP OL OGY IN conflicts studies, subdisciplines that had hitherto been absent from the Soviet research tradition, barring (in the case of political anthropology) the studies of early statehood, mostly done by Africanists (notably, Dmitry Olderogge and Lev Kubbel and their students). The official ethnos theory in the version of Bromley and his colleagues also came under attack as a scholastic and sterile armchair exercise and was replaced with constructivist conceptions of ethnicity, based on Western scholarship and field research. One of the leading figures of the emerging post-Soviet Russian anthropology was Valery Tishkov (b. 1941), an Americanist historian by training, who was director (1989–2015) of the major anthropological institution within the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS), the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology (IEA, formerly the IE). He published an essay with a suggestive title “The Crisis in Soviet Ethnography” and concluded that the crisis had to do “not so much with the social conditions under which [it] operates as with the discipline itself, including its central authoritative body, the IEA RAS” (Tishkov 1992, 371). However, at the same time as etnos, the core concept of the discipline, came under attack, was reconceptualized and reimagined, and, later on, discarded altogether, new “ethno”-prefixed anthropological subdisciplines continued to emerge and proliferate. In a way this was predetermined by the existing system of academic labor division, according to which research at the Institute of Sociology at RAS should be focused on contemporary society and ongoing social changes, whereas the IEA RAS should have on its research agenda everything “ethnic,” from purported “ethnic conflicts” and “ethnic processes” to “ethnic characteristics of gender relations” and “ethnic ecology.” It took most of the next two decades for the gradual switch to take place from this preoccupation with everything ethnic toward a broader agenda of social and cultural anthropology concerns. This shift was also discernible in other (not “ethno” prefixed) research fields within the changing field Russian anthropology, such as urban and visual anthropology and folklore studies. In urban anthropology, which started in the early 1950s as the study of working-class culture and which later mutated into urban ethnosociology, there was a noticeable shift from ethnosociological interests to youth and professional subcultures research and from “traditional” culture to its contemporary incarnations, that is, from customs and rituals to habits and daily routine practices. In part, this was also a reaction to the previous preoccupation with ethnic traditional culture to the exclusion of other legitimate objects of anthropological research. Visual anthropology of the Soviet period is often linked to the name of Dziga Vertov (1896–1954) and his documentary film theory of the 1920s. However, most contemporary Russian visual anthropologists (aside from field photography and the occasional filming of rituals, which had been considered as a mere instrumental “fixation” of field materials, along with pencil drawings, diary writing, and audio recording) date their discipline’s birth to the summer of 1987, when the first Soviet ethnographic film festival was held in Pärnu, Estonia. It took about ten years for Russian visual anthropology to mature, before the first Russian anthropological film festival took place in Salekhard, in August 1998. In 2002 the Moscow International Visual Anthropology Festival was organized and later became a regular biennial event. Now, in addition to the Centre for Visual Anthropology at Moscow State University and a department at the IEA RAS, R U SSI A , A NT HR OP OL OGY IN 11 there are groups of enthusiastic visual anthropologists at Saratov Technological University, as well as in Izhevsk (Udmurt Republic), Perm, Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, and St. Petersburg. Linguistic anthropology in Russia belongs more to linguistics than to the range of anthropological subdisciplines, with a focus on sociolinguistic research. There are several academic research centers that have units for ethno-linguistic research, situated in linguistics (at Novosibirsk, Tomsk, and Chita universities) or anthropology departments (at European University in St. Petersburg) and at institutes of the Russian Academy (such as the Institute of Linguistics in Moscow and the Institute of Linguistic Studies in St. Petersburg). In the 1960s to 1980s there was a group for the study of onomastics (the study of proper names, including ethnonymy and toponymy) at the Institute of Ethnography, as onomastics data were thought to be important for groups’ ethnogenesis and ancient ethnic migrations reconstructions, but, with