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 to scholarship, but also founding texts of Ukrainian nationalist movement. His disciples Nikolai Mogilianskii and Sergei Rudenko 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 I during his “Great Embassy” to Europe. Over the following centuries it gathered valuable collections of artefacts from travellers and explorers. The Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography was established on the basis of these collections in 1879. In the early 20th century Kunstkamera employed among others Vasilii Radlov, Lev Shternberg, and Vladimir Bogoraz. The Ethnographic division of the Russian Museum of Emperor Aleksandr III, established in 1902, was a more nationally oriented institution. Under the lead of Dmitry Klements and Nikolai Mogilianskii the Division amassed a valuable collection of artefacts of the peoples of the Russian Empire. Finally, it must be pointed out that ethnography/anthropology in the Russian Empire was often produced by non-professional authors: local intelligentsia, military, and civic officials etc.

Fieldwork and theories If contemporary Russian anthropologists were confronted with the task to name a symbolic founding father of their discipline, this would certainly be Nikolai Miklukho-Maclay (1846–1888). Born to a family of engineer, he studied zoology in Germany with the naturalist and Darwinist Ernst Haeckel. Nikolai’s first publications considered the problems of evolution in sponges and fish. Gradually his interests shifted towards anthropology. His expedition to Papua New Guinea was financed by IRGO and included naturalistic, anthropological, and ethnographic

3 tasks, influenced by Karl Baer’s ideas on the origins of Papuans. Maclay spent about three years on the Northwestern shore of the New Guinea during his stays in 1871-2, 1876-77 and 1883. He kept a detailed diary and collected all kinds of information about the nature and natives of the place, including wordlists and many drawings of their material culture. This was an early example of a long-term participant observation fieldwork. Unfortunately, his 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 coloured 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 Russian minister of foreign affairs to take these territories under Russian protectorate and even entertained a project of a Russian settlement, modelled 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 the late 19th – early 20th 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 (Vladimir Bogoraz, Vladimir Iokhelson, Dmitry Klements, Lev Shternberg) were champions of peasant socialism (narodniki), some were Marxists (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 “political fieldworkers” were sent to the Eastern Siberia where they contributed to the study of Yakuts, Chukchi, and other Siberian peoples. Shternberg and Bogoraz were the founding fathers of the Leningrad school of ethnographers, which 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 schoolbooks, organizing Soviets and cooperatives and other forms of Soviet political activism. Theoretically-minded anthropologists of the turn of the centuries Russia inclined towards evolutionism. Shternberg is the best example of this trend. His first anthropological publication analysed 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. He 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), published in four volumes in 1901-1905. 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 Saint-Petersburg in the first years of the 20th 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). Soviet period There were a lot of former revolutionaries and liberals among anthropologists and intelligentsia at large who, like Shternberg, greeted the February Revolution of 1917, but were rather sceptical 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

4 Evenki culture, in Russia his theory of etnos happened to have a long history of suppressions and revivals. The nexus between anthropology and the new regime was provided by the Bolsheviks’ politics of affirmative action towards 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 RGO. This commission grew out of another one – Commission for Ethnographic Maps of Russia at the IRGO, organized in 1910. The Commission drew an ambitious plan of compiling maps of distribution of elements of culture and physical anthropological features for the whole Empire. Fyodor Volkov and his students David Zolotarev and Sergei Rudenko played the leading part. They were also active in KIPS, an institution that was instrumental in producing ethnic maps of the USSR and preparing lists of nationalities for censuses in the 1920-30s (Hirsh 2005). Another Soviet governing body which engaged ethnographers was “The Committee of the North” (1924-1935) which developed numerous projects of modernization and Sovietization of the life of the peoples of the North (Slezkine 1996). The 1920s was a decade of comparable tolerance of the regime towards intellectual life. Anthropologists benefited also from 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 Ethnological faculty (1925-1931) in Moscow was headed by historian P. Preobrazhenskii (1894-1941). His “Course of Ethnology” (1929) was critical about evolutionism and championed “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. The Cultural Revolution of the late 1920s – 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 thinly disguised race. These accusations were especially pronounced in 1929 at the Conference of Ethnographers of Leningrad and Moscow. The leading critic was a proponent of linguist Nikolai Marr’s “new theory of language” and lecturer in Marxist theory at MGU Valerian Aptekar’. He called for abandoning the study of essentialized “timeless” cultures and turning 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 labelled “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, established in 1933. A new generation of ethnographers indeed 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 Purges 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 were shot. Volkov’s students Sergei Rudenko and David Zolotarev were exiled. Rudenko survived the GULAG and later became famous for his archaeological finding in Altai and Chukotka. The university teaching of ethnography was abandoned, although post- graduate education at the Institute as well as museum ethnographic work continued. The 1920s- 1930s were also a period when innovative approaches such as structuralism emerged in the

