A Gathering of Names: On the Categories and Collections of Siberian Shamanic Materials in Late Imperial Russian Museums, 1880–1910

by

Marisa Karyl Franz

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Study of Religion Department for the Study of Religion University of Toronto

© Copyright by Marisa Karyl Franz 2019

A Gathering of Names: On the Categories and Collections of Siberian Shamanic Materials in Late Imperial Russian Museum, 1880-1910

Marisa Karyl Franz

Doctor of Philosophy in the Study of Religion

Department for the Study of Religion University of Toronto

2019 Abstract

A Gathering of Names is an intellectual history of the ethnographic naming and systematising of Siberian shamanic materials by collectors for late imperial Russian museums, between approximately 1880-1910. The late imperial era was a time of social and political change in the Russian Empire, during which there was a dramatic increase in the number of local

Siberian museums founded. This project approaches Siberia and the local Siberian museums within the context of late imperial Russian scientific modernity to argue that these museums were constructing a new local Siberian intellectual and scientific network of researchers who were defining shamanism through their collections.

This project focuses on collectors and the museum communities in the cities of Yakutsk,

Irkutsk, and St. Petersburg. It approaches these sites as increasingly interconnected through the ii academic and personal networks and infrastructural developments that brought increasing numbers of people, willingly and unwillingly, to Siberia at the turn of the century. Specifically looking at collection programmes, a form of desiderata, this dissertation traces what types of objects and categories of information were understood as shamanic in order to explore how the category circulated and became defined within the ethnographic museums in Siberia and in

European Russia.

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Acknowledgements

I grew up wanting to go to Siberia, and while it was not a straight path to get there, I like to think that there was something inevitable about it. Over the years, my project shifted, morphed, formed, and reformed, and I see the narratives of these changes in the my chapters. Finishing a dissertation means that there is a rigidity imposed on what had, for many years, been a malleable and unsettled text. Perhaps readers will find ghosts of earlier ideas and foreshadows of future ones throughout, and I hope these add a little bit of that unsettledness back into the work and keep it in a space of change rather than ossification.

To those who saw first-hand the processes of researching and writing, I would like to express my thanks. I am particularly grateful for the support of my supervisor, Pamela Klassen, and my committee members, Alison Smith, J. Barton Scott, and Irina Mihalache. Without their mentorship throughout the different stages of my doctoral work, I would still be wandering in the wilds of research. I would also like to thank Judith Brunton, Nicholas Field, and Hannah Turner for their friendship and encouragement throughout our time together as graduate students.

My research would not have been possible without financial support. I would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Ontario Graduate Scholarship, the Canadian Corporations for Studies in Religion, American Councils, Massey College, and the University of Toronto for supporting my research abroad and providing me the financial assistance to fund my research trips to Siberia and European Russia. I would also like to thank the Northrop Frye Centre and Victoria College for supporting me once I returned to Toronto to write, and for providing me a college community within the University of Toronto.

In Russia, the excellent archivists, librarians, and researchers in Yakutsk, Irkutsk, and St. Petersburg supported and facilitated my research. In Yakutsk, I would like to thank the National Library of the Republic of Sakha, the State Archive of the Republic of Sakha (who had to deal with my first attempts at navigating the Russian archive system and I appreciate their kindness and patience), and Northeastern Federal University for providing Sakha language classes. In Irkutsk, I am grateful for the assistance of the ethnographic and archaeological departments of the Irkutsk Museum of Local History, as well as their librarians. In St. Petersburg, I would like to

iv thank Vladimir Davydov, the Siberian Department at the Kunstkamera, and the Academy of Science for supporting my research. I am also grateful to the staff at the National Library of Russia and at the Geographic Society Library. Finally, I would like to thank my friends in Yakutsk for taking me in and providing a home for me there. I am forever grateful for their kindness and their care.

Here, at the end, I would like to thank my family. My chaotic assemblage of aunts, uncles, loved- ones, cousins, parents, brother, and husband formed a community that surrounded me throughout this project. They advised me on Russian translations, provided home-cooked meals, walked the dog, read and reread drafts, and encouraged me when I needed encouragement. This work is dedicated to them.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements...... iv

Table of Contents...... vi

List of Abbreviations ...... x

Notes on Translation and Transliteration...... xi

Prologue ...... xii

Introduction...... 1

1.1 Sites of Research...... 3

1.1.1 The Kunstkamera...... 4

1.1.2 The Irkutsk Regional Museum of Local History (The Irkutsk Museum)...... 6

1.1.3 The Yakutsk State Museum of the History and Culture of the People of the North named after Emilian Iaroslavski (The Yakutsk Museum)...... 7

1.2 Desired Documents and Research Methods ...... 9

1.3 An Overview of the Argument ...... 11

1.3.1 Systems and Structures: An Organizational Overview...... 22

1 Chapter One: Museums and Modernity in Late Imperial Russia...... 27

1.1 Introduction...... 27

1.2 Late Imperial Russia ...... 30

1.3 The Siberian Colony ...... 35

1.4 Museums and Imperial Intellectuals ...... 43

1.5 The Local Exotic...... 53

1.6 Conclusion ...... 56

2 Chapter Two: Shamans and Shamanism...... 58

2.1 Introduction...... 58

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2.2 Defining Shamans and Shamanism: ...... 59

2.2.1 Shaman: Etymology and Europeanization...... 59

2.2.2 Shamans and Shamanism: Locating a Central Definition ...... 63

2.3 Periodizing Shamanic Studies...... 64

2.3.1 Intellectual Histories ...... 64

2.3.2 Shamans as Charlatans...... 66

2.3.3 Shamans and Psychology: Hysteria and Queerness...... 73

2.3.4 Shamans as a Universal Type ...... 80

2.3.5 Shamans as Geographically Bound ...... 85

2.3.6 Shamanism: Deconstructing and Reconstructing the Shaman in Context...... 88

2.3.7 Periodisation: In sum...... 93

2.4 Late Imperial Russian Shamanic Studies...... 93

2.4.1 Hysteria in Late Imperial Sources...... 94

2.4.2 Heterogeneity in Defining Shamanism in Late Imperial Russia ...... 97

2.5 A More Varied Landscape...... 104

3 Chapter Three: Circulating Desire: Ethnographic Information Collection Programmes...... 106

3.1 Introduction...... 106

3.2 Imperial Museum Collecting ...... 107

3.2.1 Epistemes of Collecting: Placing Late Imperial Russia in Context...... 111

3.2.2 Technologies of Collection: Lists of Desired Things ...... 116

3.2.3 Collection Programmes in Late Imperial Russia ...... 119

3.3 Programmes of the Gathering of Information on Siberian Shamanism...... 126

3.3.1 VSORGO and the Irkutsk Museum as a Siberian Research Centre ...... 126

3.3.2 The VSORGO Collection Programmes...... 129

3.3.3 General Ethnographic Information Collection Programmes ...... 144

3.4 Conclusion ...... 152 vii

4 Chapter Four: The Type Specimen and the Shaman: Ethnographic Taxonomies in Object Collection Programmes...... 154

4.1 Introduction...... 154

4.2 Taxonomical Collection and Type Specimens ...... 155

4.2.1 The Pre-Collected Object...... 155

4.2.2 The Non-Objective Object: Classification of the Part as the Whole ...... 157

4.3 Collection Programmes...... 160

4.3.1 How to Collect an Object: A Practical Introduction in Programmes...... 160

4.3.2 Collecting Spiritual Material...... 169

4.4 Collecting Shamanism ...... 173

4.4.1 Coats and Drums: Desired ...... 173

4.4.2 Coats and Drums: Collected ...... 176

4.4.3 Accessories of the Cult: Desired...... 182

4.4.4 Accessories of the Cult: Collected...... 186

4.5 Conclusion ...... 188

5 Chapter Five: The Impermanent Collection of Satiated Desire...... 190

5.1 Introduction...... 190

5.2 A Museum of the Imperial Centre ...... 193

5.2.1 The Siberian Collection in St. Petersburg: An Imperial Projection...... 195

5.3 The Kunstkamera’s Displayed Collection of Siberian Shamanic Materials: A Diachronic Analysis...... 198

5.3.1 Guidebooks as a Technology of Classification...... 200

5.3.2 The 1891 Collection...... 203

5.3.3 Interlude: The 1898 and 1901 Collections...... 208

5.3.4 The 1904 Guidebook...... 211

5.3.5 Guidebooks and Classificatory Systems...... 218

5.4 Conclusion ...... 219 viii

Conclusion: Desired Images ...... 221

Bibliography ...... 226

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List of Abbreviations

Irkutsk Museum: The Irkutsk Regional Museum of Local History

Kunstkamera: The Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (the Kunstkamera)

NARS: National Archive of the Republic of Sakha

SAIO: State Archive of the Irkutsk Oblast

VSORGO: Eastern Siberian Division of the Imperial Geographical Society

Yakutsk Museum: The Yakutsk State Museum of the History and Culture of the People of the North named after Em. Iaroslavski

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Notes on Translation and Transliteration

Throughout A Gathering of Names, I provide translations of my primary sources and I have strived to create readable and accurate translations from Russian. At times, however, particularly when translating the collection programmes and museum guidebooks, I have opted to preserve the formatting of the original in my translations; thus, incomplete sentences, changes from prose to bullet point lists, and bolded text in the originals are maintained in translation, since the formatting is important to the analysis of the original text. Additionally, I do not translate the Indigenous terminology when it is used in Russian-language source material.

For well-known people and places, I have opted to keep commonly used English variants, rather than transliterations; for example, Nicholas rather than Nikolai for Tsar Nicholas II, or

Yakutsk rather than Iakutsk. All other names are transliterated using the ALA-LC transliteration system. Aside from proper nouns, there are a few words I have chosen to leave in transliterated

Russian rather than translating into English; this is only done when the English translation fails to capture something in the original. In cases of terminological transliteration I have glossed the term in the text and put the transliterated form in italics. For example, I have kept inorodtsy in

Russian when referring to the imperial Russian category of non-ethnically Russian populations throughout the empire. In general, however, I attempt to avoid relying on transliterated terms for ease of reading in English and to avoid rendering commonplace terms as foreign or exotic.

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Prologue

In the summer of 2016 while waiting at the Moscow airport for my flight to Yakutsk, I began speaking with an older woman travelling back to her home in St. Petersburg after a short visit with her friends in Moscow. During our conversation, I mentioned that I was flying to

Yakutsk. She was shocked and confused, and I had to assure her that I had not misspoken. With this information confirmed, the woman looked horrified and asked how my mother would let me go so far away and so deep into Siberia.

For this woman, Siberia was a remote place and not one that people like me, or her, went.

Even in the Russian domestic imagination Siberia appears as a distant and vast expanse east of the Urals. At just over thirteen million square kilometers, Siberia contains over seventy percent of Russia’s territory and between nine and ten percent of the entire earth’s land surface. Siberian author Evgeny Grishkovets plays with the image of Siberia as a vast and unforgiving wilderness, and teases the reader’s image of Siberia in his short essay “Rivers.” He begins, “Only once did I see a bear outside of a zoo. Only one time in my whole life. Even though I was born in Siberia, and lived my first thirty-odd years there.”1 For Grishkovets, Siberia is remembered as a city with zoos, movie theatres, and Italian-made copper needles for gramophones; it is not the city of his grandfather who lived in the old city on the other bank of “a river dark and quick. A big Siberian river.”2 Drawing the readers into his memories, Grishkovets bring us into his “neither big nor small” Siberian city:

1 Evgeny Grishkovets, “Rivers, A Story” trans. Adrienne Celt, Cerise Press: A Journal of Literature, Arts & Culture 4, no. 13 (Spring 2013), 1. 2 Ibid., 2. xii

My city — it’s not an old city. It can’t be. It’s completely Siberian. And furthermore it’s younger than other Siberian cities. But even so, for me it was always quite sufficiently full, in fact more than sufficient — deeply storied. History lived within it. And not just stories constructed of facts and footprints, abandoned to factuality, but alive, and of very personal interest.3

The two ideas of Siberia—the city with its zoos and imported European commodities and the deep and distant space where my mother irresponsibly let me go—both appear throughout my work. I recount the storied histories of Russian ethnographers who brought gramophones into

Siberia to record shamans that they imagined lived in the wilderness far from the modern world.

Collecting shamans’ coats and drums, these ethnographers took them to Siberian cities, which, despite being “deep” in Siberia, were home to some of the first museums of the modern era.

3 Ibid., 1. xiii

Introduction

In A Gathering of Names, I examine the networks of imperial documentation and classification that supported the construction of shamanism as a category in late imperial Russian museums. Within the larger narrative of Russian museum history, I focus on the local context of

Siberian museums and the documents produced by ethnographers involved in the gathering of materials for the collections. I distinguish this from the Siberian collection practices of museums of the imperial centre and emphasize the particularities of the collection contexts in Siberia. I am particularly attentive to the documents published by Siberian museums as part of a system of authority, intellectual mobility, and colonial administration, that relied upon the production of documenting, record keeping, and publishing. Kenneth Dauber explains that through these bureaucratic processes it becomes “possible to characterize and administer large populations with a relatively small staff…. files accomplish this by inscribing disparate elements of the world into standard and manipulatable forms, rendering complexity manageable.”1 This bureaucratic domination through knowledge draws seemingly mundane documents into a powerful and pervasive system of knowledge production and management. My work draws on published ethnographic texts such as collection programmes, expedition notes, photographs, catalogues, and museum display guides. I look beyond their mobility and mutability, however, to examine the desires that motivated this knowledge gathering and classification, investigating how these ethnographers articulated an image of the shamanic subject.

My study focuses on the textual documentation of shamanism and the systems of classification that imperial Russian ethnographers working in museums used to manage and

1 Kenneth Dauber, “Bureaucratizing the Ethnographer’s Magic,” Current Anthropology 36, no. 1 (1995), 76. 1 2 standardize the Indigenous Siberian religious tradition. As an intellectual history of the documentation and collection Siberian shamanic materials for museums, this study examines information infrastructures and scholarly networks that supported museums within the framework of late imperial Russian modernity. A Gathering of Names adds to the scholarship on nineteenth-century museum history by focusing on local Siberian museums, thereby offering an alternative perspective from that of the museums of nineteenth-century Western European empires.2 Additionally, by focusing on shamanism I build on the growing body of intellectual historiographic studies of shamanism that examine shamanism as an academic category that was interconnected with the politics of colonialism, cultural evolution, and modernity.3

Throughout this dissertation I make use of the terms shaman and shamanism to describe

Indigenous Siberian religious traditions from across the region. While shaman is a Siberian term, it is not emic to many Siberian languages, and became a category used to define Indigenous religious professionals through the scholarship of, initially, Russian and German ethnographers. Shamanism, on the other hand, is a European academic category that articulates the larger tradition within which the shamans are found. While this has led some scholars to avoid the term shamanism all together, I employ it here to emphasize the larger religious context that many of the late imperial Russian ethnographers were engaging in their studies of

Indigenous religious life. This shamanism was rooted in a specificity that sought to differentiate

2 Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics, 1 edition (London ; New York: Routledge, 1995); Eileen Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge, Heritage (London ; New York: Routledge, 1992); Krzysztof Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice 1500-1800 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990); Arthur MacGregor, Curiosity and Enlightenment: Collectors and Collections from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). 3 Lars Kirkhusmo Pharo, “A Methodology for a Deconstruction and Reconstruction of the Concepts ‘Shaman’ and ‘Shamanism,’” Numen 58, no. 1 (January 1, 2011): 6–70; Silvia Tomášková, Wayward Shamans: The Prehistory of an Idea (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Andrei A. Znamenski, The Beauty of the Primitive: Shamanism and Western Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Cecelia F. Klein et al., “The Role of Shamanism in Mesoamerican Art: A Reassessment,” Current Anthropology 43, no. 3 (2002): 383–41.

3 between local traditions by documenting a variety of religious practices, beliefs, oral traditions, material cultures, and lay community rituals. Nevertheless, in the Russian museums and ethnographies shamanism was the name given to the different localized Indigenous traditions and shaman to the different religious professionals, despite the collection and documentation of different emic naming practices.

1.1 Sites of Research

I conducted research for this project principally during the summers of 2016 and 2017 by engaging with multiple sites of imperial desiring in the cities of Yakutsk, Irkutsk, and St.

Petersburg. My first research trip was conducted in Siberia, specifically Yakutsk and Irkutsk, over several months, during which I attended language courses at Northeastern Federal

University to study Sakha. In addition, in 2018, I conducted research at the Kunstkamera and the imperial archives and depository libraries in St. Petersburg. In conceptualizing my research trips in this way, I constructed a project in which I started in Siberia rather than in St. Petersburg, ensuring that my research grew out of the local museums first, rather than those of the imperial centre. The three museums central to my research are the Peter the Great Museum of

Anthropology and Ethnography (the Kunstkamera) founded in 1714, the Irkutsk Regional

Museum of Local History founded in 1782, and Yakutsk State Museum of the History and

Culture of the People of the North named after Em. Iaroslavski, founded in 1887. These museums were in substantially different positions in terms of collections in the late imperial era and were connected to different networks of scholarship and imperial resources. Nevertheless, there was a substantial overlap in terms of the types of materials, including materials designated as shamanic, which the museums desired for their collections. The framing and contextualization

4 of these materials, however, differed in notable ways between the Siberian local museums and the Kuntskamera, as the primary imperial museum of the metropole.

1.1.1 The Kunstkamera

As the first museum in Russia, the Kunstkamera retained a place of academic and social prominence in imperial Russia. Unlike the local Siberian museums, this was an imperial institution that maintained an imperial “Russian” collection, though it principally consisted of inorodtsy (non-Russian) materials. Standing on the banks of the Neva River, the museum’s imperial architecture and prominent setting articulate the value of the museum in the imperial city. Peter the Great founded the Kunstkamera in 1714 and chose its placement on the banks of the Neva on Vasilyevsky Island after seeing a strangely shaped pine tree that had branches growing back into its trunk. Kunstkamera collected the tree, and a branch remains on display at the museum today. Peter the Great’s original collection was modeled on the cabinets of curiosity the Tsar had seen while in Western Europe, and portions of this initial collection remain on display in the permanent exhibit called the “First Scientific Collections of the Kunstkamera.”4

The museum served as a centre of scientific study in the empire and was part of Peter the Great’s plans to modernize and Europeanize Russia through technological and scientific progress.5

4 See chapter 5 for a detailed discussion of the Kunstkamera’s late imperial collections. 5 Anthony Anemone, “The Monsters of Peter the Great: The Culture of the St. Petersburg Kunstkamera in the Eighteenth Century,” The Slavic and East European Journal 44, no. 4 (2000): 583–602; Olga A. Baird, “I Want the People to Observe and to Learn! The St Petersburg Kunstkamera in the Eighteenth Century,” History of Education 37, no. 4 (2008): 531–47; Moisei Kagan, Grad Petrov v Istorii Russkoi Kultury (St. Petersburg: AO Slaviia, 1996); Oleg Neverov, ‘“His Majesty’s Cabinet” and Peter I’s Kunstkammer’, in The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Europe, eds O. Impey and A. MacGregor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 54–61; A. K. Baiburin, N. M. Girenko, and K. V. Chistov, eds., Kunstkamera: MAE Im. Petra Velikogo RAN: Izbrannye Stati, (St. Petersburg: Evropeiskii dom, 1995); T. K. Shafranovskaia, Peterburgskaia

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Over the years, as the collection expanded, the museum became more specifically focused on anthropology and ethnography, with other collections splintering off to form independent museums of zoology, botany, etc. By the late nineteenth century, the Kunstkamera was principally an ethnographic museum, and the Siberian collection was classified first as

Russian and later as Asian, marking a greater distancing of Siberia from the European territories of the Russian Empire. Shamans and shamanism were aspects of a trans-Siberian cultural and religious identity that was projected by the imperial museum across the contiguous space of

Russia in Asia.

For three hundred years the Kunstkamera has served as a flagship ethnographic museum of imperial Russia and the Imperial Russian Academy of Science. Today, the museum remembers the late imperial era as its ‘golden age’ when its collections were growing through expeditions, donations, and the magnetism of the imperial metropole that drew intellectual, social, and economic capital to the centre through state power and prestige.6 As an example of an imperial ethnographic museum, the Kunstkamera serves as a point of contrast to the local

Siberian museums and presents an alternative projection of shamanism, in which it was more generally configured as a trans-Siberian religious tradition rather than a local, or culturally specific, tradition.

Kunstkamera: putevoditel po muzeiu (St. Petersburg: Rossiiskaia akademiia nauk, Muzei antropologii i etnografii im. Petra Velikogo (Kunstkamera), 1995). 6 “Istoria Kunstkamery” Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (the Kunstkamera), accessed October 2, 2018, http://www.kunstkamera.ru/exposition/kunst_hist.

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1.1.2 The Irkutsk Regional Museum of Local History (The Irkutsk Museum)

Over 4,000 kilometres eastward from St. Petersburg near the Mongolian border, Irkutsk served as an intellectual centre in Siberia. The Irkutsk Museum, founded in 1782, is one of the oldest museums outside of Europe, alongside the collections of the American Philosophical

Society founded in Philadelphia in 1743, the Charleston Museum in South Carolina founded in

1773, and the Indian Museum in Kolkata founded in 1814. Governor F. Klichka, a military official who became governor of Irkutsk in 1778, founded the museum as well as the city’s library and school. Local merchants, wealthy families, and members of the Academy of Science donated materials to form the museum’s initial collection; however, in 1879 this original collection, together with the museum itself, the archive, and the library were lost in a fire.7 As a result, the museum and the Eastern Siberian Division of the Imperial Geographical Society

(VSORGO), which became associated with the museum beginning in 1851, had to rebuild a collection in the late imperial era. Despite the need to rebuild, the museum sat on the foundation of its institutional legacy as a centre of Siberian intellectual culture and research. 8

Irkutsk itself was an important city in Siberia and a tourist destination due to its proximity to Lake Baikal, the world’s largest fresh water lake containing 23% of the world’s fresh surface water, and its own unique flora and fauna, including the famous nerpa (Baikal seal). The city, with its wide boulevards, rivers, and its neoclassical architecture, echoes St.

7 “Istoria Muzeia” Irkust Regional Museum of Local History, accessed November 21, 2018, https://museum- irkutsk.com/history. 8 In Russian the Eastern Siberian Division of the Imperial Russian Geographic Society is the Vostochno-Sibirskogo otdela Imperatorskogo Russkogo geografigheskogo obshchestva and generally shortened to VSORGO, which will be used throughout as an abbreviation.

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Petersburg in its imperial and European aesthetic. In an 1895 Russian travel guide, the city is introduced as the “largest and greenest city in Siberia [where] the main streets are built up almost exclusively with stone houses, of which many reach three or even four stories.”9 Amongst these buildings, the museum’s red stone building facing the Angara river retains a place of importance in the city, and, since the imperial era, has served as an intellectual centre of Siberia and became central to ethnographic research into Indigenous Siberian cultural and religious traditions.10 The long institutional history conferred a particular prestige on the Irkutsk Museum and the city of

Irkutsk itself had a certain celebrity within the empire as the “Paris of Siberia.”11 The Irkutsk

Museum was a prestigious institution in imperial Siberia and engaged in substantial and sustained collecting and documenting of local Siberian shamanism, which included generating documents related to collecting shamanic materials that became influential across the Russian empire.

1.1.3 The Yakutsk State Museum of the History and Culture of the People of the North named after Emilian Iaroslavski (The Yakutsk Museum)

Unlike both the Kunstkamera and the Irkutsk Museum, the Yakutsk Museum was founded in the late imperial era and did not have a longer institutional history to draw upon to

9 A. Orlovsk, Putevoditel po Sibiri i tyrkestanskomy kraiu (St. Petersburg: 1895), 20 10 Julia Fein, “Cultural Curators and Provincial Publics: Local Museums and Social Change in Siberia, 1887-1941” PhD diss., (University of Chicago, 2012); Julia Fein, “Talking Rocks in the Irkutsk Museum: Networks of Science in Late Imperial Siberia,” The Russian Review 72, no. 3 (June 2013): 409–426; Lev Mixailovich Dameshek, Muzei VSORGO: Istoriia formirovaniia kollektsii i vystavochnaia deiatel’nost’ (1851-1931 gg) (Irkutsk: Izd-bo IRU, 2013). 11 Sharon Hudgins, The Other Side of Russia: A Slice of Life in Siberia and the Russian Far East (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2003), 75.

8 build its collections. The museum was proposed in 1887 by the secretary of the Statistical

Committee, A. I. Popov, and developed as a community project relying on donations from the local population, including both Russian and Indigenous individuals.12 The Yakutsk Museum did not have the intellectual legacy of the Irkutsk Museum or the Kunstkamera, nor was it affiliated with an imperial society like VSORGO or the Imperial Academy of Science. Nevertheless, the museum and the ethnographic and collector communities in Yakutsk were connected to Irkutsk and participated in the network of Siberian local museums and researchers in such a way that challenges an image of the city and the museum as remote and disconnected.

Yakutsk itself is located in Northeastern Siberia and built on continuous permafrost.

Today much of the city maintains Soviet style architecture, particularly of the Stalinist era, but the city itself traces its history to the establishment in 1632 of a Russian trading fort. It later gained notoriety due to the infamous Kolyma Highway, known as the ‘Road of Bones’ that connected Yakutsk (based out of Nizhny Bastyakh, a settlement across the Lena River from the city of Yakutsk) to Magadan and the Kolyma Gulag camps.13 Almost 2,000 kilometres from

Irkutsk, Yakutsk has a radically different history and is often imagined as a harder and more remote city than its southern Siberian counterparts.14 By placing the Yakutsk Museum inside the networks of Siberian museums and late nineteenth-century ethnographic collection, I place the

Yakutsk museum and the other museums across Siberia into a network of scholars attempting to

12 See chapter 4 for a description of the collections and donations to the museum. 13 This road is called the ‘Road of Bones’ because the bodies of those who perished in its construction were buried within the foundations of the road rather than given proper burials. In Yakutsk multiple people talked about the road as a place of death, but without decay, as the bodies are thought to be frozen and preserved within the road by the permafrost. (Olga Ulturgasheva, “Ghosts of the Gulag in the Eveny World of the Dead,” The Polar Journal 7, no. 1 (2017): 26–45). 14 For an example of this in popular media articles see: Shaun Walker, “Yakutsk: Journey to the Coldest City on Earth” Independent (January 21, 2008); Diane Smyth, “Life on the Permafrost in Yakutsk” British Journal of Photography (January 23, 2019).

9 study scientifically different local spaces as part of a late imperial research methodology. Rather than remote outposts or isolated museums, these different locals were drawn together into a late imperial Siberian research network.

1.2 Desired Documents and Research Methods

This project is an intellectual history of collection told through publications and ethnographic documents. It is essential to note therefore that my work is twice removed from the people and the objects that the imperial ethnographers documented. 15 My work looks at the technologies that articulate the shaman as a local projection, contextualized and particularized by the Siberian museum to the surrounding regions. This is in contrast to the Kunstkamera’s imperial projection of the shaman as generally Siberian across the contiguous space of the

Russian Empire in Asia that presented shamanism as a unifying cultural and religious category. I had initially imagined that the research would track the accessioning of shamanic materials at local Siberian museums in the late imperial era to map who the principle donors were, what were the principle types of objects they donated, and how these were labelled in the cataloguing records. However, obtaining this information at many museums proved challenging, and I was often not granted permission to share the information I saw with the public in any writing or public talks.

15 In this I see my work as directly influenced by such works as: Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions, or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005); Ryan Tucker Jones, Empire of Extinction: Russians and the North Pacific’s Strange Beasts of the Sea, 1741-1867 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Eileen Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (New York: Routledge, 1992); Hannah Turner, “The Computerization Of Material Culture Catalogues: Objects and Infrastructure in the Smithsonian Institution’s Department of Anthropology,” Museum Anthropology 39, no. 2 (September 1, 2016): 163–77; Kenneth Dauber, “Bureaucratizing the Ethnographer’s Magic,” Current Anthropology 36, no. 1 (1995): 75–95.

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What was both apparent and accessible was the planning associated with a pre- acquisition moment, when objects and information were being requested rather than collected.

By focusing on this moment, I was able to work with publicly available sources, as museums were publishing and widely circulating documents, often called collection programmes, which were produced for the public and listed desired materials in order to prompt donations. These collection programmes are the central focus of my research, and with them the anticipatory moment that preceded acquisition and accession—a moment in which collectors wrote and organized their desires, identifying items that could anchor their projections of shamanism, and document the local and domestic lives of the non-Russian Indigenous Siberians. These collection programmes opened up a space of projection and desire where objects and information were imagined as possibilities. This anticipatory space of possibility and desire added a little bit of itself to the listed tangible materials in the collection programmes—the programme author named, ordered, and imagined the materials listed and prefigured their acquisition in the text.

For this project, I have surveyed approximately fifty collection programmes produced between 1880 and 1910 in St. Petersburg, Irkutsk, and Yakutsk. The museums did not need new programmes every year and the public often continued to use the same programmes for multiple years.16 In order to contextualize these collection programmes, I have worked with journals, museum reports, newspapers, books, expedition reports, and archival materials. The limited number of collection programmes produced by individual museums reflects the timescale of actual acquisition. While many collection programmes were produced throughout the late imperial era, many were reissued, revised, or simply reprinted rather than rewritten. These documents could outline long-term collection and research goals for museums and scientific

16 See chapter 3 for an overview of the usage of collection programmes within late imperial Russia.

11 societies. As a result, I approach these collection programmes as durational texts that were intended to have sustained usage rather than be replaced regularly. These programmes had time to circulate through different networks over time as they travelled along roadways, railways, and riverways across the Russian Empire.

1.3 An Overview of the Argument

The proliferation of museums across the Russian Empire in the late imperial era formed a network of scientific research that was grounded in an idea of imperial modernity and infrastructures that increasingly connected Siberia with the imperial centres. Exiles from the capitals (Moscow and St. Petersburg) poured into Siberian cities, new roadways and railways were being built across the empire, and local intellectual communities established institutions that formed networks with Siberia. By employing the term infrastructure, I emphasize the physicality of the systems that supported the development of museums and local ethnographic research into shamanism in the late imperial era. This includes the publishing and circulation of documents, the system of exile that forced many of the scholars I address into long-term resettlement in Siberia, and museums as physical institutions. While not an infrastructural study of Siberia museums, the history of these museums cannot be disconnected from the broader physical and organizational structures that facilitated the circulation of ideas, objects, and people that brought Siberian shamanic materials into museums.

Throughout the 1800s, Siberian cities were establishing museums with the mandate to document the local region through the scientific research methods of disciplines including geology, zoology, botany, and ethnography. In order to expand their collections, museums published collection programmes to solicit donations. The imperial infrastructures that allowed

12 the collection programmes to move across the empire also facilitated the spread of desire—desire for specific materials named, classified, and published by collectors. By using the term desire I emphasize the anticipatory nature of the collection programme within the chronology of collection. These programmes list materials that have not yet been acquired, and instead articulate an imagined thing that is named and ordered such that the collector could recognize and place it within a collection. Desire also suggests an embodiment that located collecting in people rather than in institutions, despite the fact that many of the collection programmes I address were anonymously authored. The particular desires of individual collections do, however, become influential through the circulation of the collection programmes, and I trace how a repertoire of specific shamanic material emerge as desired objects through the late imperial era. Desire has also been connected to the colonial politics in, for example, the works of

Edward Said, Ann Laura Stoler, and Robert J. C. Young that draw out colonial narratives of desire as linked with dominance, exoticism, and classification.17 This interplay of desire as a personal embodied anticipation of a collector, and desire as an aspect of a larger collection methodology and colonial system forms a complex set of associations with the term, which reflects the tensions surrounding the practices of these late imperial ethnographic collectors.

This repertoire of desired materials connects across the different Siberian museums that were attempting to document their local regions. Shamanism, as the general term used to classify the Indigenous religious traditions of Siberia, became a central feature of these museums that was desired by collectors as both local and exotic. Imperial Russia has had a long history of exhibiting and exoticizing shamans; Peter the Great ordered local governors in Siberia to send

17 Edward W. Said, Orientalism, (New York: Vintage Books, 2003). Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995); Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (New York: Routledge, 1995).

13 shamans to his court together with their coats and drums as a spectacle of the Siberian territory east of the Ural Mountains. Empress Anna had members of her court dress in shamanic costumes as part of a charade wedding for her jesters.18 The exotic presentation of shamans within the imperial court drew on ideas of remoteness and primitivity to locate shamanism in an elsewhere defined as non-Russian, non-European, and non-modern. In the space of the Siberian museums, this same distancing was not possible as their mandate for documenting the local meant that these shamans were present in the same space as the ethnographers and museums. The ethnographers’ attempts to conduct ethnographic research into shamanism were as part of the scientific documentation of the local and offered a contextualization to the shamans within larger religious, cultural, and community systems. Shamanism became a local exotic, familiar and unfamiliar, simultaneously embedded and distanced, to the ethnographers and curators, working with a late imperial Russian vision of scientific modernity, which tried to document and collect shamanic materials for Siberian museums.

The late imperial era was a time of self-conscious modernization when the imperial state reformed traditional institutions while the citizenry increasingly called for change and revolution.

Museums were part of a long narrative of modernization tracing back to Peter the Great’s founding of the Kunstkamera in 1714 as part of his plans for the technological and scientific advancement of imperial Russia.19 Many accounts of museum history leave Russia out, and

18 Andrei A. Znamenski, The Beauty of the Primitive: Shamanism and Western Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 9. 19 Anthony Anemone, “The Monsters of Peter the Great: The Culture of the St. Petersburg Kunstkamera in the Eighteenth Century,” The Slavic and East European Journal 44, no. 4 (2000): 583–602; Olga A. Baird, “I Want the People to Observe and to Learn! The St Petersburg Kunstkamera in the Eighteenth Century,” History of Education 37, no. 4 (2008): 531–47; Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy from Peter the Great to the Abdication of Nicholas II, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

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instead focus on the museums of Western European metropoles.20 Within the growing English- language scholarship on Russian museum history, much of the work focuses on the museums of the imperial centre.21 In my decision to focus on Siberian museums, I am influenced by the work of Julia Fein who has written about Siberian museums within the context of the political and social transformations of the late Russian Empire and early Soviet Union.22 Unlike Fein’s work, which provides a detailed historical account of museums across Siberia as institutions within a state and a local public sphere, my own work is invested in the specific intellectual history of ethnographic collection. Through a study of the collecting and documenting practices for gathering shamanic materials, I examine how ethnographers and museums understood

Indigenous religious traditions as a function of their attempt to articulate a late imperial Russian modernity.

This history of Siberian and Russian museums is an imperial one. The politics of the

Russian Empire and its colonization of the contiguous territory reaching eastward to the Pacific

Ocean inform how these museums collected shamanic materials in the late imperial period. The desire to document the Indigenous nations of Siberia became part of the discourse of modernity

20 Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (New York: Routledge, 1995); Eileen Hooper- Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (London ; New York: Routledge, 1992); Toby Burrows and Cynthia Johnston, Collecting the Past: British Collectors and Their Collections from the 18th to the 20th Centuries (Routledge, 2018); Arthur MacGregor, Curiosity and Enlightenment: Collectors and Collections from the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); Ruth Phillips, “Re-Placing Objects: Historical Practices for the Second Museum Age,” Culture et Musees, no. 28 (2016): 117–49; Krzysztof Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice 1500-1800 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990). 21 Katia Dianina, “The Return of History: Museum, Heritage, and National Identity in Imperial Russia,” Journal of Eurasian Studies 1, no. 2 (2010): 111–18; Katia Dianina, “Museum and Message: Writing Public Culture in Imperial Russia,” Slavic & East European Journal 56, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 173–95; Sergei Kan, “Evolutionism and Historical Particularism at the St. Petersburg Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography,” Museum Anthropology 31, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 28–46; Olga A. Baird, “I Want the People to Observe and to Learn! The St Petersburg Kunstkamera in the Eighteenth Century,” History of Education 37, no. 4 (2008): 531–47; Anthony Anemone, “The Monsters of Peter the Great: The Culture of the St. Petersburg Kunstkamera in the Eighteenth Century,” The Slavic and East European Journal 44, no. 4 (2000): 583–602; Adam Jolles, “Stalin’s Talking Museums,” Oxford Art Journal 28, no. 3 (2005): 431–55; Francine Hirsch, “Getting to Know ‘The Peoples of the USSR’: Ethnographic Exhibits as Soviet Virtual Tourism, 1923-1934,” Slavic Review 62, no. 4 (2003): 683–709. 22 Fein, “Cultural Curators and Provincial Publics: Local Museums and Social Change in Siberia, 1887-1941.”

15 as its mirrored twin, and the ‘modern’ and the ‘primitive’ reflected each other in the museum practices of collection, documentation, classification, and salvage ethnography. Tomoko

Masuzawa outlines how the documentation of religions by imperial scholars created and maintained hierarchies and boundaries that reaffirmed colonial politics.23 The construction of categories like shamanism as generic terms for Indigenous religions reinforced a primitive and universal character to the distinctive religious traditions and therefore also to the people connected to them.24 Masuzawa, and other scholars of religion and empire such as Talal Asad and David Chidester, have sought to examine how religion as a category was used to justify ideologies of colonialism, segregation, violence, and conversion.

The scholarship on Russian empire and colonialism often focuses both on the position of

Russia as ambiguously European and on the contiguous nature of the imperial territory. Edward

Said argued that the overland colonialism of Russia meant that the centre’s perceptions of the colonized territory were not “the projection of far-flung interests” as those of England and

France.25 The proximity that these Russified Siberian communities had to the Indigenous communities grounded the projections of the inorodtsy in a familiarity rooted in sustained fieldwork, linguistic study, and local knowledge.26 This does not mean that these scholars were

23 Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religion, 4. 24 Ibid. 25 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 10. 26 Andrei A. Znamenski, Shamanism and Christianity: Native Encounters with Russian Orthodox Missions in Siberia and Alaska, 1820-1917 (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1999); Andrei A. Znamenski, The Beauty of the Primitive: Shamanism and Western Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, ed., Shamanic Worlds: Rituals and Lore of Siberia and Central Asia (Armonk, NY: North Castle Books, 1997); Nicholas B. Breyfogle, Willard Sunderland, and Abby M. Schrader, eds., Peopling the Russian Periphery: Borderland Colonization in Eurasian History, (New York, NY: Routledge, 2007); Nathaniel Knight, “Was Russia Its Own Orient?: Reflections on the Contributions of Etkind and Schimmelpenninck to the Debate on Orientalism,” Ab Imperio 2002, no. 1 (2002): 299–309; Aleksandr Etkind, Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience (Cambridge: Polity, 2011); David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, Russian Orientalism: Asia in the Russian Mind from Peter the Great to the Emigration (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).