the decline of ethnogenetic studies, this kind of linguistic inquiry ceased to be used as a source for anthropological research. Western anthropologists, mostly from the United Kingdom, the United States, France, and Germany (including Dmitry Gorenburg, Bruce Grant, Francine Hirsch, Catriona Kelly, Marlène Laruelle, Alaina Lemon, Margaret Paxson, Hilary Pilkington, and Nancy Ries), used the new opportunities opened in the tumultuous period of the 1990s to the 2000s for field and archival research in various regions of Russia. They exerted a positive influence on local ethnographic research practices by bringing new methodological toolkits, observation vocabularies, and a broader range of what might count as proper anthropological research topics. This, as well as the involvement of Russian anthropologists in international projects and student training abroad, contributed to the recommencement and development of such subdisciplines as legal and economic anthropology, which for ideological reasons had suffered from political pressure to adapt to Leninist dogma during the Soviet period or had been dropped altogether, and to the emergence of new domains for Russian anthropology such as medical anthropology (previously associated mostly with the medical profession). While Soviet ethnographers paid attention to traditional medicine and healing practices, professional medicine had never been considered as a legitimate subject for anthropological research. This situation started to change in the mid-1980s in the context of multidisciplinary aging and longevity studies, when Soviet ethnographers and physical anthropologists worked in close collaboration with geriatricians. Most of the issues a medical anthropologist deals with were studied at that period in social hygiene, medical geography, and the history of medicine. The institutionalization of medical anthropology as a part of sociocultural anthropology started only in the early 2000s, when a specialized research group, turned later into a department at the IEA RAS chaired by Valentina Kharitonova, initiated regular conferences that consolidated researchers across the country. Now medical anthropology is taught and practiced at several university centers (also in Saratov and Tomsk, besides Moscow and St. Petersburg), but it remains a relatively small community, encompassing perhaps several dozens of anthropologists, who are actively involved in the relevant research 12 R U SSI A , A NT HR OP OL OGY IN projects, combining mainstream medical anthropology concerns with the study of shamanic trance and illness. Economic anthropology in the country is in its initial period of institutionalization, although there are university courses and textbooks. This is a paradox, as world-renowned economic anthropologists such as Alexander Chayanov (1888–1937) lived and worked in Russia. Marxist Soviet etnografia paid much attention to “economic base,” production, exchange, and consumption but mainly at a theoretical level, while most of the research had been done by economists specializing in applied economics. However, Soviet ethnographers did research on many economic issues, although it was often fragmented and dispersed. For example, the typology of economic–cultural types demanded a thorough knowledge of the economy of societies. Material culture studies contained much information on traditional economies of the societies studied. There was an animated discussion in anthropological publications on economic formations and on the Marxist concept of the Asiatic mode of production; modes of production were part of the research agenda at the Department of Prehistoric Societies which was created at the Academy of Sciences in 1967. Theoretical contributions to research on preindustrial economies made by the staff members of that department (Abram Pershits, Yuri Semyonov, Lev Kubbel, Vladimir Kabo, Viktor Shnirelman, and Olga Artemova), as well as a series of translations into Russian of the works that became classics in economic anthropology (those by Henry Morgan, Marcel Mauss, Bronisław Malinowski, Maurice Godelier, and Marshall Sahlins, among others) attest to the rich tradition of economic–anthropological research in the country. Attempts to institutionalize the discipline continue at several university centers, including the Higher School of Economics. A Commission for Economic Anthropology has recently been created at the Russian Anthropological and Ethnological Association to encourage the development of this field. The study of customs and customary law or legal anthropology was an inalienable part of ethnological research in Russia since its inception in the eighteenth century (for details see Vermeulen 2015). However, it was not constituted as a distinct anthropological discipline until