5 works of folklorist Vladimir Propp (1895-1970) and ethnographer Aleksandr Zolotarev (1907- 1943). 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 its 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 published posthumously only in 1964. Drawing on the wide comparative material the author observed the universal character of dualistic myths and hypothesized the “dual organization” as the earliest form of social life. The state-science nexus re-emerged during the years of Second World War. In the last days of 1942 the Moscow group of the Institute of Ethnography (IE) was created, headed by ethnographer and archaeologist Sergei Tolstov (1907-1976) A student of Preobrazhenskii and Kuftin, he became one of enthusiasts of Marxist ethnography in the late 1920s – early 1930s. His main scientific achievement was Khorezm expedition to the Central Asia, which yielded numerous archaeological findings. The volume “Ancient Khorezm” (1948), based on these finding, also contained anthropological interpretations of Central Asian myths and religion, which were in tune with Zolotorev’s views on dual organization. During the war the work at the Moscow branch centred 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 centre of the Institute of Ethnography, and the Leningrad part, 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 the “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”. 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 1950-60s 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/kolkhoz. A principal form anthropological knowledge during the post-war period became a monograph about a certain people or etnos, which described its ethnogenesis and culture from archaeological prehistory up to present. The IE’s activity and organization was structured around the project of a new synthesis of anthropological knowledge, conceived already in the 1930s, but realized after the war. This was a series of 13 volumes (in 18 books) “The Peoples of the World”. Its first volume, “The Peoples of Africa”, came out in 1954, the last one, “The Peoples of South-Eastern Asia”, in 1966. The series was considered a principal statement of the Soviet ethnography, whose main features were Marxist analysis, anti-racism and anti-colonialism. The series became an event in the Cold War ideological struggle. As Soviet authors were proud of their attention to contemporary life and processes of modernization, Western readers doubted their objectivity in portraying socialist achievements of the peoples of the USSR (Anderson, Arzyutov 2016). The late 1960s saw the re-emergence of ethnos-thinking in Soviet ethnography. The new director of the IE Yulian Bromley (1921-1990) was initially a historian of medieval Croatia, but after the 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