16 exempt or immune to the politics and ideologies of colonialism; rather, there was a nearness that intertwined with the colonialist exoticism of the shaman in Siberia. I simultaneously support and challenge Said’s distinction between the far-flung orientalist projection of European colonialism and the relative closeness of the contiguous imperialism of Russia. On the one hand, the Siberian museums’ local context produced a nearness to the projection of shamanism in the museum, while still exotic and inorodtsy, it was also familiar and contextual. On the other hand, the

Kunstkamera’s distancing of Siberia emphasized and desired a greater distance between Asian and European Russia. From the vantage of the Kunstkamera, shamanism was located in the remote and non-European elsewhere of a colonial space.

The category of the inorodtsy during imperial Russia often was used as a taxation category to indicate the populations of non-Russians who were subjected to different legal obligations like taxation or military service. However, as John W. Slocum writes in his article on the history of the category: “over the course of the nineteenth century, the term (inorodtsy) applied almost exclusively to the native peoples encountered over the course of Russia’s eastward expansion. The genealogy of the term is thus inextricably linked to the history of

Russian colonial policy…”27 The politics of colonialism blur lines between bureaucratic categories and social ones, and the inorodtsy were subject to different taxation policies, but were also socially constructed as different, emphasising politics of social evolution and foreignness.

While Slocum notes that in the nineteenth century the Indigenous people of Russia in Asia were particularly closely affiliated with the category of inorodtsy, it is important to note that this category has included Jewish, Tatar, Armenian, Baltic Germans, and other non-Russian

27John W. Slocum, “Who, and When, Were the Inorodtsy? The Evolution of the Category of ‘Aliens’ in Imperial Russia,” The Russian Review 57, no. 2 (1998): 175.

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populations within the empire.28 Throughout this dissertation, I use the term inorodtsy to refer to the historical category and concept of the non-Russian populations of nineteenth century imperial

Russia. However, I use the term Indigenous more frequently both as a means of differentiating my own authorial voice from that of my sources, and to recognize the Siberian Indigenous nations without positioning them those other than or alien to the assumed norm of Russian origins.

The collection, documentation, and circulation of Indigenous visual and material culture by the communities associated with the Siberian museums in this late imperial era was guided by a desired projection, or image, of a “local exotic”—something constructed simultaneously both as familiar and grounded and as other and imagined. Here, I use the term exotic to emphasize the intellectual distancing and fantastical imagining of shamans that drew upon a well-established repertoire of images and narratives in Russian and European scholarship.29 The local, however, is rooted in the deeply contextualized and particularized research of Siberian ethnographers who sought to understand shamanism not as far-flung sensationalized religious tradition of the inorodtsy, but as specific and differentiated religious and cultural practices of different

Indigenous Siberian nations. Julia Fein suggests that the local was itself an imagined category within Siberian museums, and writes, “Even if there ever existed such a thing as the authentically ‘local,’ surely these museums that are the focus of this study do not represent it… here: ‘the local’ is as much a product of the modern imagination as ‘the masses.’”30 While the

‘local’ was a term used amongst the ethnographers and collectors in late imperial Russia to articulate their own collection practices, the exotic was not. By adding the exotic to the local, I

28 Ibid., 186. 29 See chapter 2 for a sustained overview of this scholarship. 30 Ibid., 541-540.

18 emphasize the legacies and duration of shamans as exotic subjects in Russian ethnographic and display contexts that continued to inform the desired collections of museums within the empire.

Both the local and the exotic are constructions of imperial ethnographic classification, but within the Siberian museums they are not mutually exclusive and together shaped the desires of the collections and helped to articulate a Siberia modernity.

The scholarship on colonialism and the Russia Empire is divided between scholars such as David Schimmelpenninck, Paul Werth, Andrei Znamenski who approach the particular position of Russia as itself not-quite-European and the contiguous nature of its empire as mitigating factors in the experience of colonialism. Others, such as Aleksandr Etkind, Ryan

Tucker Jones, and Marjorie Balzer, acknowledge the particularities of Russia without ceding ground to a milder interpretation of imperial control of its colonial territory, citizens, or natural resources.31 My own approach to Russian colonialism in Siberia is particularly influenced by

Ryan Tucker Jones’ framing of Russian colonialism of the North Pacific. He writes,

Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, nature and the study of nature occupied the center of imperial politics in the North Pacific. Russians founded their expansion into the region upon the harvesting and trading of marine mammals, and Russian imperial control was legitimized in part through the claim that they had mapped, described, and thoroughly understood North Pacific nature. The Russian Empire competed there with confident, aggressive Enlightenment European empires, and to win this competition it relied upon commerce and the accumulation of knowledge as much as or more than military power.32

31 David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, Russian Orientalism: Asia in the Russian Mind from Peter the Great to the Emigration (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); Paul W. Werth, The Tsar’s Foreign Faiths: Toleration and the Fate of Religious Freedom in Imperial Russia, First edition, Oxford Studies in Modern European History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Andrei A. Znamenski, Shamanism and Christianity: Native Encounters with Russian Orthodox Missions in Siberia and Alaska, 1820-1917, Contributions to the Study of World History, no. 70 (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1999); Aleksandr Etkind, Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience (Cambridge: Polity, 2011); Ryan Tucker Jones, Empire of Extinction: Russians and the North Pacific’s Strange Beasts of the Sea, 1741-1867 (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, The Tenacity of Ethnicity: A Siberian Saga in Global Perspective (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). 32 Jones, Empire of Extinction, 15.

19

Jones’ work on the North Pacific and the fur trade of marine mammals focuses on the roles played by natural science research and the infrastructures of resource extraction which remapped colonized land as a resource territory in the service of the imperial centres.33 Like Jones, my work focuses on the technologies of power expressed in naming, collecting, and documenting as tools for the accumulation of knowledge and territory. More specifically, I address the systematic imagination of imperial Russian ethnography as an expression of desire for the local, yet exotic shaman, and not as the far-flung projections of a fantastical imagination.

Local Siberian museums relied on colonial infrastructures through which a network of scholars, Russian and Indigenous local communities, objects, and ideas circulated. Influenced by

Said, I see the local Siberian colonial space of the museums as at the critical centre of processes of documenting Siberian shamanism. These museums did not participate in the same distancing projections by which intellectuals and imperial officials in Moscow or St. Petersburg sought to classify and reform the inorodtsy but they were also not exempt from the desire to have such distanced, imaginative power. The museum collectors’ desires for the scientific documentation of the local manifested in the insatiable need for documenting Siberian Indigenous life, and shamanism became part of this ethnographic naming.

I approach the classification and categorization of shamanic materials within museum collecting and collections as knowledge-producing systems, consisting of networks between people, objects, and ideas mobilized through infrastructures that support and circulate them.34

33 Ibid., 234. 34 Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things out: Classification and Its Consequences (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1999); Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Hannah Elizabeth Turner, “Information Infrastructures in the Museum: Documenting, Digitizing, and Practising Ethnographic Objects in the Smithsonian’s Department of Anthropology,” November 2015; Nikolai Vakhtin, “Mobility and Infrastructure in the Russian Arctic Das Sein Bestimmt Das Bewusstsein,” Sibirica 16, no. 3 (Winter 2017): 1–13.

20

These systems not only describe and sort information; they are also productive of it. Bowker and

Star explain: “a ‘classification system’ is a set of boxes (metaphorical and literal) into which things can be put to then do some kind of work.”35 In my work, these boxes are visible infrastructures that sort, label, and shelve objects; however, they rest on invisible ones that inform the desires, imaginations, ideas, and ideologies that mobilize networks of people and institutions to gather objects. Similar to Hooper-Greenhill’s intellectual history of epistemes and collection practices in European museums, I examine how the classification of shamanic materials establishes a repertoire of shamanism that becomes systematized within imperial

Russian ethnographic collection as a means of producing and circulating knowledge about shamanism as local and domestic exotic internal to the empire.36

By focusing on the pre-collection moment when museums and collectors were producing wish lists that were publicly circulated in museums, journals, and pamphlets, I look at how the anticipatory desire for something was expressed within a classificatory system that named it as a specific type of museum object. The collectors were gathering within an already existent knowledge system that articulated a projection of what the collected material was and how it connected to other things, people, and ideas. The projections of desired objects in these collection programmes—things such as drums, coats, stories, and names—were already pre- figured in the systems, networks, and assemblages of the museums.

Both the local and the imperial projections of shamanism engage with the idea and the politics of remoteness. Here I see remoteness not as a geographical condition, but as an

35 Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things out: Classification and Its Consequences (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999). 36 Eileen Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (London ; New York: Routledge, 1992).

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infrastructural one wherein certain areas are “not properly linked to the dominant zone.”37 This includes hard infrastructural links through, for example, roads, and invisible infrastructural ones such as the emotional and cultural articulation of distance. While Siberia as a remote place appears as a trope in late imperial Russia, it was also increasingly connected to the dominant zones throughout this period.38 The development of infrastructures and networks that connected

Siberian cities to Russian European ones also helped facilitate the increased ethnographic study of Siberian Indigenous cultural and religious traditions. Already in the 1890s, many ethnographers perceived this same connection between the ‘remote’ Siberia and the central metropoles as a threat to Indigenous life. The idea of salvage ethnography then took root to prevent what was perceived as the inevitable destruction of traditional Indigenous life in the wake of modernity and Russification.39

Late imperial Russian museums articulated their desire to collect and document shamanism in the collection programmes that moved through networks of local and scholarly communities and along roads, rivers, railways. Through the technologies of naming, mapping, and describing shamanism, the ethnographers placed individual objects, people, and ideas into literal and metaphoric boxes that did the work of projecting shamanism in the Russian Empire.

37 Edwin Ardener, “Remote Areas: Some Theoretical Considerations” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2, no. 1 (2012): 532 quoted in Nikolai Vakhtin, “Mobility and Infrastructure in the Russia Arctic Das Sein Bestimmt Das Bewusstsein,” Sibirica 16, no. 3 (Winter 2017): 7. 38 Mark Bassin, “Inventing Siberia: Visions of the Russian East in the Early Nineteenth Century,” The American Historical Review 96, no. 3 (1991): 763–794; Mark Bassin, Imperial Visions: Nationalist Imagination and Geographical Expansion in the Russian Far East, 1840-1865, Cambridge Studies in Historical Geography 29 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 39 M. V. Zagorskin, Otvety na programmu Imperatorskago Russkago Geograficheskago Obshchestva, dlia sobiraniia narodnykh iuridicheskikh obychaev (Irkutsk: 1891), II-III; V. M. Mikhailovskii, “Shamanism in Siberia and European Russia, Being the Second Part of ‘Shamanstvo,’” trans. Oliver Wardrop, The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 24 (1895): 62.

22

1.3.1 Systems and Structures: An Organizational Overview

By examining the collecting of Siberian shamanic materials in the context of late imperial

Russian museums, I explore how technologies of ethnographic documentation—collection programmes, classifications, naming conventions, etc.—produced knowledge about shamanism.

The Siberian museums and ethnographers articulated desired images of Indigenous Siberians as simultaneously local and exotic, expressing both a late imperial Russian scientific modernity and a history of imperial projections that imagined the shaman as ‘primitive’ and ‘foreign.’ This imperial projection retained a stronger hold at the Kunstkamera, where the localness of Siberia became part of a generalized imperial context and shamanism was presented as a unifying trans-

Siberian category. This diminished the local as a contextualizing and differentiating methodology seen in the practices of the local Siberian museums.

Chapter 1 places the development of local Siberian museums in the nineteenth-century in a broader context and historiography of modernity in late imperial Russia. As Tsarist reforms were changing the social, political, and economic organization of imperial Russia, Siberian cities were expanding and the infrastructures that connected them to the dominant zone increasingly connected Russia in Asia to Russia in Europe. Unlike the imperial museums of the capitals

(Moscow and St. Petersburg), the Siberian museums tended to be local in focus, collecting and documenting their regional space rather than an imperial or international one. In Siberian museums, the presence of Indigenous Siberians and their classification by the Russian state as

23 inorodtsy was presented as part of the local story, while simultaneously being framed as remote in both spatial and temporal ways.40

Chapter 2 explicitly addresses the intellectual history of shamanism within western academic traditions moving between historical and contemporary sources to examine the legacies of different methodologies. Throughout this section I refer to contemporary critical scholarship on the intellectual history of shamanism in the present tense, in order to distinguish these scholars from those I draw upon as primary sources of the distinctive periods within the historiography. Following this overview, I address the late imperial Russian ethnographic research in detail in order to destabilize a simple chronological periodization that could suggest that specific ideas and theories had finite lifespans rather than continued existences as durational texts. In particular, the role the shaman has played within the western imagination has meant that shamanism as a broader category of “religion” is often neglected in favour of the exoticized figure of the shaman as a magician, a charlatan, an archetype, and a madman. By an increased focus on shamanism as inclusive of activities, beliefs, traditions, and knowledge that exist beyond the specific figure of the shaman, the specificity of different shamanic religious traditions can become increasingly apparent.

Both Chapters 3 and 4 look specifically at collection programmes as a genre of museum document for communicating and circulating desire for shamanic materials. Chapter 3 examines collection programmes produced by local Siberian museums to gather ethnographic information on shamanism. These programmes maintained a broad perspective and include prompts

40 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).

24 regarding stories, medicine practices, marriage ceremonies, and diverse spirits and deities that inhabit the different worlds in many Siberian shamanic traditions. This characterization of shamanism seen in these programmes reflected a very different image from the ethnographic accounts discussed in chapter 3, which tended to focus principally on the shaman as the epicenter of shamanism. Chapter 4 moves to the collection programmes and collection practices for gathering shamanic objects by the Irkutsk and Yakutsk museums. I trace the consolidation of shamanic traditions into three principle categories of collection: the coat, the drum, and the ongon (a Mongolian-Buryat term for both a spirit and the vessel within which it resides). I consider these three categories as material cultural objects collected by museums in the late imperial era. Moving from collection programmes to specific acquisition narratives, I show how these three types of objects formed the basis for museum object collections that conformed to a longer history of shamanism within western visual and material culture.

The final chapter of the dissertation addresses the Kunstkamera in St. Petersburg as a comparative example of museums in late imperial Russia. Chapter 5 also addresses the classification systems employed by the museum for organizing the displayed permanent collection within the galleries as a different moment in the chronology of collecting that is no longer anticipatory. Here, objects have already been acquired but, unlike the parts of a permanent collection not displayed within the galleries, the exhibited objects, like the collection programmes, present the categories and classifications of the object within a public sphere.

In order to trace how the Kunstkamera classified and categorized shamanic objects for the public, I rely upon a series of guidebooks produced for visitors to the museum that allow me to construct a diachronic analysis of the changes within the galleries between the late 1880s through the early 1900s. Of particular focus, will be the reclassification of Siberian collections

25 from a gallery of Russian to Asian ethnography. By shifting from Siberian museums to a museum of the imperial metropole, this chapter explores how shamanism was reconfigured outside of a local context and became a general category. With this shift, shamanism increasingly operates as a uniting category that draws together the different Indigenous nations across the contiguous Siberian territory. The Kunstkamera reconfigures the local exotic of the shaman as curated within Siberian museums into an imperial projection of the exotic that is at once remote and general across the Asian colonial territories.

A Gathering of Names is about the documentation and collection of Siberian shamanic materials by and for Russian museums. It is an intellectual history of the bureaucracy of classification, infrastructures, and networks that anticipated and projected shamanism within the context of late imperial Russian modernity. Grishkovets writes about the home city he left in

Siberia, “My mind no longer contains the mechanism to understand the city, and perhaps more importantly, I’m not completely convinced that I need to understand it.”41 This is where I position my own work: I do not have the mechanism to understand Siberia or shamanism, nor does this project set out with the goal to understand them.

Rather, I intend to leave something unresolved in the histories and stories I recount that is at once sufficiently full and deeply storied but also ambiguous and resistant. Classification and technologies of ethnographic documentation offer a mechanism for attempting to understand and to translate something unknown into something known and the unfamiliar into familiar.42 It is essential that the ability for these mechanisms and bureaucracies to account for reality should be held in doubt. Dostoevsky, in his fictionalized memoir, writes about the different people living

41 Grishkovets, “Rivers, A Story,” 1. 42 Naoki Sakai, “Translation,” Theory, Culture, and Society 23, no. 2-3 (2006): 71-78.

26 together in a Siberian prison camp, but he is unable to construct a suitable typology to account for them; he writes,

Here I am, however, trying to classify all the convicts into categories, but is that possible? Reality is infinitely diverse compared with all the deductions of abstract thought, even the most clever ones, and it abhors sharp and sweeping distinctions. Reality tends towards fragmentation.43

The fragmentation of reality and its infinite diversity resists the systems of name and ordering needed by museums and their collectors.

43 Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the House of the Dead, trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2013): 230.

1 Chapter One: Museums and Modernity in Late Imperial Russia

1.1 Introduction

Siberian cities as far apart as Tyumen in the far west and Vladivostok in the Russian Far

East founded local museums at the end of the nineteenth century. The development of these museums was part of the changing social and cultural landscape of the late imperial era, which ended in 1917 with the Russian Revolution and the establishment of the Soviet Union. Imperial

Russia had ethnographic museums in the capitals of Moscow and St. Petersburg that maintained international collections featuring North America, East Asia, and Oceania as well as domestic collections that represented the diversity of the multi-ethnic empire, though typically excluding

Russian ethnographic materials local to the region. In contrast to these museums of the imperial metropoles, the local Siberian museums did not develop “foreign” collections, and sought to collect, document, and display regional ethnography and nature to the local community.

Involving substantial local support, various city officials, merchants, and bureaucrats founded museums across Siberia with funds and collections sourced from the cities and surrounding areas.

The development of these museums reflected the fact that late imperial Russia was a period of dramatic social transformation, when ideas of modernity, reform, and revolution were being negotiated and imagined by a changing population. Shifts in class dynamics and civil society, increased education and literacy, and the movement of people across the empire through exile and economic opportunity, reshaped the intellectual communities engaged in ethnography

27 28 and museum collection. The scholarship on late imperial Russia has tended to focus on European

Russia, and often specifically on Moscow and St. Petersburg as epicentres of urbanization, industrialization, and social and political change.1 However, late imperial Russia was also characterized by growth in cities across the empire.2 Siberia’s cities were also changing and

1 For works on late imperial European Russia with a focus on social changes see: Stephen Frank and Mark D. Steinberg, eds., Cultures in Flux: Lower-Class Values, Practices, and Resistance in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861-1917; Edith W. Clowes, Samuel D. Kassow, and James L. West, eds., Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1991; Catriona Kelly and David Shepherd, eds., Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution, 1881- 1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); Katherine Pickering Antonova, An Ordinary Marriage: The World of a Gentry Family in Provincial Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Sally West, I Shop in Moscow: Advertising and the Creation of Consumer Culture in Late Tsarist Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2011); Theodore R. Weeks, Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia: Nationalism and Russification on the Western Frontier, 1863-1914 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008). For works addressing changes to specific communities in late imperial Russia see: Christine Ruane, Gender, Class, and the Professionalization of Russian City Teachers, 1860-1914, (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009); Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Vera Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve of Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Julia Mannherz, Modern Occultism in Late Imperial Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2012); Christine Ruane, Gender, Class, and the Professionalization of Russian City Teachers, 1860-1914, (Pittsburgh: Chicago: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009); Chris J. Chulos, Converging Worlds: Religion and Community in Peasant Russia, 1861-1917 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003); Corinne Gaudin, Ruling Peasants: Village and State in Late Imperial Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007). 2 For examples of works that address late imperial Russia outside of the European territory see: Nathaniel Knight, “Nikolai Kharuzin and the Quest for a Universal Human Science: Anthropological Evolutionism and the Russian Ethnographic Tradition, 1885–1900,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 9, no. 1 (March 10, 2008): 83–111; Ekaterina Emeliantseva, “The Sacred Before the Camera: Religious Representation and the Medium of Photography in Late Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 57, no. 2 (2009): 161–72; Julia Fein, “Talking Rocks in the Irkutsk Museum: Networks of Science in Late Imperial Siberia,” The Russian Review 72, no. 3 (June 2013): 409–426; Mark Bassin, Imperial Visions: Nationalist Imagination and Geographical Expansion in the Russian Far East, 1840-1865, Cambridge Studies in Historical Geography 29 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Elena I. Campbell, The Muslim Question and Russian Imperial Governance, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015); Paul W. Werth, The Tsar’s Foreign Faiths: Toleration and the Fate of Religious Freedom in Imperial Russia, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Roland Cvetkovski and Alexis Hofmeister, eds., An Empire of Others: Creating Ethnographic Knowledge in Imperial Russia and the USSR (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2014); Kathryn E. Graber and Jesse D. Murray, “The Local History of an Imperial Category: Language and Religion in Russia’s Eastern Borderlands, 1860s– 1930s,” Slavic Review 74, no. 1 (2015): 127–152; Vera Tolz, “Imperial Scholars and Minority Nationalisms in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 10, no. 2 (May 21, 2009): 261–290; Anya Bernstein, “Pilgrims, Fieldworkers, and Secret Agents: Buryat Buddhologists and the History of an Eurasian Imaginary,” Inner Asia 11, no. 1 (2009): 23–45; Jesse D. Murray, “‘Not Far from the Kingdom of God’: Shamanism and Colonial Control in Russia’s Eastern Borderlands, 1853-1917” Journal of World History 27, no. 3 (September 2016): 535–563; Andrei A. Znamenski, Shamanism and Christianity: Native Encounters with Russian Orthodox Missions in Siberia and Alaska, 1820-1917, Contributions to the Study of World History, no. 70 (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1999).Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).

29 growing due to the increased mobility of the population and the expanding exile system. Local

Siberian museums, while indicative of larger cultural changes of the late imperial Russian academic and social spheres, also speak to the changes in Siberia itself as the increased movement of people into Siberia, whether for study, for exile, or for adventure generated a larger intellectual community engaged in documenting Siberian life, nature, and culture for Russian and

Siberian audiences. Museums became sites of Siberian intellectual life, and the focused study of the local allowed Russian and European academic communities to perceive Siberia as a scientifically rich space of research. This fostered an association of the museum researchers and collectors with modern scientific practices that framed the ethnographic subjects, the inorodtsy— the non-Russian—apart as outside of modern Russian life.3 The Russian ethnographer focused the identification of the ethnographic subject on the category of the inorodtsy as a politically and socially distinct identity that was, by definition, non-Russian.

As Siberian museums developed their identities as modern institutions, ethnographers focused their research on the Indigenous Siberians as simultaneously regionally specific subjects and exotic. The ethnographers’ ascription of this local exotic identity to the inorodtsy and the idea that, as non-moderns, these communities were under threat from the industrialisation and

3 While there has not been substantial English language scholarship on imperial Russian museums, several notable works include: Julia Fein, “Talking Rocks in the Irkutsk Museum: Networks of Science in Late Imperial Siberia,” The Russian Review 72, no. 3 (June 2013): 409–426; Anthony Anemone, “The Monsters of Peter the Great: The Culture of the St. Petersburg Kunstkamera in the Eighteenth Century,” The Slavic and East European Journal 44, no. 4 (2000): 583–602; Katia Dianina, “The Return of History: Museum, Heritage, and National Identity in Imperial Russia,” Journal of Eurasian Studies 1, no. 2 (2010): 111–118; Katia Dianina, “Museum and Message: Writing Public Culture in Imperial Russia,” Slavic & East European Journal 56, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 173–195; Sergei Kan, “Evolutionism and Historical Particularism at the St. Petersburg Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography,” Museum Anthropology 31, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 28–46; Olga A. Baird, “I Want the People to Observe and to Learn! The St Petersburg Kunstkamera in the Eighteenth Century,” History of Education 37, no. 4 (2008): 531–547; Roland Cvetkovski and Alexis Hofmeister, eds., An Empire of Others: Creating Ethnographic Knowledge in Imperial Russia and the USSR (Central European University Press, 2014).

30 modernisation of Siberia, motivated their desire to document the Indigenous cultures which became a dominant ethnographic enterprise in late imperial Russia.

This chapter introduces late imperial Russia and the discourse surrounding modernity and social reform. I then turn specifically to history of imperial Russian colonialism to address

Siberia’s changing connections to the social and political dominant zone of the empire. Siberia and its position as colonized land was inextricably interwoven with imperial discourses of modernity, both as an imagined anti-modern space and as an active participant in articulating modernity that alternatively conformed to and rejected European Russian modernism. In this cultural and political landscape, I turn to museums as particular sites of Siberian modernity to explore how the local became a privileged category for scholars in Siberia and to address how this fostered a methodology of regionally specific and embedded research associated with the local mandate of the Siberian museums.

1.2 Late Imperial Russia

Late imperial Russia as a specific historical period has a somewhat ambiguous start date, but a clear end: the 1917 Revolution and the abdication of Nicholas II. Different authors begin discussions of late imperial Russia at different points of time, depending on the specific issues they address. For some, the start of the late imperial era is marked by the abolishment of serfdom in 1861 by Alexander II, for others by the assassination of Alexander II in March of 1881, by the reign of Nicholas II in the 1890s, or the Stolypin Reforms and the peasant uprisings in the first

31 few years of the 1900s.4 Often, however, the late imperial era is principally defined by its end date, and the promises of imperial collapse and revolution mean that the stories told about the late empire often risk being teleological ones.

The Great Reforms by Tsar Alexander II (starting with the abolishment of serfdom in

1861 and continuing through till the middle of the 1870s) brought about changes to the judiciary, censorship, military, and local governance systems such as the zemstvo (elected local assemblies).5 These sought to reform Russian governance and society, but the structure of the society itself was still grounded on preserving the systems of sosloviia.6 Sosloviia were inherited social estates, or classes, that structured Russian society and governance, determining taxation, mobility, political representation, and other aspects of the population’s lives within the state.7

Often simplified into four principle groups (nobles, clergy, townspeople, and peasants), the different soslovie were complex and multi-tiered categories, and, occasionally, individuals could petition to change their estate, though in general one was born within a specific soslovie and

4 For example, even a quick survey of the range of dates used to frame the late imperial era in Russian historical scholarship is observable in the titles of works on the period, see: Theodore R. Weeks, Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia: Nationalism and Russification on the Western Frontier, 1863-1914; Ilya V. Gerasimov, Modernism and Public Reform in Late Imperial Russia: Rural Professionals and Self-Organization, 1905-30 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Hanna Chuchvaha, Art Periodical Culture in Late Imperial Russia (1898-1917): Print Modernism in Transition, Library of the Written Word, volume 44 (Boston: Brill, 2016); Charlotte E. Henze, Disease, Health Care and Government in Late Imperial Russia: Life and Death on the Volga, 1823-1914 (New York: Routledge, 2011); Wendy R. Salmond, Arts and Crafts in Late Imperial Russia: Reviving the Kustar Art Industries, 1870-1917, Modern Architecture and Cultural Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 5 The zemstvo was a system of provincial assembly run by local elected councils that started in 1864, after the emancipation of the serfs. The zemstvo brought together members of the different social estates (soslovie) to discuss matters such as public health, local industry, and regional public works. 6 Ruane, Gender, Class, and the Professionalization of Russian City Teachers, 3. 7 See Alison Karen Smith, For the Common Good and Their Own Well-Being: Social Estates in Imperial Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Gregory L. Freeze, “The Soslovie (Estate) Paradigm and Russian Social History,” The American Historical Review 91, no. 1 (1986): 11–36.

32 lived out one’s life as a noble or a peasant.8 While the more revolutionary and reform minded individuals disliked the system of sosloviia, the Great Reforms did not abolish them and instead sought to reform society around the estates.9 By the end of the nineteenth century, the system of sosloviia faced considerable pressure for reform due to rising concerns over economic limitations brought about by the estate system.

Both Tsars Alexander III and Nicholas II connected changes to the sosloviia to the modernization of Russian society in general, which they were struggling against in order to preserve traditional systems of governance and social order.10 It is, however, important not to reduce the broader histories of social class into the institution of the sosloviia. The changes in late imperial Russian society extended beyond the scope of the Great Reforms and social estates, and into the broader nature of Russia life. Alison Smith notes that the formal system of sosloviia was slowly being eroded within late imperial Russian society by reforms, but the larger legacies of social classification remained.11 She writes, “This particular version of viewing the population through categories that defined their opportunities and obligations, their places within the social hierarchy and on the map of the empire, died. But, of course, it was soon replaced by other versions of categorization, other efforts by an imperial state to see its population, and unfortunately for many, other ways of using those categorizations to further imperial and

8 Gregory L. Freeze, “The Soslovie (Estate) Paradigm and Russian Social History,” 22. Additionally, for a specific example, see the account of Aleksandr Miliukov in Smith, For the Common Good and Their Own Well-Being, 96- 97. 9 Smith, For the Common Good and Their Own Well-Being, 127; Freeze, “The Soslovie (Estate) Paradigm and Russian Social History,” 26; Ruane, Gender, Class, and the Professionalization of Russian City Teachers, 1860- 1914, 3. 10 Smith, For the Common Good and Their Own Well-Being, 142. 11 The Bolsheviks in 1917 finally official ended the institution of soslovie, but as Alison Smith notes, the soslovie were already coming to mean a more general idea of class than formal estates as the reforms chipped away at the restrictions of economic activity, mobility, serfdom, etc. throughout the late imperial period (Smith, For the Common Good and Their Own Well-Being).

33 political goals.”12 While other systems intended to classify the peoples of the Russian Empire existed, the persistence of soslovie was emblematic of the way the imperial state viewed its population: as divided into groups that defined them and made them understandable in ways that were recognizable to the state and to others within society.

During this late imperial era rapidly changing demographics, particularly in the urban centres, and the increasing presence of institutions of civil society (obshchestvennost’) —such as universities, independent courts, a somewhat free press, and professional societies—and an increasingly educated population, challenged the traditional categories that defined the populations of the Russian Empire. While these different aspects of Russian civil society contributed to a modernization and creation of public institutions of late imperial Russia, the editors of Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late

Imperia Russia note, “civil society implies not so much a specific complex of ideas, institutions, and identities; rather it connotes, through the presence of organizational and cultural networks, a basic attitude about power.”13 This change in attitude regarding the relationship between the people and the imperial state fostered the growing public sphere that was relatively free from state control (such as a free press). This was particularly apparent within the growing urban populations where a new middle class was developing, made up of educated professionals, artists, industrialists, and specialized labourers. These groups challenged the traditional categories of the sosloviia and demanded increasing autonomy from the state.14

12 Smith, For the Common Good and Their Own Well-Being, 208. 13 Edith W. Clowes, Samuel D. Kassow, and James L. West, eds., Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 6. 14 Ibid., 4, 7.

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Tsars Alexander III and Nicholas II saw in the modernization of Russia the deterioration of traditional imperial systems and structures involved in the management and classification of imperial Russia’s society. Their reforms chipped away at these traditional institutions like the system of soslovie while also trying to preserve them, but the reforms could not keep pace with the revolutionary demands percolating throughout the empire. Different social and political communities in Russia viewed the idea of imperial Russian modernity as either a threat or a promise. Conservative factions such as the Slavophiles, an intellectual movement that sought to reform Russia according to historical Slavic traditions, values, and institutions, perceived the articulation of modernity in late imperial Russia as a turn to European culture and governance. In opposition to this European turn, conservative communities attempted to articulate a resistance to modernity by returning to traditional life, and rejecting the reforms that were disintegrating the traditional estates and changing the landscape of class identity. The revolutionaries and reformers were imagining modernity located in a future that looked increasingly urban, without institutions of inherited rank, and, for some, heralded a socialist reorganization of social and economic institutions. Studies of Russian history often characterize the late imperial era as a liminal state of modernity—somehow betwixt and between the imperial enlightened modernity of Catherine’s court and the socialist Marxist-Leninist modernity of the early Soviet Union. As a result, this late imperial period often becomes defined by its discord, rather than its alignment, with modernity.15

15 See Georges Florovsky, “The Problem of Old Russian Culture,” Slavic Review 21, no. 1 (1962): 1–15, for the now classical articulation of this idea. Other discussions of modernity and social change in late Imperial Russia include Laura Engelstein, Slavophile Empire: Imperial Russia’s Illiberal Path (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009); Edith W. Clowes, Samuel D. Kassow, and James L. West, eds., Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Joseph Bradley, Voluntary Associations in Tsarist Russia: Science, Patriotism, and Civil Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009); Julia Mannherz, Modern Occultism in Late Imperial Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University

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1.3 The Siberian Colony

The landscape of Siberia was also rapidly changing during this time of urbanization and industrialization in the European metropolises of the late imperial period. Increasingly connected to the political and intellectual discourses of the European metropoles, Siberia’s cities were expanding, and the influx of revolutionary exiles created an intellectual sphere of radical and reform-minded people clustered together outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Siberia, however, was also home to numerous Indigenous nations, older waves of exiles, Russian settlers, and religious minorities escaping persecution. It was not an empty space into which new intellectuals entered, despite this rhetoric appearing frequently, similar to other colonial territories imagined to be empty and awaiting the development of Western settlers, industries, and political systems.16

The Indigenous peoples of Siberia, who became collectively known as the inorodtsy in imperial Russia, lived in the territory into which the Russian Empire sought to expand starting in the sixteenth century. Like soslovie, inorodtsy was both a political and social category within the

Russian Empire used to define a subsection of people. The collectivization of these different communities into the category of inorodtsy minimized these differences and offered a general

Press, 2012); Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861-1917, Studies in Russian Literature and Theory (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003). 16 Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); Mark Bassin, “Inventing Siberia: Visions of the Russian East in the Early Nineteenth Century”; Mark Bassin, Imperial Visions: Nationalist Imagination and Geographical Expansion in the Russian Far East, 1840-1865, Cambridge Studies in Historical Geography 29 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

36 category that demarcated different peoples as similarly non-Russian. The bureaucratic management of the peoples of the Russian Empire relied upon the classification and systematization through systems like soslovie and categories like the inorodtsy. These categories homogenized heterogeneous communities. Local scholarship by Siberian ethnographers challenged this homogeneity, but it nevertheless remained powerfully persuasive within the imperial centre where the local was erased within the larger context of an imperial space that encompassed the larger expanse of the Russian Empire.

Scholars of imperial Russian history have been reluctant to address colonialism, favouring instead an idea of economic imperialism and emphasizing that non-Russians were generally able to maintain their religions, local systems of governance, languages, and cultural practices.17 However, more recent scholarship has brought into focus the colonial histories of

Russification, religious persecution, relocation, and other state tactics that sought to reform and remove communities across the empire to make room for populations, industries, and ideologies that supported the Russian-European centre.18 As Ryan Tucker Jones notes in his environmental

17 This characterisation of Imperial Russian historiography is laid out in Aleksandr Etkind, Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience (Cambridge: Polity, 2011). 18 For examples of this scholarship see: Nicholas B. Breyfogle, Heretics and Colonizers: Forging Russia’s Empire in the South Caucasus (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005); Ryan Tucker Jones, Empire of Extinction: Russians and the North Pacific’s Strange Beasts of the Sea, 1741-1867 (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Nicholas B. Breyfogle, Willard Sunderland, and Abby M. Schrader, eds., Peopling the Russian Periphery: Borderland Colonization in Eurasian History, BASEES/Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies 38 (New York: Routledge, 2007); Mark Bassin, Visions of Empire: Nationalist Imagination and Geographical Expansion in the Russian Far East, 1840–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Jesse D. Murray, “‘Not Far from the Kingdom of God’: Shamanism and Colonial Control in Russia’s Eastern Borderlands, 1853- 1917,” Journal of World History; Honolulu 27, no. 3 (September 2016): 535–563; Alberto Masoero, “Territorial Colonization in Late Imperial Russia: Stages in the Development of a Concept,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 14, no. 1 (March 1, 2013): 59–91; Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); Willard Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004); William Sunderland, “Empire without Imperialism? Ambiguities of Colonization in Tsarist Russia,” Ab Imperio, no. 2 (2003): 101– 114; A. V. Remnev, “Vdvinut′ Rossiiu v Sibir′: Imperiia i russkaia kolonizatsiia vtoroi poloviny XIX–nachala XX vv.,” Ab Imperio, no. 3 (2003): 135–158; Remnev and N. G. Suvorova, “Upravliaemaia kolonizatsiia i stikhiinye migratsionnye protsessy na aziatskikh okrainakh Rossiiskoi imperii,” Politika, nos. 3–4 (2010): 150–191.

37 history of the Russian Empire in the North Pacific, the ideology and recognition of authority over the territory came together with the gathering of resources. While the imperial history of the

Russian North Pacific is distinctive from Siberia, Tucker’s analysis of the relationship between resource extraction, imperial knowledge production, and imperial control clearly articulates how knowledge production became an extractable resource within the Asian territory of the Russian

Empire. The entanglement of extraction, colonialism, and documentation is central to the telling of Siberian history.

The growing attention to Russian colonialism has facilitated a new body of scholarship on the Indigenous Siberians; much of this scholarship in focused on the twentieth century and few books offer histories of the Indigenous communities of Siberia that include the imperial era.19 In many standard surveys of Russian history, it is traders, militia, mercenaries, and exiles who dominate the history of imperial expansion into Siberia and the history of Indigenous populations of Siberia remain generally forgotten or relegated to a pre-colonial period.20

Narratives of the Russian settlement of Siberia often start in 1582 with the Cossack mercenary

Ermak and his army’s destruction of the Khanate of Sibir in the Westernmost part of Siberia and the subsequent establishment of the Russian city of Tobolsk fifteen miles from the ruins of the

19 Two of the more substantial efforts at providing a history of the Indigenous peoples of Siberia are, Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); James Forsyth, A History of the Peoples of Siberia: Russia’s North Asian Colony, 1581-1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Works that provide histories of specific communities and/or nations within Siberia include: Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, The Tenacity of Ethnicity: A Siberian Saga in Global Perspective (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Bruce Grant, In the Soviet House of Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Alexander Pika and Bruce Grant, eds., Neotraditionalism in the Russian North: Indigenous Peoples and the Legacy of Perestroika, (Edmonton: Canadian Circumpolar Institute, 1999); Bella Bychkova Jordan and Terry G. Jordan- Bychov, Siberian Village: Land and Life in the Sakha Republic, (Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 2001). 20 For examples see: Gregory L. Freeze, ed., Russia: A History, 3rd ed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Nicholas V. Riasanovsky and Mark D. Steinberg, A History of Russia, 7th ed (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); James H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture, (New York: Knopf, 1967).