the mid-1990s, when anthropologists and jurists joined their efforts to establish a set of teaching courses, summer schools, and conferences and a series of publications, mainly in the form of conference reports, article and documentary collections, and occasional monographs focusing mainly on indigenous peoples, minority group rights, or the study of sharia law and adats as forms of customary law. Russian anthropologists specializing in these subjects (Vladimir Bobrovnikov, Natalia Novikova, and Sergei Sokolovskiy, among others) often act as consultants or experts in the legislation process in cases that concern nationality policy issues or in courts that deal with violations of indigenous and minority rights or with xenophobia and intolerance. Studies of xenophobia and intolerance, viewed either as a part of ethnopsychological studies (e.g., Nadezhda Lebedeva, Galina Soldatova, Tatiana Stefanenko) or as a part of historical research (e.g., Viktor Shnirelman) remain a separate and important specialization in Russian anthropological research. The post-Soviet period put an end to the overcentralized character of Soviet etnografia. Previously there were ethnography chairs only at Moscow, Leningrad, and Kazan universities and an ethnography chair at Yerevan University in Armenia, a R U SSI A , A NT HR OP OL OGY IN 13 former Soviet republic). Now there are anthropology or ethnology departments in more than twenty universities across the country (see Sokolovskiy 2012, 37–43). In place of a single specialized journal Etnograficheskoe obozrenie (EO, Ethnographic Review), there are now more than twenty-five academic journals that regularly publish papers in anthropology, with at least three journals competing to be the flagship anthropological journal: besides “EO,” there is the St. Petersburg-based Anthropologicheskii Forum (Forum for Anthropology and Culture) and Archaeology, Ethnology and Anthropology of Eurasia, published quarterly in Novosibirsk. The number of anthropological research centers has also increased to include, in addition to old centers in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk, and Kazan, cities such as Abakan, Irkutsk, Krasnodar, Makhachkala, Omsk, Rostov-on-Don, Perm, Petrozavodsk, Saratov, Stavropol, Syktyvkar, Tomsk, Vladivostok, Volgograd, Ufa, Ulan-Ude, Yakutsk, and Yekaterinburg. This fact alone has drastically transformed the character of regional ethnography and anthropological fieldwork. Where most of the field research had previously been coordinated from Moscow and Leningrad and on a smaller scale from Kazan and Novosibirsk, and most research had been planned and orchestrated from metropolitan centers, regional scholars now successfully compete with their colleagues from the capitals in developing innovative research, some of which are world renowned, for example, the discovery of Homo denisova fossil remains in Denisova Cave, Altai, southwestern Siberia, by anthropologists and archaeologists from the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the Siberian Branch of the RAS (Novosibirsk). Furthermore, many of the new research domains and venues, innovative methods, writing styles, and experimental approaches within Russian anthropology are associated more often than not with new anthropological research centers based at universities beyond the capitals. Among such domains and objects, which are quite new for the traditional ethnology that remains predominant in many old anthropological research institutions, are the anthropology of professions and leisure, the anthropology of the state, the anthropology of science and technology, and the anthropology of perception (or sensorial anthropology), and the anthropology of body and movement studies. The rise of the anthropology of the professions is usually traced to the work of sociologists based at the chair for social anthropology and social work of Saratov Technological University and to the anthropologists at the Center for Social Policy and Social Research in Saratov. They conducted a score of thematic conferences and summer schools and published several volumes of article collections on various professions, occupations, and trades that contained a plethora of case studies, based on fieldwork among taxi drivers and policemen, ballet dancers and foundry workers, cemetery workers and dentists, lawyers and urban healers. The emergent research field of anthropology of the state, a subdiscipline related to the anthropology of organizations and business, involves both anthropologists and historians. The field is institutionalized as a network of researchers operating from the Social Sciences and Humanities School within St. Petersburg’s branch of the Higher School of Economics and the Anthropological Department of the European University in