6 and aware of their unity and distinction from other groups”. Another branch of ethnos theory was developed by historian and orientologist Lev Gumilev (1912-1992), who reclaimed the term “ethnology” for his theory of etnos as 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). There were variants of the official theory of etnos by Sergei Arutyunov and Nikolai Cheboksarov, Viktor Kozlov, Vladimir Pimenov and others. According to Bromley, ethnography was supposed to study “similarity and differences between peoples-etnoses and the changes of their characteristics in time, i.e. ethnic processes” (Bromley, Kozlov 1989). The study of kolkhoz villages that started in the late 1940s, developed into a full-fledged sub-discipline of ethno-sociology whose task was to observe the transformations of traditional culture and 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 intra-ethnic integration. The department for “concrete social research” (later renamed to ethno-sociological) appeared at IE in 1966. For several decades the head of it was Yuri Arutyunian (1929-2016), one of the pioneers of sociological study of 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 by the example of Tatars and Russians of the Tatar ASSR. Another old, vast and thriving research domain in Russian anthropology is the anthropology of religion, converging with religion studies that often overlap with regional specializations (e.g. most anthropologists, with area specialisations in Caucasus, Volga or Central Asian studies contribute to the study of Islam and pre-Islamic ‘survivals’) many ‘Siberianists’ pursue research of shamanism; folklorists studying various local groups of Russians often excel in knowledge of Orthodox rites, etc.) The discipline is not institutionalized in current Russian anthropology, 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, anthropology of religion remains a subject that many Russian anthropologists could claim as their own. Physical anthropology (the only sub-discipline 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 specialisations were origins of ethnic groups (“ethnogenesis”) and races, 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 anti-racism. The 1970s and 1980s saw the expansion of sub-disciplines with prefix “ethno”: ethno- sociology, ethno-geography, ethno-linguistics, ethno-psychology, ethno-ecology etc. There were achievements in all of them. Thus, linguist Yuri Knorozov from Kunstkamera deciphered Mayan script. Ethno-ecologists accomplished multidisciplinary international research of the causes of longevity in the Caucasus. The characteristic feature of the period was the use of collective interdisciplinary research projects. The most ambitious and probably the most time- and resource-consuming was the idea of ethnographic atlases, which reappeared already in the 1950s. The work of whole departments at IE and institutes in republics was guided by the task of collecting material (primarily traditional material culture) for cartography. Only ethnographic atlases of Siberia and “The Russians” were finalized. There were collective research projects, which resulted in a series of books on ethnic pedagogy and anthropology of childhood, traditional calendar of the peoples of the world etc. The study of traditional culture and folklore

7 in this period was also influenced by structuralism and Yuri Lotman’s semiotics in the works of Boris Putilov, Albert Baiburin and others. Finally, the history of primitive society was a sub-field that tried to integrate Marxist theory, palaeoanthropology 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 the clan structure and the mode of production in primitive society, which lasted throughout the 1970s. His “revisionist” opponents Nikolai Butinov, Mikhail Chlenov, Vladimir Kabo, and others attacked the ideas of Semenov. In the post-Soviet period Semenov produced an all-encompassing theory of history, based on Marxism and world-system theory. Post-Soviet Developments The social turmoil of the decade of 1986-1995 with its radical changes in ideology demanded a sharp turn in social sciences and humanities from Marxist dogma to more liberal approaches. In Soviet etnografia this demand brought the birth of political anthropology (albeit politically applied research, such as ethnic groups mapping and demography, existed throughout Soviet period) and ethnic conflicts studies, sub-disciplines hitherto absent in Soviet research tradition, barring (in the case of political anthropology) the studies of early statehood, done mostly by Africanists (notably, Dmitry Olderogge and Lev Kubbel’ and their students). The official ethnos theory in the version of Bromley and his colleagues came also under attack as a scholastic and sterile armchair exercise to be 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 Valery Tishkov, Americanist historian by training, who had at the time (1989) got the position of the director of the major anthropological institution within the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology (IEA RAS, former IE), published an essay with a suggestive title “The Crisis in Soviet Ethnography”. He concluded that the crises 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” (1992: 371). However, at the same time when etnos as the core concept of the discipline came under attack to be re-conceptualized and re-imagined, and then, at a later time, discarded altogether, new ‘ethno-prefixed’ anthropological sub-disciplines continued to emerge and proliferate. In a way this was predetermined by the existing system of academic labour division, according to which the research at the Institute of Sociology, RAS should be focussed on contemporary society and on-going social changes, whereas 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 from this pre-occupation with ‘everything ethnic’ towards broader agenda of social and cultural anthropology concerns. This shift was discernible also in other (not ‘ethno-prefixed’) research fields within transforming Russian anthropology, such as urban and visual anthropology and folklore studies. In urban anthropology that started in early 1950s as the study of working-class culture and later mutated into urban ethno-sociology, there was a noticeable shift from ethno-sociological 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 previous pre-occupation with ethnic traditional culture and the exclusion of other legitimate objects of anthropological research. Visual anthropology of the Soviet period is often linked with the name of Dziga Vertov and his documentary film theory of 1920s. However, most of contemporary Russian visual anthropologists (aside from field photography and occasional shooting of rituals that had been