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Khanate’s capital city, Kashlyk.21 The eastward expansion of imperial Russian forces was rapid and reached the Pacific Ocean in approximately 60 years, establishing in its wake a network of forts spanning the 4000 miles of the subarctic taiga forest. Following Tsar Ivan III’s ‘Gathering of the Russian Lands’, an era that brought European Slavic populations under Russian control,

Tsar Ivan IV began the process of the ‘gathering of inorodtsy lands’ that established the Asian territory of the Russian Empire.

The category of inorodtsy was also a legal category that indicated those who were subject to different laws than the Russian and European populations, which included the iasak, or fur tax. The state levied the iasak on inorodtsy men to collect the ‘soft gold’ of sable fur. These furs were so valuable that the Tsars routinely made decrees that the inorodtsy and the Bukharan traders who helped move the furs into the capitals should be treated kindly and respectfully so as not to disturb the flow of the iasak.22 Together with this taxation came settlement. Yuri Slezkin, in Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North, describes the eastward movement of Russians as the expansion of a network of forts built to impose the fur tax, the iasak, on new inorodtsy and “when the fur resources were exhausted or the iasak-paying population became too large to be administered from one ostrog [fort], a new one would be built and the whole process would be repeated.”23 However, historical records show the treatment of the Indigenous people involved in the fur trade was marked by violence, sexual and psychological assaults, and

21 For an overview of this early history of expansion into Siberia see: Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North; Janet M. Hartley, Siberia: A History of the People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014); James Forsyth, A History of the Peoples of Siberia: Russia’s North Asian Colony, 1581-1990 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 22 Slezkin, Arctic Mirrors, 16-22; Hartley, Siberia: A History of the People, 39-41; Gwenn A. Miller, Kodiak Kreol: Communities of Empire in Early Russian America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 39-45. 23 Slezkin, Arctic Mirrors, 13.

39 exploitative and corrupt administration.24 Starting with the initial expansion of the Russian

Empire into Siberia in the seventeenth century, many Indigenous communities experienced radical and destructive changes to their populations, traditions, languages, and movement within the region. For example, the spread of smallpox, syphilis, and alcoholism had devastating effects on the Indigenous communities across Siberia. With the first movement of Russians into Siberia in the 1600s, some communities lost between a half and two thirds of their populations to smallpox, with the entire Yukaghir population dropping from 4,500 to 1,450.25

After the fur trade had dwindled, travellers, explorers, and merchants presented a new image of a vast inhospitable place east of the Ural Mountains. Andrei Znemenski discusses in his book on Russian Orthodox missionaries in Siberia and Alaska how these men conceptualized their journeys in Siberia as akin to Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness and understood that this religious suffering that would lead them closer to God.26 Their reports were full of exaggerated and horrific accounts of the land and the trials they experienced, which contributed to an image of Siberia as frightening and difficult for living.27 Despite the dwindling economic enterprises in

Siberia during the first half of the 1800s, Russians continued to resettle in Siberia, and the motivations that brought or forced Russians into Siberia were complex.

Siberia’s position as outside of European Russia served both as its condemnation and its absolution. Siberia’s real and imagined location beyond the Europeanization and

Westernization campaigns of the Tsars had led some nineteenth century intellectuals to seek it

24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., 27. 26 Znamenski, Shamanism and Christianity, 48-50. 27 Ibid., 49; 53.

40 out as a space outside the imperial centres where new social organizations were possible.

Alexander Herzen, a famous Russian socialist and exile, described Siberia in the 1830s as “an entirely new country, an America sui generis, precisely for the reason that it is a land without aristocratic origins… Here everyone is an exile and everyone is equal.”28 His idea of Siberia as open territory led him to imagine it as a new, more horizontally organized, social hierarchy without serfdom or landed aristocracy. Siberia as a land with its own Indigenous people did not figure within Herzen’s imaginary new country.

The dissatisfaction with the ordering and governance of imperial Russian society during the nineteenth century led to various groups trying to articulate or locate a better alternative. The ‘Slavophiles’ imagined a space of non-Europeanized Russia and a return to an authentic Slavic traditional culture. Laura Engelstein writes, “They (the Slavophiles) located the vestiges of this lost ideal in the Great Russian peasant commune, remote from their own sophisticated lives. Obedient still to the direction of the village priest and the systems of the sacred calendar, governed by the patriarchal authority of the household head and the ritualized consensus of the village assembly....”29 This romantic view of peasant life spoke to a fantasy of

Russian authenticity that was decidedly not located amongst the Indigenous communities who were, as inorodtsy, categorically not included within the Slavophiles’ imagined historical

Russian or Slavic identity.

In the early nineteenth century Siberia became a romantic and exotic place that served as an antithesis to European Russia. Mark Bassin writes, “some Romantic writers discovered that in

28 Herzen, 1835. Note that while Herzen was exiled, he was sent to the Ural Mountains and never actually went into Siberia, underscoring the imagined nature of his Siberia as a sui generis nation. 29 Engelstein, Slavophile Empire, 6.

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Siberia’s unspoiled landscape they could regain a pure, inspirational bond with the organic natural world, a bond long lost in civilized and despiritualized European Russia.”30 Here, the collective inorodtsy could be re-imagined as proto-socialists who were uncorrupted by the vices of Europe.31 Bassin traces the intellectual history of Russian imaginings of Siberia, noting that in the articulation of Siberia as a wondrous place of nature and authentic life, the colonial episteme was still operating. Siberia still existed in the imagination of the west as wholly other than

European Russia and continued to be defined through and by this comparison. Russians disaffected from their industrializing, westernizing, and urbanizing life could see Siberia as an antitype of Europe and European Russia, and a space of “utopian aspirations” that were perceived as antithetical to the European society of Russia. Yet, as Bassin argues, within this utopic aspiration the “geographical Other became inextricably enmeshed in the larger ideological web of the European imperial imagination.”32

The exile system that brought individuals charged with revolutionary activities into

Siberia en masse furthered the adoption of Siberia as an imagined alternative to European

Russia. Unlike the Russians who entered Siberia in hopes of economic and social opportunity, the exile community were there by force. Russia did not maintain an expansive prison system, and exile to Siberia was the foundation of the penal system.33 The specific nature of exile ranged from enslaved labour in prison camps to resettlement in Siberian cities with the relatively minor

30 Bassin, “Inventing Siberia,” 782. 31 Slezkin, Arctic Mirrors, 74-79; 125. 32 Bassin, “Inventing Siberia,” 764. 33 Sarah Badcock, A Prison without Walls? Eastern Siberian Exile in the Last Years of Tsarism, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Daniel Beer, The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile under the Tsars, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017); Andrew Armand Gentes, Exile, Murder and Madness in Siberia, 1823-61 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Jonathan W. Daly, “Criminal Punishment and Europeanization in Late Imperial Russia,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 48, no. 3 (2000): 341–362.

42 restrictions on travel and on the type of work that could be undertaken. The result of this was that many revolutionaries, political dissidents, and religious minorities found themselves in Siberia, often for sustained periods of time. The exile system forcibly brought together people from across Russia and settled them in cities and villages.

By the 1890s this movement of people into Siberia reached the point that a Siberian ethnographer named Mikhail Vasilevich Zagoskin complained that all the villages near roads or cities were filled with people from all across the empire. The exile system, he worried, had exacerbated this to the extent that it was difficult to even establish what were local Indigenous cultural practices and what were “syncretic” ones.34 While the idea of the totally isolated village is often more part of an ethnographic fiction than a lived reality, Zagoskin’s complaint provides a characterization of Siberian cities and villages as diverse places that were not immune to the movement of people within the empire. Initially, the exile systems were supposed to be limited so that only one out of five members of any given local population could be exiles, however, by

1881 this was changed to be one out of every three, reflecting a reality very much already in existence at that time.35 By 1898, there were over 300,000 exiles living in Siberia, a region that only had approximately 5,760,000 people in total—meaning, that just over 5% of the total

Siberian population were exiles.36

Amongst the large number of exiles was a subcategory of highly educated, literate, and politically radical people who found themselves in Siberia for years at a time without permission

34 Zagoskin, Otvety na programmu imperatorskago Russkago Geogrfiskago Obshchestva dlia sobiraniia narodnykh iuridicheskikh obychaev (Irkutsk: 1891), II. 35 Zhanna Popova, “Exile as Imperial Practice: Western Siberia and the Russian Empire, 1879–1900,” International Review of Social History 63, no. S26 (2018): 143. 36 Hartley, Siberia: A History of the People, 116.

43 to work, for example, in political or governmental positions. These exiles came to form a substantial labour force in developing Siberia as part of a late imperial scientific and intellectual network that connected smaller cities and towns with the imperial metropoles. At a moment when Russia was undergoing social and political reforms and unrest, the exile system and these new networks brought Siberia into closer dialogue with the capitals. Simultaneous with the articulation of Siberia as a region beyond European Russian corruption and social hierarchy was the increased integration of Siberia and the Indigenous peoples to European Russia through infrastructures of roads, railroads, and the exile system. This infrastructure also supported the networks of scholars, museums, communities, and objects that sought to fulfill a desire to document Siberia.

1.4 Museums and Imperial Intellectuals

The public museum as an institution developed in tandem with the burgeoning civil society of European metropoles. Increasingly middle class, educated, and cosmopolitan citizens in London, Paris, Berlin, and New York were visiting public museums and exhibitions as part of the cultural and intellectual society of the late 19th century. Tony Bennett, in his canonical history of the public museum, connects the development of the exhibitionary spaces of imperial capitals with the development of the modern citizen within a progressive and evolutionary narrative.37 Museums were sites of social reform and cultural socialization, and became associated variously with prestige culture, the imperial centre, civic identity, and national

37 Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics, (New York: Routledge, 1995), 46.

44 ideology.38 This account of the history of public museums that Tony Bennett articulates has become an accepted narrative within museum history, and similar accounts can be seen in the works of Eileen Hooper-Greenhill, Carol Duncan, and Kryzsztof Pomian, all of whom approach the history of museums in the nineteenth century from the point of view of imperial metropoles.39

Following Bennett, a museum history of Russia could be told through the capitals of

Moscow and St. Petersburg, where museum practices were more in line with those in other

European metropoles.40 Museums of the imperial capitals such as the Kunstkamera, the

Tretyakov Gallery, and the Alexander Alexandrovich Crown Prince Historical Museum in

Moscow were important institutions in the Russian Empire and were involved in the articulation of Russian intellectual and artistic culture, the rising urban culture of educated and literate professionals, and an articulation of Russian identity. Katia Dianina, writing about the

“museomania” in St. Petersburg and Moscow, explains: “the rise of the public museum [in

38 Ibid., 24-28. 39 Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics, (New York: Routledge, 1995); Tony Bennett, Pasts beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism, Museum Meanings (New York: Routledge, 2004). Krzysztof Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice 1500-1800 (Cambridge: Polity Press ; Basil Blackwell, 1990); Ruth B. Phillips, “Re-Placing Objects: Historical Practices for the Second Museum Age,” The Canadian Historical Review 86, no. 1 (March 17, 2005): 83–110. Eileen Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge, Heritage (London ; New York: Routledge, 1992); Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums, Re Visions: Critical Studies in the History and Theory of Art (London ; New York: Routledge, 1995); Carole Paul, ed., The First Modern Museums of Art: The Birth of an Institution in 18th- and Early-19th- Century Europe (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2012); Arthur MacGregor, Curiosity and Enlightenment: Collectors and Collections from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). 40 See: Anthony Anemone, “The Monsters of Peter the Great: The Culture of the St. Petersburg Kunstkamera in the Eighteenth Century,” The Slavic and East European Journal 44, no. 4 (2000): 583–602; Katia Dianina, “The Return of History: Museum, Heritage, and National Identity in Imperial Russia,” Journal of Eurasian Studies 1, no. 2 (2010): 111–118; Katia Dianina, “Museum and Message: Writing Public Culture in Imperial Russia,” Slavic & East European Journal 56, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 173–195; Sergei Kan, “Evolutionism and Historical Particularism at the St. Petersburg Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography,” Museum Anthropology 31, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 28– 46; Olga A. Baird, “I Want the People to Observe and to Learn! The St Petersburg Kunstkamera in the Eighteenth Century,” History of Education 37, no. 4 (2008): 531–547; Roland Cvetkovski and Alexis Hofmeister, eds., An Empire of Others: Creating Ethnographic Knowledge in Imperial Russia and the USSR (Central European University Press, 2014).

45

Russia] in the 1860s-1890s took place in an atmosphere of cultural renaissance, heightened national consciousness, and an overall flourishing of social life. Following the defeat in the

Crimean War (1853-1856), Russian society ‘awakened as if from a lethargic sleep’….”41

Dianina asserts, “the museum age was one positive landmark on Russia’s uncertain road to modernity.”42 Dianina places these museums as part of the landscape of imperial modernity, and in dialogue with other aspects of imperial Russian modernity such as social changes of the Great

Reforms, growing literacy, civic engagement, voluntary associations and an evolving public sphere, and a general rise in national consciousness.43

Local museums in Siberia participated in this expression of imperial modernity, but inhabited a different space within the empire.44 During the imperial era, museums appeared across Siberia starting with Irkutsk at the end of the eighteenth and continuing throughout the nineteenth century. Examples of the founding dates and the spread of these local museums across

Siberia, include, moving eastward across Siberia, Tyumen (1879), Tobolsk (1870), Omsk (1878),

Minusinsk (1877), Krasnoyarsk (1889), Barnaul (1823), Irkutsk (1782), Yakutsk (1887),

41 Katia Dianina, “Museum and Message: Writing Public Culture in Imperial Russia,” Slavic & East European Journal 56, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 177. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid, 175-179. 44 For works on local museums see: Amy K. Levin, ed., Defining Memory: Local Museums and the Construction of History in America’s Changing Communities, American Association for State and Local History Book Series (Lanham, Md: Altamira Press, 2007); Janis Wilton, “Museums and Memories: Remembering the Past in Local and Community Museums,” Public History Review 12 (March 1, 2006); Andrea L. Smith, “Settler Historical Consciousness in the Local History Museum,” Museum Anthropology 34, no. 2 (2011): 156–172; Jirawan Sirivanichkul et al., “Interpretation of a Local Museum in Thailand,” Sustainability 10, no. 7 (July 1, 2018): 25-63; Julia Fein, “Talking Rocks in the Irkutsk Museum: Networks of Science in Late Imperial Siberia,” The Russian Review 72, no. 3 (June 2013): 409–426; Svend Larsen, “Local Museums of Cultural History in Denmark,” Museum International 13, no. 2 (1960): 74–78; Yunci Cai, “Review of Museum of Our Own: In Search of Local Museology for Asia,” Papers from the Institute of Archaeology 25, no. 2 (March 1, 2015).

46

Khabarovsk (1894), and Vladivostok (1884).45 While the majority of these local Siberian museums were founded in the 1800s, the Irkutsk Museum marks the beginning of their establishment when it opened in 1782. The Yakutsk Museum, established in 1887, opened in

May of 1891 as one of the later local Siberian museums of the Russian Empire. These museums were popular spaces to visit and were open to the local communities. For example, in 1897, the city of Yakutsk had a population of 6,535 people according to the imperial census.46 According to museum records, 732 people visited the local museum that year, and by 1900 yearly visitors numbered 1,458 people. Russians and Indigenous community members went to the Yakutsk museum, and are recorded in the guest books that kept visitor records.47

These museums were embedded within local spaces of these cities, run out of shops, schools, merchant houses, and stand-alone buildings. For example, the museum in Yakutsk first opened in a shop in the gostiny dvor (an indoor market area), and later moved into its own building once funds were raised and the building was constructed. The Minusinsk Museum was first housed together with the city’s library in the parish school. These local museums allow another version of the story of the rise of museums to be told that centers Siberia in the historical narrative, and looks westward to the capitals from the Siberian provinces. These museums were active in developing Russian ethnography, geography, and natural history as fields of research

45 To gauge a sense of the positioning of these museums, at least 3 (i.e. Omsk, Barnaul, and Tyuman) of these are located on what is now called Lenin Street. The Soviet renaming of urban spaces was an important inscribing of Soviet ideology into the everyday spaces of socialist life. Lenin Street would be a central important street within cities and the museums appearing on these is suggestive of the centrality to the cultural and economic heart of these Siberian cities. 46 Statisticheskago Komitete Ministerstva Vnutrennix Del, “LXXX. Yakutskaia Oblast” in Pervaia vesobshchaia naseleniia Rossiiskoi Imperii, 1897 g. (Russia: 1899). 47 NARS F. 490 op.1 d. 6

47 and supported the domestic focus of the imperial science and research at the time.48 Through soliciting donations from local populations and collecting archaeological and natural history materials from the region, these museums collected and presented the region to its inhabitants.

As these museums were developing, contemporaries argued that they were necessary scientific and educational institutions dedicated to the rigorous study of the local Siberian culture and natural history. In an 1883 newspaper article in the Eastern Review advocating for proliferation of local museums, the author, Skornyakov, wrote “as for the advantages of a museum for one district of another, I will not talk or argue about it, because they have the same value for science, and the materials that nature and man produce will be sufficient for every single museum.”49 Local material culture became a critical site of valuation and documentation in these museums and a defence for their rapid proliferation. The local became a framework the

Siberian museums used to distinguish themselves from the institutions of the imperial capitals.

The rich study of the different local areas of Siberia was to provide a depth of analysis impossible to attain in the imperial capitals that maintained a view of the empire that homogenized distinct areas into general categories in order to render them manageable. The idea of the local becomes a rhetoric of Siberian intellectual scholarship that desired a regional heterogeneity that was not captured in the broader imperial context of the scholarship of the capitals.

Advocates for Siberian museums drew upon the idea of the local as a valuable space of research to support the further development of museums across the region. V. P. Vradii, a travelling Russian naturalist, wrote a 1905 article called “Siberian Museums and their Weapons

48 Cvetkovski and Hofmeister, An Empire of Others, 10. 49 N. Skornyakov, “Nuzhny li muzei v sibir?” Vostochnoe Obozrenie (October 18, 1883), 9-10.

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Departments.” In it, he discusses the Siberian museums he visited while on an over-land trip that took him to numerous cities (including Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, Blagoveshchensk, Irkutsk, and

Omsk).50 Echoing Skornyakov and the local focus of Siberian museums, Vradii wrote, “I particularly emphasized the following: that every Siberian museum should be the spokesperson of the local nature, ethnography and social life of the surrounding places…”51 At the conclusion of his comparative essay he includes a programme specifically aimed at developing the collections of weapons in Siberian museums as part of the more general project of supporting the gathering of local ethnographic materials for the museum collections from both the local Russian and Indigenous communities.52 Unlike the museums of the capitals that featured materials from across the Russia Empire and the world, these museums provided detailed accounts of the local and saw this as their particular value and vocation. In order to collect, document, and display the

“local nature, ethnography, and social life” of the region, he argued, these local museums needed educated and literate staff.

The influx of exiles into these Siberian cities provided an unusual reservoir of educated and unemployed individuals with enforced years of residency. Though the founding of these museums generally came from local officials, merchants, and bureaucrats, exiles became a substantial labour force in the early development of the local museums across Siberia, and through their publications, expeditions, and collections helped create and extend a network of museums in the Russian Empire. In the town of Minusinsk, for example, the local museum director Nikolai Mikhailovich Martianov was notorious for quickly engaging exiles when they arrived in town. In his memoirs, Felix Kon, a Polish-born Jewish revolutionary and Bolshevik,

50 V. P. Vradii, Sibirskie muzei i ix oruzheinyi otdel (iz putevyx zametok po Azii) (St. Petersburg, 1905), 1. 51 Vradii, 5. 52 Vradii, 8-9.

49 wrote, “to many it has seemed outright wild that I, arriving in Minusinsk – a place of exile – only in the evening, already at eight in the morning was in a museum.”53 While Martianov was a particularly active recruiter, many exiles found themselves reconstituted as ethnographers, geographers, botanists, and archaeologists for local museums.

The role these exile-ethnographers played in the colonization of imperial Siberia complicated the clear dichotomy between those empowered by and those subjugated by the imperial state. On the one hand, these exiles benefited from colonialist ideologies of cultural progress and social evolution, from their cultural and linguistic privilege that allowed their scholarship to be circulated within and beyond the Russian Empire, and from the perception of their ethnographic research as scientific and authoritative. On the other hand, these were individuals rejected by the political and social institutions of the empire; they were typically exiled as students who were engaged in what we now might call grass-roots political activism— running revolutionary presses, organizing student protests, and participating in anarchist and communist study groups. Additionally, many of these exiles were Jewish, including some of the most prominent figures such as Vladimir Bogoraz, Lev Shternberg, Berthold Laufer, and

Vladimir Jochelson who became involved in ethnographic museums, and eventually became affiliated with the Jesup Expedition’s Siberian research.54 Their Jewish identity marked them as

53 Quoted in Julia Fein, “Cultural Curators and Provincial Publics: Local Museums and Social Change in Siberia, 1887-1941,” PhD diss., (University of Chicago, 2012), 129. 54 The Jesup Expedition ran from 1897-1902 out of the American Museum of Natural History. Franz Boas hired two teams of researchers to study the North Pacific coastal communities in Siberia, Alaska, and British Colombia to study the Bering Strait land migration hypothesis. This remains one of the most famous Siberian ethnographic expedition, and established a large collection of Siberian ethnographic materials in New York City. For more information of the Jesup Expedition see: Laurel Kendall, ed., Drawing Shadows to Stone: The Photography of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition 1897-1902 (New York: American Museum of Natural History in association with the University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1997); Igor Krupnik and William W. Fitzhugh, eds., Gateways: Exploring the Legacy of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, 1897-1902 (Washington, D.C.: Arctic Studies Centre, Smithsonian Institute, 2001), William W. Fitzhugh, Aron Crowell, and National Museum of Natural History, eds.,

50 doubly outside the power structures of the Russian Empire. Not only were they exiles, but they were also part of Jewish communities that, through much of imperial Russian history, and particularly in these last decades of the tsarist empire, were subject to persecution, social and geographic isolation, and systemic violence.55

In organizing the Siberian team for the Jesup expedition, Franz Boas of the American

Museum of Natural History had difficulty gaining permission from the Russian government for their Jewish colleagues to conduct research. Bertold Laufer was initially denied access to Siberia, and in an 1898 letter from the Embassy of the United States in Berlin to Morris K. Jesup and the

American Museum of Natural History, Andrew White wrote about the hope of acquiring permission for Laufer, “…alas, my experience at St. Petersburg showed me how uncertain all efforts for justice to anybody with Jewish blood in his veins is in that part of the world.”56 As exiles, and, in many cases as Jewish men, these exile-ethnographers were not in Siberia as stewards of the empire, upholding the intellectual and political ideology of the imperial Russian

Crossroads of Continents: Cultures of Siberia and Alaska (Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988); Susan Roy, These Mysterious People: Shaping History and Archaeology in a Northwest Coast Community, (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010); Nelson H. H. Graburn, “Constructing Cultures Then and Now,” American Anthropologist 100, no. 4 (1998): 1009–1013; Stanley A. Freed, Ruth S. Freed, and Laila Williamson, “Capitalist Philanthropy and Russian Revolutionaries: The Jesup North Pacific Expedition (1897-1902),” American Anthropologist 90, no. 1 (1988): 7–24; Igor Krupnik, “Jesup Genealogy: Intellectual Partnership and Russian- American Cooperation in Arctic/North Pacific Anthropology. Part I. From the Jesup Expedition to the Cold War, 1897-1948,” Arctic Anthropology 35, no. 2 (1998): 199–226. 55 Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia, Studies on the History of Society and Culture 45 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Eugene M. Avrutin, Jews and the Imperial State: Identification Politics in Tsarist Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010); Simon Rabinovitch, Jewish Rights, National Rites: Nationalism and Autonomy in Late Imperial and Revolutionary Russia, Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014); John Klier, Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 1855-1881, Cambridge Russian, Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies 96 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Leonid Livak, The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination: A Case of Russian Literature, Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). 56 Andrew D. White, Andrew D. White to Morris K. Jesup. Letter. From the American Museum of Natural History, The Jesup Expedition Archive. (Accessed February 7th, 2019).

51 state, nor were they part of a politically or socially empowered community. However, as educated, European, intellectuals they were able to benefit from a larger European colonial privileging that allowed their work to be mobile beyond the confines of the Russian Empire, and the specific period in which they were working. Furthermore, after the 1917 Revolution and the return of many of these exile-ethnographers to the capitals of Moscow and St. Petersburg, this cadre of intellectuals became the social and political elites managing the museums of the socialist metropoles, establishing ethnographic research centres, and overseeing the committees for the governance of the Siberian Indigenous communities with whom they had once lived.

These local museums were not isolated from the intellectual and political centres of power in Russia, nor were they under the authority of the centre in such a way that they lost their regional identity.57 The Irkutsk Museum, for example, was managed by the Imperial

Geographical Society, which, while centrally based in St. Petersburg, maintained regional offices, including the Eastern Siberian Division of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society based at the Irkutsk museum. Siberian historian Julia Fein notes, “due to its distance from the

Russian capitals, its virtual administrative independence, and a vacuum of elected self- government in Siberia, the Geographic Society was much more than a provincial society of gentlemen scientists. It functioned as a de facto academy of science for Siberia.”58 As one of the oldest museums located in a wealthier and larger city in Siberia, the Irkutsk Museum and its community of local and exile scholars became a central hub of Siberian intellectual life.

Irkutsk served as a regional intellectual centre, but was deeply connected with the imperial centre and should not, therefore, be imagined as an isolated outpost. Fein notes that the

57 Fein, “Cultural Curators and Provincial Publics,” 58-61; 58 Fein, “Talking Rocks in the Irkutsk Museum,” 414-415.

52 exile-scholars brought “professional skills from the capitals to the peripheries” and gained professional experience during their time in exile in Siberian museums. They then returned to the capitals after the revolution as leaders in museology and ethnography.59 This, she notes, follows a pattern of imperialism and social advancement and “strongly resembled the mobility ‘to the empire’ that was one path to a career for British men in India, Africa, Australia, New Zealand or

Canada or for Americans in the West.”60 By emphasizing the connection of these Siberian local museums to the rest of the Russian Empire and to an international community, Fein concludes that the ‘local’ was a concept constructed by ethnographers and museum professionals in Siberia.

Nevertheless, as a concept, the local shaped the structure and scope of the Siberian museums’ collections, but did not impose a limit to the scope of their intellectual, ideological, and political networks.

In one telling, the history of Russian museums can be understood through the centre, and the local museums can be seen as participants in imperial ideological dissemination. Tony

Bennett’s concept of the nineteenth century museum can accommodate the local museums of

Siberia as regional branches of an imperial system. In another telling, however, their particular placement in the liminal place between the empire and the local, the centre and the periphery, the colonist and the exile, and late imperial modernity’s own ambiguous space allows this history to complicate a clear narrative of nineteenth century imperial modern museums.

59 Fein, “Cultural Curators and Provincial Publics,” 536. 60 Ibid.

53

1.5 The Local Exotic

The nineteenth century museum emerges from its earlier predecessor, the cabinet of curiosities, and marks a change in the conceptualisation of what is communicated through a collection and a display. 61 Krzysztof Pomian notes that the shift from cabinets of curiosity to scientific museums marked a prioritizing of the normal and local over the wondrous and exotic within museums which follows the development of scientific research methodologies that sought to establish laws and standards rather than exceptions and abnormalities.62 The local museums, with their ability to document and to account for the normal and every-day in their region, now had a value within an intellectual system that prioritized this knowledge. Skoryakov’s argument for the scientific value of the local museum to Siberian cities rests on this reconceptualization of worth of the ‘normal’ specimen within museum collections, wherein the knowledge produced from each individual region of Siberia has an inherent value and sufficient depth to support all local museums.63 Despite this, Pomian notes that this new focus on the local “does not mean that the distant and the exotic had lost their attraction, but rather that all that was to be found nearby was even more interesting.”64 Nineteenth century Russian museums positioned the shaman as a local exotic, simultaneously fulfilling both the mandates of the new local museums and the attraction of the wondrous and spectacular. The shamanic materials retained a uniqueness that did not confirm with the normalcy of other scientific specimens. Through this, the exotic became

61 For an examination of the cabinet of curiosity in Russia see: Anthony Anemone, “The Monsters of Peter the Great: The Culture of the St. Petersburg Kunstkamera in the Eighteenth Century,” The Slavic and East European Journal 44, no. 4 (2000), 582-602. 62 Krzysztof Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities, Paris and Venice, 1500-1800 (Cambridge: Polity Press), 1990, 234. 63 N. Skornyakov, “Nuzhny li muzei v sibir?” Vostochnoe Obozrenie (October 18, 1883), 9-10. 64 Ibid.

54 not only something of a foreign projection, but also something spectacular in its presentation.

The local, or Pomian’s nearby, values the ‘normal’ specimen and pushes against the exotic or spectacular specimen. Whereas, the shaman, as both local and exotic, became betwixt and between these two concepts, and the real and imagined nearness and farness became interwoven in the classification and categorization of shamanic materials. Siberian museums were able to use this overlapping of the local as scientifically valuable in its normalcy and the local as exotic for their self-articulation as modern scientific institutions similar to, and distinctive from, the museums of the imperial capitals.65 Indigenous religious materials related to shamanism fit within the purview of these local museums’ mandates to collect, document, and display aspects of the regional ethnography and natural history; however, the shamans were also part of

Indigenous culture, and in that way were, by definition, non-Russian. Collectors for museums desired shamanic materials both as spectacles and as specimens, exotic characters and local ethnographic subjects.66

The presentation of shamans as displayed spectacles has a long history in Russia, one that is, in turn, connected to a longer history of human zoos and other displays of marginalized and dehumanized people. The presentation of people as ethnographic subjects displayed as spectacle- objects has a long history of exploitation, exotification, and dehumanization.67 Those who employed practices of exotifying the ethnographic subject used a wide range of tactics and degrees of violence. The display of Siberian shamans in imperial European spaces begins with

65 Anthony Anemone, “The Monsters of Peter the Great: The Culture of the St. Petersburg Kunstkamera in the Eighteenth Century,” The Slavic and East European Journal 44, no. 4 (2000): 583–602; Krzysztof Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice 1500-1800 (Cambridge: Polity Press ; Basil Blackwell, 1990. 66 See chapter 2 for a more sustained discussion of the perceptions of shaman and shamanism during the late Imperial era. 67 Pascal Blanchard, ed., Human Zoos: Science and Spectacle in the Age of Colonial Empires (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008); Gary Bruce, Through the Lion Gate: A History of the Berlin Zoo (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

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Peter the Great who requested shamans be delivered to his court for show, and who made repeated requests to the governor-general of Siberia to send several Siberian shamans to the court together with their “appropriate shamanic costumes and drums.”68 Empress Anna held a mock wedding for two court jesters that involved members of the court dressing in the ethnographic costumes that included Tungus shaman costumes from the collections of the Imperial Academy of Science.69 In the late imperial era, local museums organized ethnographic evenings that in some cases included shamanic performances within the museum spaces.70 Shamans were fixtures in the Russian imagining of Siberian inorodtsy as the local exotic both regionally within museums of Russified cities like Irkutsk, and imperially within St. Petersburg and the imperial court.

This local exotic also provided a foil against which the articulation of these museums and their communities as modern scientific spaces could define themselves. The inorodtsy as bureaucratic category within the modernity of late imperial Russia reflects a broader narrative of the Indigenous as anathema to modernity. The alliance of nature and the Indigenous within ethnographic theory is important when considering the ethnographic collections of these local scientific museums.71 Ethnographic material as part of the collections in natural history museums, and faded the lines between ethnography of Indigenous Siberians and the natural sciences. The shaman was particularly susceptible to this slippage as someone who may speak

68 Znamenski, The Beauty of the Primitive, 9. 69 Ibid. 70 Julia Fein, “Cultural Curators and Provincial Publics,” 247. 71 For discussions of anthropology and the natural sciences see Marissa H. Petrou, “Apes, skulls and drums: using images to make ethnographic knowledge in imperial Germany” in the British Journal for the History of Science 51, no. 1 (March 2018), 69-98; Donna Jeanne Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989); Samuel J. M. M. Alberti, Nature and Culture: Objects, Disciplines and the Manchester Museum (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009); Tony Bennett et al., Collecting, Ordering, Governing: Anthropology, Museums, and Liberal Government (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017).

56 with the voices of animals, interact with spiritual beings of the natural world, and worship deities of the fire, of mountains, and of rivers.

These local museums of Siberia also requested donations of Russian ethnographic materials, principally household tools and decorative arts. Objects associated with Russian orthodoxy were rarely included in collection programmes, since, within ethnographic collections, religious materials tended to relate solely to Indigenous Siberian religious life. Shamanism and technologies of fortune telling or magic became the primary ethnographic categories related to a supernatural world. The Russian local museum’s collections of Indigenous ethnographic materials supported and reinforced the narrative of the researchers and collectors as shepherds of a scientific progress. The category of the inorodtsy provided a narrative space outside of the

Russified scientific museum community that could represent something else, something outside of the modern. This idea, in turn, supported the ethnographers’ need to document Indigenous

Siberian life, which was perceived as under threat by the industrialization, modernization, and urbanization of Siberia.72

1.6 Conclusion

Throughout the late imperial era, demands for social and political reform brought increases in literacy, economic freedom, and social mobility that helped communities conceptualize and realize institutions like museums in their local communities. In many cases, the individuals articulating these ideas of reformation in the capitals became the intellectuals exiled to Siberia for participating in revolutionary activities who formed a new labour force for

72 See chapter 2 and chapter 4 for discussions of salvage ethnography in the Siberian museum context.

57 these local museums. Late imperial Russian ethnographers and museums drew on images of the inorodtsy to articulate projections of them variously as non-Russians, non-moderns, proto- communists, and threatened communities. The museums supported the rigorous study and documentation of these Indigenous communities as part of their scientific labour. The local became a site to express the values of scientific research, but aspects of the local associated with the category of the inorodtsy were still exotic. The context of the nineteenth century museum facilitated the development of an image of the local that was both exotic and commonplace, and allowed museum ethnographers to present Siberian shamanism within museums as both scientific and spectacular.

In the following chapter, shamanism as a subject of late imperial Russian ethnographic research is discussed at length, before moving into later chapters that specifically address collection practices. Shamanism is not the only aspect of Indigenous life that was sought for museum collections, but it becomes a central cultural symbol that Russian museums mobilized to unify the different Indigenous communities, already configured collectively as inorodtsy within the imperial Russian bureaucracy, into a common Siberian cultural and religious identity.

Throughout this dissertation, my focus remains on the relationship between the ethnographers and museums as participants within a modern scientific study of the local and shamanism as the ethnographic object they desired. This infrastructure of desire that formed shamanism within the museum was an ambiguous space that was at once local and exotic, domestic and foreign, familiar and unfamiliar.

2 Chapter Two: Shamans and Shamanism

2.1 Introduction

Through the imperial era, artists, ethnographers, and the tsars presented the shaman as an exotic image of Siberian Indigenous life. Ethnographic research into shamanism in the late imperial era was developing into a substantial field of study that was circulating beyond the empire. For example, the American Museum of Natural History published in English the works of Russian ethnographers Vladimir Bogoraz and Vladimir Jochelson as part of the Jesup

Expedition (1897-1902) and brought Siberian ethnography into conversation with North

American Indigenous studies.1 This chapter provides an overview of general periods within the intellectual history of shamanism in ethnographic and religious studies. The specific history of late imperial Russian scholarship on shamanism is then addressed to destabilize the rigidity of this periodization and to trace legacies and foreshadowings of old and new interpretations of shamanism within the nineteenth-century Russian academy.

The chapter is divided into two principle sections. The first section is an examination of the different periods of shamanic studies to form a general intellectual history of western academic scholarship on shamanism and the substantial theoretical models. Throughout I rely both on primary sources from the different periods, and contemporary secondary scholarship to draw to the fore some of the critical issues and legacies of these different eras. In the second section I transition into a specific examination of late imperial Russian scholarship that destabilizes the rigidity of these periods to demonstrate a more diverse intellectual network of

1 Waldemar Jochelson, The Yakut (New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1933); Waldemar Bogoras, The Chukchee. Memoirs of the AMNH (New York: Leiden, E. J. Brill ltd., 1904).

58 59 scholars engaged with shamanism as a Siberian Indigenous religious tradition. This final section is intended as a shorter introduction to late imperial Russian studies of shamanism, and the remaining chapters continue in this task providing increasingly textured and detailed discussion about the specific character of shamanism documented and collected by Russian and Siberian museums in the 1880s through early the 1900s.

2.2 Defining Shamans and Shamanism:

2.2.1 Shaman: Etymology and Europeanization

The word shaman originates from a Tungusic language spoken by the Evenk in

Northeastern Siberia. Shaman can be considered as an emic term for the Evenk, and perhaps extended to other Tungusic-speaking peoples of Siberia; the term enters into the trans-Siberian lexicon through Russian. The statuses of Indigenous languages in Siberia today range from

Sakha, which has approximately 450,000 speakers, to endangered languages such as Aleut with five or Oroch with eight speakers.2 Russian has become the lingua franca of Siberia, and shaman

(шаман) and shamanism (шаманизм) are used as the term for the religious professional within

Indigenous religious practices.

The term shaman has come under scrutiny in recent scholarship for being used as a comparative term to describe religious practitioners from geographically, culturally, and temporally distinct settings. Siberia is often exempted from such critiques, as the term is

2 Jenanne Ferguson and Lena Sidrova, “What Language Advertises: Ethnographic Branding in the Linguistic Landscape of Yakutsk” Language Policy 17, no. 1 (February 2018), 24; Eberhard, David M., Gary F. Simons, and Charles D. Fennig (eds.) Ethnologue: Languages of the World. Twenty-second edition (Dallas, Texas: SIL International, 2019), Online version: http://www.ethnologue.com.