St. Petersburg (see Abashin 2012; Ssorin-Chaikov 2003). This research is 14 R U SSI A , A NT HR OP OL OGY IN complemented by comparative studies in the quantitative history of state building in preindustrial societies, which relies mostly on archival research and cross-tabulation of ethnographic traits analysis in the manner of George Murdock’s Atlas of World Cultures and as exemplified in the work of anthropologists such as Andrei Korotayev, Nikolay Kradin, and Dmitry Bondarenko. There is no neat division of labor between, on the one hand, anthropologists who specialize in fields such as the anthropology of business and organizations, of science and technology, of medicine, of transport, of youth subcultures, or of tourism and, on the other hand, those who are involved in research on the anthropology of professions and leisure. Not only do all these research fields overlap significantly but there is substantial similarity in the methodology and conceptual toolkits used, as well as a degree of mingling and mixing of terminology. Predictably, these new research fields involve younger scholars, and all the centers that pursue this kind of research are not the research institutes of the Academy of Sciences or old anthropological departments but relatively new university centers (Saratov University, European University in St. Petersburg, Tomsk University, and the Higher School of Economics with its branches in Moscow and St. Petersburg). The students are often trained as sociologists, who come to anthropology for their PhD research or postdoctoral fellowships. The anthropology of science and technology is a recently formed research area in Russia that has not yet gained the status of an anthropological subdiscipline or any institutionalization beyond the occasional university course or article collection. There are notable exceptions in terms of sustainable research networks that coalesced around such topics as the anthropology of the academy (on which there is a book series, initiated by Galina Komarova and published at the IEA RAS) or actor-network theory applications to material culture research. There is also the Institute for the History of Natural Sciences and Technology at RAS, which conducts and coordinates research in the relevant research fields and publishes several journals and series of themed article collections. As for the anthropology of the senses, body, and movement, this is an emerging area of anthropological research, drawing anthropologists’ attention to other channels of perception besides the visual and to kinaesthetics. In the Soviet period, only dance studies were among the traditional objects of the ethnographer’s attention. A number of article collections on the anthropology of smell, taste, and touch, as well as on body and movement, have recently been published. Research communities, organizations, and networks The most inclusive community is the Association of Anthropologists and Ethnologists of Russia, which has more than 1,000 members and conducts biannual conventions in various cities (the eleventh Congress took place in Yekaterinburg in 2015; the twelfth in Izhevsk, the capital of the Udmurt Republic, in 2017). Russian medical anthropologists have their own association which conducts annual conferences and regular seminars, publishes its own journal, Medical Anthropology and Bio-ethics, and has a website (www. medanthro.ru). R U SSI A , A NT HR OP OL OGY IN 15 There is also a number of formal and informal networks that bring together Russian anthropologists from various thematic or area specializations. Among the former (formal thematic network) is EAWARN or Network for Ethnic Monitoring and Early Warning of Conflicts with headquarters at the IEA RAS (led by Valery Tishkov), uniting over forty regional correspondents, mostly from various regions of Russia but also from Armenia, Belarus, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, and Tajikistan. The network, created in the early 1990s, publishes bulletins and annual reports and conducts regular seminars on interethnic-relations monitoring and conflict prevention. There are also a number of informal networks that function as coordinators for such subdisciplines such as visual (http://visant.etnos.ru) and legal anthropology (www.ethnoconsulting.ru). Area studies, such as the anthropology of the Caucasus, Central Asia, Volga–Urals, and Siberia are better institutionalized: there are special departments in both capitals at the IEA RAS, Kunstkamera, Institute for Oriental Studies, RAS; Moscow State Institute for International Relations, as well as in various regional institutions and research centers—for example, in Novosibirsk, Tyumen, Ufa, Ulan-Ude, and Yakutsk. The Russian anthropological community, besides its fragmentation into subdisciplines and