Russia, Anthropology in Alymovs Sokolovskiys Final
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Russia, anthropology in Sergei Sokolovskiy Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, RAS [email protected] Sergei Alymov Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, RAS [email protected] Abstract The entry provides the description of the main periods in the history of Russian anthropology from the early 18th c. to the present time, with special attention to Soviet and post-Soviet periods, its institutional structure, current subdivisions into sub-disciplines and research fields, thematic differentiation, area specializations, and current development trends. Suggested Keywords: Russian anthropology, Soviet anthropology, history of anthropology, anthropological sub-disciplines, area studies Main Text The 18th Century Although travelogues as well as information about exotic peoples existed in medieval Russian state, the beginning of scientific systematic collection of this information can be traced back in Russia to the establishment of the Academy of Sciences by Peter the Great in 1725. The age of Enlightenment, ushered by Peter, was also a period of “great academic expeditions” which carried on throughout the 18th century. The most well known of them were the expedition of Daniel Gottlieb Messerschmidt to Siberia (1720-1727), the Great Northern Expedition, headed by naval explorer Vitus Jonassen Bering; with an “academic troop” including Gerhard Friedrich Müller and Johann Georg Gmelin (1733-1743). The “Physical Expedition” headed by Peter Simon Pallas traversed Southern Russia and Siberia from the Orenburg steppes to the Transbaikal region (1768-1774). The Southern borders of the Empire were also studied by the Orenburg expedition, which featured the famous Russian historian Vasilii Tatishchev among its organizers. These expeditions were aimed at collecting all kinds of knowledge mainly about natural resources of empire’s vast periphery. They studied mineral, botanical, and water resources, made geographical maps, discovered new routes. The works, which resulted from these expeditions, also depicted the diversity of peoples and languages they encountered. The findings of the expeditions were conveyed to the imperial authorities in numerous maps and memos. The scientific results were also published in German, Russian, and French languages. 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 (1705-1783) joined the Academy in Saint Petersburg in 1725, and was enlisted in the Bering expedition to study Siberia’s history and geography. He collected huge amount of information about the peoples of this land, only part of which was published in his “History of Siberia”. 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 terms 1 ethnographia, coined by Müller’s associate August Ludwig Schlözer and his colleagues at Göttingen in the 1760-70s. One of the major influences behind this development was philosopher Leibniz’s idea of historical linguistics as evidence for the “origins of nations”, applied by Müller to his Siberian material. Apart from Müller’s conceptualizations, the age of great expeditions yielded the first systematic ethnographic description of the peoples of the empire. Its author, doctor and naturalist Johann Gottlieb Georgi’s (1729-1777) took part in the “Physical Expedition” and published his “Description of All Peoples Living in the Russian State” in Saint Petersburg in 1776-77. He used both his own field observations and works of his predecessors. He also personally consulted Müller and other academics. The book was a series of essays on 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 etc. The first half of the 19th century saw the continuation of geographical explorations – now including territories of the Americas, Pacific and the Far East. The influence of Romanticism contributed to the development of folklore collection and interest in the life of Russian peasantry. Such scholars as Ivan Snegirev (1797-1868), Ivan Sakharov (1807-1863) and Aleksandr Tereshchenko (1806-1865) published collections songs, proverbs etc., and their analysis. First Institutions The institutionalisation of ethnography as a discipline in Russia is usually dated 1845, when the Imperial Russian Geographical Society with a department of statistics and ethnography was established. This establishment was effected amidst the struggle between two factions: academics and naval officers mostly of German origin and the “Russian faction”, supported by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The first years of its existence the department of ethnography was controlled by the naturalist Karl von Baer who advocated its tasks in terms of the study of human “races” with a focus on non-Russian periphery. He is also viewed as the first Russian biological anthropologist who classified crania in Kunstkamera collection and published papers on craniology. Baer’s vision was challenged by the philologist and literary critic Nikolai Nadezhdin (1804-1856). He took up the lead in the department in 1848. In the first published statement of the tasks of Russian ethnography “About the ethnographic study of the Russian nationality” (1847) Nadezhdin presented his view, based on the tradition of Herder and 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). His vision of Romantic nationalism combined with 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. Most interesting answers were published by the IRGO or were included in Aleksandr Afanasiev’s famous collection “Russian Folktales”. The society also published the first ethnographical map of the Russian Empire (1851), prepared by Peter Köppen. 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 the Moscow University. In the following year a department of anthropology was created there, and in 1867 it was renamed as “The Imperial Society of Amateurs of Natural Sciences, Anthropology and Ethnography” (OLEAE). The driving force behind this institution for the first several decades was professor of zoology at the Moscow University Anatolii Bogdanov (1834- 1896), who’s specialization in anthropology was craniology. He organized systematic archaeological excavations of burial hills in Moscow region and authored the first Russian monograph in biological anthropology titled “The Materials for the Anthropology of the Burial 2 Hills Period in Moscow region” (1867). In 1879 the Society opened an international Anthropological Exhibition and congress in Moscow, which firmly placed Russia on the map of the world anthropology. In 1889 OLEAE started the first Russian ethnographical journal “Etnograficheskoe obozrenie” (Ethnographical Review). The journal was meant to publish folklore and ethnographic materials collected by intelligentsia in the provinces, including political exiles, along with papers of famous scholars. In 1887 chairs in geography and ethnography were established at natural sciences divisions of the Moscow and Saint-Petersburg universities. Although lectures in ethnography featured in the curriculum, it was oriented towards physical anthropology. Dmitrii Anuchin (1843-1923) held the chair in Moscow. A student of Bogdanov, in the 1870s he studied with Pierre-Paul Broca (1824-1880), Paul Topinard (1830-1911), and Rudolf Virchow (1830-1902). During his long career he produced a range of anthropological studies, the most influential among them was “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, Boris Kuftin and others). The first lecturer of anthropology at Saint-Petersburg University was Eduard Gottlieb Petri (1854-1899), a descendant from a Livonian Swedish family, who received his medical education in Bern. His lectures “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 the Saint-Petersburg University was established (Mogilner 2013). It became the mouthpiece of the school of anthropologists since 1907 lead by Fyodor Volkov (Vovk) (1847-1918), a Ukrainian national activist, anthropologist, archaeologist, and ethnographer, born in Poltava province in the Southern Russia/Ukraine. After 25 year of exile, which he spent mostly in Paris, he was allowed to return to the Russian Empire and teach anthropology and ethnography at the Saint-Petersburg University. In 1916 he published his essays on the anthropology and ethnography of Ukrainians, which became not only valuable contribution