60 understood as linguistically local to the region; however, it is not an emic term for many of the

Indigenous languages. Different emic terms such as udagan (Sakha), böö (Buryat), or xam

(Tuvan) are used in Siberian Indigenous languages but are usually glossed in Russian and

English scholarship as shaman and these terms tend not to circulate outside of specific ethnographic studies.3

Shaman entered Russian via western European ethnographic research on Siberia in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. 4 One of the first images of a shaman to circulate within Europe was from the 1692 book, North and East Tartary by Nicolaas Witsen.5 Witsen was a Dutch explorer from Amsterdam who produced a map of Siberia in 1687, dedicated to

Peter the Great; that map together with his written accounts of the region, provided extensive geographic information to a European audience.6 The plate of the shaman, titled, “een Schaman ofte Duyvel-priester. in‘t Tungoesen lant” (A shaman or devil-priest. In the Tungusen land), depicted a man with clawed feet in a knee-length fur coat and antlered headdress holding a drum and beater in the midst of dancing and singing outside of a dwelling, presumably a d’u, the

Evenki term for a temporary tent or chum often made out of reindeer hides and wood poles similar to the Saami lavvo.7 Inside the tent there appear to be three people, two of whom seem to be supporting a reclining central figure. In the background other d’u and people are seen and two

3 Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, “Beyond Belief? Social, Political, and Shamanic Power in Siberia,” Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice 52, no. 1 (2008), 99. Gregory Delaplace, “Establishing Mutual Misunderstanding: A Buryat Shamanic Ritual in Ulaanbaatar,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 20, no. 4 (2014), 617.; Theodore Craig Levin and Valentina Süzükei, Where Rivers and Mountains Sing: Sound, Music, and Nomadism in Tuva and Beyond (Indiana University Press, 2006), 16. 4 Andrei A. Znamenski, The Beauty of the Primitive: Shamanism and Western Imagination, 5. 5 Ibid. 6 Johannes Keuning, “Nicolaas Witsen as a Cartographer,” Imago Mundi 11 (1954), 98; Znamenski, The Beauty of the Primitive, 5; Gloria Flaherty, Shamanism and the Eighteenth Century (Princeton University Press, 2014), 23. 7 John P. Ziker, Peoples of the Tundra: Northern Siberians in the Post-Communist Transition (Waveland Press, 2002), 69; Igor Nedjalkov, Evenki (New York: Routledge, 2014), 332.

61 dogs watch the shaman in the foreground. Andrei Znamenski explains this as a shaman “caught in his ecstatic dance” and Ronald Hutton elaborates that, with the claws, “Witsen’s shaman is himself a demon.”8 Regardless of the shaman’s personal demonic nature, the caption was evidence for Witsen’s interpretation of the shaman as diabolical in orientation. As a priest of the devil, the image draws on a rich repertoire of witchcraft and sorcery that would be more familiar to a European and Christian audience. Despite the long history of contact between European

Russian and Indigenous populations, it is only in this period of the late seventeenth century that an image of the shaman circulated within European Russia and Witsen’s reference to the diabolical priesthood offered a framing to contextualize the shaman for Orthodox European imperial court.9

Witsen’s image contains within it components of the shamanic religious material culture.

In this image we can see the shaman and recognize him as a priest of the devil by his horns and clawed feet, and ritual acts of singing, dancing, and drumming that draw on established iconography of the devil and diabolical rituals.10 The material elements of the coat, the headdress, the drum, and the beater remain key elements of shamanic material religious culture that are replicated in museum displays and later ethnographic illustrations, such as those for

Johann Gottlieb Georgi’s A Description of All Peoples Living in the Russian State; the Way of

Life, Religion Habits, Dwellings, Clothing, and other things of Note or William Alexander’s The

Costumes of the Russian Empire. In this latter work, Georgi stated, in a brief discussion of the

8 Znamenski, The Beauty of the Primitive. 5; Ronald Hutton, Shamans: Siberian Spirituality and the Western Imagination (New York: Hamledon Continuum, 2007), 32. 9 Znamenski, The Beauty of the Primitive, 5-6. 10 Valerie Kivelson, Desperate Magic: The Moral Economy of Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013); Randall Styers, Making Magic: Religion, Magic, and Science in the Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

62 shaman’s costume, “The Schamans dress themselves in the most fantastical and grotesque manner, under the idea, that they by these means make themselves agreeable to god, and formidable to men; and, on this account, their whole endeavour is to surpass each other in singularity. Their dress also differs very much according to the nations they are of.”11 Here, the

Germanic schaman was used in the English, which was not uncommon in the earlier scholarship on the topic displaying the influence of early Germanic ethnographers of Siberia in facilitating the term’s entrance into European lexicons.

The general tone of Alexander’s work was deeply dismissive of shamans and shamanic practice and suggests, “in spite… of all the absurdities in Schamanism, an attentive inquirer may perceive some similarity to the Mosaic religion…”12 Alexander suggested that various aspects of shamanism, the “sacred fires, the oblation, and adorations the opinions concerning women…have perhaps been borrowed from the religion of the Jews.”13 While he did not expand further on this point, already in the seventeenth century we see the contextualization of shamanism within the context of other religions, which will later become a focus of shamanic studies as efforts to locate an origin of religion turn to Indigenous traditions (including shamanism) to find a reflection of this religion primeval.14

Shamanism, as a term, entered into European lexicons in the 1600s from Siberian ethnography and Tungusic languages, and remains in circulation as a polysemous term that is

11 William Alexander, The Costume of the Russian Empire, Illustrated by a Series of Seventy-Three Engravings. (London, 1803), plate XXXVII. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 Examples of this work on the history of religion include: Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Carol Cosman, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (New York: BasicBooks, 1963); W. Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites: The Fundamental Institutions (London: A. & C. Black, 1927); E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966).

63 shaped and reshaped to fit different eras of scholarship, cultural and historical contexts, and intellectual objectives. The term, while etymologically Evenk, has become an academic category used cross-culturally and trans-temporally to define and explain diverse Indigenous religious traditions.15

2.2.2 Shamans and Shamanism: Locating a Central Definition

The large field of shamanic studies has, since the seventeenth century, proposed various definitions, origins, and theories of shamanism. As a subject of academic study in fields such as comparative religion, ethnography, history of religion, area studies, and Indigenous studies, shamans have been extensively written about, photographed, filmed, fictionalized, and pathologised for centuries.16 This results in a multiplicity of definitions of shamanism. For example, Mircea Eliade centred his definition on the shaman as a master of the ecstatic trance that he enters during ritual performances.17 Arguing specifically against Eliade and his broad definition, Alice Beck Kehoe offers a definition that particularizes shamanism as only existing in

15 Laurel Kendall, “Review of Shamans and Religion: An Anthropological Exploration in Critical Thinking by Alice Beck Kehoe,” American Anthropologist 104, no. 1 (2002): 359–360; Lars Kirkhusmo Pharo, “A Methodology for a Deconstruction and Reconstruction of the Concepts ‘Shaman’ and ‘Shamanism,’” Numen 58, no. 1 (January 1, 2011): 6–70.; Mari Womack, “Commentary: Emies, Etics, ‘Ethics’ and Shamans,” Anthropology News 42, no. 3 (2001): 7. 16 Znamenski, The Beauty of the Primitive; Tomášková, Wayward Shamans: The Prehistory of an Idea (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Pharo, “A Methodology for a Deconstruction and Reconstruction of the Concepts ‘Shaman’ and ‘Shamanism’”; Klein et al., “The Role of Shamanism in Mesoamerican Art: A Reassessment.” 17 Eliade tends not to account for women as shamans in his work, which is why I have opted to use the male pronoun here rather than a gender-inclusive one. Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstacy, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972). Other scholars who focus on this trance-state include: I. M. Lewis, Ecstatic Religion: A Study of Shamanism and Spirit Possession, (New York: Routledge, 1989); Peter T. Furst, Visions of a Huichol Shaman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2007); Ortiz de Montellano, Aztec Medicine, Health, and Nutrition (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990); Michael Winkelman “Shamans and other 'Magico-Religious' Healers: A Cross-Cultural Study of their Origins, Nature and Social Transformations." Ethos 18(3): 308-352; S. M. Shirokogoroff Psychomental Complex of the Tungus (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, and Co.,1935).

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Siberia and culturally contiguous areas of Northern Europe and North America.18 More recently within shamanic studies, there have been increasing efforts to construct an intellectual history of shamanism that takes into account these differing definitions of shamanism and to organize them into recognizable periods.19

2.3 Periodizing Shamanic Studies

2.3.1 Intellectual Histories

Efforts to produce an intellectual history of shamanism face the daunting task of drawing together scholarship from the late seventeenth century forward that accounts for geographically and temporally diverse examples from shamanism in Old Icelandic and British traditions to anthropologist-turned-practitioner Michael Harner’s ‘core shamanism,’ a new religious movement based in California.20 As a result, efforts to construct periods, or schools of thought, of shamanism as a means of categorizing the diverse scholarship into definable groups has been a common approach to making sense out of the large body of scholarship. This is particularly notable in the work of scholars such as Andrei Znamenski, Lars Kirkhumso Pharo, and Silvia

18 Alice Beck Kehoe, Shamans and Religion: An Anthropological Exploration in Critical Thinking (Prospect Heights, Ill: Waveland Press, 2000). 19 Znamenski, The Beauty of the Primitive; Tomášková, Wayward Shamans; Pharo, “A Methodology for a Deconstruction and Reconstruction of the Concepts ‘Shaman’ and ‘Shamanism”; Klein et al., “The Role of Shamanism in Mesoamerican Art: A Reassessment”; Kehoe, Shamans and Religion: An Anthropological Exploration in Critical Thinking. 20 Stefanie v. Schnurbein, “Shamanism in the Old Norse Tradition: A Theory between Ideological Camps,” History of Religions 43, no. 2 (2003): 116–138; Miranda Aldhouse-Green and Stephen Aldhouse-Green, Quest for the Shaman: Shape-Shifters, Sorcerers and Spirit Healers in Ancient Egypt (London: Thames and Hudson, 2005); Lisa Aldred, “Plastic Shamans and Astroturf Sun Dances: New Age Commercialization of Native American Spirituality,” The American Indian Quarterly 24, no. 3 (June 1, 2000): 329–352; Michael Harner, The Way of the Shaman, (San Francisco: Harper One, 1990).

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Tomášková, who have all produced historiographies of shamanism that propose systems of grouping and periodizing intellectual movements within the larger field of shamanic studies.21

The effort to periodize shamanism is not to place shamans themselves or the cultures of shamanism along an evolutionary line of progress, as so many works on the history of religions have attempted, but rather, to examine how the concept of shamanism has morphed and remained malleable throughout its history within academic scholarship. Tomášková, Pharo, and

Znamenski all trace the history of the idea of shamanism as a category rooted in European ethnography. The mobility of the term is part of this intellectual history, and not inherent to shamans or shamanism as a kind of religion primeval or archetype. Tomášková states, “described in vivid detail by early ethnographers and geographers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, shamans grew abstract as they left their homeland. Soon they became a category: every tribe considered outside civilization could now have a least one of them.”22 The idea of shamanism becomes a mobile category brought into different areas as a term for identifying, predominantly,

Indigenous religious traditions. Despite their similar premise, Tomášková, Pharo, and Znamenski end up providing different histories of shamanism. Tomášková focuses on gender and sexuality within the development of the idea of the shaman tracing its movement from a diverse “more varied, confusing, and colourful array of possibilities” to its calcification in archaeological narratives as “a public, male religious leader as the standard representation of the origins of human spirituality, creativity, and knowing.”23 Znamenski, a Russian historian, provides a more linear history of scholarship on shamanism starting, like Tomášková, with ethnographies of

21 Znamenski, The Beauty of the Primitive; Tomášková, Wayward Shamans; Pharo, “A Methodology for a Deconstruction and Reconstruction of the Concepts ‘Shaman’ and ‘Shamanism.’” 22 Tomášková, Wayward Shamans, 2. 23 Tomášková, Wayward Shamans, 198; 197.

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Siberia and moving forward to contemporary new religious movements that incorporate ideas of shamanism within their traditions.

Drawing on Tomášková, Pharo, and Znamenski, together with other scholars of shamanism, five principle theorizations of shamans and shamanism emerge: 1) shamans as magicians or charlatans, 2) shamans as psychologically different or distinctive subjects, 3) shamans as universal types of religious practitioners, 4) shamans as geographically defined and limited to Siberian territory, and 5) shamanism as a religio-cultural tradition in which shamans may, or may not, exist. These categories are listed in a loosely chronological manner, though many ideas of shamanism existed concurrently, frequently within the same works, and need not be mutually exclusive categories. However, different theories of shamanism gain and lose currency within different broader epistemes, and the pathologisation of shamans popular in the early twentieth century coincides with the development of psychology and psychiatry as scientific fields and the rise of colonial medicine, which saw the alien land of the colonized territory as dangerous and hazardous to one’s health.24

2.3.2 Shamans as Charlatans

Diderot’s Encyclopaedia, published in multiple volumes in the 1750s through the 1760s, offered an early definition of a shaman:

This is the name that Siberians give to those imposters who perform for them the functions of priests, jugglers, witches and doctors. These shamans claim to have credit

24 Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Edward F Foulks, The Arctic Hysterias of the North Alaskan Eskimo (Washington, D.C.: American Anthropological Association, 1972).; Lyle Dick, “‘Pibloktoq’ (Arctic Hysteria): A Construction of European-Inuit Relations?,” Arctic Anthropology 32, no. 2 (1995): 1–42.; Waldemar Bogoraz, K Psikhologii Shamanstva u Narodov Severovostochnoi Azii (Moscow: Imperatorskago Moskovskago Universiteta, 1910).; Marie Antoinette Czaplicka, Aboriginal Siberia: A Study in Social Anthropology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914).

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with the devil, who they consult to learn the future, to heal ailments and to make tricks which appear supernatural to ignorant and superstitious people. To do this, they vigorously beat drums, dancing and turning with surprising speed until they are dizzy with twisting and exhaustion. They claim that the devil appears to them when he is in a good mood. Sometimes the ceremony ends by pretending to cut themselves with a knife, which redoubles the astonishment and respect of their imbecilic spectators. These contortions are usually preceded by a sacrifice of a dog or horse which is eaten while guzzling brandy and the farce finishes by giving the shaman some money to which he is no more indifferent than other imposters of the same type.25

Diderot’s characterization of the shaman as a diabolical priest or witch, a circus performer, and a doctor was grounded in the fundamental principle that in all these functions the shaman is a hoax. Presentations of shamans as charlatans who use “tricks which appear supernatural to ignorant and superstitious people” tended to focus on explanations and speculations of how the various effects were created using ventriloquism, slight-of-hand, misdirection, and props such as animal bladders filled with blood that could be pieced through slits in the clothes.26

The performative nature of shamans was used to disprove the legitimacy of shamanism, for instance in Catherine the Great’s play The Siberian Shaman wherein a shaman named

Amban-Lai is brought to the Imperial Russian court from Irkutsk and dazzles everyone with his powers, until a servant girl names Mavra reveals that a cure the shaman performed was a hoax

25 "Shamans." The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d'Alembert Collaborative Translation Project. Trans.Steve Harris (Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, 2007). http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0000.882 (accessed September 28, 2018) Originally published as "Schamans," Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, 14:759 (Paris, 1765). 26 For examples see: Waldemar Bogoraz, The Chukchee.(New York: Leiden, E. J. Brill ltd., 1904).; Waldemar Jochelson, The Yakut, (New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1933).; Johann Gottlieb Georgi, Opisanie vsiekh obitaiushchikh v Rossiiskom gosudarstve narodov (St. Petersburg: izhdiveniem I. Grazunova, 1799); Peter Simon Pallas, Puteshestvie po raznym miestam Rossiiskago gosudarstva (St. Petersburg: Imperatorskaia Akademiia nauk, 1788). For a broader cultural and intellectual history of the charlatan priest see: Frank Edward Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959); J. A. I. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and Its Enemies, 1660-1730, Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Leigh Eric Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000); Johannes Quack, Disenchanting India: Organized Rationalism and Criticism of Religion in India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

68 and Amban-Lai is marked as a fraud.27 The play was part of a three-part series produced between

1785 and 1786 known as the anti-Masonic trilogy, which all attempted to undermine occult, mystical beliefs, and, specifically, freemasonry.28 Historian Lurana D. O’Malley suggests that

Catherine was attempting to counter the image of Russia as a backwards and barbaric country as had been depicted in Abbé Jean Chappe d’Auteroche’s Voyage to Siberia (1761) by performing the triumph of rationalism and enlightenment over the fraudulent irrationality of shamans, in this case Amban-Lai. Catherine was a known correspondent with Diderot, and the definition of shamanism in the Encyclopedia may have contributed to her perception of shamanism as contrary to enlightenment values.

As in Diderot’s depiction, Catherine’s shaman danced, drummed, lost consciousness, and had a desire for money. The first introduction of the character Amban-Lai in the play has him silently running across the stage, pantomiming being tickled, and greeting the assembled

Russians with bows and nods. He only begins making sounds after he is offered money, and then mimics animal sounds. Later, he “enter[s] gravely with a rapt visage, holding a shamanic kettledrum in his hands. He strikes it intermittently at first, then quickens his steps and blows and run around Sidor Drobin, singing oo oo oo oo oo oo oo oo, producing a sound like the howling of a storm… Lai continued to run around them all shaking and frightening them…then he runs straight up the chair, where he falls as if unconscious.”29 In the play, Amban-Lai is compared to

27 Catherine Romanova, Two Comedies by Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia: Oh, These Times! And The Siberian Shaman, trans. Lurana Donnels O’Malley, Russian Theatre Archive, v. 15 (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1998). 28 Lurana D. O’Malley, “The Monarch and the Mystic: Catherine the Great’s Strategy of Audience Enlightenment in The Siberian Shaman,” The Slavic and East European Journal 41, no. 2 (1997): 228. 29 Romanova, Two Comedies by Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, 47.

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“the village women in hysterics,” using the Russian term klikusha.30 The klikusha, or klikushestvo, were understood as demonically possessed people within a Russian Orthodox tradition, and were predominately women who would scream in public, make animal noises, writhe on the ground, and cower away from religious paraphernalia like icons or crosses.31

Despite this allusion to Russian popular religious practices, the audience is quickly told that shamans have power and performances beyond those of the klikusha, and that these practices are learned, not inherent to the state of possession.32 The shaman, as a performer, was initially presented as someone who studies in order to become like a klikusha. However, once this shaman was revealed to be a hoax, this studied possession was more a training in performance and deception, unlike the religiously authentic demonic possession understood within the structure of the Russian Orthodox Church.

The shaman as charlatan (like Amban-Lai and Diderot’s shaman) seemingly faded with the close of the eighteenth century. However, in more contemporary scholarship from the twentieth century it became adapted into the scholarship of shamanism and ritual performance, as opposed to an evaluation of religious sincerity seen in the seventeenth-century scholarship.

Claude Lévi-Strauss articulates this performative charlatanism in Structural Anthropology, wherein the deception or chicanery of shamanism and other forms of magic is part of the ritualized actions themselves.33 Quesalid, a shaman, is at odds with himself, simultaneously believing in shamans and apprenticing to become one, while also “exposing the impostors and

30 Ibid., 46. 31 Christine Worobec, Possessed: Women, Witches, and Demons in Imperial Russia (DeKalb, Ill: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001). 32 Romanova, Two Comedies by Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, 47. 33 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 167-185.

70 full of contempt for the profession.”34 Quesalid, or George Hunt, was Franz Boas’ co-worker, researcher, and principle Kwakiutl informant, and wrote about his own experiences with shamanism. However, while Hunt produced four different accounts of his shamanic experiences, it was only the last one, published under the title “I Desired to Learn the Ways of the Shaman,” that became familiar to Levi-Strauss, a version that had “eliminated what Boas called all the supernatural elements in the earlier versions….”35 It would later be through Levi-Strauss’ discussion of this material for his chapter “The Sorcerer and his Magic” in Structural

Anthropology that brought the essay out of obscurity and became a widely known example of shamanic charlatanism.36 In this retelling by Levi-Strauss, George Hunt is presented as an ambiguous figure—a shaman who reveals other shamans as fakes. Levi-Strauss writes,

And Quesalid, rich in secrets, pursued his careers, exposing the impostors and full of contempt for the profession. ‘Only one shaman was seen by me, who sucked at a sick man and I never found out whether he was a real shaman or only made up. Only for this reason I believe that he is a shaman; he does not allow those who are made well to pay him. I truly never once saw him laugh.’ Thus his original attitude has changed considerably. The radical negativism of the free thinker has given way to more moderate feelings. Real shamans do exist. And what about him? At the end of the narrative we cannot tell, but it is evident that he carries on his craft conscientiously, takes pride in his achievements, and warmly defends the technique of the bloody down against all rival schools. He seems to have completely lost sight of the fallaciousness of the technique which he had so disparaged at the beginning.37

This image of Quesalid/George Hunt by Levi-Strauss echoes the ambiguity in the subject himself—it is unclear who is an impostor, and the concept of a real or legitimate shaman appears

34 Ibid., 178. 35 Michael Taussig, Walter Benjamin’s Grave (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 134. 36 Ibid., 133. 37 Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, 178.

71 unclear in Quesalid/George Hunt’s assessment.38 George Hunt affirms in his writing that real shamans exist. Though Hunt was himself a shaman, it remains unclear in Levi-Strauss’ portrait whether Hunt thought of himself as a real shaman or whether he even believed he had ever truly encountered one. Levi-Strauss, in his work, foregrounds the ‘fallaciousness of the techniques’ of the shamans and frames Quesalid as a moderate and ambiguous figure who is betwixt and between shamanic belief and doubt.

In other ethnographic accounts of shamans there appear references to one shaman accusing another of spurious performances, and like Levi-Stauss, the authors recounting these accusations take an external view that shamans do not truly perform the acts they purport to.39

Scholars who presented the shaman as akin to a stage magician tricking willing audiences into believing in the supernatural, also regularly provided an assessment of the mental capacities of the Indigenous Siberians. They were cast as the victims of shamanic trickery, as unenlightened, irrational, and savage.40 Diderot, for example, presents the shaman as an exploiter of unenlightened people who takes money for false cures, as does the character of Amban-Lai in

The Siberian Shaman.

38 Paige Sylvia Raibmon, Authentic Indians: Episodes of Encounter from the Late-Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Harry Whitehead, “The Agency of Yearning on the Northwest Coast of Canada: Franz Boas, George Hunt and the Salvage of Autochthonous Culture,” Memory Studies 3, no. 3 (July 1, 2010): 215–23; Charles Briggs and Richard Bauman, “‘The Foundation of All Future Researches’: Franz Boas, George Hunt, Native American Texts, and the Construction of Modernity,” American Quarterly 51, no. 3 (1999): 479–528; Jeanne Cannizzo, “George Hunt and the Invention of Kwakiutl Culture,” Canadian Review of Sociology/Revue Canadienne de Sociologie 20, no. 1 (1983): 44–58; Margaret M. Bruchac and Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel, Savage Kin: Indigenous Informants and American Anthropologists, Native Peoples of the Americas (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2018); Franz Boas and George T. Hunt, The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians, Landmarks in Anthropology (New York: Johnson Reprint Corp, 1970). 39 See Waldemar Bogoraz’ ethnographic account of Scratching Woman in The Chukchee for a similar account of a shamans disparaging fellow shamans while the reader is simultaneously presented allusions to the chicanery of the shaman-informant’s own falseness. 40 Znamenski, The Beauty of the Primitive, 21, 30.

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Wilhelm Radloff, a German ethnographer whose depictions of shamans became widely circulated in nineteenth-century encyclopaedias, sought to rehabilitate the image of the shaman as akin to other religious ethical and ritual leaders in Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam.41

Thomas Karl Alberts writes in his book Shamanism, Discourse, Modernity, that Radloff

“lament[ed] that ‘the poor shamans are not as bad as they are usually perceived.’ Noting that shamans ‘are carriers of the ethical ideals of their people’ and ‘no worse than clerics of other religions.”42 The sympathetic tone of Radloff and the tragic presentation of Quesalid in Levi-

Strauss both speak to later rejections of shamans as knowing charlatans or snake oil salesmen that characterized much earlier scholarship on shamans.43

Radloff’s positive view of shamans contrasted with many other nineteenth-century scholars whose sympathetic views of shamans were structured around a paternalistic idea of the primitive subject who could not help but fall victim to the stage magic of the shaman. The relationship between the shaman and the community was the subject of much speculation and study throughout the nineteenth century. For Diderot, this was a malicious trickery, but for others it was part of a cultural system. Znamenski points to Frants Beliavskii, who published travel accounts of the Khanty and Nenets, as an example of this, writing “Beliavskii stressed that the point was not that native ‘doctors’ performed magic tricks, but the respect they enjoyed in their clans: ‘simple-minded folk view these raging madmen with tender emotions… these ‘native geniuses’ (the shamans), as Beliavskii called them, were people of ‘tragic fate’ because their

41 Thomas Karl Alberts, Shamanism, Discourse, Modernity (Routledge, 2016), 35. 42 Alberts, Shamanism, Discourse, Modernity, 35; Znamenski, The Beauty of the Primitive, 39. 43 Znamenski, The Beauty of the Primitive; Tomášková, Wayward Shamans; Alberts, Shamanism, Discourse, Modernity; Pharo, “A Methodology for a Deconstruction and Reconstruction of the Concepts ‘Shaman’ and ‘Shamanism.’”

73 artistic and creative talents were wasted in the barren northern land….”44 Here the magic tricks are understood as a creative outlet for the shamans that garnered them respect and acceptance by their community.

The image of the shaman as a stage magician performing tricks raised the question of whether shamans were in on the chicanery of the performance, and this became the subject of much curiosity within early scholarship on shamanism and later studies of magic.45 One answer that appears in the early twentieth century is the turn towards the developing field of psychology to pathologise the shaman and diagnose the shaman’s claims and abilities as illness or mental disturbance.

2.3.3 Shamans and Psychology: Hysteria and Queerness

The pathologising of shamans as hysterics gained popularity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and brought into shamanic studies new colonial discourses of medicine, scientific racism, and sexuality.46 The idea that the colonized territory, or territory located in the

44 Andrei A. Znamenski, ed., Shamanism: Critical Concepts in Sociology (New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), xxiv. 45 James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Bronislaw Malinowski, Magic, Science and Religion: And Other Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1948); Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea (New York : Routledge, 1978); E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966); Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1963); Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966). 46 Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Bengt-Ove Andreassen, “A Review of Theories on the Laestadian Rørelse: On the Academic Construction of Something Extraordinary and Exotic,” Acta Borealia 34, no. 1 (2017): 70–89; Franz Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man, (New York: Macmillan, 1938); Waldemar Bogoraz, The Chukchee. (New York: Leiden, E. J. Brill ltd., 1904); Waldemar Bogoraz, K Psikhologii Shamanstva u Narodov Severovostochnoi Azii (Moscow: Imperatorskago Moscovskago Universiteta, 1910); Marie Antoinette Czaplicka, Aboriginal Siberia: A Study in Social Anthropology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914); Lyle Dick, “‘Pibloktoq’ (Arctic Hysteria): A

74 variously defined elsewhere of the western medical field, was inhospitable and hazardous to one’s health became part of the rhetoric of scientific progress and racial evolution, with hygiene existing in partnership with whiteness and modernity.47 In other contexts, the idea that a specific geography was medically hazardous would later shift to account for germ theory and a more intense focus on the hygiene of colonized people. In his work on medicine and U.S. Occupied

Philippines, Anderson Warwick explains “fears of contagion, of the pathological consequences of contact with native races, largely supplanted older assumptions of environmental danger, of hazards of geographical displacement. The mismatch of race and place—which once had suggested the inevitable degeneration of Europeans in conditions of moist heat—soon seems less threatening to invading whites than contact with diseased or meretriciously ‘healthy’ natives.”48

While Anderson is discussing the moist heat of the tropics, the “barren northern land” was also understood as inhospitable to Europeans and the idea of Arctic hysteria as a medical hazard associated with the geography of the north developed as part of this earlier “assumption of environmental danger.”49

Construction of European-Inuit Relations?,” Arctic Anthropology 32, no. 2 (1995): 1–42; Andrei A. Znamenski, The Beauty of the Primitive: Shamanism and Western Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Edward F Foulks, The Arctic Hysterias of the North Alaskan Eskimo (Washington, D.C.: American Anthropological Association, 1972); Waldemar Jochelson, The Yakut, (New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1933); Robert E. Peary, Nearest the Pole: A Narrative of the Polar Expedition of the Peary Arctic Club in the S.S. Roosevelt, 1905-1906, (London: Hutchinson & Company, 1907); Robert E. Peary, The North Pole (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1910) 47 Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines;. Bowker and Star, Sorting Things out; Kalala J. Ngalamulume, Colonial Pathologies, Environment, and Western Medicine in Saint-Louis-Du-Senegal, 1867-1920, Society and Politics in Africa, v. 21 (New York: Peter Lang, 2012); Michael T. Taussig, The Nervous System (New York: Routledge, 1992); Michel Foucault, Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (New York: Routledge, 1989). 48 Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies, 2. 49 Znamenski, ed., Shamanism, xxiv; Anderson, Colonial Pathologies, 2.

75

Arctic hysteria was grounded in the idea that the severity and sparseness of nutritional diversity and sunlight impacted the psychological state of the Indigenous communities that resided within the circumpolar region.50 These environmental conditions supposedly rendered these communities susceptible to mental instability, particularly hysteria. Hysteria as a psychological condition has a long history of being employed to diagnose marginalized communities, whether on the basis of gender, sexuality, or race; its application to circumpolar

Indigenous communities draws on the relationship hysteria has to marginalized people considered mentally inferior to the normative subject (as constructed by European scholarship).51

Notably, this remains a diagnosable mental disorder, and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders continues to identify the symptoms associated with Arctic hysteria as a

‘culture-bound syndrome.’52 In the Siberian context, numerous writers provide accounts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of their observations of Siberians suffering from

Arctic hysteria.53 These accounts encompassed regions across the Northern Siberia territory, including Evenki and Sakha communities, though notably not with the Chukchi, according to

50 Bengt-Ove Andreassen, “A Review of Theories on the Laestadian Rørelse: On the Academic Construction of Something Extraordinary and Exotic,” Acta Borealia 34, no. 1 (2017): 70–89; Lyle Dick, “‘Pibloktoq’ (Arctic Hysteria): A Construction of European-Inuit Relations?,” Arctic Anthropology 32, no. 2 (1995): 1–42. 51 Sabine Arnaud, On Hysteria: The Invention of a Medical Category between 1670 and 1820 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, trans. Alisa Hartz (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004); Jann Matlock, Scenes of Seduction: Prostitution, Hysteria, and Reading Difference in Nineteenth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Andrew Scull, Hysteria: The Biography, Biographies of Disease (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Bengt-Ove Andreassen, “A Review of Theories on the Laestadian Rørelse: On the Academic Construction of Something Extraordinary and Exotic,” Acta Borealia 34, no. 1 (2017): 70–89; Lyle Dick, “‘Pibloktoq’ (Arctic Hysteria): A Construction of European-Inuit Relations?,” Arctic Anthropology 32, no. 2 (1995): 1–42. 52 Dick, “‘Pibloktoq’ (Arctic Hysteria): A Construction of European-Inuit Relations?,” 53 These include notable scholars such as Vladimir Bogoraz, Wenceslas Sieroszewski, Vasilii Filippovich Troshchanskii, S. I. Mitskevich, Maria Czaplicka, and Sergei Shirokogoroff.

76 both Vladimir Bogoraz and Vladimir Jochelson’s reports.54 Outside of the works produced by

Siberian ethnographers and exiles, Robert E. Peary wrote about Arctic hysteria in Nearest the

Pole and The North Pole, and more recently, in 1972, an American psychologist Edward Foulks published The Arctic Hysterias of the North Alaska Eskimo.

In the late nineteenth century, Arctic hysteria was thought to be diagnosable in various circumpolar people; however, shamans were particularly noted for their ailments. Shamanism articulates a spiritual world that overlaps with the natural material world—trees, mountains, rivers, animals, and weather patterns may form part of a religious pantheon and be home to various gods, spirits, and ancestors. As a result, the natural landscape of the Arctic is inexorably tied to shamanic beliefs. Combined with the history of shamanic calling as an experience of illness that leads to hallucinations, prolonged periods of unconsciousness, and other physical and psychological disturbances, shamans were in a particularly vulnerable state to have their practices reframed as psychological fits of hysteria.55 For example, Danish explorer Peter

Freuchen (1886-1956) noted that in Greenland there was an increase in shamanic activity starting in Autumn when the sunlight waned, the ocean froze, and animals left the area: “Every year, in the fall, we had a veritable epidemic of evil spirits materializing among the houses when the storms and darkness set in, and panic ensued. Sometimes nerves would reach the limits of endurance, consciousness would be cancelled out, and the individual in question would become

54 Bogoraz, The Chukchee; Bogoraz, K Psikhologii Shamanstva u Narodov Severovostochnoi Azii; Jochelson, The Yakut; Vasilii Filippovich Troshchaiskii, Evoliutsiia Chernoi Very (Shamanstva) u Iakutov (Kazan: Imperatorskago Universiteta, 1902). 55 For scholarship on these phenomenon see Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972); I. M. Lewis, Ecstatic Religion: A Study of Shamanism and Spirit Possession (New York: Routledge, 1989), Morten Axel Pedersen, Not Quite Shamans: Spirit Worlds and Political Lives in Northern Mongolia, Culture and Society after Socialism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011); Jochelson, The Yakuts, Waldemir Bogoraz’s K psikhologii shamanstva u narodov Severovostochnoi Azii; V. F. Troshchaiskii, Evoliutsiia Chernoi Very (Shamanstva) u Iakutov (Kazan: Imperatorskago Universiteta, 1902).

77 senseless and hysterical, doing and saying incomprehensible things.”56 The medicalization of shamanism lead scholars to assert that shamans are not selected through a supernatural calling, but by a geographically configured ‘epidemic.’ Vladimir Jochelson wrote, “Nobody can become a shaman of his own free will. The spirits enter into any person they may choose, and force him to become their servant. Those that become shamans are usually nervous young men subject to hysterical fits, by means of which the spirits express their demand that the young man should consecrate himself to the service of shamanism.” 57 In this analysis, shamanism was no longer a choice, and a shaman was not in on the trickery of the acts, rather shamans were victims of medical ailments that force them into shamanism.

Both Jochelson and Bogoraz addressed the mental state of shamans as part of their analysis and in their works there was a slippage between shamanism and hysteria and shamanism and queerness. Jochelson’s assertion that “nervous young men” prove themselves particularly susceptible to the ailment of hysteria hints at a larger body of work that explores the relationship between hysteria and sexual orientation and identity, and specifically shamans and gender queering.58 Bogoraz addressed this more robustly in his account of Chukchi shamanism throughout which he routinely referred to male shamans as exceedingly “bashful,” or “soft,” which appears as a pathological shyness, fragility, and coyness connected with the gender- queering of Chukchi shamans, who may assume female gender identities permanently, during

56 Peter Freuchen, Book of the Eskimos (New York: Fawcett Premier, 1973) quoted in Lyle Dick, “‘Pibloktoq’ (Arctic Hysteria): A Construction of European-Inuit Relations?,” 13. 57 Jochelson, The Koryak. 47. 58 Tomášková, Wayward Shamans; Bogoraz, The Chukchee; Znamenski, The Beauty of the Primitive; Ana Mariella Bacigalupo, “The Mapuche Man Who Became a Woman Shaman: Selfhood, Gender Transgression, and Competing Cultural Norms,” American Ethnologist 31, no. 3 (2004): 440–57; Randall Styers, Making Magic: Religion, Magic, and Science in the Modern World, Reflection and Theory in the Study of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

78 rituals, or only take on the clothing or hair styles of Chukchi women.59 However, far from accepting this, Bogoraz discussed the perversion of the shamans’ transformations, and describes a marriage between a man and a female-identified shaman, writing, “The couple lives much in the same way as do other people. The man tends his herd and goes hunting and fishing, while the

‘wife’ takes care of the home… They cohabit in a perverse way, modo Socratis, in which the transformed wife always plays the passive role.”60 Despite the apparent social acceptance,

Bogoraz noted that “the state of a transformed man is so peculiar that it attracts much gossip and jests on the part of the neighbours. Such jests are of course interchanged only in whispers, because the people are extremely afraid of the transformed, much more so than of ordinary shamans.”61 This fear, while not clearly disentangled from the ambiguous social acceptance of transgendered shamans, drew on the reputation that ‘transformed shamans’ are the most powerful shamans.62

The relationship between the shaman as a charlatan and the shaman as a hysteric can be linked together through the idea of queerness outlined by Randell Styers in Making Magic:

Religion, Magic, and Science in the Modern World. Styers addresses a wide historical and cultural range of magics, including Siberian shamanism, and how these categories all violated social norms and are interconnected through their deviations from the heterosexual male rational norm.63 Styers writes,

59 Bogoraz, The Chukchee, 450. 60 Ibid., 451. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid., 453; Jochelson, The Koryak, 53. 63 Styers, Making Magic, 184-192.

79

The magician may be a fraud or a dupe, a cross-dresser or a homosexual, dreamy or hysterical, but the logic of his deviance is clear. In the dominant scholarly articulations of this theme the magician is deformed in his fundamental nature; in fact, he serves to embody deviance at its most generalized level. He violates the basic norms of modern, rationalized, masculine, and heterosexual subjectivity. Regardless of the precise nature of his offense, the magician is, in a word, queer.64

The specific queer identity of a shaman, or of the broader category of magicians, varies, but

Styers reflects upon the role the magician plays in subverting or amplifying the sexual norms of the society.65 Siberian shamans who may be transgendered, ritually or habitually dress in the opposite gender’s clothing, homosexual, or hypersexualized, find space both within the larger body of ethnographic narratives that articulate the colonized body as sexually other and within

Styers’s framing of magic as a queering of modernity, that at once conforms to the imperial projection of sexual deviancy on to colonized subjects, and the ways in which trickery and chicanery become associated with queerness.66

The development of scholarship addressing the gender and sexuality of shamans only emerged in the late nineteenth century and, as Styes articulated, was not disconnected from the previous century’s interpretations of shamans as tricksters. Tomášková provides an alternative account of this new scholarly turn in her intellectual history of shamanism, writing, “the end of the nineteenth century offered a momentary opportunity for gender analysis, courtesy [of] (sic.) political exiles infused with Russian revolutionary spirit and a willingness to imagine social difference in radical new forms. In the midst of their own forced marginal experience in Siberia,

64 Ibid., 191. 65 Ibid., 192. 66 Styers, Making Magic: Religion, Magic, and Science in the Modern World; Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The “manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century, Studies in Imperialism (New York: Manchester University Press, 1995); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995); Pamela Cheek, Sexual Antipodes: Enlightenment Globalization and the Placing of Sex (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).

80 these urban exile-turned-ethnographers could well imagine that a spirit might order a Koryak man to change into a woman.”67 Dan Healey, in his history of homosexuality in Soviet Russia, characterizes the attitude of this era of anthropologist differently than Tomášková, writing,

“‘homosexuality’ among non-Christian peoples on the periphery of empire was read differently and inconsistently, from the ways it was interpreted among the Great Russians at the centre.