area studies, seems at present to be divided into two large research domains. Members of the first engage in politically applied research, such as federal and regional government’s nationalities policy and legislation consultancy, ethnic relations monitoring, migration studies, language policy, and education reform. Anthropologists of the second category tend to concentrate their efforts on folklore and religious studies, with particular emphasis on traditional culture and its transformations. Both categories of scholars publish the results of their respective research in different academic publications (journals and book series). However, if one takes into consideration the demographic dimension, that is, both the age strata and the demographic strengths of various specializations, the future of the discipline as a whole seems to lie in the innovative research directions, as exemplified in hybrid fields such as the anthropology of science and technology, of sport and leisure, of styles of life, or of bioethics, as their practitioners tend to be younger than the adherents of more conservative and currently mainstream research fields. SEE ALSO: Dance, Anthropology of; Economic Anthropology; Enlightenment, the; Evolutionism; Gellner, Ernest (1925–95); Marxism; Medical Anthropology; Peasants; Postsocialist Europe, Anthropology in; Privatization; Religion, Marxism, and Ideology; Siberia, Anthropology in; Visual Anthropology; World Anthropologies REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING Abashin, Sergei. 2012. “Nation-Construction in Post-Soviet Central Asia.” In Soviet and Post-Soviet Identities, edited by Mark Bassin and Catriona Kelly, 150–68. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Alymov, Sergei. 2014. “Ethnography, Marxism and Soviet Ideology.” In An Empire of Others: Creating Ethnographic Knowledge in Imperial Russia and the USSR, edited by Ronald Cvetkovski and Alexis Hofmeister, 121–44. Budapest: Central European University Press. 16 R U SSI A , A NT HR OP OL OGY IN Alymov, Sergei. Forthcoming. “World War II and the Cold War as a Context for Discipline Formation: The Case of Soviet Ethnography (1940s–1960s).” In In Search of Other Worlds: Essays towards a Global Historical Reading of Area Studies, edited by Torsten Loschke, Katja Naumann, Matthias Middell, and Steffi Marung, Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag. Anderson, David G., and Dmitry V. Arzyutov. 2016. “The Construction of Soviet Ethnography and ‘The Peoples of Siberia.’” History and Anthropology 27 (2): 183–209. Bassin, Mark. 2016. The Gumilev Mystique. Biopolitics, Eurasianism, and the Construction of Community in Modern Russia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Bromley, Yulian V. 1973. Etnos i etnografia [Ethnos and Ethnography]. Moscow: Nauka. Bromley, Yulian, ed. 1974. Soviet Ethnology and Anthropology. The Hague: Mouton. Bromley, Julian, and Viktor Kozlov. 1989. “The Theory of Ethnos and Ethnic Processes in Soviet Social Sciences.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 31 (3): 425–38. 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Exploring the Edge of Empire: Soviet Era Anthropology in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Berlin: LIT Verlag. Romanov, Pavel, and Elena Iarskaia-Smirnova. 2014. “Social Anthropology à la Russe: Fragmented Field of a Discipline and Contemporary Battles for the Curriculum.” In Reforming Social Sciences, Humanities, and Higher Education in Eastern Europe and CIS after 1991, edited by Anatoli Mikhailov and Olga Breskaya, 166–90. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Slezkine, Yuri. 1996. Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Sokolovskiy, Sergei. 2012. “Writing the History of Russian Anthropology.” In Russian Cultural Anthropology After the Collapse of Communism, edited by Albert Baiburin, Catriona Kelly, and Nikolai Vakhtin, 25–49. London: Routledge. Ssorin-Chaikov, Nikolai. 2003. The Social Life of the State in Subarctic Siberia. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Ssorin-Chaikov, Nikolai. 2008. “Political Fieldwork, Ethnographic Exile, and State Theory: Peasant Socialism and Anthropology in the Late-Nineteen-Century Russia.” In A New History of Anthropology, edited by Henrika Kuklick, 191–206. Oxford: Blackwell. Tishkov, Valery. 1992. “The Crisis in Soviet Ethnography.” Current Anthropology 33 (4): 371–82. Tolstov, Sergei P. 1946. “Etnografiia i sovremennost [Ethnography and Modern Life].” Sovetskaia Etnografiia 1: 3. Tumarkin, Daniel. 1982. “Miklouho-Maclay: Nineteenth Century Russian Anthropologist and Humanist.” RAIN 51: 4–7. Vermeulen, Han. 2015. Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Yamskov, Anatoly. 2006. “Practicing Ethnology in Contemporary Russia.” NAPA Bulletin 25: 82–103.