8 considered as a mere instrumental ‘fixation’ of field materials, along with pencil drawings, diary writing, and audio recording) date their discipline’s birth as summer 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 Moscow International Visual Anthropology Festival was organized to become later a regular bi-annual event. Now, besides the Centre for Visual Anthropology at MGU and a department at IEA RAS, 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 sub-disciplines, with a focus on socio-linguistic research. There are several academic research centres, situated either at linguistic departments (Novosibirsk, Tomsk and Chita universities), or at the institutes of Russian Academy, such as the Institute of Linguistics, RAS in Moscow and the Institute of Linguistic Studies, RAS in St. Petersburg; European University in St. Petersburg, etc., which have units for ethno-linguistic research. In 1960s–1980s there was a group for the study of onomastics (the study of proper names, including ethnonyms and toponymy) at the Institute of Ethnography, as onomastics data were thought 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 UK, USA, France and Germany (Dmitry Gorenburg, Bruce Grant, Francine Hirsch, Catriona Kelly, Marlène Laruelle, Alaina Lemon, Margaret Paxson, Hilary Pilkington, Nancy Ries a.o.; for the list of Siberianists, see: Siberia, anthropology in, this volume), who used the new opportunities opened in the tumultuous period of 1990s – 2000s for field and archival research in various regions in Russia, exerted positive influence on local ethnographic research practices by bringing new methodological toolkits, observation vocabularies, and 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 were factors that contributed to the recommencement and development of such sub-disciplines as legal and economic anthropology that for ideological reasons had suffered from political pressure to adapt to Leninist dogma during Soviet period or had been dropped altogether, and to the emergence of such new domain for Russian anthropology (previously associated mostly with medical profession) as medical anthropology. Although Soviet ethnographers paid attention to traditional medicine and healing practices, professional medicine had never been considered as a legitimate candidate for anthropological research. This situation started to change in 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 institutionalisation of medical anthropology as a part of socio- cultural anthropology started only in early 2000s, when a specialized research group turned later into a department at IEA RAS under the head of Valentina Kharitonova initiated regular conferences that consolidated researchers across the country. Now medical anthropology is being taught and practiced at several university centres (besides Moscow and St. Petersburg, also in Saratov and Tomsk), but it remains a relatively small community, encompassing perhaps several dozens of anthropologists, who are actively involved in the relevant research projects, combining mainstream medical anthropology concerns with the study of shamanic trance and illness. Economic anthropology in the country goes through 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, lived and worked in