Gender-transgressive shamans in Far Eastern [I]ndigenous societies could be deemed to suffer from ‘perversion of the sexual instinct’ by turn-of-the-century anthropologists, following the medical model; yet Muslim males who exploited boy prostitutes were judged by Russian doctors to be depraved, not diseased.”68 While Tomášková perhaps overstates the acceptance of gender and sexual difference among Russian exile-ethnographers, it is clear that these scholars were able to write and reflect upon these topics, unlike earlier works that had erased or marginalized such topics.69

2.3.4 Shamans as a Universal Type

As the category of shaman became more familiar within the western academic community, it lost the specificity of the Arctic and became rooted in an idea of Indigenous religious practice. Shaman, medicine man, magician, and witch doctor became categories used within religious and ethnographic studies to name religious and ritual professionals in various

67 Tomášková, Wayward Shamans, 140. 68 Dan Healey, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 8. 69 Ibid.

81 cultural contexts, and the shaman became a global type.70 The long history of classifying disparate and distinctive Indigenous religious traditions into generic and often primitivizing categories, which includes shamanism, is being challenged by current scholars, and Indigenous scholars are calling attention to the colonialist ideology at play in the renaming and reinterpreting of their religious traditions. There continues to be resistance towards this generic characterization of Indigenous religious traditions—Inéz M. Talamantez, a contemporary Mescalero Apache professor of religious studies, explains, “They raped us by taking away our language. Now they are stealing our religion by calling our medicine men shamans… Our language does not know shamans.”71 Tomoko Masuzawa notes that the application of categories of religions that are able to become generic and move across disparate cultural and geographic spaces are considered as

‘little traditions’ rather than formal religions, such as Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, or Christianity.

She notes that these ‘little traditions’ “tend to go by certain generic lower-case names (such as shamanism and animism), often with a particular place marker attached (e.g. Native American,

Siberian, Aboriginal Australian).” 72 These little traditions and generic categories became, as a whole, associated with primitive religion. 73 This set up a dichotomy between the shaman and the priest wherein “[the] ‘shaman’ designated a ‘primitive’ religious specialist living in allegedly

‘simple’ tribal communities whereas the ‘priest’ is a religious specialist in hierarchically organized (e.g., self-styled ‘civilized’) urban societies.”74 At its heart, the shaman, whether a

70 Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 3; Lars Kirkhusmo Pharo, “A Methodology for a Deconstruction and Reconstruction of the Concepts ‘Shaman’ and ‘Shamanism.’” 71 Inéz M. Talamantez, quoted in Lars Kirkhusmo Pharo, “A Methodology for a Deconstruction and Reconstruction of the Concepts ‘Shaman’ and ‘Shamanism,’” 13. 72 Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions, 4. 73 Ibid. 74 Pharo, “A Methodology for a Deconstruction and Reconstruction of the Concepts ‘Shaman’ and ‘Shamanism,’” 18.

82 charlatan or hysteric, is often configured within broader discourses on religion as part of a distinction between modern, enlightened, civilized society and ‘primitive’ Indigenous society.

The association of the shaman with ‘primitivity’ becomes critical to the universal approach to shamanism. As twentieth-century scholars of the history of religions attempted to reconstruct the evolution of religion from what was perceived of as its most primitive to its most advanced forms, they studied and documented shamanism and other forms of Indigenous religious traditions as relics of a primeval religion. Émile Durkheim articulated this clearly in his introduction to Elementary Forms of Religious Life: “We shall not study a very archaic religion, then, just for the pleasure of recounting its oddities and singularities. We have made it the subject of our study because it seems most likely to yield an understanding of the religious nature of man by showing us an essential and permanent aspect of humanity.”75 In this method of study,

Indigenous pre-industrial societies, in Durkheim’s case the Indigenous Australians, were understood as evolutionarily closer to an original state of nature and by studying them something essential about the human condition, psyche, or religious consciousness could be determined.

The primitivizing discourse surrounding the shaman as a universal type of religious figure remains a central critique by contemporary scholarship of shamanism regarding the usage of the term shaman itself, even when the universalizing is no longer directly tied to an evolutionary theory of religions. Some universal shamanism theorists have worked to construct a definition of the shaman that can move across time and space to refer back to a ‘generic’ construction that establishes some foundation of what a shaman is that is simultaneously unique and generalizable. Mircea Eliade remains perhaps the most central figure in the universal

75 Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 3.

83 application of shamanism.76 Despite criticisms, his foundational work Shamanism: Archaic

Techniques of Ecstasy continues as one of the most influential books on the subject and remains within the bibliographies of academic studies of shamanism to this day.77 Eliade defined shamanism broadly as “shamanism = technique of ecstasy” and that the ecstatic experience is considered the “religious experience par excellence.”78 This state of ecstasy is a euphoric, trance- like, or otherwise altered state during which shamans may come into contact with the spiritual or sacred.79 However, Eliade noted, not all ecstasy is shamanic ecstasy, and while shamans are part of a magical system, not all magicians are shamans (though all shamans are magicians).80 Eliade used this broad definition to examine religious traditions from around the world as exhibiting a universal pattern of ecstatic shamanic religious practice.

Eliade defined Siberia as the locus classicus of shamanism. He notes that Siberia and

Central Asia present the ‘typical’ presentation and have “the advantage of presenting a structure in which elements that exist independently elsewhere in the world—i.e. special relations with

‘spirits,’ ecstatic capacities permitting of magical flight, ascent to the sky, decent to the underworlds, mastery over fire, etc—are all here already found integrated with a particular

76 Other scholars who present a universal shaman, or the shaman as a religious type include: Piers Vitebsky, The Shaman, (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995).; Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968); Carlos Castaneda, The Wheel of Time: The Shamans of Ancient Mexico, Their Thoughts about Life, Death and the Universe (London ; New York ; Toronto: Penguin Books, 2000); Miranda Aldhouse-Green and Stephen Aldhouse-Green, Quest for the Shaman: Shape-Shifters, Sorcerers and Spirit Healers in Ancient Egypt (London: Thames and Hudson, 2005); Laurel Kendall, Shamans, Nostalgias, and the IMF: South Korean Popular Religion in Motion (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009); Lars Kirkhusmo Pharo, “A Methodology for a Deconstruction and Reconstruction of the Concepts ‘Shaman’ and ‘Shamanism,’” Numen 58, no. 1 (January 1, 2011): 6–70; Mari Womack, “Commentary: Emies, Etics, ‘Ethics’ and Shamans,” Anthropology News 42, no. 3 (2001): 7–7. 77 Znamenski, The Beauty of the Primitive, 180; Tomášková, Wayward Shamans, 160, 187-188. 78 Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 4. 79 Ibid., 5. 80 Ibid.

84 ideology and validating specific techniques.”81 Shamanism is typified in Siberian and Central

Asian cultures, but, as Eliade noted, “nowhere in the world or in history will a perfectly ‘pure’ or

‘primordial’ religious phenomenon be found.”82 As part of this acknowledgement, he identified various shifts, influences, and alterations in Siberian and Central Asian cultures that render their shamanism not a pure and untouched isolate.83

Eliade’s encyclopaedic accounts of shamans from Siberia to South America have retained a place at the foundations of contemporary scholarship on shamanism. Contemporary scholars who wish to support a version of the shaman as a cross-cultural figure and those who reject a universal approach to the shaman have to make sense of the legacies of colonial images of the universal primitive subject and of Eliade’s archaic type of religious practice. Studies of Siberian shamanism, however, because it represented the etymological and historiographic place of origin, are often granted the privilege of freely using the term without implying that the shaman maintains a universal or archetypal quality. Eliade’s work has become closely associated with this universal and primitivizing approach to shamanism, and is increasingly treated as more an example read as part of an intellectual history of shamanism than as a theoretical or ethnographic source in and of itself.84

81 Ibid., 6. 82 Ibid., 11. 83 Ibid., 7. 84 Kehoe, Shamans and Religion; Pharo, “A Methodology for a Deconstruction and Reconstruction of the Concepts ‘Shaman’ and ‘Shamanism,’”; Znamenski, The Beauty of the Primitive.

85

2.3.5 Shamans as Geographically Bound

While Eliade has maintained a position as a canonical scholar of shamanism, his work has received substantial criticism from scholars such as Alice Beck Kehoe, Silvia Tomášková, and Cecile F. Klein.85 Rejecting a universal or generic image of shamanism, there has been an effort to restrict shamanism and deny a global approach, which reflects the shift in the latter half of the twentieth century towards deconstructive and post-colonial critiques of intellectual classification. As post-colonial thought developed a vocabulary to critically challenge the genericism and exoticism that Western scholars attributed to the non-west, shamanism came under examination as a category of colonial classification. One of the proposed correctives for shamanism is to limit it to its original cultural context—shamanism could, therefore, be useful in describing what Eliade considered the typical shamanism of North and Central Asia, but used elsewhere the term gains a colonialist air of genericising and primitivising Indigenous cultures.

Alice Beck Kehoe has been one of the more strict advocates for this geographic restriction, she writes: “good scholarship, good science, and ethics” require that scholars limit their usage of the terms shaman and shamanism to “Siberian practitioners so called in their homelands,” though she allows for communities historically connected to these Siberian peoples to have these terms applied “with notes of caution.”86 Kehoe’s concern over the generic application of shamanism to disparate Indigenous religious communities is clearly articulated; however, the extent to which shaman and shamanism were terms of salience across the different languages and cultures indigenous to Siberia makes her position of only applying the title shaman to those called as such

85, Shamans and Religion; Tomášková, Wayward Shamans; Klein et al., “The Role of Shamanism in Mesoamerican Art: A Reassessment.” 86 Kehoe, Shamans and Religion, 102.

86 in “their homeland” less transparent than she perhaps intended. The restriction to Evenki and related Tungusic languages minimizes the cultural exchange and religious spread of shamanic practice within other Siberian communities not linguistically related to the Evenki. Some shamanic communities have long-standing identifications with this term, and now largely speak in Russian, using the word shaman rather than Indigenous terms from languages in precarious states.87 Caroline Humphrey, a scholar of Mongolian shamanism, similarly uses the term shaman for “specialists called by equivalent words in native languages.”88 This appears similar to Kehoe in its linguistic and etymological restriction of the term, but opens it to ‘equivalent’ terms from other languages, which would allow, for example, the use of the term shaman when discussing

Mongolian and Sakha religious traditions where the emic term would not be etymologically connected to shaman, but the long history of cultural and religious exchange and influences could render the different terms equivalent.

Kehoe’s position has, however, been critically challenged by scholars who advocate shaman as a comparative category of religious practice. Laurel Kendall responded directly to

Kehoe’s argument, arguing for shamanism as an appropriate term for specific forms of practice.

In response to Kehoe’s suggestion that anthropologists replace the term shaman with the more neutral-seeming healer, doctor or seer, Kendall notes, “while most shamans are (and have been described as) healers, doctors, and seers, there are multitudes of doctors and diviners who do not intervene with the spirit realm on behalf of the community through an embodied, usually

87 Pharo, “A Methodology for a Deconstruction and Reconstruction of the Concepts ‘Shaman’ and ‘Shamanism,’” 22. See earlier discussion of the etymology of shaman for an overview of the status of Indigenous languages in Siberia. 88 Caroline Humphrey, "Shamanic Practices and the State in Northern Asia: Views from the Center and Periphery” in Shamanism, History and the State, ed. Thomas Nicholas and Caroline Humphrey, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1994), 192.

87 publicly enacted experience brought on by some form of musical stimulus.”89 Here, Kendall approaches shamanism as a form of practice rather than as a tradition in itself. Similarly, Mari

Womack insists: “the convention in anthropology and other scholarly disciplines is to call a shaman a shaman whether he or she practices in Siberia or Somalia.”90 In short, this view argues that provided a shaman is specifically defined, it is a useful category that avoids even more general terms such as local priest or healer (both of which Kehoe suggests).91

While Kendall acknowledges the colonial legacies of the category of the shaman, she sees Kehoe as neglecting scholarship that seeks to place shamans in post-industrial, urban, non-

Indigenous, and multi-religious contexts that also seek to provide postcolonial reengagements with shamanism outside of a primitivising discourse.92 Kendall responds to Kehoe’s discussion of faith healing by Catholic nurses, writing: “‘Is this shamanic?’ Kehoe asks, intending a rhetorical question, assuming that the anthropological reader would balk at including Catholic

89 Kendall, “Review: Shamans and Religion: An Anthropological Exploration in Critical Thinking,” 360. 90 Womack, “Commentary: Emies, Etics, ‘Ethics’ and Shamans,” 7. 91 Ibid. 92 For examples of shamanism within urban and post-industrial contexts see: Morten Axel Pedersen, Not Quite Shamans: Spirit Worlds and Political Lives in Northern Mongolia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011); Manduhai Buyandelger, Tragic Spirits: Shamanism, Memory, and Gender in Contemporary Mongolia (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013); Manduhai Buyandelgeriyn, “Dealing with Uncertainty: Shamans, Marginal Capitalism, and the Remaking of History in Postsocialist Mongolia,” American Ethnologist 34, no. 1 (2007): 127– 47; Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, Shamans, Spirituality, and Cultural Revitalization: Explorations in Siberia and Beyond, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Laurel Kendall, Shamans, Nostalgias, and the IMF: South Korean Popular Religion in Motion (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009); Piers Vitebsky, The Shaman (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995); Olga A. Shaglanova, “Buriat Urban Shamanism as a Phenomenon,” Anthropology & Archeology of Eurasia 51, no. 3 (2012): 76–88; David Chidester, “Credo Mutwa, Zulu Shaman: The Invention and Appropriation of Indigenous Authenticity in African Folk Religion,” Journal for the Study of Religion 15, no. 2 (2002): 65–85; David Chidester, “Zulu Dreamscapes: Senses, Media, and Authentication in Contemporary Neo- Shamanism,” Material Religion 4, no. 2 (July 1, 2008): 136–158; Valentina Kharitonova, “Revived Shamanism in the Social Life of Russia,” Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore, no. 62 (2015): 37–54; Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, “Healing Failed Faith? Contemporary Siberian Shamanism,” Anthropology and Humanism 26, no. 2 (2001): 134–149.

88 nurses in Milwaukee. But the answer among shaman scholars would more likely be a resounding

‘Yes!’”93

The methodologies for a postcolonial reimagining of shamans as no longer located in the universalised elsewhere of the primitive take different forms. Both Kehoe and Humphrey’s usage of the term as bound to its emic cultural-linguistic context and Kendall and Womack’s relocating of shamanism within industrialized, urban, and religiously diverse communities attempt to shift away from an idea of shamanism as a primeval religion.

2.3.6 Shamanism: Deconstructing and Reconstructing the Shaman in Context

The intellectual legacies of the term shaman have fostered amongst contemporary scholars an uneasiness when using the term due to its long associations with primitivizing ideologies and evolutionary narratives. As in the postcolonial reinterpretations of the shaman, contemporary scholars are attempting to deconstruct the term and reinterpret what a shaman is, and what shamanism more broadly might be. Many of the scholars from the earlier periods of shamanic studies focused on the shamans themselves as the cornerstone of shamanism. Pharo notes, “the designations ‘shaman’ and ‘shamanism’—the term ‘shamanism’ being derived from

‘shaman’—are thus constructions of western anthropologists. The Tungus never employed the concept ‘shamanism’ in their own language. It was used by Western anthropologists to describe a certain religious complex or ideology which they thought they had identified in Siberia and

93 Kendall, “Review: Shamans and Religion: An Anthropological Exploration in Critical Thinking,” 360.

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North Asia.”94 Shamanism, as opposed to the shaman, was the subject of less scholarly attention within the early European sources. After all, if, as Diderot explained, the shaman is simply a charlatan performing tricks and stage magic for guileless audiences, who would presume that there could be a religious tradition to document and not simply the hopes and fears of a community being exploited by the shaman.95 Gloria Flaherty, in her book Shamanism and the

Eighteenth Century, writes:

Most eighteenth-century observations of shamanism were written from the point of view of the interested yet disbelieved Western European. They almost all follow the same pattern… Whether treating shamans in Siberia, Lapland, Greenland, or the Americas, the reports attempted to come to terms with the ritual of the healing or soothsaying séance. They treated its theatricality by mentioning both its acoustical and its visual aspects. The shaman’s costume, with its symbolic spangles, teeth, and feathers, was stressed as much as the tambourine, with which the shaman was said to fly to the various levels of the heavens in order to recapture lost souls or gain victory over evil spirits.96

Flaherty’s characterization of eighteenth-century depictions of shamanism is, in fact, a picture of the individual (or prototypical) shaman. The broader religious context in which the shaman is situated only appears as references to the shaman’s movement between worlds and interactions with the spirits therein. The shaman appears as a ritual professional and a magician performing

94 Pharo, “A Methodology for a Deconstruction and Reconstruction of the Concepts ‘Shaman’ and ‘Shamanism,’” 24. 95 "Shamans." The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d'Alembert Collaborative Translation Project. Translated by Steve Harris. Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0000.882 (accessed September 28, 2018) Originally published as "Schamans," Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, 14:759 (Paris, 1765); Romanova, Two Comedies by Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia; Znamenski, The Beauty of the Primitive; Tomášková, Wayward Shamans. 96 Flaherty, Shamanism and the Eighteenth Century, 10-11.

90 for a client for pay (healing, ‘soothsaying’, etc.) and not as a religious leader engaging with a community gathered through religious beliefs or traditions.97

When Flaherty writes about the eighteenth-century “observations of shamanism,” she is really addressing the images of shamans, not shamanism. Categorizations of shamans as charlatans, the shaman as a universal type, and the shaman as etymologically and geographically bound to the North and Central Asian territory all focus on shamans themselves. Western scholarship has been able to mobilize shamans as an academic category in part because they often appear divorced from a broader religious tradition and therefore can exist in isolation as a character, or an archetype. As a result, differences in initiation, rituals of entering the ecstatic trance-state, sacred geographies of the worlds, the pantheon of divine beings, and the modes of healing and divining all serve as variables within shamanism, even within more limited Siberian shamanic traditions.98 In some areas of contemporary shamanic study there is an increasing effort to position shamanism rather than shamans at the forefront of analysis and providing more contextual and specific situating of shamanism within cultural and religious traditions.99

97 For a longer discussion of how magic (inclusive of shamanism) cannot have a community in the same way as Christianity or Islam can, see Durkheim’s explanation of why a church of magic cannot exist in Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 42-43. 98 Piers Vitebsky, The Shaman, (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995).; Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968); Carlos Castaneda, The Wheel of Time: The Shamans of Ancient Mexico, Their Thoughts about Life, Death and the Universe (New York: Penguin Books, 2000); Miranda Aldhouse-Green and Stephen Aldhouse-Green, Quest for the Shaman: Shape-Shifters, Sorcerers and Spirit Healers in Ancient Egypt (London: Thames and Hudson, 2005); Laurel Kendall, Shamans, Nostalgias, and the IMF: South Korean Popular Religion in Motion (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009). 99 For examples of this foregrounding of shamanism as a religious tradition see: Morten Axel Pedersen, Not Quite Shamans: Spirit Worlds and Political Lives in Northern Mongolia, Culture and Society after Socialism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011); Manduhai Buyandelger, Tragic Spirits: Shamanism, Memory, and Gender in Contemporary Mongolia (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013); Rane Willerslev, Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs, First edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Michael T. Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).

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The focus on shamanism forces the specificity of shamans to be reconciled with a larger body of beliefs, practices, communities, and traditions. Shamans are part of a system; this system—as Pharo and Masuzawa argue—named shamanism, is a generic category constructed by the Western academy to classify Indigenous religious practices, and it is grounded in the idea of the shaman as a mobile archetype.100 By shifting the focus onto shamanism rather than the shaman, the intellectual legacies that established the shaman as an archetype can be deconstructed as the production of scholarly work. In reconstructing the shaman as religious professional who engages in specific forms of practice within broader religious traditions, the specificity and breadth of shamanism is highlighted. Pharo writes:

…shamanism is not a religion in itself but only a ‘configuration’ within a religious system. This point is important because numerous scholars tend to reduce so-called ‘indigenous religions’ to a category of ‘shamanism,’ thereby depriving these religions of their individual identity. Instead these religions ought to be recognized and analyzed as distinct systems of belief and practice… the paradigmatic post-colonial reduction of many indigenous religious systems to ‘shamanism’ has created an impoverished view of religions that are no less complex and sophisticated than the so-called ‘Great Traditions.’101

Pharo’s statement that “shamanism is not a religion in itself” should not be taken to mean that these Indigenous religious traditions labelled as shamanic are not, in fact, religious traditions.102

Rather, if shamanism is an intellectual by-product of the western academic tradition of studying shamans, then shamanism describes only a portion of the religious tradition more broadly. For

Pharo, shamanism retains its position as a cross-cultural category, but does not define the various

Indigenous religions in toto, but only describes a configuration, a mode of practice, within the

100 Pharo, “A Methodology for a Deconstruction and Reconstruction of the Concepts ‘Shaman’ and ‘Shamanism,’”; Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions, 4. 101 Pharo, “A Methodology for a Deconstruction and Reconstruction of the Concepts ‘Shaman’ and ‘Shamanism,’” 6. 102 Ibid.

92 broad and more complex religious traditions. Shamanism is for Pharo fundamentally attached to the shaman as a figure, but the shaman (and shamanism) is embedded within a larger religious system.

If Pharo’s reconstruction is akin to shamans within shamanism, then Morten Axel

Pedersen, a scholar of post-socialist Mongolian shamanism, offers shamanism without shamans.

Pedersen explains that the people of Ulaan-Uul in Northern Mongolia “…found themselves in a paradoxical situation: most if not all the shamans had disappeared, but the spirits—and the complex assemblage of ideas, practices, and artefacts associated with these occult entities—had come back.”103 Pedersen depicts a Mongolia that has suffered a “veritable ontological meltdown” as the institutions of the socialist state such as health care, education, and the infrastructure of the country fall into disarray. It is in this context that shamanic spirits have come back to a community in which there are no longer trained shamans to tend to them or to guide those experiencing the calling into becoming shamans who could take over this work.104

This shamanism is integrally tied to the contemporary social, political, and economic landscape of Mongolia and expressed as rage, cries, drunkenness, violence, and loss of consciousness in the

‘not-quite shamans’ left within the shamanic world of contemporary Mongolia.

Pedersen presents a shamanism that is engaged in a contemporary world of neo-liberal economics, modern technology, and the collapse of states and governing ideologies. “Shamanism without shamans” is a statement that shamanism exists with or without shamans, and that the

103 Pedersen, Not Quite Shamans, 9. 104 Ibid., 8.

93 spirits continue to exist in Mongolia even after the shamans were erased after years of repression and persecution.105

2.3.7 Periodisation: In sum

The five categorizations of shamanic theorization (charlatans, hysterics, universal archetypes, geographically-bound North and Central Asian religious figures, the deconstructed and reconstructed shamans) describe loose periods. These are not all mutually exclusive interpretations, and they do not cover all the conceptualizations of shamans and shamanism over the past four hundred years of Western scholarship. Rather, these are intellectual nodes around which various theorists, ethnographers, writers, and travellers gather, forming epistemes that simultaneously glance back at older ideas and imagine forward, anticipating intellectual changes.

Over the course of the remaining pages of this chapter, and the dissertation as a whole, the lines between these periods will become blurred, and the chronological sequencing will give way to a more varied intellectual episteme where multiple ideas cohabitate.

2.4 Late Imperial Russian Shamanic Studies

Shamans and shamanism were the subject of extensive scholarship in late imperial

Russia, and this work has been foundational to the field of shamanic studies more broadly, influencing the work of influential scholars of magic, ethnography, and shamanism such as

105 Pedersen is deeply invested in the ontological turn, as a theory and method of engagement for understanding different systems of being. Aside from Not Quite Shamans, Pedersen also addresses this more generally in: Martin Holbraad and Morten Axel Pedersen, The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

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Bronisław Malinowski, Franz Boas, and Mircea Eliade.106 In the periods of shamanic study previously outlined, if taken as strict chronological epistemes, late imperial ethnographic scholarship would fall principally within the era of hysterical shamans as the dominant theory.

This is not an inaccurate characterisation of some of the dominant figures in Siberian ethnographic research in this period, notably Vladimir Bogoraz, V. F. Troshchanskii, Sergei

Shirokogoroff and Maria Czaplicka.107 However, other ideas and theories about shamans appear in the scholarship of this period, and within the works of the ethnographers previously listed as contributors to literature on shamans as hysterics. Notably present are remnants of charlatanism and articulations of evolutionary ideas that place shamanism into a universal narrative of religious progress.

2.4.1 Hysteria in Late Imperial Sources

The hysteria theory of shamanism was most prominent in American and European late nineteenth and early twentieth century scholarship. Amongst late imperial Russian ethnographers, there was a substantial amount of scholarship published on the psychological instability and hysteria of the shaman. Maria Czaplicka was a Polish-born ethnographer who conducted field work in Siberia between 1914 and 1915, before returning to Oxford and

106 For discussions of the influence of these late nineteenth and early twentieth century ethnographers of Siberian shamanism see: Znamenski, The Beauty of the Primitive; Znamenski, ed., Shamanism: Critical Concepts in Sociology; Hutton, Shamans: Siberian Spirituality and the Western Imagination; Igor Krupnik and William W. Fitzhugh, eds., Gateways: Exploring the Legacy of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, 1897-1902 (Washington D.C.: Arctic Studies Centre, Smithsonian Institute, 2001); Tomášková, Wayward Shamans; Han F. Vermeulen, Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015). 107 See “Neurotics to Tribal Psychoanalysts” in Znamenski’s The Beauty of the Primitive: for a wider history of the psychological historiography of shamanism.

95 becoming the first female lecturer in Anthropology.108 Czaplicka approached shamanism within the context of the hysteria hypothesis, and had ambiguous attitudes towards it. In support of the hypothesis she wrote in Aboriginal Siberia: A Study in Social Anthropology:

[shamanism] seems to be such a natural product of the Continental climate with its extremes of cold and heat, of the violent burgas (sic.) [whirling Arctic snowstorms] and burans [powerful wind-storms of steppes], of the hunger and fear which attend the long winters, that not only the Paleo-Siberians and the more highly cultivated Neo-Siberians, but even Europeans have sometimes fallen under the influences of certain shamanistic superstitions.109

Czaplicka particularly considered the shamanic calling and interaction with the spirits as drawing their source from psychological disturbance connected to the geography of the Arctic. However, she noted that other areas of extreme climate (notably the equatorial regions) provoke a similar

“nervous disease.”110 Pushing further away from full subscription to the arctic hysteria hypothesis, she limits her study to cases of hysteria which are connected with the religious life of the natives and are considered by them as forms of ‘inspiration.’”111

Czaplicka argued: “no one who has studied ‘arctic hysteria’ was a specialist in psychiatry.”112 Her cautious approach to only using examples of individuals who were understood within their own cultural context as suffering from a spiritual ailment aligns with her scepticism about the expansive diagnosis she saw in the works of other scholars writing on the topic.113 She stated,

108 Grażyna Kubica, “Maria Czaplicka and Her Siberian Expedition, 1914–1915: A Centenary Tribute,” Arctic Anthropology 52, no. 1 (July 30, 2015): 14. 109 Czaplicka, Aboriginal Siberia, 168. 110 Ibid., 323. 111 Ibid., 309 112 Ibid., 318. 113 A list of scholars Czaplicka cites as writing on arctic hysteria can be found on page 309 of Aboriginal Siberia: A Study in Social Anthropology.

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In studying and defining the diseases of primitive peoples, it is necessary to take account of the way in which such peoples regard the patients. Thus, among the aborigines of Siberia, a person suffering from manerick may become a powerful and influential shaman, while one afflicted with ämürakh is considered as of no account socially, and, like one suffering from syphilis, leprosy, or sibirskaya yazva, may even be segregated from society by special restrictions and disabilities.114

These three different conditions are differentiated from one another and Czaplicka took care to address only manerick as a shamanic ailment. Sibirskaya yazva was defined as “‘Siberian boil- plague’ (anthrax, carbuncle), a disease cause by the Bacillus anthracis in cattle and other animals, and also in men.”115 This disease could be fatal, and the German scholar Adolph

Erman, in his 1848 book Travels in Siberia: Including Excursions Southwards, down the Obi, to the Polar Circle, and southwards to the Chinese Frontier, described this ‘Siberian plague’ as the

“terror of natives and visitors.”116 Ämürakh was defined as a Sakha term translated variously as sensitive, compliant, or shuddering that, Czaplicka explains, is appropriate given that “…the first symptom of this disease is the great impressionableness of the patient, his feeling of fright and timidity. Besides this susceptibility to fright, in which the patient shouts the most obscene words or rushes at the cause of his terror, there is another symptom of this disease, viz. an inclination to repeat all visual and auditory impressions.”117 Finally, Czaplicka explained that manerick, the shamanic hysteria, is derived from “some Turanie languages” to mean ‘mad’ or ‘crazy.’ It is the only disorder she presents as truly a possession by spirits that causes the afflicted person to

114 Czaplicka, Aboriginal Siberia, 325. 115 Ibid., 307. 116 Adolph Erman, Travels in Siberia: Including Excursions Northwards, down the Obi, to the Polar Circle, and Southwards, to the Chinese Frontier (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1848). 117 Czaplicka, Aboriginal Siberia, 316.

97 spasm, fall into trace, howl, dance, and have epileptic seizures.118 These symptoms are those of the shaman’s ailment, and mark the specific diagnosis of shamanic hysteria tied, according to

Czaplicka, to extreme climate.

Similar to Bogoraz and Jochelson’s account of the Sakha, Koryak, Yukaghir, and

Chukchi shamanism, Russian ethnographer V. F. Troshchanskii’s Evolution of the black faith

(shamanhood) among the Yakuts added a gendered and evolutionary aspect to the shamanic hysteria when he speculates that “since women are generally more prone to neuroses, then they should also have been the first to start shamanizing….”119 The hysterical theory of shamanism was common in late imperial Russian sources, and within scholarship more broadly on shamanism in this period. This adoption of hysteria within the field of shamanic studies was dependent upon the development of psychology as a field of study and evolutionary ideas of society that fostered a racialized pathologization of the Siberian shaman.

2.4.2 Heterogeneity in Defining Shamanism in Late Imperial Russia

In October of 1892 an article, suggestive of shamanism as a subject of popular inquiry, ran in the Irkutsk newspaper the Eastern Review, titled “Shamans and their Mysteries.” The anonymous author, offered an overview of various conceptualizations of shamanism and issues in the field of ethnography. This newspaper was affiliated with both progressive politics and the

Geographic Society, and frequently ran articles about expeditions, research, and happenings at

118 Czaplicka, Aboriginal Siberia, 316. Note that Znamenski, in The Beauty of the Primitive, states that this is actually a Sakha term that literally translates as the “crazy one” (Znamenski, The Beauty of the Primitive, 83). 119 V. F. Troshchaiskii, Evolutsia chernoi very (shamanstva) u Iakutoy. 119.

98 the museum. Founded in St. Petersburg in 1882 by Siberian regionalist Nikolai Yadrintsev, and moved to Irkutsk in 1888, the newspaper had a circulation rate that reached 20 000 in 1904-1905, but was then closed by the censors in 1906.120 The Russian author Valentin Rasputin, in his non- fiction work Siberia, Siberia, quotes the newspaper’s former editor Ivan Popov, stating “The

Gromovs’ central office (a family of Siberian merchants), like the editorial offices of the Eastern

Review and the Irkutsk Museum of the Geographical Society, were a kind of secret address where you could get all kinds of information about ‘political types.’”121 For example, Leon

Trotsky, under the pseudonym Antid Oto, published articles in the newspaper “about the peasantry; about the Russian classic authors; about Ibsen, Hauptmann and Nietzsche; de

Maupassant, Andreyev and Gorky.”122 As a publisher of articles on literary, political

(predominantly leftist), and scientific research, the Eastern Review connected many of the exile- ethnographers at the Irkutsk Museum (most notably Dimitri Klements, who published numerous articles in the newspaper). The inclusion of articles on shamanism was well within the scope of the newspaper, and would not have seemed out of place to the large readership.

The article “Shamans and their Mysteries” offered an introduction for the reader to the study of shamanism and opened with the statement, “Since the time when people stopped looking at the religions of the savages as the exclusive work of an evil spirit, the interest in them and the study of them begins to take on greater and greater dimensions.”123 After establishing the trajectory of shamanic studies as moving towards increasing complexity, the author

120 Y. F. Lukin, Arkticheskaia entsiklopediia, 2 vols. (Paulsen, 2017); Viacheslav Shevtsov, “Siberian Newspapers of the Russian Empire and USSR Periods: Issues of Conservation, Digitization, and Scientific Use,” Sibirica 15, no. 1 (March 1, 2016): 103. 121 Valentin Rasputin, Siberia, Siberia (Northwestern University Press, 1997), 198. 122 Leon Trotsky, My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography (Courier Corporation, 2012), 126. 123 “Shaman i ix misterii” Vostochnoy Obozreniye (Irkutsk, Russia) October 18, 1898. No. 42, p. 9.

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(unnamed in the article) explained the dominant conceptualizations of shamanism in the

European scholarship:

This word (shamanism),124 formed by European researchers from the Manchurian- Tungus saman'—magician [volkhv], sorcerer [vedun], conjurer of spirits, was not understood by them in the same way. Some designated with it religious beliefs only of the inorodtsy of Northern Asia, others, the inorodtsy of North Asia, Northern Europe, and North America, a third, preserving the etymological meaning of the word, designated any type of sorcery and wizardry by the word shamanism, among whatever peoples were encountered and the description of shamanism turned into a description of only the rites and the actions of the shamans, ignoring the fact that shamans and their mysteries exist, as well as their distinctive ideas about the relationship between man, spirits, and gods.125

The author introduced three different approaches to the boundaries of shamanism as a category:

1) as a term only applied to the religious beliefs of Siberian communities in Northern Asia, 2) as a larger term for Indigenous communities in the Northern regions of Asia, Europe, and North

America, and 3) as a generic category for any magical practice. The author noted that despite the vast scholarship on the religious traditions of the inorodtsy there is “not even a tolerable classification of them.”126 This is partially due, the author explained, to the “observer’s subjectivism” that colours their interpretations of shamanism and to the multiple categories (i.e.

“fetishism, sabianism, zootheism, anthropotheism, and monotheism”) in play that makes it difficult to compare and categorize the different religious traditions.127 This article provides an account of conceptualizations of shamanism circulating in the late imperial era, but stresses the heterogeneity of these ideas.

124 While in general I translate shamanstvo as the practice of shamanism, as noted in the introduction, I have used shamanism here as the original text emphasized shamanstvo as a singular “word,” which would render a three-word translation unwieldy. 125 “Shamany i ix misterii” Vostochnoe Obozrenie. No. 42 1892. 9. 126 Ibid. 127 Ibid.

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Among the diversity of conceptions of shamanism circulating simultaneously to the hysteria hypothesis were continuations of the charlatanism concept, seen clearly in Bogoraz’ writings about the Chukchi shamans. As he stated, “various tricks performed by the Chukchee shamans, including ventriloquism, have to be learned in the preparatory stage. However, I could obtain no detailed information on this point, since the shamans, of course, assert that the tricks were done by ‘spirits’ and denied having any hand whatever in proceedings of such a character.”128 This was not limited to false shamans, as the example of Quesalid suggests.

Bogoraz noted, “The trader Kuva’r at Indian Point (a settlement on the Pacific coast on the

Chukhotka Peninsula), of whom I have spoken several times, assured me that even the most renowned shamans are only clever deceivers.”129 Chicanery and hysteria were not always mutually exclusive interpretations of the shamans and their actions.

Unlike Bogoraz, Jochelson was particularly interested in an evolutionary conceptualization of shamanism, and sought to establish the differences between the white and black shamans, wherein the black shaman evolved from earlier Sakha family shamans, and the white shaman was “not an aboriginal institution.”130 Jochelson outlined the following characteristics of these two types of shamans:

Shamans (saxa ababyta, Yakut priest, and säbäki in the Viliuisk District) are divided into two classes, white or creative shamans (Ajȳ aȳuna) and black or malevolent beings’ shamans (Abasy oyuna). The white shaman serves as an intermediary between benevolent creative beings and mankind, whom he does not and cannot harm. He has no special shamanic dress and does not even possess a drum… The black shaman serves as an intermediary between evil spirits and men. He cures sick people by extracting from them the evil spirits causing the illness. The power and ability of the black shaman varies. His spirit protectors may dwell in the upper, middle, or lower worlds. The most powerful

128 Bogoraz, The Chukchee, 425. 129 Ibid., 429. 130 Jochelson, The Yakuts. 106.

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shaman is one who has wolf and bear spirits as his protectors. The black shaman may also harm men against whom he is ill-disposed, casting diseases and miseries on them.131

This division between black and white shamans received, and continues to receive, substantial attention within scholarship on Siberian shamanism, and it remains somewhat unclear the extent to which this division held salience, or was even recognizable, to different Indigenous communities which practiced shamanism.132

The evolutionary conceptions of shamanism extend beyond the configuring of how it evolved within the shamanic communities; it was also used as part of the framing of shamanism as a primitive religion doomed to extinction in the face of imperial Russian modernity. In 1892

V. M. Mikhailovskii, the Vice-President of the Ethnographic section of the Imperial Society of

Natural History, Anthropology and Ethnography, wrote:

Shamanism among the Siberian peoples is at the present time in a moribund condition; it must die out with those beliefs among which alone such phenomena can arise and flourish. Buddhism on the one hand, and Mohammedanism on the other, not to mention Christianity, are rapidly destroying the old ideas of the tribes among whom the shamans performed. Especially has the more ancient Black Faith suffered from the Yellow Faith preached by the lamas. But the shamans, with their dark and mysterious rites, have made a good struggle for life, and are still frequently found among the native Christians and Mohammedans.133

In this passage, Mikhailoskii maintains that not only was shamanism declining, due in part to the influence of other religious traditions, but specifically the ‘Yellow Faith’ of the lamas had eroded

131 Ibid., 107. 132 For scholarship that addresses the categories of white and black shamans in Siberia see: Vladimir N. Basilov, “Chosen by the Spirits” in Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, ed., Shamanic Worlds: Rituals and Lore of Siberia and Central Asia (Armonk, New York: North Castle Books, 1997); Andrei V. Anokhin, Materialy po shamanstvu u Altaitsev (Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo RAN, 1924.); V. M. Mikhailovskii, “Shamanism in Siberia and European Russia, Being the Second Part of ‘Shamanstvo,’” trans. Oliver Wardrop, The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 24 (1895); V. F. Troshchanskii, Evoliutsiia chernoi very (shamanstva) u Iakutov; Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstacy; Hutton, Shamans: Siberian Spirituality and the Western Imagination; Andrei Viktorovich Anokhin, Materiali po shamanstvi i Altaitsev, sobirannie vo vremia puteshestvii po Altaiiu v 1910-1912 gg. po porucheniio Russkogo komiteta dla izucheniia srednei i vostochnoi Azii” (Gorno-Altaysk: AK Chechek, 1994). 133 V. M. Mikhailovskii, trans. Oliver Wardrop “Shamanism in Siberia and European Russia, Being the Second Part of ‘Shamanstvo’ in The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. 63.

102 the ‘ancient Black Faith,’ which was associated variously with female shamans, malevolence, underworldly spirits, and the more powerful shamans. This evolutionary perspective was not uncommon in turn-of-the-century ethnography, and Tomoko Masuzawa notes, “nineteenth- century Europe was generally of the opinion that, upon encountering and confronting any of these world religions, an indigenous tribal religion would eventually and inevitably dissipate or disappear, through the process of assimilation, atrophy, or banishment.”134 V. F. Troshchanskii, in his book The Evolution of the Black Faith (Shamanism) Among the Yakut, was more sceptical of this necessary atrophy and observes, ““The Yakuts adopted Christianity about a hundred years ago, but, nevertheless, they did not lose, even up to the present time, their beliefs, brought by them from their distant ancestral homeland.135 It is true that these beliefs were significantly weakened, but Christianity was not the main reason, since the Yakuts adopted only the most significant rites of Christianity; Christian doctrine, however, remained unknown to them.”136

Troshchaiskii’s distinction between the rites and the doctrine of Christianity suggested a divide between practice and belief, in that the nominally converted Sakha may have performed

Christian rituals, but did not understand or believe in the theological significance or meaning of them; for example, Troshchaiskii noted that while they may have knowledge that heaven and hell exist, they did not understand that “only the good life and true faith can lead to heaven” since

“they do not even know what virtue is and there is no word in their language to express moral concepts.”137

134 Masuzawa’s The Invention of World Religions, 14. 135 Note that the Sakha (also known as the Yakuts) are a Turkic Siberian community that migrated northward from Central Asia and is often recognized as the northernmost Turkic community. 136 Troshchaiskii, Evoliutsiia chernoi very (shamanstva) u Iakutov, 1. 137 Ibid., 1-2.

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The impact of contact with other religions on shamanism, as well as that of contact with

Russian imperial control and settlement, has been debated in Russian historical studies. Among contemporary scholars, Marjorie Balzer suggests that the Christianization and Russification of

Siberia had a substantial impact on the lives of Indigenous Siberians, whereas Ronald Hutton and

Andrei Znamenski note the inconsistent nature of missionary efforts and the general haphazardness of conversion.138 The range of responses to shamans by officials of the Russian

Empire also encompass a wide range. Bogoraz mentioned that the Russian chief official of

Anadyr asked the shaman Scratching-Woman during a “shamanistic séance, whether his Second

Interior Loan bond, with prizes, would draw a lucky number in the yearly lottery.”139 Regardless of whether the question was in jest or not, the Russian man was engaging with the shaman during a ritual, and seems unperturbed by the religious context or difference before him. Different still,

Grigori Potanin, a renowned ethnographer and Siberian regionalist, concluded that Christianity

(and all other religions) originated in Southern Siberian shamanism and that the Garden of Eden was located at the source of the Irtysh River.140 These different accounts and conceptualizations of shamans introduce more variation in the study of shamanism that pushes against a more general characterization of late imperial ethnographic research on shamanism.

138 See Marjorie Balzar, “Christianization: Processes of Incomplete Conversion” in The Tenacity of Ethnicity for a more detailed account of the conversion efforts in the Siberian Khanty; Andrei A. Znamenski, Shamanism and Christianity: Native Encounters with Russian Orthodox Missions in Siberia and Alaska, 1820-1917 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999); Ronald Hutton, Shamans: Siberian Spirituality and the Western Imagination. 139 Bogoraz, The Chukchee, 430. 140 Znamenski, “The Beauty of the Primitive: Native Shamanism in Siberian Regionalist Imagination, 1860-1920” 149-152.

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2.5 A More Varied Landscape

Fin-du-siècle ethnographers of Siberia did not blindly fall in step with the hysteria hypothesis. Rather, they engaged with ideas and theories that echoed or foreshadowed other eras of ethnographic research into shamanism. Like a field appearing flat at a distance, the periodizations even out into a general character, and the deviations only become apparent when you are walking in the field, seeing the small alterations. The hysterical hypothesis for explaining shamanism circulated widely in the scholarship of the day, and became a characteristic element of the period both due to its frequency and its relative isolation to this specific time. While Arctic hysteria has faded in its popularity, it did continue past the turn-of-the-century. For example,

Edward Foulks’ The Arctic Hysterias of the North Alaskan Eskimo was published in 1972, and the concept remains recognized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV, though now known by the Inuit word pibloktoq. The historian Lyle Dick has called this term into question as perhaps itself a made up term or a mistaken transcription of a different Indigenous word.141 Even during the late imperial era, however, there was a substantial community of ethnographers writing on shamanism and these ideas circulated through their publications, lectures, in newspapers, and in museums.

The author of the article in the Eastern Review noted that in the scholarship on shamans from the late imperial era, “the description of shamanism turned into a description of only the rites and the actions of the shamans.”142 The consistent focus remains on the shamans themselves whether they are seen as hysterics, charlatans, magicians, or archetypes. However, in

141 Dick, “‘Pibloktoq’ (Arctic Hysteria): A Construction of European-Inuit Relations?,” 10. 142 “Shamany i ix misterii” Vostochnoe Obozrenie. No. 42 1892. 9.

105 the following chapter, my focus turns to the efforts by local Siberian ethnographers to collect information regarding shamanism as a broader religious and cultural landscape in which shamans appear as only part of a larger system. Nevertheless, in the later chapters, this late imperial

Russian ethnographic desire to document shamanism increasingly became restricted to the shaman as the sole representative of shamanism in the museums’ object collections, particularly at the Kunstkamera in St. Peterburg. The materials discussed in the next chapter appear as a thread within the tangled web of shamanic ethnographic collections in late imperial Russia, and more broadly, within shamanic studies, where shamanism is desired and imagined beyond the image of the shaman.

3 Chapter Three: Circulating Desire: Ethnographic Information Collection Programmes

3.1 Introduction

Late imperial Russian ethnographers who were documenting Indigenous Siberian religious life relied upon various institutions and different infrastructures of the empire to facilitate, fund, and circulate their work. Museums and museum collections were sites where the results of the research were presented for the public, serving as a node for knowledge production about the Russian Empire’s different peoples. At the museums, ethnographers, geographers, linguists, and museum staff produced collection programmes to facilitate the gathering of materials. Through the circulation of documents, an expanded community of potential collectors, trained or not, became involved in museum collecting by following the systematic outlining of ethnographic field research contained in these collection programmes.

This chapter addresses museum collecting as practice that relied upon substantial infrastructures and networks to produce knowledge about ethnographic categories. Collection programmes—documents produced for systematizing collecting and prompting acquisitions— represent a technology of systematization in late-nineteenth-century museums. These documents were important for constructing ethnographic knowledge about shamanism and for constructing some communities as “remote” within the local sphere of the Siberian regional museums. The chapter starts with an overview of nineteenth century Russian museum collection programmes as engaging in networks of information, people, resources, labour, and desire. Looking at specific examples of collection programmes from late imperial Russia, I consider how the desires of the

106 107 collectors form an invisible infrastructure, rooted in the idea of the local exotic, that fuelled the systems of knowledge production in the local museums of Siberia, which in turn influenced the collectors of the imperial centres of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Shamanism emerges as a broadly constructed category of local ethnographic research mapped into a systematized technology of documentation to prompt collection and documentation of various local practices that would be beyond the scope of a single researcher. These programmes offer a substantively different image of shamanism than the nineteenth-century Russian ethnographic accounts of shamanism that attempted to define shamanism through the shaman (as a hysteric, a charlatan, etc.). The questions in these programmes articulated a desired account of shamanism that was deeply contextualized within the particular cultural and religious traditions of local communities that included oral traditions, knowledge of the natural and supernatural worlds, rituals, and, critically, practices of a shamanic community beyond the individual shamans themselves.

3.2 Imperial Museum Collecting

Museum collections are changeable assemblages that draw together different actors, including objects, people, and ideas, in an intricate network. Different systems of infrastructure move, organize, manage, and care for the actors in this assorted assemblage and form a system that is engaged in knowledge production and manifest in the museums’ permanent collections.1

1 For work on infrastructures and networks see: Edwin Ardener, “Remote Areas: Some Theoretical Considerations.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2, no. 1 (2012), 519–533; Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Brian Massumi, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Manuel De Landa, Assemblage Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016); Susan Leigh Star and Karen Ruhleder, “Steps Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces,” Information Systems Research 7, no. 1 (1996): 111–134. For works specifically addressing infrastructure and

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In late nineteenth-century Russia, imperial infrastructures of roadways, railways, and shipping routes moved the objects and people across the Russian Empire. These connected and facilitated the networks of institutions of knowledge production (i.e. schools, museums, voluntary scientific societies, etc.) that also provided the collectors with training, access, and resources. Together, these imperial infrastructures supported the circulation of ideas of modernization, scientific progress, and civil society and created a system of desire that generated the mobilization of labour, capital, and attention that supported the museums’ collection mandates.

Collecting as a networked assemblage relies upon the support of physical infrastructures that directly and indirectly facilitate the work of the collectors and the museums to which the materials are sent, stored, and rendered into a collection. The Siberian collection programmes participate in this broader infrastructure of knowledge production and networks of communities, desired objects, ideas of remoteness, and articulations of a scientific modernity in late imperial

Russia. Individuals form particular networks with Russian and Indigenous communities, local museums, and collected and desired objects, while relying upon roads, publishing houses, journals, educational institutions, and classification systems to circulate and communicate their work. These individual networks become part of larger ones, and the local Siberian museums became increasingly connected with each other, with museums of the imperial centre, and the

museums see: Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, “‘Thoughts in Things’: Modernity, History, and North American Museums,” Isis 96, no. 4 (2005): 586–601; Amanda J. Guzmán, “Collecting the Puerto Rican Colony: Spanish- American War Material Encounters between Officer-Wives and Puerto Ricans,” Museum Anthropology 41, no. 1 (2018): 76–92; Hannah Turner, “The Computerization Of Material Culture Catalogues: Objects and Infrastructure in the Smithsonian Institution’s Department of Anthropology,” Museum Anthropology 39, no. 2 (September 1, 2016): 163–177; Haidy Geismar and William Mohns, “Social Relationships and Digital Relationships: Rethinking the Database at the Vanuatu Cultural Centre,” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17 (2011): 133–155; Joshua A. Bell, “A Bundle of Relations: Collections, Collecting, and Communities,” Annual Review of Anthropology 46, no. 1 (2017): 241-259.

109 wider museological and ethnographic international community.2 With this movement between individual and imperial networks and infrastructures, I locate the specific collections and collectors as particularized individuals and periodised within the intellectual, social, and political setting in late imperial Russian museums— museums that are at once locally specific and imperially general.

In Siberia, the Indigenous communities whose objects, ideas, memories, and stories become the collected materials in museums both locally and in the metropoles were also part of these infrastructures, but the ethnographic desire for an exoticism to the local space projected them as remote and outside of the Russified networks and infrastructures of the empire. The scholarship on imperial Russian infrastructure is extensive, and includes a wide range of issues

3 from railways to regional governance to the idea of mail order clothing. Despite late imperial

Russia’s continued development of infrastructures to connect the different regions of the empire

(such as the Trans-Siberian Railroad), Siberia remained remote. Nikolai Vakhtin, a linguistic anthropologist of the Russian Far North, explains that remoteness is not about geographic centrality or periphery, but rather the isolation from infrastructural connections with the dominant zone.4 The Indigenous Siberians, configured as the ethnographic subjects, were

2 Fein, “Cultural Curators and Provincial Publics,” 541-540. 3 The scholarship on infrastructure and Siberia during the Russian Empire is extensive, and includes a wide range of issues from railways to regional governance to the idea of mail order clothing; as examples of some of this scholarship, with a focus on infrastructures of mobility and ideas of remoteness see: Nikolai Vakhtin, “Mobility and Infrastructure in the Russia Arctic Das Sein Bestimmt Das Bewusstsein,” Sibirica 16, no. 3 (Winter 2017): 1–13; Alison K. Smith, “Movement and the Transformation of Siberia in the Eighteenth Century,” Sibirica 16, no. 2 (June 1, 2017): 44–67; Vera Kuklina and Edward C. Holland, “The Roads of the Sayan Mountains: Theorizing Remoteness in Eastern Siberia,” Geoforum 88 (2018): 36–44; Marlène Laruelle, ed., New Mobilities and Social Changes in Russia’s Arctic Regions (New York: Routledge, 2017); Kimitaka Matsuzato, “The Creation of the Priamur Governor-Generalship in 1884 and the Reconfiguration of Asiatic Russia,” Russian Review 71, no. 3 (2012): 365–90. 4 Nikolai Vakhtin, “Mobility and Infrastructure in the Russia Arctic Das Sein Bestimmt Das Bewusstsein,” Sibirica 16, no. 3 (Winter 2017), 7.

110 disconnected from the infrastructures of the empire through the desired projection of them as remote, non-modern, and non-Russian. This included a remoteness from the central organizations, such as the Academy of Science, that published, circulated, and funded the ethnographic research; isolation from roadways, railways, and shipping routes that connected

Russian cities and settlements back to the imperial metropoles, but often did not (and still do not) spread extensively across the Siberian territory linking together smaller settlements and communities to larger ones. The movement between Siberian remoteness and nearness in the

Russian Empire helped shape desire for information, objects, stories, and knowledge from the different Siberian Indigenous people, but was predicated on a distinction between the Indigenous and Russian communities of Siberia that configured one as remote, and one as not.

The remote as local is integral to my framing of shaman and shamanism as part of a local exotic; the museums and ethnographers were placed within an imperial infrastructure and network and the local focus of these museums in Siberia placed shamans and shamanism within the purview of their collections, but the local of the museums and the local of the shamans was not the same. The shamans and shamanism were a remote local, disconnected from imperial infrastructures, and able to be desired as exotic subjects. In contradistinction, the ethnographers and museums were also local, but were not relegated to a remote space but used the local as a means of connecting themselves to networks of other scholars, institutions, and communities also engaged in the same scientific research methodologies and collection practices.

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3.2.1 Epistemes of Collecting: Placing Late Imperial Russia in Context

Collectors for museums exist within intellectual periods that inform their collection practices. Different eras of collection prompt different types of collections and foster different systems of knowledge production grounded in the desires of the collectors. For example, in addressing the relationship between knowledge production and collection periodization, Eileen

Hooper-Greenhill addresses the effects intellectual eras, or epistemes, have on the formations of collections and the collectors themselves. Anthony Anemone, for example, places Peter the

Great’s cabinet of curiosities within the scientific and religious ideas of the early eighteenth century to examine how it functions as a medical research collection.5

Cabinets of curiosity, also known as Kunstkammers or Wunderkammern, had wide- ranging collections that were inclusive of botany, zoology, geology, archaeology, ethnography, and paleobiology. These collections are described by Hooper-Greenhill as attempting to represent the world in miniature so that in viewing the assemblage one could simultaneously be viewing the world.6 Arthur MacGregor’s work on cabinets of curiosity stresses that these were not chaotic collections, and that there were similarities in the collections, displaying techniques, and scope of the collections as well as manuals for helping collectors mount their collections.7 In

Russia, Peter the Great developed his cabinet of curiosities through various collection practices, including purchasing collections from Western Europe to add to his Kunstkamera (including the famous anatomical collection of the Dutch anatomist Frederick Ruysch), ‘collecting’ children

5 Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge; Anemone, “The Monsters of Peter the Great: The Culture of the St. Petersburg Kunstkamera in the Eighteenth Century.” 6 Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge, 78-104. 7 Arthur MacGregor, Curiosity and Enlightenment: Collectors and Collections from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007): 20-22.

112 and animals with deformities as living human and animal displays, and decreeing that other objects “especially what was extremely old and extraordinary” all be sent to the Kunstkamera.8

In 1724, ten years after the founding of the Kunstkamera, the collections and their management were turned over to the Academy of Science and the collections became increasingly systematized and subdivided, leading to the breaking apart of the Kunstkamera into separate museums of zoology, mineralogy, botany, anthropology and ethnography.9 By the late imperial era the Kunstkamera only contained ethnographic and anthropological (understood as physical anthropology) displays and the collections were managed by the Academy of Science. It oversaw donations to the museum from the private collections of the nobility, the Geographical Society, expeditions and explorers, and from various local governors and bureaucrats.10

Peter the Great’s decree to have old and extraordinary things sent to the museum served as the first collection programme in Russia. Peter the Great desired materials for the museum

(“misshapen infants, extraordinary stones, human and animal bones, as well as bones of fish and birds, old inscriptions on stones, on iron or on copper, as well as old remarkable weapons, plates and dishes and so on, especially what was extremely old and extraordinary”) and encouraged the public to sell or donate those items to the museum.11 By the late imperial era, museums were

8 Anemone, “The Monsters of Peter the Great: The Culture of the St. Petersburg Kunstkamera in the Eighteenth Century,” 592. 9 Today these collections remain divided into separate museums which include the Mineralogical Museum Named for A. E. Fersman (Moscow), the Zoological Museum of the Russian Academy of Science (St. Petersburg), the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (the Kunstkamera) in the historic original building on the banks of the Neva (St. Petersburg), and the museum of the Botanical Gardens of Peter the Great (St. Petersburg), 10 Putevoditel’ po muzeiu imperatorskoi adakemii nauk” antropologii i etnografii (St. Petersburg: 1891). See chapter 5 for a more detailed description of the various donors to the Kuntskamera’s ethnographic collections. 11 Anemone notes that some of the prices associated with purchasing these items were as follows: 100 rubles for living humans with various defects, 15 rubles for the body of someone with physical differences; for animals the price dropped significantly to only 15 for a living specimen and 5 for a body. Anemone, “the Monsters of Peter the Great,” 592.

113 more taxonomical in their approach in soliciting collections, and the desired things become mapped out in specific scientific fields of study (e.g. geology, anthropology, botany, etc.). To facilitate this systematization, late imperial Russian museums relied upon various methods of professionalizing ethnography that sought to ensure proper documentation, systematization, and reporting on new acquisitions through lists, files, catalogues, and charts that would map out what was wanted, what was already had, and what needed to be learned.12

Ethnographic collectors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries lived within a colonial episteme that fostered a desire for the production of knowledge about the imperial territory and its people.13 This desire was able to circulate through the infrastructures and networks that increasingly connected the different local collectors to each other and to other institutions. The individualized and embodied desires of individual collectors were communicated to others and common repertoires of materials became desired across the different and interconnected local museums. This network of desire was made up of collectors who sought to study and document through scientific methodologies the various local spaces. This is a moment of transition in Russian museum history wherein older museums, including the

Kunstkamera in St. Petersburg and the Irkutsk Museum of Local History (both established as

Wunderkammern), restructured their collections as scientific museums from their origins as

12 Kenneth Dauber, “Bureaucratizing the Ethnographer’s Magic,” Current Anthropology 36, no. 1 (1995): 75–95. 13 Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics, (New York: Routledge, 1995); Ruth Phillips, “Re-Placing Objects: Historical Practices for the Second Museum Age,” Culture et Musees, no. 28 (2016): 117–49; Jonah Siegel, ed., The Emergence of the Modern Museum: An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Sources (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Annie E. Coombes, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture, and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); Sarah Longair and John McAleer, eds., Curating Empire: Museums and the British Imperial Experience (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012); John M. MacKenzie, Museums and Empire: Natural History, Human Cultures and Colonial Identities (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009); Toby Burrows and Cynthia Johnston, Collecting the Past: British Collectors and Their Collections from the 18th to the 20th Centuries (New York: Routledge, 2018); Ken Arnold, Cabinets for the Curious: Looking Back at Early English Museums (New York: Ashgate, 2006).

114 cabinets of curiosity. This shift was intertwined with the development of the sciences as fields and modes of study, and the shift away from wonder and spectacle and towards the ordinary and the representational specimen.14 This does not mean, as Eileen Hooper-Greenhill, Lorraine

Daston, Katharine Park, and Anthony Anemone argue, that the cabinet of curiosities or the idea of wonder were devoid of scientific value or rational logic; rather, the episteme in which wonder operated as a principle for scientific collection was different than that of the later scientific museum.15

Scientific systematization and documentation became fundamental to the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century museums.16 In a critical assessment of the imperial-era Yakutsk

Museum, Emelian Yaroslavskii, writing in 1917 under the pseudonym M. I. Gubelman, states that the museum was in a dismal state and that it was so crowded and disorganized that it should no longer even be considered a museum, writing:

… it was not a museum, but a warehouse of various items collected for an unknown purpose. There was no catalogue, not even a brief inventory of the museum collections. Only one document is stored in the museum’s archive under the name ‘An extract from

14 Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,” Representations, no. 40 (1992): 81–128; Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (New York: Zone Books, 2001; Krzysztof Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice 1500-1800 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990); Anthony Anemone, “The Monsters of Peter the Great: The Culture of the St. Petersburg Kunstkamera in the Eighteenth Century,”; Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge. 15 Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge; Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (New York: Zone Books, 2001); Anthony Anemone, “The Monsters of Peter the Great: The Culture of the St. Petersburg Kunstkamera in the Eighteenth Century.” 16 There is substantial scholarship on the rise scientific documentation and systematizing as connected with ideas of modernity. Notable works include Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,” Representations, no. 40 (1992): 81–128; Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things out: Classification and Its Consequences, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999); Mary Douglas, David L. Hull, and Nelson Goodman, eds., How Classification Works: Nelson Goodman Among the Social Sciences (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993); Ronald E. Day, Indexing It All: The Subject in the Age of Documentation, Information, and Data (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2014). Hannah Turner, “Critical Histories of Museum Catalogues,” Museum Anthropology 39, no. 2 (2016): 102–10; Alex Wright, Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); W. Boyd Rayward, ed., European Modernism and the Information Society: Informing the Present, Understanding the Past (New York: Routledge, 2016).

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the inventory of exhibits of the Yakutsk Museum, compiled on November 1, of the year 190…’ Conservators, who changed rather frequently, made notes on this document about the acceptance and delivery of objects. Mineralogical collections—the most valuable— were placed in closed cabinets, without any identifications or descriptions. Skins and taxidermied animals, as well as ethnographic objects, were considerably spoiled by moths.17

Yaroslavskii, after whom the Yakutsk museum was later named (its current full name being the

Yakutsk State United Museum of the History and Culture of the Peoples of the North named for

Emelian Yaroslavskii), points specifically to the lack of infrastructural systems of classification, ordering, and documenting as reasons for the museum appearing as a warehouse. There was no catalogue, there were no identifications on the objects, there were no full accession records.

These records, for Yaroslavskii, were part of the processes that systematized the collections and ordered them into a museum.

The late nineteenth-century museum’s relationship with colonialism and capitalist ideas of ownership were connected to this practice of documentation and systematization. Ryan

Tucker Jones addresses documentation as an imperial technology of power, writing, “Russian imperial control was legitimized in part through the claim that they had mapped, described, and thoroughly understood North Pacific nature. The Russian Empire competed there with confident, aggressive Enlightenment European empires, and to win this competition it relied upon commerce and the accumulation of knowledge as much as or more than military power.”18 Tony

Bennett also notes, in his work on nineteenth-century museums, that the colonial power of documentation and systematization in museums was a means of exerting imperial authority over

17 M. I. Gubelman (Emelian Yaroslavskii) Yakutskii oblastnoi muzei za 25 let svego sushchestvovaniia: (26 maia 1891 – 26 maia 1916 g.) (Yakutsk: 1917), 6. 18 Jones, Empire of Extinction, 14.

116 land, people, animals, and resources.19 The bureaucratic aspects of museum collections allow for technologies of ownership, authority, and control to be exerted over the assembled materials; as

Dauber notes, “it is to seemingly mundane technologies—files, charts, and records—that we should turn in grasping the most durable source of ethnographic authority. These are the means which enable a few to know about or to rule over many.”20 The ethnographic documenters often located themselves in a prioritized position in the hierarchy of these mundane technologies of the classification and systematizing of knowledge. Whether this manifests as racial theories of evolution, the unequal pathologizing of marginalized communities through, for example, hysteria, or the classifications of great religions and little traditions, these systems tend to reinforce the position of already privileged communities who are the ones producing the knowledge.21

3.2.2 Technologies of Collection: Lists of Desired Things

Amongst the various technologies of ethnographic collecting employed by late imperial

Russian museums, the collection programme is a form of desiderata (translated as a ‘list of

19 Bennett, The Birth of The Museum. Other works that address ideas of colonial ownership in relation to museums collections and culture include: Michael M. Ames, Cannibal Tours and Glass Boxes: The Anthropology of Museums (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1992); Susan M. Pearce, ed., Interpreting Objects and Collections, (London: Routledge, 1994); Hannah Turner, “The Computerization Of Material Culture Catalogues: Objects and Infrastructure in the Smithsonian Institution’s Department of Anthropology,” Museum Anthropology 39, no. 2 (September 1, 2016): 163–77; Amy Lonetree, Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Sharon Macdonald, The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture (London: Routledge, 1998); John M. MacKenzie, Museums and Empire: Natural History, Human Cultures and Colonial Identities, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009). Also, for a broader discussion of knowledge production, classification, and power see: Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism, (New York: Vintage Books, 1994); Edward W. Said, Orientalism, (New York: Vintage Books, 2003); Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1980); Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language, (New York: Vintage, 1972). 20 Dauber, “Bureaucratizing the Ethnographer’s Magic,” 75. 21 Bowker and Star, Sorting Things Out; Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions; Sabine Arnaud, On Hysteria: The Invention of a Medical Category between 1670 and 1820 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

117 desired things’) that acts as anticipatory systematization of collection to prompt would-be collectors to gather ethnographic information and materials for museums. Like Peter the Great’s decree for collecting old and extraordinary plates, weapons, and bodies, these documents were produced to solicit materials from the public for the museum. Unlike the decree, these late imperial Russian collection programmes tend to provide highly systematized and specialized requests, rather than general curiosities.

Hooper-Greenhill explains that collectors are individuals and should be understood not as some essential or universal archetype. At the same time, she argues, collectors can also be approached as collectively participating within an episteme that informed their practices. She writes, “Different modes and scales of collecting operate and there is no essential ‘collector’, but there are many differently positioned collecting subjects operating in specific and linked networks.”22 Desiderata become a technology of networking these collectors by providing a means of documenting not only the specific materials desired by the museum, but also standardizing the identifications of these items and their place within broader systems of classification in museums.

The practice of soliciting donations for museums by providing systematic programmes for doing so has been a well-established practice beyond Russia. The Smithsonian, for example, published lists to solicit donations that they circulated to various military and state divisions

(such as the Navy, the War Department’s United States Signal Service, etc.). In the

Smithsonian’s Annual Report from 1885, the Board of Regents note: “since the publication of the ‘List of species of Middle and South American Birds not contained in the United States

22 Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge, 86.

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National Museum,’ in December, 1881, more than 200 species of Neotropical birds have been added to the collection, by far the larger number of additions being the direct result of the judicious distribution of the list in question.”23 By circulating a desiderata, museums were able to reach a larger audience of prospective collectors and to provide guidelines for what and how to collect specimens.

Vera Keller, a historian of science in early modern Europe, explains the desiderata as a technology for collaborative research; “The desiderata list allowed a unit of desired knowledge to remain suspended in a state of active research over the long term, past the narrow lifespans, limited abilities, and biases of individuals.”24 Keller addresses desiderata as lists of desired things (inclusive of objects, research questions, scholarship, etc.) that have the potential for sustained attention that can extend beyond a single researcher and become a collaborative endeavour across both contemporary and multigenerational communities of scholars. The desiderata is a durational text for collecting that opens the door to community participation and the involvement of a broader scholarly community than the individual author or even a single museum. Additionally, by laying out a systematized list of desired things, the desiderata articulate an ideal ordering of an ideal collection. A desiderata is located in that anticipatory moment of desire, not in its fulfillment or satiation.

Collections as assemblages are located between the opposing forces of systematization and randomness. The systematization of collection programmes tries to mitigate the latter while

23 Smithsonian Institution Board of Regents, Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution (The Institution, 1885). See Hannah Turner’s forthcoming book The Legacy of Data: A History of Documentation in an Ethnographic Museum for more information regarding desiderata and ethnographic documentation at the Smithsonian. 24 Vera Keller, “Accounting for Invention: Guido Pancirolli’s Lost and Found Things and the Development of Desiderata” Journal of the History of Ideas, 73 no. 2 (April, 2012). p. 244-245.

119 supporting the former. Preserving the desired things in a state of suspended active collection allows the ethnographic enterprise to extend beyond the abilities, opportunities, and resources of an individual.25 The collection programmes of late imperial Russia, as publicly circulated texts, were meant to connected broader communities of people who could be mobilized to help bring objects, information, and resources to the museum. These museums also become increasingly connected to one another as different museums and scholarly societies produced their own collection programmes, and individual local desires became contagious, spreading across the empire and the networks that connected Irkutsk to Moscow.

3.2.3 Collection Programmes in Late Imperial Russia

Late imperial Russian museums and academic societies such as the Imperial Academy of

Science and the Irkutsk Museum solicited information and objects from the public for their collections through collection programmes. These documents were published and circulated as individual pamphlets, or included in journals, such as News of the Eastern Siberian Division of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society, both as articles and as inserts. Like the

Smithsonian’s desiderata, these collection programmes were distributed to a broader public than just trained collectors (botanical, zoological, ethnographic, etc.) and thus needed to be accessible to a wide range of readers. These were then sent out through various journals, given to people on expeditions and living in the various regions of interest, and available for free at the Irkutsk

25 Ibid.

120 museum for visitors to take with them.26 Generally, these programmes consist of a list of numbered questions or items that act as prompts for collection. The shorter ones usually focus on specific topics, such as shamanism or folk tales, and consist of approximately four to five pages; the longer ones generally are broader in scope and address various aspects of ethnographic research including religion, legal practices, domestic life, and social organization and are around one hundred pages. The range of circulation rates change dramatically based on the scope of both the collection programme itself and the community being addressed; the Geographic Society’s one such published general programme from 1874 was printed in a run of seven thousand copies, and the Yakutsk Museum published another in a run of one hundred and fifty.27

The collection programmes produced in late imperial Russia cover a vast array of different topics from fields such as ethnography, law, folklore, botany, zoology, medicine, and linguistics. A critical point of division amongst these programmes was whether they were written to solicit information or objects. Those soliciting information tended to include a broader range of topics and might be associated with a researcher or scientific society rather than a museum.

The object collection programmes were generally associated with specific museums, and tended to relate to a specific category of collection, such as ethnography or the natural sciences.28

Museums and scientific societies, like the Imperial Russian Geographical Society or the Imperial

Amateur Society of Natural History, Anthropology, and Ethnography published the information collection programmes to solicit information about topics related to their collections. Aside from

26 Izvestiia Vostochno-Sibirskago Otdela Imperatorskago russkago geograficheskago obshchestva, XIX No. 3 (1888): verso of back cover. 27 “Archive” ; Gubelman, Yakutskii oblastnoi muzei za 25 let svoego sushchestvovaniia, 3. 28 See chapter 4 for a discussion of the object-oriented collection programmes.

121 the general programmes, like the Imperial Amateur Society’s 1889 147-page Programme for the

Gathering of Ethnographic Information that solicits information on everything from local diet to physical characteristics to folk art, most of the programmes published focused on highly specific topics. These include, as examples of both the specificity and the range, programmes for the collection of folk music, communal landownership, folk juridical practices, and Belarusian dialectology.29

These programmes were manuals produced for information collection and, as desiderata, allowed large numbers of people to be involved in the gathering of data. The format of these programmes is comprised, in the overwhelming majority of cases, of lists of prompts that solicit specific information, in one of the following three forms:

1) Questions—e.g. “What are the ways for acquiring property in peasant life (seizure, finding, donation, etc.)?”30

2) Lists of terms for which information/translations are desired—e.g. “Names of Beasts, Birds, and other Animals: The bat. The bear (male, female, bear cub, old bear). The badger. The wolverine. The Marten. The Sable. The fare. The weasel (Mustela sibirica ). The ermine. The otter. The wolf. The fox. The arctic fox. The wild dog. The lynx. The tiger. The lion. The leopard. The mole. The hedgehog. The flying squirrel. The squirrel. The chipmunk. The gopher or ground squirrel (Spermophylus). The marmot. The mountain hare or the European hare. The jerboa…”31

3) Longer prose descriptions—e.g. Intellectual and moral development: “In this regard it is necessary to pay attention only to those properties and inclinations of the mind and character which sharply distinguish the inhabitants of a particular locality from their

29 E. F. Karski, Programma dlia sobiraniia osobennostei belorusskogo narechiia, (St. Petersburg: Imperial Academy of Science, 1896); Programma dlia sobiraniia narodnykh iuridicheskikh obychaev (St. Petersburg: Imperial Russian Geographical Society, 1889); Petr Savvich Efimenko, Programma dlia sobiraniia svedenii ob obshchinnom zemlebladenii (St. Petersburg, 1878); A. L. Maslova, Programma dlia sobiraniia narodnykh pesen i drugikh muzykalno-etnograficheskikh materialov (Moscow: Imperial Amateur Society of Natural History, Anthropology, and Ethnography, 1902). 30 Programma dlia sobiraniia narodnykh iuridicheskikh obychaev, 21. 31 G. N. Potanin, Programma dlia sobiraniia svedenii o sibirskom shamanstbe (Irkustk: Eastern Siberian Division of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society,1880), 5.

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neighbours, and not those things which make up a general property of the whole tribe or nation. First of all it is necessary to define the most important feature of their character: its liveliness and its lethargy. Are the inhabitants receptive to different impressions and mainly in what instances? How are their reactions expressed, by rapid, quick movements, loud exclamations, speed of transition from timidity to distress, etc... Or are the inhabitants marked especially by their restraint in expressing their feelings, by their serious deliberation in regard to objects which relate to them, by their resolve in carrying out their intentions, etc… Are the inhabitants inquisitive, do they display curiosity when encountering an object or the appearance of something new, do they wish to learn its essence, the reasons for its existence and the effects it produces? Or do they remain indifferent in all such instances and do they express little desire to learn more than they know?”32

In each of these different formats the specific information requested is indicated to the reader.

While the longer prose approach does not provide prompts that could be simply read aloud as questionnaires or answered directly as a means organizing the data collection, it still operates as a manual in field collection. Since these programmes were distributed to the public, they could not presume training in field work or data collection, and thus provided specific prompts that could be used, in theory, by anyone as almost a survey or questionnaire. Additionally, by standardizing the questions, terms, and structures, the authors could receive data that could more readily be compared and collated.

These programmes were used for data collection, and occasionally publications explicitly used these programmes and their questions as the methodology for data collection. For example,

M. V. Zagoskin used the Programme for the Gathering of Folk Juridical Customs (produced by the Imperial Geographic Society in 1889) as the guide for his own publication, Answers to the

Programme of the Imperial Russian Geographic Society for the Gathering of Folk Juridical

32Programma dlia sobiraniia mestnykh etnograficheskikh svedenii (St. Petersburg: Imperial Russia Geographical Society, 1887), 2.

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Customs.33 Zagoskin was from Irkutsk and lived as a local writer, journalist, and editor of the newspaper Irkutskie gubernskie vedоmosti publishing on local ethnography and natural science.34 In this document there is the rare opportunity to see the programme directly being used to organize and structure the research conducted by Zagoskin. The publication is divided into two columns with the programme’s questions in the left-hand column and the answers in the right-hand column listed by the question numbers to which they correspond indicated at the start of each answer. For example:

228. [Question from Programme] Who, in the beliefs and customs of the people, has the power to prosecute, judge, and punish those guilty of crimes?

228. [Answer by Zagoskin] The people’s (narod) conceptions regarding this are obscure and confused. While cases of 'mob-law' are not frequent, the people are also constantly under fear of revenge on the part of thieves, robbers, and murderers; and furthermore, even knowing that the power to pursue crimes belongs to the authority, the people are prone to think themselves in the right to pursue and punish criminals, as they are inclined to do themselves, at least, for lighter crimes: horse theft, unruly conduct, and harsh punishment.35

Zagoskin’s answers not only provide insights into the juridical traditions of the local Indigenous community in the Urikovsiy Volost in the Irkustk Oblast, an area just North of the city of

Irkutsk, but also demonstrate the implementation of the collection programme as a methodology for fieldwork and ethnographic reporting.36 While not all the answers are as detailed as the example quoted above, Zagoskin attempted to follow the pattern of the questions and to find

33 This appears to be based on a different edition of the Programme for the Gathering of Folk Juridical Customs as the questions published in Zagoskin’s work do not match those of the 1889 programme; however, the Geographic Society also published other editions of this programme including, for example, one from 1864, another simply dated 186-, and another by Pavel Aleksandrovich Matveyev from 1877. All of these were published with the same title and by the Geographic Society. 34 Nikolai Nikolaevich Koz’min, “M. V. Zagoskin i ego znachenie v historoii razvitiia” in Ocherki proshlogo i nastoiashchego Sibiri (St. Petersburg, 1910). 35 M. V. Zagoskin, Otvety na programmu Imperatorskago Russkago Geograficheskago Obshchestva, dlia sobiraniia narodnykh iuridicheskikh obychaev (Irkutsk: 1891), 93. 36 Notably, the administrative centre of the Urikovsiy Volost the city of Urik, which is famous for having the grave of one of the leaders of the Decemberist Revolt of 1825, Nikita Mixailovich Muravyov.

124 information that matches the topic, if not the specific question. In his answer to question 228,

Zagoskin provided a nuanced answer that addresses the division between people’s knowledge of official criminal punishment and the continued existence of unofficial forms that coexist, particularly for ‘lighter crimes.’

Supporting the answers to the Programme for the Gathering of Folk Juridical Customs,

Zagoskin also provides an introduction with additional insights into the methodology of the data collection for answering the programme’s questions. Zagoskin wrote,

The present notes were compiled on the basis of many years of personal observations and inquiries. During the last ten years the author has lived among the peasants, and since 1884 had the opportunity to familiarize himself with the practice of the parish court of the nearby Urikovski Volost, as well as the protocols of this court for five years. But this last source provided him little for а familiarity with local, ordinary legal norms. In addition, the settlement, in which observations were made, belongs to the suburban ones, at a distance of 25 versts [approximately 27 kilometres] from the city of Irkutsk.37

Zagoskin spent a considerable amount of time living in the Urikovski Volost ‘among the peasants’ who acted as his ethnographic informants. Zagoskin appears to have worked both with the local inhabitants and with the official court system, which is then reflected in his answer to question 228 that acknowledges both an official and unofficial side of the juridical practices in the area.