9 Russia. Marxist Soviet etnografia paid much attention to ‘economic base’, production, exchange, and consumption, but mostly at a theoretical level, while most of research had been done by economists, specializing in applied economics. However, Soviet ethnographers throughout Soviet period produced research of many economic issues, although it was often fragmented and dispersed. For example, the typology of the economic-cultural types demanded thorough knowledge of the economy of societies classified. Material culture studies contained much information on traditional economies of the societies studied. There was an animated discussion in anthropological publications of economic formations and of the Marxist concept of Asiatic mode of production; the modes of production were part of the research agenda of the department of pre-historic societies that was created at IE AN in 1967. Theoretical contributions to pre- industrial economies research, made by the staff members of that department (Abram Pershits, Yuri Semyonov, Lev Kubbel, Vladimir Kabo, Viktor Shnirelman, Olga Artemova), as well as a series of translations into Russian of the works that became classical in economic anthropology (those by Henry Morgan, Marcel Mauss, Bronislaw Malinowski, Maurice Godelier, and Marshall Sahlins, among others) attest to the rich tradition of economic-anthropological research in the country. Attempts to the institutionalisation of the discipline continue at several university centres, including the Higher School of Economics. A Commission for Economic Anthropology has been recently 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 were inalienable parts of ethnological research in Russia since its formation in 18th c. (for details, see: Vermeulen 2015). However, it was constituted as a distinct anthropological discipline only in mid-1990s, when anthropologists and jurists joined their efforts to establish a set of teaching courses, summer schools, conferences and a series of publications, mainly in the form of conference reports, article and documentary collections and occasional monographs, focussing mainly on indigenous peoples or minority groups rights or the study of Shari‘a law and adats as forms of customary law. Russian anthropologists, specializing in these subjects (Vladimir Bobrovnikov, Natalia Novikova, Sergei Sokolovskiy, among others), often act as consultants or experts in legislation process in cases that concern nationalities policy issues or at courts that deal with violations of indigenous and minority rights or with the cases of xenophobia and intolerance. The studies of xenophobia and intolerance, viewed either as a part of ethno-psychological studies (Nadezhda Lebedeva, Galina Soldatova, Tatiana Stefanenko, a.o.), or as a part of historical research (Viktor Shnirelman) remain a separate and important specialisation in Russian anthropological research. The post-Soviet period in Russian anthropology’s development put an end to the over- centralized character of Soviet etnografia: when previously there were ethnography chairs only at Moscow, Leningrad, and Kazan’ Universities (plus ethnography chair at Yerevan University, Armenia, former Soviet republic that was part of the Soviet Union), now there are anthropology or ethnology departments in more than 20 universities across the country (see for the list: Sokolovskiy 2012: 37-43). In place of a single specialized journal “Etnograficheskoe obozrenie / Ethnographic Review” there are also now more than 25 academic journals that regularly publish papers in anthropology, with at least three journals, competing to be flagship: besides “EO”, this is St. Petersburg based “Anthropologicheskii Forum / Forum for Anthropology and Culture”, and “Archaeology, Ethnology & Anthropology of Eurasia”, published quarterly in Novosibirsk. The number of anthropological research centres has also plummeted to include, besides old centres in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk, and Kazan, such cities as Abakan, Irkutsk, Krasnodar, Makhachkala, Omsk, Rostov-on-the-Don, Perm’, Petrozavodsk, Saratov, Stavropol’, Syktyvkar, Tomsk, Vladivostok, Volgograd, Ufa, Ulan-Ude, Yakutsk, Yekaterinburg, a. o. This fact alone has drastically transformed the character of regional ethnography and anthropological fieldwork. If previously most of field research had been co-ordinated from Moscow and Leningrad, and on a smaller scale, from Kazan’ and Novosibirsk, and most of research had been planned and orchestrated from metropolitan centres, now regional scholars successfully compete with their

10 colleagues from the capitals in developing innovative research, some of which, e.g. the finding of Homo denisova fossil remains in Denisova cave, Altai, South-Western Siberia, made by anthropologists and archaeologists from the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, Siberian Branch, RAS (Novosibirsk), are world renown. 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 quite new for traditional ethnology that remains predominant in many old anthropological research institutions are the anthropology of professions and leisure, anthropology of the state, anthropology of science and technology, and the anthropology of perception (or ‘sensorial anthropology’), body and movement studies. The rise of anthropology of professions is usually traced to the works of sociologists, based at the chair for social anthropology and social work of Saratov Technological University and to the anthropologists at the Centre for Social Policy and Social Research (Saratov), who conducted a score of thematic conferences and summer schools, and published several volumes of article collections on anthropology of various professions, occupations, and trades that contained a plethora of case studies, based on fieldwork among taxi-drivers and policemen, ballet dances and iron founders, cemetery workers and dentists, lawyers and urban healers. The emergent research field of anthropology of the state, a kin sub-discipline to the anthropology of organizations and business, involves both anthropologists and historians. The field is institutionalized as a network of researchers, operating from Social Sciences and Humanities School within St. Petersburg’s branch of the Higher School of Economics and Anthropological Department of the European University in St. Petersburg (cf.: Abashin 2012; Ssorin-Chaikov 2003). This research is complemented by comparative studies in quantitative history of the state-building in pre-industrial societies, which relies mostly on archival research and cross-tabulation of ethnographic traits analysis in the manner of the Atlas of World Cultures by George Murdock, exemplified in the work of such anthropologists as Andrei Korotayev, Nikolay Kradin, and Dmitry Bondarenko. There is no neat division of labour among anthropologists, who specialize in such fields as anthropology of business and organisations, science and technology, medicine, transport, youth sub-cultures, or tourism with those, who are involved in research on anthropology of professions and leisure. Not only all these research fields significantly overlap, there is a substantial similarity in methodology and conceptual toolkits used, as well as a certain degree of mingling and mixing of terminology. Predictably, these new research fields involve younger scholars, and all the centres that pursue this kind of research are not the research institutes of the Academy of Sciences or old anthropological departments, but relatively new university centres (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 postdoc fellowships. Anthropology of science and technology is a recently formed research area in Russia that has not yet gained the status of an anthropological sub-discipline or any institutionalisation beyond occasional university course or article collections. There are notable exceptions in terms of sustainable research networks that coalesced around such topics as the anthropology of the academy (there is a book series, initiated by Galina Komarova and published at IEA RAS ) or actor-network theory applications to material culture research. There is also the Institute for the History of Natural Sciences and Technology, RAS that conduct and co-ordinate research in the relevant research fields and publishes several journals and serial article collections. As for anthropology of the senses, body and movement, this is an emerging area of anthropological research, drawing anthropologists’ attention to other channels of perception

11 besides visual, and to kinaesthetics. In Soviet period, only dance studies were among the traditional objects of ethnographer’s attention. A number of article collections on the anthropology of smell, taste, and touch, as well as on body and movement have been recently published. Research communities, organizations and networks The most inclusive community is the Association of Anthropologists and Ethnologists of Russia that comprises more than a thousand members and conducts bi-annual conventions in various cities (the last, 11th Congress took place in Yekaterinburg, in 2015; the next 12th will be held this year in Izhevsk, the capital of Udmurt republic). Russian medical anthropologists have their own association that conducts annual conferences and regular seminars, publishes its own journal “Medical Anthropology and Bio-Ethics”, and has a website (http://www.medanthro.ru). There is also a number of formal and informal networks, uniting Russian anthropologists of various thematic or area specialisations. Among the former (formal thematic network) is EAWARN or Network for Ethnic Monitoring and Early Warning of Conflicts with headquarters at IEA RAS (under the chairmanship of Valery Tishkov), uniting over forty regional correspondents mostly from various regions of Russia, but also from Armenia, Byelorussia, Estonia, Kazakhstan Latvia, and Tajikistan. The network, created in early 1990s, publishes bulletins and annual reports and conducts regular seminars on inter-ethnic relations monitoring and conflict prevention. There is also a number of informal networks that function as co- ordinators for such sub-disciplines as visual (http://visant.etnos.ru/) and legal anthropology (http://www.jurant.ru/). Area studies, such as anthropology of Caucasus, Central Asia, Volga-Urals, and Siberia are better institutionalized: there are special departments in both capitals at IEA RAS, Kunstkamera, Institute for Oriental Studies, RAS; Moscow State Institute for International Relations as well as in various regional institutions and research centres – in Novosibirsk, Tiumen’, Ufa, Ulan-Ude, Yakutsk a.o. At the same time, in terms of co-citation and publication policies Russian anthropological community, besides its fragmentation into sub-disciplines and area studies, seems at present to be divided into two large research domains or factions, with members of the first engaging 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, etc., whereas the anthropologists of the second category or co-citation grouping tend to concentrate their efforts in folklore and religion studies, with particular emphasis on traditional culture and its transformations. Both categories of scholars publish the results of their respective research in different sets of academic publications (journals and book series). However, if one takes into consideration the demographic dimension, i.e. both age strata and demographic strengths of various specializations, the future of the discipline as a whole seems to lie with the innovative research directions, exemplified in such hybrid fields as anthropology of science and technology, sport and leisure, styles of life, or bioethics, as their practitioners tend to be younger than the adherents of more conservative and currently mainstream research fields. Also read: Siberia, anthropology in; Central Asia, anthropology in; Caucasus, anthropology in.

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