Zagoskin also provided more general ethnographic information regarding this region in late imperial Russia. He notes that in the villages near cities and along large roads people of different backgrounds from all over Russia were mixing with the local populations.38 He also points out that the movements of other Siberian groups, and the system of exile in particular,

37 Zagoskin, Otvety na programmu imperatorskago Russkago Geografiskago Obshchestva dlia sobiraniia narodnykh iuridicheskikh obychaev, III. 38 Ibid., II.

125 brought new people into these villages and with them came different customs and ideas.39 His ethnographic work was not, then, in some fictionalized untouched village maintaining its traditions in pure isolation; rather, the obscure and confused juridical system that was in parts official and unofficial in operation seems appropriate for a village in transition with people from all across Russia living together in the Urikovski Volost.

Whether or not Zagoskin had the Programme for the Gathering of Folk Juridical

Customs with him while making inquiries over the ten years of fieldwork remains unclear.

Nevertheless, it is apparent that he made use of the programme to systematize his information for publication, and, unlike other examples of published responses to collection programmes,

Zagoskin's 1891 publication most clearly preserves the format of the programme in its presentation. The programme provided an organizational and lexical system for him to articulate his findings.

The authors of the late imperial Russian collection programme provided a guide for fieldwork and offered an articulation of how to systematize the collected data. As a form of desiderata, these documents allowed the research to extend beyond the author or researcher affiliated with the society, museum, or institute that produced the programme. While seemingly documents of the mundane bureaucracy of ethnographic and scientific work, these programmes articulate the desired research projects of a scope that extends beyond the resources, capabilities, and access of a single individual.

39 Ibid., II.

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3.3 Programmes of the Gathering of Information on Siberian Shamanism

Unlike ethnographic scholarship of shamanism published as studies and sustained texts, collection programmes project an image of shamanism that is fragmented. Shamanism is not defined, but the prompts suggest the range of imagined possibilities that might or could be part of the religious traditions of different Indigenous nations. These programmes for gathering information on shamanism are situated within a larger field of other collection programmes produced for late imperial Russian scientific collecting. Shamanism was part of this larger system of collection and documentation of local Siberian spaces that was grounded in the desired and asserted image of remoteness. Siberian shamanism with its particular history of exotification within Russian ethnographic and display contexts was able construct the local exotic within this scientific enterprise of the local Siberian museums of late imperial Russia.

3.3.1 VSORGO and the Irkutsk Museum as a Siberian Research Centre

The Eastern Siberian Division of the Imperial Russian Geographic Society (VSORGO) and the Irkutsk museum, which VSORGO managed, was an important centre of Siberian ethnographic research and produced several collection programmes on shamanism.40 Nikolai

Nikolaevich Murav’ev-Amurskii, a governor in Eastern Siberia and a military general who pushed Russian imperial expansion along the Amur and towards the Sea of Japan, founded

VSORGO as one of the first two regional branches of the Imperial Russian Geographic Society

40 In Russian the Eastern Siberian Division of the Imperial Russian Geographic Society is the Vostochno-Sibirskogo otdela Imperatorskogo Russkogo geograficheskogo obshchestva and generally shortened to VSORGO, which will be used throughout as an abbreviation.

127 in 1851.41 Located in the city of Irkutsk, it became the first of two regional branches, the other being the Caucasian Division of the Imperial Russian Geographic Society founded in the city of

Tbilisi, today the capital city of Georgia. This division located in Irkutsk operated relatively independently from the St. Petersburg central branch. Julia Fein notes that VSORGO developed from its initial membership principally of merchants and noble state servitors into a broader community consisting of clergy, doctors, bureaucrats, and members of the Buryat communities; she also notes, “due to its distance from the Russian capitals, its virtual administrative independence, and a vacuum of elected self-government in Siberia, the Geographic Society was much more than a provincial society of gentlemen scientists. It functioned as a de facto academy of science for Siberia…”42 VSORGO was a central figure in the development of Irkutsk as an important research centre in Siberia and in Russia more generally. Amongst their operations,

VSORGO also managed the Irkutsk museum from 1854 until it was nationalized in 1920.

VSORGO was a critical component of the local Irkutsk community, the Siberian ethnographic enterprise, and imperial Russian museum networks. This was a centre of research, scholarship, and exhibition in Siberia and many leading Russian ethnographers and geographers were involved with this community as an active intellectual centre in Eastern Siberia.43 While

41 For more information about Nikolai Nikolaevich Murav’ev-Amurskii see: Ivan Barsukov and Nikolaĭ Nikolaevich Muravëv-Amurskiĭ, Graf Nikolai Nikolaevich Murav’ev-Amurskii: Iograficheskie Materialy Po Ego Pis’mam, Ofitsial’nym Dokumentam, Rasskazam Sovremennikov i Pechatnym Istochnikam (Khabarovsk: Riotip, 2008); S. C. M. Paine, Imperial Rivals: China, Russia, and Their Disputed Frontier (Armonk, N.Y: M.E. Sharpe, 1996). 42 Fein, “Talking Rocks in the Irkutsk Museum,” 414-415. 43 For example, the notable figures exiled to Siberia in this time include Nikolai Mikhailovich Przhevalskii who explored parts of Inner Asia, particularly parts of Siberia, Tibet, and China; Grigori Nikolaevich Potanin, a famous Siberian regionalist and ethnographer; Dmitri Alexandrovich Klements, an ethnographer and revolutionary who returned to St. Petersburg after the Revolution to work at the Ethnographic Museum of Emperor Alexander III (today the Russian Museum of Ethnography); Nikolai Mikhailovich Yadrintsev who discovered Karakorum (the capital of the Mongolian Empire established by Genghis Khan) and first documented examples of the Orkhon Turkic language; and Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin, the famous anarcho-communist theorist (“Ob Otdelenii” Russkoe Geograficheskoe Obshchestvo: Irkutskoe Oblastnoe Otdelenie Accessed January 19, 2019)

128 the Irkutsk museum operated as a local museum, this version of the local was extended to cover much of Eastern Siberia. Consequently, materials in its collection came not only from the surrounding area, but also from farther afield communities such as the Sakha, Chukchi, Tibetan, and Evenki.44 The networks that the Irkutsk museum maintained with the Geographical Society, the Academy of Science, the members of the Jesup Expedition, and various expeditions throughout the region allowed them to become a centre of intellectual life in eastern Siberia.

The collection programmes produced by VSOGRO guided the collector community in the acquisition and systematization of ethnographic materials. VSORGO operated a publishing house, a journal, the museum, expeditions, and regular gatherings of the society. The VSORGO journal, News of the Eastern-Siberian Division of the Imperial Russian Geographic Society, regularly featured a list of books for sale at the Museum. These include various editions of the journal, I. V. Shcheglov’s general history of Siberia titled The Chronological Index of the Most

Important Dates in the History of Siberia, Grigori Potanin’s travel and ethnographic account published as the four volume Essays on North-Western Mongolia, and Nikolai Mikhailovich

Przhevalski’s exploration narrative From Zaysan through Hami to Headwaters of the Yellow

River. While these works would be expensive for many people, there also was a list of publications available at the museum in Irkutsk for free, including: The Programme for the

Gathering of Ethnographic Materials for the Museum of the Eastern-Siberian Office of the I. R.

G. Society, The Experimental Programme for the Study of the Beliefs of the Inorodtsy of Siberia

(thus called Shamanism) by N. N. Agapitov, and the Forms for Recording Observations of

44 For example the museum received collections from the expeditions of Potanin (in Tibet, Mongolia, China, etc.), Bobir (head of the Sayan Expedition of 1887) and Prein (botanical expedition in the Yenisei region).

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Periodic Natural Phenomena.45 Unlike the books, which were the works of members of

VSORGO, these programmes were free and available to the public and allowed the authors and the museum to solicit information, materials, and records from their visitors to aid in their collections and research.

3.3.2 The VSORGO Collection Programmes

Amongst the broad range of information collection programmes produced in late imperial

Russia, a small subsection specifically addresses shamanism and provides insight into the state of shamanic research particularly in Siberia. These collection programmes solicited a broad range of information classified under shamanism and suggest an image of shamanism that is at once detailed in its presentation of a specific aspect of shamanism, and broad in its scope. It is shamanism, not the shaman in particular, that is at the core of the collection programmes. In examining these specific case studies, I start with several programmes produced by VSORGO for studying shamanism, before considering some more general ethnographic programmes produced in this period by other museums and academic societies to trace how VSORGO programmes influence the broader practices of ethnographic information collection in late imperial Russia.

Grigori Potanin produced in 1880 the Programme for the Gathering of Information on

Siberian Shamanism that was published in Irkutsk by VSORGO. Potanin is most known for his research in the Altai region and further into the southeast in Mongolia and China. Potanin’s

45 Izvestiia Vostochno-Sibirskago Otdela imperatorskago russkago geograficheskago obshchestva, XIX No. 3 (1888): verso of back cover.

130 programme, in addition to the questions, also contains notes with information about names and designs of various shamanic people, places, and things in Altaic languages, as well as Mongolian and Chinese. Potanin is also demonstratively interested in a linguistic anthropological project and substantial portions of his programme are dedicated to listing the names of things he would like to have documented in the local languages of shamanic communities. For example, Potanin begins with a discussion of the clothes of the shaman and requests not only information regarding the physical characteristics of shamanic fur coats (what type of material it is made from, whether there are ribbons or iron pendants, or plaits decorating the coat), but the text also poses questions about the ritual practices of constructing the coat and the symbolism of the different pieces. Potanin also cautions potential collectors about generalizations and is particularly interested in the specific linguistic mapping of shamanic terms as a means for differentiating communities; for example, in the questions about the shaman’s tambourine the author provides names for the aspects of the tambourine in various Indigenous languages, including Tungus, Yakut, Altai and Uryanhai.46

Potanin’s programme is subdivided into thematic sections including а section soliciting the detailed description of the shaman’s clothes, the names of beasts, birds, and other animals, and plants. The latter two of these categories consist solely of lists of the names of animals and plants; for example, among animals, Potanin requests: “The bat. The bear (male, female, bear cub, and old bear). The badger…The hedgehog. The flying squirrel…The raven, crow, rook, jackdaw, and red-billed scimitar… The spider. The worm, mollusc (shell), snake-head

(cypraemoneta). Coral (red coral).”47 Potanin is ordering the animals here according to general

46 Potanin, Programma dla sobiraniia svedenii o sibirskom shamanstve, 1. 47 Ibid., 5.

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Linnaean taxonomical class (mammalia, aves, insecta, etc.) and then further grouped by family/order—i.e. the canines, strigiformes, and cervidae are all listed together.48 The plants similarly move from trees (e.g. pine, larch, and birch), to berries (e.g. bilberry, cowberry, and currents), to poisonous plants (e.g. henbane, wolfbane, and wild peonies), and mosses and mushrooms. This list of plants indicates a regional attention to the taiga biome of central Siberia, rather than the more Northern and elevated regions where birch and apple trees cannot take root.

While Potanin lists the plants and animals in order to request their local names, he also includes numerous questions related to the beliefs and stories regarding them. For example, Potanin asks whether there are “legends of the bat, and how it did not recognize as its king either the king of the birds (the eagles) or the king of the beasts (the lion).”49

Potanin did not organize his programme into numbered questions, but rather prompts, listed in fragmentary phrases, in large block text in the programme. He grouped these prompts into categories, and like appears with like (i.e. lightning with thunder, and celestial bodies with natural phenomena like the northern lights and rainbows). The ethnographic focus of Potanin’s programme is on oral culture, with questions on naming, stories, and traditional histories. There are relatively few questions regarding rituals, and when these do appear, the oral linguistic landscape remains a feature. For example, the subsection “Rites of Passage in Shamanism” opens with the following list:

Premonitions and omens for the selection of shamans. The acquisition of stave, the acquisition of tambourines and their structure. The rite of raising the shaman on felt and the hopping along the tops of birch trees planted nearby. During this rite, what speeches or exclamations are made by the shaman being initiated and by the crowd. The mysteries of the shaman during the time of sacrifices. The mysteries performed on those who are

48 This appears more as a folk taxonomical system than a clearly scientific one, grouping like with like—such as the dogs, owls, and deer. 49 Potanin, Programma dlia sobiraniia svedenii o sibirskom shamanstve 3.

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sick, during folk festivals, and when the propitiatory sacrifice is brought in. The ritual of dedicating the animals to god: covering cows with patches and ribbons. The covering of trees with ribbons. Record the largest possible number of invocations. Any exclamation during this ritual must also be recorded.50

Potanin’s requests for the invocations, shouts, and words associated with the rituals speak to this broader focus on the oral culture of the inorodtsy that characterized his programme.

Additionally, Potanin poses numerous questions regarding the stories and beliefs of the inorodtsy, often with very specific prompts. For example, “What is done with the dead bodies of animals killed by lightning?”, “Do people ascribe it (the eclipse) to a monster’s swallowing or abduction?”, or “Are there legends concerning the birth of the progenitor through his mother swallowing a hailstone, a snowflake, a pea, a drop of water, the saliva of a passing pilgrim, etc.”51 Potanin offers details and examples of different aspects of shamanism within the questions, and in notes throughout the text he presents information from Mongolia, Altai,

Uryanhai, and other border areas of South-eastern Russia. This more southern focus demonstrated in Potanin’s botanical listings is also observed in some of the other questions, for example, his prompt for information regarding “legends about Burhan-Bakshi, Ochirvan, and other Mongolian deities” or regarding khans, a Mongolian-Turkic term for a political or military ruler, “the story of the poor man whom the fox marries to the Tsar’s daughter and makes a

Khan.”52 While the Khanates did historically stretch into more northern areas of Siberia, and

Turkic-Siberian linguistic communities are located in the North, this programme appears focused more on the Southern Siberian and border areas of Buryatia, Mongolia, and China where

Potanin’s own research was principally centred.

50 Ibid., 3. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid., 4.

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Shamanism, in Potanin’s programme, is conceptualized as a broad category that interacts with cultural practices, material culture, the natural world, medicine, beliefs, and stories. In

“Rites of Passage in Shamanism,” the shamanic rituals appear as communal events requiring the participation of many, whether lifting the felt to bring the shaman into the air or shouting invocations. Potanin opens his programme with the section prompting “A detailed description of the clothes of the shaman” that addresses the fur coat, hat, drum, rattle, staves, and badges of the shamans. Here again, there is an insistence on the names of these objects. In his notes, Potanin lists the names of different aspects of the shamanic costume. For example, in a note regarding the shamanic drum, Potanin writes, “amongst the Mongolians the tambourine is called Bar, amongst the Altai—Tunir. The cross-beam amongst the Mongolians is called Bar, amongst the Uryanhai the Tuda, amongst the Yakut the Xas, amongst the Tungus Dzavalgan.”53 This linguistic mapping emphasizes the regional specificity of shamanic materials, as Potanin notes, “since there is a great variety in these decorations, even in one region, it would be best if the describer did not limit himself to the coat of one shaman.”54 Outside of the sections of the shamanic costume and the rites of passage (which also include rites for oath taking, entering into a blood brotherhood, and birthing practices), the other places where shamans appear in the text are related to various stories including ones about a shaman’s descent into the underworld while in a dream, the bears being the shamans of the past, and the legendary contest between two shamans.55

Four years after Potanin’s programme, Nikolai Nikolaievich Agapitov published The

Experimental Programme for the Study of the Beliefs of the Inorodtsy of Siberia (thus called

53 Ibid., 1. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid., 4.

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Shamanism) on April 25th, 1884.56 Like Potanin, Agapitov was affiliated with the intellectual community at the Irkutsk Museum and with the VSORGO. Agapitov was a Buryat ethnographer and botanist, and co-authored with M. N. Khangalov (also a Buryat scholar affiliated with

VSORGO) a work on Buryat shamanism published in 1883 that was one of the first substantial works on the subject.57

This programme was available for free at VSORGO’s museum in Irkutsk for visitors to take with them and, presumably, to use for ethnographic information collection.58 Agapitov’s programme consists of one hundred and forty-nine numbered questions and a short paragraph containing prose questions on various topics. The questions asked names of the first man and woman, the names of different groups of people in the local Siberian languages, and who taught people how to use “stone, wood, honey, and iron.”59 Aside from this prose section, the questions are listed in numerical order and are loosely grouped thematically—the questions about fire and hearths appear together, as do thunder and lightning, and death and the afterlife of the soul.

These questions are more general overall than Potanin’s, and do not offer prompts for specific stories (such as Potanin’s questions about the legends of the bat or the first blacksmith). Instead,

Agapitov favours shorter questions, often in chains of related topics. To provide a sense of the range of questions asked in the programme, what follows is a sample of ten questions from different sections of the programme:

56 Nikolai Nikolaievich Agapitov, Opyt Programmy dlia izucheniia verovanii inorodtsev Sibiri (tak nazyvaemago shamanstva (Irkutsk: 1884), 16. 57 For more information on Agapitov and Khangalov see A. A. Znamenski, Shamanism in Siberia: Russian Records of Indigenous Spirituality (Springer Science & Business Media, 2013), 43-47. 58 Izvestiia Vostochno-Sibirskago Otdela imperatorskago russkago geograficheskago obshchestva, XIX No. 3 (1888): verso of back cover. 59 Agapitov, Opyt Programmy dlia izucheniia verovanii inorodtsev Sibiri (tak nazyvaemago shamanstva, 15.

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13. What are the customs and regulations regarding the usage of fire? Can the fire be transferred from one yurt to another? Can you extinguish the fire by means of water, or feet? Is poking the fire with sharp objects prohibited? Are there special regulations for women handling the fire?

24. Are there special charms against wounds inflicted by iron?

54. List of all the stars that are known to the inorodtsy, what do they call them? What do they call the Milky Way and Ursa Major?

59. What is the name of the head forest god, his epithets and names? Is he known as the master of the forest, the forest tsar? What is his appearance, how is he painted or what form is his idol, what sacrifices are given to him, and how is he summoned?

69. What is the deity called who protects the feeling of sexual love—the god or goddess of love?

82. How is the soul portrayed in idols and sacred pictures and what is the form they give it?

93. Do souls leave traces on the ground in the ashes of the hearth when moving? Does this make sound? Can it sing (note details about those songs, which are accepted as songs of souls)?

102. Is this place called the tsardom of death? How is it presented: is there a sky, forests, mountains, or rivers there?

103. How do souls enter into the tsardom of death? Are there stories about a visit to the country of the dead by living people, by a hero? In what manner do they enter? Does some animal guide them, for example horses or foxes? What do they say about this in stories?

127. Different types of shamans by origin: a) hereditary; b) accidental (due to the loss of relatives by thunder or for other reasons). 60

In this sampling several examples of more general trends can be seen, including the strong focus on mapping the different names and patronages of the deities, rituals, stories, names in the local languages, representations (idols and sacred pictures), and customs. The questions generally are connected to one of these larger categories (rituals, stories, names, etc.) and differ principally in

60 Ibid., 1-15.

136 their specific subject (fire, water, earth, death, hunting, etc.). Agapitov poses numerous questions regarding the naming and narratives of the natural world within the local shamanic culture.

Topics such as hunting, astrological and meteorological phenomena, and classical elements (fire, water, earth, and air) fill and organize much of the programme. Shamanism is suggested in the questions to have a polytheistic structure with gods, ancestors, spirits, and animals interacting with humans in various spaces, both ritually and in prescribed spaces such as during hunts, in lakes, or by the hearth. Shamanism appears as a profoundly populated cosmological landscape and as having a profound impact on how people interact with the world through their customs, language, art, craft, and stories.

Similar to Potanin’s programme, shamans themselves do not feature prominently throughout the programme; in fact, shamans themselves are mentioned in approximately a quarter of the questions and are spread across the topics of the programme more broadly. There are questions regarding the rituals of consecration, the customs of painting either half the face or the full face of the shaman, beliefs regarding the first shaman(s), the names of male and female shamans in the local languages, and descriptions of the shamanic costume.61 Agapitov also queried the distinction between black and white shamans: “128. Are shamans black and white

(devilish or divine), i.e. servants of evil or good deities.”62 In addition, he asked about the relationship between shamans and blacksmiths: “131. Is there any rivalry between shamans and blacksmiths? 132. Do secret societies exist between shamans and blacksmiths?”63 Unlike an image of the shaman as an isolated religious figure, the shaman here appears as part of a populated religious community in relation with blacksmiths, other shamans, and a ritually active

61 Ibid., 13-15. 62 Ibid., 13. 63 Ibid., 13.

137 community with whom the shamans interact. Additionally, the shaman features only as a small component of the broader category of shamanism. Shamanism here is presented as the ‘beliefs of the inorodtsy’ that inform rituals, customs, stories, the perception of the natural world, the lexicon, and other features of inorodtsy life outside of the purview of the shamans themselves.

Absent here are the ethnographic accounts of shamanism that focus on the shamans as charlatans, hysterics, or archetypes. Rather, shamans are part of a larger shamanic tradition that is inclusive of a larger conceptual space and community.

The year after Agapitov’s programme was published, the journal, News of VSORGO, printed an article titled “Information for the Study of Shamanism among the Yakut of Yakutsk

Region (gathered according to the programme of N. N. Agapitov by a people’s teacher64 Nikolai

Pripuzov).”65 The title of ‘people’s teacher’ (Narodnyi uchitel’) was a set term in both imperial and soviet Russia. During the late imperial era, for example, there was a journal named Narodnyi uchitel’, published between 1906 and 1919, that advocated for the democratization of schools, published the activities of the All-Russian Union of Teachers, and focused on rural schooling.

Pripuzov’s adoption of this term suggests an affiliation with more reform-minded modernization politics of the late imperial era like so many of the other Siberian ethnographers of this period.

Similar to V. Zagoskin’s Answers to the Programme of the Imperial Russian Geographic Society for the Gathering of Folk Juridical Customs, Pripuzov’s article responds to the questions posed

64 Narodnyi uchitel’ translates variously as folk/popular/people’s teacher. In the Soviet Union Narodnyi uchitel’ CCCP was an honourary title and medal awarded to teachers of particular merit, which has been continued in the new Narodnyi uchitel’ Rossiiskoi Federatsii administered by the Russian Federation. In keeping with this usage of the term, I have opted to translate narodnyi as people’s rather than folk (which is the more frequent translation I use throughout this project) as it retains the more socialist and revolutionary connotations. 65 Nikolai Pripuzov, “Svedeniia dlia izucheniia shamanstva u iakutov Iakutskago okruga (sobrany po programme N. N. Agapitova narodnym uchitelem Nikolaem Pripuzovym,” Izvestiia Vostochno-Sibirskago Otdela imperatorskago russkago geograficheskago obshchestva 15, no. 3-4 (1885): 59.

138 in Agapitov’s programme based on the information from a specific region, here Yakutsk region

(okrug). Unlike Zagoskin’s work, however, Pripuzov does not import Agapitov’s organizational system, and the answers read more as an independent article than a systematic response to a series of questions. Nevertheless, many of the sections of Pripuzov’s article are clear and direct responses to specific questions that are easily identifiable. Thus, while not as immediately recognizable as the answers to a programme as in Zagoskin’s work, Pripuzov directly responds to Agapitov’s programme and is not simply inspired or motivated by its questions.

The relationship between the Agapitov programme and Pripuzov’s article is seen throughout the text, and moves between clearly identifiable responses to specific questions, and more thematic groupings where sections of prose respond to general areas of Agapitov’s questioning. In the mode of the former, we can take as an example two of Agapitov’s questions listed above: “13. What are the customs and regulations regarding the usage of fire? Can the fire be transferred from one yurt to another? Can you extinguish the fire by means of water, or feet?

Is poking the fire with sharp objects prohibited? Are there special regulations for women handling the fire?” and “69. What is the deity called who protects the feeling of sexual love—the god or goddess of love?” In Pripuzov’s article the following responses appear: “Fire is carried from one yurt to another. A fire is not put out with water, nor is it stamped out by one’s feet, but it is also forbidden to dig into the fire with sharp objects. A woman after giving birth, until a month has passed, should not hold fire, otherwise a spirit will condemn her to infertility for 3 to

12 years.”66 Similarly: “The divinity, which awakens a feeling of sexual love, is called Kyalyani. A Shaman portrays him as very funny, a terrible stutterer and limp in both legs,

66 Ibid., 61.

139 and still offers love to all women.”67 Some sections of Pripuzov’s article are not as directly extractable as answers to specific questions, for instance he groups answers about the demons and gods all together in several paragraphs. This is different from Zagoskin’s much more direct structuring of his ethnographic research on folk juridical systems that accepts the original programme’s questions as the organizational method for his own work. Pripuzov still drew from

Agapitov’s programme for his ethnographic work, but allowed himself more freedom to extrapolate and expand from the questions, creating an article that reads as a more independent work than Zagoskin’s.

Pripuzov’s article moves between direct responses and more interpretive responses that further extend certain topics or provide information that are relevant, but unasked for, within

Agapitov’s programme. For example, on the topic of blacksmiths, Agapitov asked: “20) Who first began to forge iron? What is the relationship between the first blacksmith and the celestial deities?”68 Pripuzov opened a paragraph stating, “The Yakut do not know from whom the first smith learned to forge iron, what he was called and when he lived, but there is the following story about the first smith….”69 Pripuzov did not answer the second part of this question regarding the celestial deities, and instead provides the readers with a story about how the first smith learned to weld.

The story goes that while the first blacksmith knew how to forge steel extremely well, he could not weld the iron and was unhappy that he had to throw away something he could have

67 Ibid., 63. 68 Agapitov, Opyt Programmy dlia izucheniia verovanii inorodtsev Sibiri (tak nazyvaemago shamanstva), 2. 69 Pripuzov, “Svedeniia dlia izucheniia shamanstva u iakutov Iakutskago okruga (sobrany po programme N. N. Agapitova narodnym uchitelem Nikolaem Pripuzovym,” 62.

140 used. At this point, a demon was visiting the people and would often come to the smithy while the blacksmith was working, and the blacksmith suspected that the demon knew the secret to welding iron. But despite asking the demon repeatedly, he could not get an explanation. An old man told the smith that when the demon comes the next time he should heat a large ingot of iron in the fire, place it on an anvil sprinkled with snow, and then strike it with a heavy hammer so that it makes a loud noise which will frighten the demon and since “demons are very timid” in his fright he will tell the secret.70 The blacksmith does this and the demon is so scared that he cannot hold the secret and shouts out “some sand!” And so, “…from that time on the blacksmith learned how to weld steel with sand.”71 Agapitov did not prompt this story or any other story through the questions in his programme, nor did the story tell us anything about the origin of this first blacksmith; rather, Pripuzov offered it as a related piece of information that seems relevant to the question.

The shifts away from the prompts of the original programme illustrate the particular relationship between the programme writer and the field researcher. The idiosyncrasies of fieldwork, the happenstance of collection, and the unique characteristics of different sites destabilize the systematic construction of the collection programme. Some of Agapitov’s questions were simply dismissed by Pripuzov. For instance, there was no divide between black and white blacksmiths and shamans among the Yakut, whereas others are merged or reinterpreted to better match the ethnographic materials Pripuzov has assembled.72 The division between the pre-collection moment of the collection programmes and the post-collection

70 Ibid., 62. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid., 62; 64.

141 moment of fulfillment are connected through the desiderata as a durational text, but are not identical reflections of one another. In the collection moment, the programmes offer prompts and vocabularies to approach the fieldwork, not a doctrinal creed.

A striking addition to Pripuzov’s article, absent in Agapitov’s programme, was the influence of Christianity in the Yakutsk region in relation to the practices of shamanism.

Agapitov never mentions anything related to Christianity in his programme, but this was woven throughout Pripuzov’s responses. For example, when discussing the practices of burying the dead, Pripuzov noted “The Yakut now usually bury their shamans in the Christian way and they do not dress them in shamanic clothing.”73 This is a shift from the traditional manner of placing the bodies of shamans (and other people) “on poles in the forest…[in] empty places further from the settlement and large roads.”74 Pictures of shamans’ graves in this manner usually consist of a wooden coffin elevated in trees with poles used as supports. Currently, one of these wooden coffins is on display at the Yakutsk State Museum of History and Culture of the People of the

North exhibited with an archival image of a tree burial to contextualize the coffin.75 Elsewhere,

Pripuzov recounted how after the Sakha adopted Christianity they were no longer comfortable keeping the ‘idols’ made upon the death of a daughter in their houses, so a shaman “carried them out of the house, hid them in the hollows of trees, or released them into the water.”76 However, this resulted in “the wrath of these spirits” and in one case the “soul of the maiden Nurd, whose

73 Ibid., 65. 74 Ibid., 75 Grob koloda (Yakutsk, Russia: Yakutsk State Museum of History and Culture of the People of the North, n.d.). Museum exhibit. 76 Pripuzov, “Svedeniia dlia izucheniia shamanstva u iakutov Iakutskago okruga (sobrany po programme N. N. Agapitova narodnym uchitelem Nikolaem Pripuzovym,” 60

142 idol was drowned 40 years earlier” caused illness and the death of the children of her relatives.77

Although Pripuzov described the Sakha here as having converted to Christianity, the shamanic spirits continued to impact the lives of the Sakha even in their rejection of the traditional practices. Like Pedersen’s work on the not-quite shamans of post-socialist Mongolia, the ruptures brought by modernity do not appear to have fully ruptured the shamanic world. What was lost is the ability to care properly for the spirits that remain after radical social change or

Christian conversion.

Christianity was present throughout Pripuzov’s article, though only ever in the corners rather than the centre of the stories. Pripuzov’s article ends with a note by the editor that stated:

Note: in the letter in which this work was presented, Mr. Pripuzov states that in all of West-Knagalassk ulus, in an expanse of 400 square versts and among 20 thousand people, there are not more than 10 male or female shamans and only one is 35 years old, all the others are old; but although they will at first perform shamanic rituals, they will then say: “Pray to god, he will save you from any sorrow that may come! Nothing can be 78 done against his will.”

Shamanism throughout Pripuzov’s article appears as an animated and extensive cultural and religious system, but the concluding note changes this tone and reinterprets the work as a kind of salvage ethnography accounting for the waning of shamanism. While shamanism continues to this day in the Republic of Sakha, shamans faced extreme hardship at this point in imperial

Russia. Yakutsk shamans’ coats were being taken and burned by the police and clergy and later in the Soviet Union shamans were persecuted, discredited, and imprisoned.79 The survival of shamanism has been in spite of the state- sponsored cultural and religious violence against

77 Ibid.,, 60. 78 Izvestiia Vostochno-Sibirskago Otdela imperatorskago russkago geograficheskago obshchestva, 15, no. 3-4 (1885): 66. 79 Priklonsky, 99-100; Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, ed., Shamanic Worlds: Rituals and Lore of Siberia and Central Asia (New York: North Castle Books, 1997): xiii.

143 shamans and shamanic practices, and the characterization of shamanism in this article speaks to the colonial context of Siberia in the imperial era. In a telling moment, Pripuzov, in a list of beliefs and meanings of various Yakut traditions, noted, “If someone sees a priest, a dog, and many Russians… there will be an epidemic.”80 The Russian settlement of Siberia not only brought Christianity into increasing contact with shamanism and the local populations, but epidemics (particularly smallpox) ravaged Siberian communities.

Pripuzov’s article provides not only detailed information about shamanism in the

Yakutsk region, but demonstrates the usage of the Agapitov programme as an ethnographic research guide. Pripuzov’s scope of research and the terms used throughout are developed through Agapitov’s work and desire for information. However, Pripuzov was not a passive figure and engaged with Agapitov’s questions by supporting, rejecting, and refocusing the prompts in accordance with his findings. Pripuzov was not simply filling out a form and submitting it back to Agapitov or VSGORO. He was also not presenting this information as wholly independent of

Agapitov and aspects of the methodology and research interests of the original programme are preserved in the article.

Shamanism was the central focus of both Agapitov and Potanin’s programmes, and it was clearly articulated as a shamanism with shamans, but not one that was limited solely to these religious professionals. Rather shamanism appears as a broadly applied category to encompass cultural and conceptual systems. As demonstrated in Pripuzov’s ethnography of Sakha shamanism, this broad reach of the study outlined in Agapitov’s programme helped facilitate an expansive ethnographic scope to shamanic research. In the 19th century, ethnographers often

80 Pripuzov, “Svedeniia dlia izucheniia shamanstva u iakutov Iakutskago okruga (sobrany po programme N. N. Agapitova narodnym uchitelem Nikolaem Pripuzovym,” 64.

144 characterized communities deemed as primitive within ideas of social evolution as wholly religious in their worldview, such that the totality of a culture was understood through a lens of religious or magical interpretation.81 This was particularly applied to Indigenous cultures.

However, the increasing images of shamans as isolated practitioners of arcane and magical arts or hysterical subject appear in this period, and it was in this context that the idea of shamanism as a larger cultural and conceptual system presented in these programmes provided a necessary corrective to the characterization of 19th century Siberian shamanic studies.

3.3.3 General Ethnographic Information Collection Programmes

Collection programmes aimed at broader information gathering were either limited to a region and retained the smaller size associated with the other more specific programmes, or were truly expansive programmes aimed at accounting for multiple regions. The two examples considered here reflect this difference in scope and scale. The first, which VSORGO produced in

Irkutsk, was specifically addressed to collection about the Uriankhai, a Turkic people Indigenous to northern Mongolia. Maria Czaplicka provided an introduction to the Uriankhai in Aboriginal

Siberia, stating, “[the Uriankhai] are Turkic in origin, but use a Mongolic dialect and consider themselves as belonging to the old Western Mongolic branch of the Oliut… They are divided into ten sumyns [a subdivision of the Uriankhai community], and are, according to Potanin, the poorest and most disorganized of the Mongolic tribes.”82 As a programme produced in Siberia within the VSORGO community, it included shamanism in its questions, as a religious tradition in the area. The second programme, produced in Moscow by a voluntary scientific society, is a

81 Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions. 82 Czaplicka, Aboriginal Siberia, 63.

145 general programme for ethnographic study disconnected from a specific region, ethnicity, or other limiting focus. Religion is treated as a broad category, and while shamanism is not mentioned, magic comes into play as a substantial category within the subsections of religious beliefs.

Both the Urainkhai programme and the Moscow programme provided a broader ethnographic purview than the Agapitov and Potanin programmes, which are specifically addressed to the collection of shamanic information. While not all ethnographic programmes address religion or belief within their scope of research, it does often appear as a central and prioritized category. Generally, the authors of these programmes present shamanism as a wide- ranging category that is not limited to beliefs and rituals, but encompasses cultural practices, the perceptions of the natural world, and the stories of the world and its inhabitants. Shamanism is part of this, and is presented as a multifaceted religious, cultural, cosmological, and theological system beyond the confines of a single shaman or a specific mode of religious practice.

The Programme of the expedition to the Uriankhai Land by F. R. Kon and G. P.

Safianov, published by VSORGO in 1904 was printed in the society’s journal, News of

VSORGO, and covers a broad range of disciplines of research, including geography, anthropology (meaning physical anthropology), ethnography, and juridical systems. The

Ethnographic section, like others, is subdivided into sections that include beliefs. Only two religions are mentioned, Lamaism and shamanism. Lamaism is a term used with some regularity in late imperial Russian sources and is sometimes a separate category from Buddhism and at other times not; however, in its usage Lamaism more often appears in reference to the religious practices principally in Tibet, parts of Mongolia, and Southeastern Siberia around Buryatia and

146

Uriankhai.83 Despite its inclusion, Lamaism receives only a single entry that reads, “Lamaism, and its influence on fetishistic worldview of the Soyots.”84 Shamanism, in comparison, has а list of 21 specific questions, most of which consist of a transliterated term and a gloss, i.e. “‘Tiuk tagyr’—wool festival… ‘Xam iash tagyr’ prayer to forest spirits.”85 This is then followed by more open-ended questioning about shamanism also featured in the Potanin and Agapitov programmes—the relationship between shamans and blacksmiths, transferring fire to a new yurt, stories about the soul wandering during sleep, whether there is a god or goddess of sexual love, and whether there is a patron of the hunt.86

Unlike in any of the other progammes previously, the Uriankhai programme makes specific reference to various technologies of documentation that were to be employed in the documentation of shamanism. The author noted, “The department of belief intends to illustrate

[shamanism] with as many photographs as possible. With the receipt by the expedition members of a phonograph the rituals of the shaman, and the individual moments of prayer will be described with its help.”87 The ethnographers employed various technologies of documentation to satiate the desires for shamanic information. Photographs, sound recordings, sketches, transcriptions of music, and field notes all formed materials that became part of the documentary record. Shamanism is not only central to the research on belief, but is the subject selected to

83 See Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, “Editor’s Introduction: Buddhism (Lamaism) in Russia,” Anthropology & Archeology of Eurasia 39, no. 4 (2001): 4–9; N. L. Zhukovskaia, “Lamaism,” Anthropology & Archeology of Eurasia 39, no. 4 (2001): 10–14; H. S. Hundley, “Defending the Periphery: Tsarist Management of Buriat Buddhism,” The Russian Review 69, no. 2 (2010): 231–50. G R. Galdanova et al., Lamaizm v Buriatii, XVIII- nachala XX veka: Struktura i sotsial'naia roV kul'turnoi sistemy (Novosibirsk, 1983); K. M. Gerasimova, Lamaizm i natsional'no-kolonial'naia politika tsarizma v Zabaikal'e v XlX-nachale XX vv. (Ulan-Ude, 1957) 84 Programma ekspeditsii v Uriankhaiskuiu zemliu F. IA. Kona i G. P Saf’ianova (Irkutsk: VSORGO, 1904), 74. 85 Ibid. 86 Ibid., 75. 87 Ibid.

147 receive attention from new and costly technological innovations in documentation. The majority of the ethnographic subcategories such as food, family life, and language do not have any such requests and religious beliefs appear as a uniquely prioritized subject for such documentary methods and as such are clearly demarcated from other categories of ethnography.

In contrast to the geographic specificity of the Uriankhai programme, the 1889

Programme for the Gathering of Ethnographic Information published in Moscow by the

Ethnographic Division of the Imperial Amateur Society of Natural History, Anthropology, and

Ethnography is a useful example of a more general ethnographic collection programme. This vast programme consists of one-hundred-and-forty-seven pages of questions. It was produced by

Vsevolod Miller, the president of the society, member of the Imperial Academy of Science, and a famous folklorist who worked at the Dashkovsky Ethnographic Museum in Moscow and taught at various universities and institutes throughout his life.88 This programme is not specifically aimed at a region or community in the Russian Empire, and instead opens with the statement that the Ethnographic Division of the Imperial Amateur Society of Natural History, Anthropology, and Ethnography “wishes, as far as possible, to contribute to the success of studying their native country…”89 However, the introduction notes that people may find new questions that emerge from their particular setting and invites them to use these questions as a starting point, acknowledging that “…in compiling a programme all the peoples inhabiting Russia are being

88 Note, this programme was produced by the Ethnographic Division of the Imperial Amateur Society of Natural History, Anthropology, and Ethnography under the presidentship of Miller who contributed questions to it, and it is signed “Vsevolod Miller 18 October 1889” at the conclusion of the text, but it is unclear whether he worked as an editor, author, or compiler for this programme. However, for ease, I have cited this work under the name Miller, rather than by title. 89 Miller, Programma dlia sobiraniia dlia etnograficheskikh svedenii, V.

148 considered and it is understood that those who use this programme do not need to answer every

90 question.”

The wide ethnographic purview of this 1889 programme covers in detail a vast range of topics, and is divided into ten sections organizing the 147 pages of questions and is substantially longer than any of the other programmes previously discussed.91 The subsection “beliefs” is the largest, containing 1106 questions. The questions about belief in general begin with introductory questions such as: “1. What ideas do people have about the deity? 2. What is the number of gods92 (if they confess polytheism) and what are their mutual relations? 3. Is there a concept of a single God, or at least a supreme deity among others?”93 While these introductory questions are quite general, the programme does include specific questions related to Russian Orthodoxy, including questions about the Trinity, the Ascension, and Maslenitsa, a Slavic celebration the week before Lent that pre-dates the Christianization of the Russians.94 Unlike the programmes produced by VSORGO that are specifically aimed at documenting the local Indigenous communities, this Moscow programme includes Slavic and Orthodox communities within its scope. For example, there are sections of questions on icons95 and on angels, such as: “31. Do people distinguish angels, archangels, seraphim, and cherubs only by name, by appearance, or by

90 Ibid., VI-VII. 91 These subdivisions are I. Geographic and Historical Information, II. Anthropological Information, III. Dwellings and their Ownership, IV. Clothing, V. Food and Drink, VI. Life and Activities, VII. Family Manners, Customs, and Some Other National Traits, VIII. Beliefs, IX. Language, Letters, and Art, and X. Folk Literature 92 Note that Miller uses both the terms bozhestvo (Божество) and bog (Бог), which I have translated as deity and god respectively to preserve their differentiation in the original text. 93 Ibid., 48. 94Maslenitsa often consists of a week of eating, visiting family, general merrymaking, then a bonfire built around a straw figure. 95 Miller, Programma dlia sobiraniia dlia etnograficheskikh svedenii, 61.

149 significance,”96 followed later by “182: Do they carry an icon around a burning building to stop a fire, or hold it against the wind so that the wind changes during the fire?”97

Miller’s programme also poses extensive questions about magic and spirits that are in keeping with the Christian and Slavic traditions of Western Russia. He poses numerous questions about magical practices associated with Western European and Christian-influenced ideas of magic and witchcraft.98 He supplies multiple names for the different magical practitioners, asking: “Are there beliefs in sorcerers, witch doctors, healers, witches, etc…?”99 There are also practical questions regarding how magic is performed, i.e.: “Are witchcraft or spells sent with the wind or water, are they given in drink and food?”100 The specific turn to food here is particularly grounded in Russian forms of magic where the term for spell or hex is porcha, which literally translates as ‘spoiling.’ As Valerie Kivelson demonstrates in her account of early

Russian magic, food items and other common household items were a common mode of transferring a spell such that ingredients ‘for borscht’ were included as evidence in a 1653 witchcraft trial in Sevsk.101 Additionally, a pantheon of spirits and supernatural beings is figured

96 Ibid., 60. 97 Ibid., 61. 98 For more information regarding magic, witchcraft, and Slavic animism in European Russia see: Valerie Kivelson, Desperate Magic: The Moral Economy of Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013); W. F. Ryan, The Bathhouse at Midnight: An Historical Survey of Magic and Divination in Russia (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999); Christine Worobec, Possessed: Women, Witches, and Demons in Imperial Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001); Stella Rock, Popular Religion in Russia: “Double Belief” and the Making of an Academic Myth, (London: Routledge, 2007); Linda J. Ivanits, Russian Folk Belief (Armonk, N.Y: M.E. Sharpe, 1989). 99 Miller, Programma dlia sobiraniia dlia etnograficheskikh svedenii, 74. See W. F. Ryan, The Bathhouse at Midnight: An Historical Survey of Magic and Divination in Russia (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999) for a discussion of the specific distinctions in Russian of magic users such as koldun, vedma, volsebnik, tsarodei, etc. 100 Ibid., 76. 101 Kivelson, Desperate Magic, 75.

150 in the questions, including Baba Yaga, and other spirit-beings of the Slavic traditions such as the vodyanoi (water spirits), polevik (the fieldmaster), domovoi (house spirits), and the ognevik (fire spirits). As examples, Miller poses the questions: “are there stories about the vodyanoi tsardom or the tsar of the vodyanoi?” or “are there domovoi in every house?”102 There are also more general spirits that populate the programme; for instance, “Are there beliefs in ghosts and doppelgangers?” and “Is the soft and pleasant wind considered the breath of angels, but the sharp cold—the breath of evil spirits?”103

Despite the broad focus of Miller’s programme, it does not mention shamans and shamanism, although the introduction cites Potanin’s 1880 programme on shamanism as having assisted the Society in assembling the questions. The programme maintains a vocabulary grounded in the Western European Russian context in which it was produced, and yet one sees the influences from the Siberian shamanic programmes. Some of the questions in Miller’s programme mirror those found in Potanin’s Programme for the Gathering of Information on

Siberian Shamanism, such as: “260. What are the ideas and beliefs of comets, falling stars, solar and lunar eclipses, clouds, rainbows, sunrise and sunset, the seasons, the Milky Way, the

Northern Lights, stars in general and some constellations (Ursa Major, Pleiades, Orion, and others), and about the planets.”104 This list is almost identical to the subjects mentioned in

Potanin’s programme wherein he asks,

How do the people explain the eclipse and what is the name of this phenomenon…What is the name of the sun, and the moon; the constellations: Ursa Major, Orion, Pleiades, the

102 Ibid., 57; 55. Note, on page 60 there is a long list of different Slavic spirits that Miller is curious as to whether they exist in whatever community these questions are posed to. 103 Ibid., 87; 71. 104 Ibid., 68.

151

summer lightning, and the Milky Way, also the northern lights, and rainbows?...Are there stories about Ursa Major…Is the cold ascribed to Pleiades or another constellation? Is there a story associated with the constellation Orion about the hunt for three animals? ...How is the phenomenon of the rainbow explained? And Comets?105

Potanin’s influence on the Miller programme may not have manifested in the inclusion of shamanism, perhaps being too regionally specific a category for such a general programme, with questions regarding magic and sorcery possibly standing in for shamanism as a more general trans-regional classification. Nevertheless, Miller not only borrows specific points of questioning, but also similarly constructs the category of belief as a broad topic that is inclusive of cultural beliefs such as: “446. What scares children so that they stop crushing bread on the floor?”106

The scope of the Miller programme is substantial, both in terms of its range of questions, and the lack of geographic or cultural specificity of the Potanin, Agapitov, or other VSORGO programmes. While intended as a programme for use across the Russian Empire, the programme draws substantially on Slavic, Christian, and European categories to discuss religious traditions and beliefs. On the one hand, this places traditions like shamanism within a framework of magic rather than as separate and specific traditions, but, on the other hand, it also expands ideas of who constitutes an ethnographic subject beyond Indigenous Siberians, often the only ethnographic subjects of the Siberian programmes. Russian, Slavic, and Christian communities here also become subjects of ethnographic collection, alongside the various communities that are

105 Potanin, 2. Note that for brevity I have removed some of Potanin’s prompts regarding specific possible stories or legends regarding some of these phenomena. 106 Miller, Programma dlia sobiraniia dlia etnograficheskikh svedenii, 83.

152 collectively considered the inorodtsy in imperial Russia.107 This places the inorodtsy within a collective project of imperial ethnography that did not construct the ethnographic subject as inherently non-European or alien to the cultural context of the ethnographers themselves.

3.4 Conclusion

The circulation and usage of these programmes both depended upon and developed an infrastructure of ethnographic documentation that facilitated ideas of shamanism moving across

Russia. This formed a network of scholars, researchers, and museums involved in articulating an image of shamanism that was expansive beyond the shamans themselves and included oral traditions, cultural practices, cosmological knowledge, and other forms of knowledge and traditions. This is unlike the scholarly image of shamanism that was rooted in the shaman as a charlatan, a hysteric, or magician archetype and which often focused solely on the shaman as an individual figure, at the expense of any larger cultural or religious system.

As the programmes became prompts for object collection and museums then built collections of shamanic artefacts, the ethnographic conceptualizations and terminological systematization of shamanism became materialized as objects within the public spaces of galleries. The infrastructures that supported these collections, and the desires that motivated them, manifested through the circulation of these programmes, the centralization of intellectual capital in non-remote local areas, and, as will be discussed in the following chapter, the gathering of materials in museums across Russia. Critically, those who desire are not the same people who

107 See chapter five for a discussion of the composition of the Russian Ethnographic collection at the Imperial Academy of Science’s Kunstkamera that contextualized the ethno-cultural breakdown of who is included in this domestic ethnographic exhibition.

153 can offer fulfilment, and the divide between those who study and those who are studied becomes increasingly populated with deputized collectors and ethnographers who can take up the programmes of museums and academic societies and offer documentation of the inorodsty across

Russia and Siberia.

The idea that desiderata allow research to extend beyond the lifespans (or perhaps research-scopes) of individual researchers allowed the authors to pose specific questions that draw upon longer networks and histories of research. This allowed the authors to pose questions that isolated and articulated highly specific aspects of shamanism in an attempt to map different local shamanic traditions. This imagined information gathering appears then as the collection of items. The construction of a taxonomy of shamanism extends beyond a single researcher and into an imagined documented and categorized ethnographic system where the different nodes of local scientific ethnographic knowledge can come together into a collectively drawn ethnographic map of Siberia. These programmes open to the pubic the desires of researchers for information about the various remote local spaces, and allowed a larger range of people to participate in the ethnographic collection. Rather than an institutional or authoritative collection methodology, the participatory model motivated the documentation of the different local spaces in Siberia.

Nevertheless, the anticipatory classification of the materials by the authors offered a framework that named and identified specific materials as desirous. This taxonomy of desired things attempted to draw together and systematize all the names for henbane and wolfsbane, and document the different stories about why the chipmunk had a striped back.108

108 Potanin, Programma dlia sobiraniia svedenii o sibirskom shamanstve, 2-3.

4 Chapter Four: The Type Specimen and the Shaman: Ethnographic Taxonomies in Object Collection Programmes

4.1 Introduction

The programmes for gathering ethnographic objects for museums in late imperial Russia provided lists of categories of objects, generally with minimal detail specifying either best practices in collection or details about the objects in any local context. While the ethnographic information collection programmes attempted to grasp specific details about regional differences among rituals, stories, and beliefs, the collection programmes that focused on objects turned to general types. Specific objects appear as iterations of a general type, rather than as locally contextualized ones. These collection programmes expressed the desire for shamanic objects as one category amongst many within the larger taxonomies of ethnographic objects. The particular objects associated with shamanism tended to centre on those of a particular shaman, rather than on the broad classification of shamanism seen in the ethnographic information collection programmes.

Starting with an examination of the methodology of the object collection programmes, this chapter lays out how ‘best practices’ of acquisition were described and the ways in which the systematization of ethnographic types of objects calcified certain categories as representative of broader cultural and religious traditions. In shamanic object collections, these central types include the shaman’s coat, drum, and ‘accessories of the cult’ (which include objects variously termed idols, amulets, images, fetishes, and ongon or tyus in different Indigenous languages

154 155 spoken in Siberia). By organizing these three categories of objects as parts of different Siberian shamanic material cultural traditions, museums created a repertoire of shamanic types within their ethnographic documentation and collections. These types became the means of classifying shamanic religious traditions and establishing the museum objects as valuable and exotic.

4.2 Taxonomical Collection and Type Specimens

4.2.1 The Pre-Collected Object

The substantial scholarship on museum collection practices tends to focus on the tangible acquisition of objects or the biographies of collectors and famous collections. Focusing on collection programmes as an infrastructure of desire, however, articulates an anticipatory moment before the objects are made tangible through acquisition.1 These collection programmes included lists of desired items ranging from shaman’s drums to beetles as sought-after objects to build up the museum’s collections. While museums may have acquired these things, the programmes did not document an existent collection, but a desired one in which general types of objects are imagined without yet having a physical thing to sit in as a representation. This

1 See Toby Burrows and Cynthia Johnston, Collecting the Past: British Collectors and Their Collections from the 18th to the 20th Centuries (New York: Routledge, 2018); Arthur MacGregor, Curiosity and Enlightenment: Collectors and Collections from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Nancy J. Parezo, “The Formation of Ethnographic Collections: The Smithsonian Institution in the American Southwest,” Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory 10 (1987): 1–47; Susan M. Pearce, ed., Interpreting Objects and Collections, (London: Routledge, 1994); Krzysztof Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice 1500-1800 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990); Joshua A. Bell, “A Bundle of Relations: Collections, Collecting, and Communities,” Annual Review of Anthropology 46, no. 1 (2017); Simon J. Knell, ed., Museums and the Future of Collecting (New York: Routledge, 2016); James Delbourgo, Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017); Sonja Mejcher-Atassi and John Pedro Schwartz, eds., Archives, Museums and Collecting Practices in the Modern Arab World (Burlington: Ashgate, 2012); Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Nicholas Thomas et al., eds., Artefacts of Encounter: Cook’s Voyages, Colonial Collecting and Museum Histories (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2016).

156 effectively constructs the thing as a type prior to its material existence as a specific collected object. As prefigured types, the requested objects fall into archetypes of ethnographic categories.

A shaman’s drum may be collected as a representative iteration of the desired type rather than as a particularized object connected with a specific shaman, community, or tradition.

Nancy J. Parezo addresses the displacement and recontextualisation that occurs through the act of collection and argues that there is always a bias informing the sample of material taken.2 However, Parezo also outlines the idea of a systematic collection, a collection assembled through a “logical, comprehensive, and organized fashion.”3 While the collection programmes discussed in the chapter, as well as the displays in the museums, suggest such a systematic approach to collection as Parezo outlines, the realities of the collection process often fall short of the idealised plans. For example, Parezo mentions that between 1879 and 1888 approximately

15% of the objects collected for the Smithsonian Institute in the American Southwest were

“destroyed because of transportation problems, errors in packing, lack of storage space, and faulty conservation.”4 She also notes that the “lack of adequate storage facilities influenced collecting as well as what happened to the collections. Large and heavy objects that could not be easily transported or stored, such as houses, boats, and rafts, were not collected, even though they were deemed of anthropological interest.”5 In the pre-collection moment when desires are being listed in programmes, these practical concerns of field collection, such as issues of access, availability, methods of acquisition, transportation, preservation, and other such pragmatic and ethical questions, are not restrictive or binding constraints on the project. The utilitarian realities

2 Parezo, “The Formation of Ethnographic Collections,” 3. 3 Ibid., 6. 4 Ibid., 17. 5 Ibid., 17.

157 of collecting present a challenge to the desired systematic collection expressed in the collection programmes, and the desired may not always be satiated by tangible acquisition.

4.2.2 The Non-Objective Object: Classification of the Part as the Whole

Collection in the nineteenth century sought a scientific approach grounded in rationalism and classification. Through an examination of the classificatory systems and categorizations of materials it is possible to see the categories of objects that held positions of authority in collections and guided the gathering of ethnographic materials. Through questioning the classificatory structures that frame the ethnographic object we can call into question the idea of an objective or neutral object, one that discloses itself freely and truthfully without being subject to the interpretations of the systematic collection.

Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison discuss in “The Image of Objectivity” how objectivity acquired a reverential status in the nineteenth-century sciences. The disdain of subjective observation took on a moral dimension that promoted self-disciplined scientific aestheticism over and against such personal idiosyncrasies as the researcher’s expectations, generalisations, categories, and linguistic frameworks.6 Daston and Galison argue that it was scientific illustrations or reproductions that “were thought least vulnerable to such subjective intrusions— protective charms against ambiguity, bad faith, and system building.”7 Here, Daston and Galison are discussing images and not objects. They note that in nineteenth century scientific circles,

“Simply pickling the anomalous organ in alcohol is a poor substitution for a faithful drawing of a

6 Daston and Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,” 82. 7 Ibid., 82.

158 fresh cadaver, since changes of form and colour ‘denature them’ and in any case such a specimen

‘profits only a small number’ of observers.”8 The specimen was available to a smaller community, due to its more limited affordances for circulation and issues with preservation, but the drawing was more readily able to be circulated and could offer a better objectivity in its stable form, less distorted by preservation methods.

The ethnographic object when it is collected and removed from its cultural context is like the organ removed from the fresh cadaver—it still has a particular material nature, but it becomes sterilized and preserved as an objective specimen.9 However, as Daston and Galison conclude: “objectivity is a multifarious, mutable thing.” Objects in collections are not objective in their self-disclosure but are being reinterpreted through the museum’s systems of classification.10 As objects become representatives of categories, they become untethered from their lived context and become objectified and museumified as something other than a used, personalized, and living contextualized thing.11

8 Ibid., 86. 9 For a discussion of how museum preservation technologies can approach objects from a perspective of cultural change, reinterpretation, and destruction or decay as a methodology of cultural care see Marilena Alivizatou, Intangible Heritage and the Museum: New Perspectives on Cultural Preservation (Walnut Creek, Calif: Left Coast Press, 2012). 10 Daston and Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,” 123. 11 Richard H. Davis, Lives of Indian Images (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Cara Krmpotich and Alexander Somerville, “Affective Presence: The Metonymical Catalogue,” Museum Anthropology 39, no. 2 (2016): 178–91; Crispin Paine, Religious Objects in Museums: Private Lives and Public Duties (London ; New York: Bloomsbury, 2013); Mary Bouquet and Nuno Porto, Science, Magic, and Religion: The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005); Joshua A. Bell, “A Bundle of Relations: Collections, Collecting, and Communities,” Annual Review of Anthropology 46, no. 1 (2017); Tilo Grätz, “La Muséification Sur Place (‘Museumfying’ on the Spot),” Cahiers d’Études Africaines 39, no. 155/156 (1999): 829–843; Robert A. Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).

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Cara Krmpotich and Alexander Somerville suggest that museum objects, as metonyms, operate in a system wherein “the part that is there stands for the parts that are not there—or at least that which is present can make the missing parts conspicuously absent. This is perhaps most palpable in ethnographic collections that were the result of salvage anthropology. For source community researchers, museum collections very often pulse with their ability to make ‘the missing parts’ conspicuously absent.”12 Krmpotich and Somerville, in arguing for a more affective relationship between objects and people in museums, raise the subjective nature of the seemingly objective presentation of objects in museums in a way that helpfully shows how a shaman’s coat is not simply a garment, but an embedded thing connected to different cultural, sacred, and personal systems of meaning.13

Museum objects, however, can be used in collections as generalized representative specimens, where a specific object stands in for, as example, a larger concept, a type or category of thing, or broader culture or religious tradition—they appear, to paraphrase Daston and

Galison, to be unaffected by subjective systems of knowledge production, interpretation, or contextualisation. Desirers list types in collection programmes and these categories become inscribed in the objects as they become metonymic objects standing in for a broader thing, idea, culture, person, etc. For example, in the collection programmes of late imperial Russian museums, an object used by a shaman for curing illnesses may be called an “accessory” of the shaman, a fetish, a cult object, or a religious one. These categories reform the object in the collection as different things with different values, affective relationships, networks, and understandings attached to it by those viewing and caring for it. This plasticity in meaning is

12 Cara Krmpotich and Alexander Somerville, “Affective Presence: The Metonymical Catalogue,” Museum Anthropology 39, no. 2 (2016): 179. 13 Ibid.

160 reflected by Richard Davis, who explains that objects are “fundamentally social beings whose identities are not fixed once and for all at the moment of fabrication, but are repeatedly made and remade through interactions with humans.”14 While Davis’ work primarily addresses issues of displaying religious art in secular museum contexts, his idea of the polysemous nature of an object is of fundamental import to thinking about the non-objectivity of objects. Meanings, uses, linguistic and cultural contexts, and other frames of an object change; even the object itself changes through use, storage, damage, restoration, setting, and other natural and unnatural interferences. Simply put, things change.

4.3 Collection Programmes

4.3.1 How to Collect an Object: A Practical Introduction in Programmes

Late imperial Russian collection programmes were intended to solicit acquisitions for museum collection, and as such, had to be legible to the publics in which they were circulated. If a museum required or desired certain collection practices for an object to enter into its collection—say, specific documentation of contextual information regarding the object—it would appear to be best practice to include these instructions in the programmes that were designed to prompt collectors. Nevertheless, this is rarely seen in ethnographic collection programmes in the late imperial era and more often the programmes are simply lists of items without guidance. Records of donors of ethnographic materials to museums include a wide range

14 Davis, Lives of Indian Images, 7-8.

161 of people including scholars, explorers, exiles living in Siberia, regional bureaucrats, and local community members including peasants, priest, and merchants.15

In some cases, it was well-known ethnographic researchers who collected and donated materials to museums, such as Vladimir Jochelson who acquired examples of Even and Sakha clothing that were displayed at the Kunstkamera in St. Petersburg. In other cases local community members would write to the museum offering something for the collection, such as the Priest Vinokurov, who offered a shaman’s coat to the Irkutsk museum.16 In discussing the early history of the Yakutsk museum, Emelian Yaroslavskii characterised the donation practices of the local community to the museum following the publication and circulation of the object collection programme as a great success that rushed the need for a physical museum space prior to the building of the museum itself. He writes,

The programme, sent together with the appeal, enjoyed great success. Many people, from different corners of the vast region responded in lively fashion. At the same time, the local administration played a significant role not only through its authoritative invitation to the local population to aid in the project, but also through its personal example and zeal. Donations began to pour in to the Statistical Committee, and it became necessary to consider premises for a future museum…

However, the first decade of the museum’s existence must be considered as a very happy time in consideration of the creation and gathering of material. It quickly expanded, despite the fact that there were no experienced workers, nor funds, nor a suitable environment. Despite all of these obstacles, the museum was enriched thanks to the responsiveness of all layers of the population…Here one encounters the names of nearly all of the chief police officers of the time, through whom donations from the districts were received, here were also present peasant, doctor, merchant, priest, Russian, and

15 Putevoditel’ po muzeiu imperatorskoi akademii nauk” antropologii i etnografii. (St. Petersburg: 1904), 59; Julia Fein, “Cultural Curators and Provincial Publics: Local Museums and Social Change in Siberia, 1887-1941,” PhD diss., (University of Chicago, 2012). 16 Putevoditel’ po muzeiu imperatorskoi akademii nauk” antropologii i etnografii. (St. Petersburg: 1904), 29; SAIO F. 293 Op. 1 Ed. Xp. 68.

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Yakut, here diocesan priest, and political exiles. This general sympathy was ultimately reflected, as well in the city self-government’s attitude towards the museum.17

Yaroslavskii’s presentation of the intense community participation from diverse sources reflects the impact the programme had in fostering local involvement in the museum. The donors were not limited to the social and economic elites, the intelligentsia, or the ethnically Russian community. The range of participants in the initial collection process meant that not all those involved had familiarity with the norms and standards of collection typical of the time, and the possibility that items could arrive without provenance information, contextual information, or other useful supporting materials. Yaroslavskii notes that the lack of experienced workers was an obstacle for the museum in building its initial collection, but the community’s involvement led to a deep sympathy for the museum and allowed people across the region to have personal investments and connections to the new museum.

The collection programmes facilitated the range of people potentially involved in collecting for museums as a technology of ethnographic bureaucracy that attempts to structure and manage the results of the collective research prompted through the desiderata. However, despite the museum’s awareness that these programmes were to be circulated amongst a wide community of people, the ethnographic programmes rarely contained clear instructions on how to collect. The 1902 Programme for Gathering Ethnographic Materials produced by the Russian

Museum is an unusual example amongst the collection programmes for ethnographic objects as it provides a substantial introduction to guide the novice collector in proper practices for documenting and contextualizing acquisitions. The programme cautions against buying objects

17 M. I. Gubelman (Emelian Yaroslavskii) Yakutskii oblastnoi muzei za 25 let svego sushchestvovaniia: (26 maia 1891 – 26 maia 1916 g.) (Yakutsk: 1917), 4.

163 that are not Indigenous in form or style to the area, for example local production of spring carriages or marble vases, which, while potentially fabricated in the area, would not constitute an indigenous product.18 Additionally, there is a stated preference for “…a thing that has already been used, and not a new one.”19 However, there is a caveat for models of large-scale items like boats and houses, which may be commissioned.20 There are instructions on how to gather a systematic collection, including the note: “in a complete scientific collection it is necessary to present both samples of raw material and tools used in production, as well as auxiliary substances, for example, paints, etc.”21 The focus on documentation of the production techniques that used in the fabrication of the collected item offers a contextualization of the object within human labour and technological practices of construction.

The instructional section continues from the specific collection practices to a general reminder that every item in a collection sent to the museum must be labelled and enumerated on a list; this is stated together with a warning to collectors, “A thing without a designation of origin cannot be an ethnographic document…”22 To return to the claim that objects do not disclose an objective reality merely through their physicality, the need for supporting and contextual information to explain the object is articulated in the warning that a thing must arrive with a classificatory system already in place that names it, places it, numbers it, and dissects it into its auxiliary substances for it to become a museum object. The thing itself as a part of a larger

18 Programma dlia sobiraniia etnograficheskikh predmetov (St. Petersburg: Russian Museum of Emperor Alexander III, 1902), 6. 19 Ibid., 7. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., 7-8. 22 Ibid., 7.

164 material culture is distinct from its existence as a museum object, or an ‘ethnographic document.’

The Russian Museum’s distinction between the thing and the ethnographic document (i.e. the museum object) points to the requirement of contextual information to support the acquired material in the museum collection that frames it through systems of classification, provenance, production, etc. If the museum object loses too much of its embedded thingness it can no longer, to paraphrase Krmpotich and Somerville, be a part that stands in for the whole which allows it to be recognized as a representative example of some type of thing.23

Unlike these few examples of instructions, most of the object collection programmes are presented simply as lists divided into categories, under which specific types of objects are listed.

For example, in the Programme for the Gathering of Objects for the Museum, Proposed to be

Constructed by the Yakutsk Regional Statistical Committee the ethnographic section is divided into twenty-one categories. To give a sense of the breadth of categories, the first seven listed in the programme are food, medicinal substances, materials for lighting, medicinal substances, household utensils, hunting gear, and fishing gear.24 The section on drugs offers more details on what the museums desire, stating, “medicinal substances in samples, with the accessories for their use (with material from which these substances are obtained), together with a description as

23 For examples of the constructive nature of classification systems in forming and reforming objects Richard H. Davis, Lives of Indian Images (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Cara Krmpotich and Alexander Somerville, “Affective Presence: The Metonymical Catalogue,” Museum Anthropology 39, no. 2 (2016): 178–191; see Hannah Turner, “The Computerization Of Material Culture Catalogues: Objects and Infrastructure in the Smithsonian Institution’s Department of Anthropology,” Museum Anthropology 39, no. 2 (2016): 163–177; Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1980); Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, 2nd (New York: Routledge, 2001); Bruno Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things out: Classification and Its Consequences, Inside Technology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999). 24 A. I. Popov, Programma po sobiraniiu predmetov dlia muzeia, predpologaemago k ustroistvu pri Iakutskom Oblastnom Statisticheskom Komitete (Yakutsk: 1887), 4.

165 to its use, whether in food or drink, or for smoking, chewing, or sniffing.”25 While there is no sustained exposition on how to collect ethnographic objects in this programme, we can still observe in this section the interest in used objects, in contextualising samples (i.e. the inclusion of a sample of the material from which the drug is extracted), and the inclusion of expository information, here related to the manner of ingesting the substance. Even this, however, is not standard to this programme, with the majority of entries appearing more akin to the entry on fishing gear, which reads in full as follows: “Fishing gear: rods, fish-traps, nets, harpoons, and fishing weirs.”26 This stripped-down listing of objects under a heading of a general category is the most common format for the collection programmes. Thus, the moments when we are privy to instructional guidance in the programmes are all the more valuable for the insights into collection methodologies, especially given the potential amateur nature of the audience, as noted in the introduction to the 1902 programme from the Russian Museum that is included for

“…those persons who are completely unfamiliar with the technique of this pursuit (ethnographic collection).”27

Unlike the ethnographic collection programmes, those produced for collecting specimens in the natural sciences produced by the Academy of Science provided detailed outlines for how to collect samples focusing on detailed descriptions of collection and preservation practices. For example, the programme Instructions for the Gathering of Insects written by G. Yakobsen, a junior zoologist at the Zoological Museum, together with the senior zoologist V. L. Bianki and fellow junior zoologist H. H. Adelung, contains extensive instructions and diagrams for

25 Ibid., 7-8. 26 Ibid., 8. 27 Programma dlia sobiraniia etnograficheskikh predmetov (St. Petersburg: Russian Museum of Emperor Alexander III, 1902), 5.

166 gathering specimens. For example, when discussing how to kill insects for purposes of collection, the authors suggest several poisons, including cyanide, “cyanide or potassium cyanide in sticks… a piece of the poison is placed in a special glass sphere, from which a short tube exits one side; this tube is passed through the cork so that the poison does not escape the jar, the tube is plugged with cotton or its aperture is tightened with material. In order to be certain the poison will be effective, the jar should not be very dry, but also avoid excessive moisture, the latter causes severe spoiling of the insects.”28 These instructions are accompanied by four diagrams depicting the apparatus to be constructed.

The Russian zoologist Evgeny Bicher also adopts the instructional methodology in his

1888 programme, Instructions for the Gathering of Mammals, which includes a discussion on how to prepare skins, skeletons, and spirit preservation.29 While providing notes on the preparation of the skeletons of large and small mammals, Bichner provides a useful aphorism:

“a well-tied skeleton travels easily and without harm.”30 In these and other natural science instructions for collection, the emphasis is on how to collect and prepare the sample, rather than listing the specific specimens desired—an approach that appears as counter to that of the ethnographic programmes. While the guides for gathering insects and mammals are titled as

‘instruction’ (instruksii) rather than ‘programmes’ (progammy) they were still produced for the collector. The introduction to Instructions for the Gathering of Insects includes a note: “The present instruction is intended for people collecting insects for the Zoological Museum of the

28 Grigorii Iakobson, Instruktsiia dlia sobriraniia nasekomykh (St. Petersburg: Zoological Museums of the Imperial Academy of Science, 1898), 5. 29 Both Iakobson and Bichner were famed zoologists and both have various taxa named for them. These include the Pseudaphaenops jakobsoni (a species of cave dwelling beetle) and the Pteromys volans buechneri (a subspecies of the Eurasian flying squirrel). 30 Evgeny Bikhner, Instruktsiia dlia sobiraniia mlekopitaiushchix (St. Petersburg: Zoological Museums of the Imperial Academy of Science), 9.

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Imperial Academy of Science. All the following apply to adult insects (sexually mature), i.e. to beetles, butterflies, bedbugs, dragonflies, grasshoppers, flies, etc. and not to their larvae or caterpillars.”31

Biological specimens like beetles and rabbits decay quickly and need specific treatments to remain unspoiled by rot or infestation. In addition, collectors would need to ensure that the body was not damaged in such a way that taxidermy or other preservation techniques would not be able to reconstitute it as a whole specimen. Similar issues of preservation are involved in caring for ethnographic materials but are not as immediately apparent in their necessity as with biological specimens that need to be treated right away. For example, the Yakutsk museum’s taxidermied animals and their ethnographic collections suffered moth damage due to problems in the storage and preservation of the items, but for the animals to have survived long enough to be eaten by moths they would have had to be tanned and treated during the taxidermy processes to allow them to be kept in a stable condition.32

Like the ethnographic programmes, these instruction guides are intended to facilitate the collection of samples for the museum; however, here the emphasis is on technical rather than categorical instruction. Generally, the programmes for collecting ethnographic objects do not emphasise instructional guidance on how to collect, focusing instead on what to collect. While ethnographic collection tends not to require technical equipment in the manner required when collecting insects (i.e. through lures and traps armed with cyanide or chloroform), information on

31 Iakobson, Instruktsiia dlia sobriraniia nasekomykh, 1. 32 Minei Izrailevich Gubelman (Emelian Yaroslavskii) Yakutskii oblastnoi muzei za 25 let svego sushchestvovaniia: (26 maia 1891 – 26 maia 1916 g.) (Yakutsk: 1917), 6.

168 preservation, collection methodologies, labelling, and provenance is still critical for ethnographic collections.33

The need for specialised material and training for the preservation of ethnographic materials is explained in a 1917 essay titled The Yakutsk Regional Museum After 25 Years of Its

Existence (May 26, 1891 – May 26, 1916). The author claims that the museum was in need of extensive restoration, specifically noting, “… the ethnographic objects were, to a large extent, spoiled by moths.”34 Despite ethnographic materials requiring specialised handling, especially textiles, which remain notoriously difficult for museums and conservators, the programmes remain relatively silent on the proper collection, preservation, shipment, etc., unlike the natural history instructions. While both types of publications appear to be addressed to a community that included non-professional, or non-trained, individuals, the divide between the technical specificity and assumed access to materials in the natural sciences and the more general and accessible approach in the ethnographic programmes is noteworthy and is suggestive of different participating communities. The lack of technical and scientific framing in ethnographic programmes does allow for a larger potential community of collectors and donors at the cost of a potential dearth of information regarding preparation for the preservation or collection record of the collected object.

The apparent educational and financial discrepancy between potential collectors involved in ethnography versus the natural sciences is notable. Being able to afford chemicals and equipment for the collection and preparation of specimens for the Zoological Museum limits the participants to those with scientific knowledge and some disposable income. Ethnographic

33 Ibid., 5-6. 34 Ibid., 6.

169 collections, by contrast, tended to desire objects of folk culture, which could be possessed by members of more variable educational and socio-economic communities who could all be potential donors.

4.3.2 Collecting Spiritual Material

The anonymous authors of a 1902 programme published by the Russian Museum of

Emperor Alexander III, a newer ethnographic museum founded by Tsar Nicholas II in 1895, established the broader importance of collecting spiritual (dukhovnyi) material. In Russian, the term Dukhovnyi is generally translated as spiritual, except in specific phrases where its meaning shifts either to the sacred, for example in the phrase dukhovnyi san (holy orders) cloths, or to an inner intangibility such as dukhovnyi mir (the inner world) or dukhovnoe oko (the mind’s eye).

However, the Russian words sviashchennyi (sacred) or svatoi (holy) are more frequently used within an Orthodox context in phrases such as Svatoi Dukh (Holy Ghost) or sviashchennye knigi

(sacred books). The importance of this spiritual material is foundational to the classification system of the author of the Russian Museum’s programme; the author states, “As a general rule, it can be said that it is necessary to collect all the accessories of life and existence, both material and spiritual, since the latter also often finds expression in material objects.”35 Here there are two threads that need to be pulled. First, the specific emphasis on collecting spiritual material as a fundamental part of the ethnographic project, and, second, the understanding of material objects as expressive of a broader spiritual existence. The materiality of the religious life of the ethnographic subject is a complicated issue. In one respect, it is important to recognize the

35 Programma dlia sobiraniia etnograficheskikh predmetov , 5.

170 materiality of religious life, and this can come across as a relatively contempory sounding statement in light of the recent material turn in the study of religion. Acknowledging the value of material culture both within the practicing community and for the scholarly community could suggest a view of religion that is more inclusive of broader forms of practice and religious expression. However, there is also a substantial history of scholarship that emphasises the materiality of religions (including many Indigenous religious traditions, Catholicism, Tibetan

Buddhism, etc.) as indications of their sinfulness and, often, their primitivity.36

In the Programme for Gathering Ethnographic Materials for the Russian Museum, the emphasis on gathering spiritual objects does not mention religion as a category, or specific religions or religious items. Additionally, while this programme does not specify a geographic or cultural region, the inclusion of domovoi, leshii, and vodyanoy (the Slavic spirits of the house, forest, and water respectively) suggests a more Western and Slavic framework; however, no objects associated with Russian Orthodoxy are included. This category of spiritual material appears located in a non-Orthodox elsewhere conceived generally in order to facilitate greater take-up of the programme across disparate cultures across the Russian Empire. Unlike the Miller programme that included Orthodox material in its general formulation of questions on religious belief, this programme by the Russian museum limits the bounds of the ethnographic subject to a non-Orthodox one. Finally, while this programme drew attention so specifically to spiritual materials in the introduction, the only section that addresses this category is the penultimate section titled ‘Superstitions and Fortune-Telling.’ The passage, in its entirety reads as follows—

36 Laurel Kendall, “On the Problem of Material Religion and Its Prospects for the Study of Korean Religion,” Journal of Korean Religions 1, no. 1 (2010): 93–116; N. L. Zhukovskaia, “Lamaism,” Anthropology & Archaeology of Eurasia 39, no. 4 (2001): 10–14; Bruno Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, Science and Cultural Theory (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, I,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 9 (1985): 5–17; William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, II: The Origin of the Fetish,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 13 (1987): 23–45;

171 note that in my translation, I have made an effort to preserve the formatting and grammatical notation of the original in order to represent accurately the fragmented nature of this entry:

VII Superstitions and Fortune-Telling. Different ways for divining the future, preventing misfortunes, means to protect against infection, hail, and other disasters.

All kinds of omens.

Philtres, “bewitched roots,” and other means by which you can draw affection to you.

Means of sacred divination.

Charms and amulets (i.e. items that are worn or kept which possess protections against misfortune, sickness, that give good luck on hunting, etc.). Protections from the evil eye. Fortune-tellers, sorcerers and healers. Signs by which you can identify a sorcerer or witch.

Werewolves.

Domovoi [house spirits], Leshii [forest spirits], and Vodyanoi [water spirits].37

In this passage, several points are immediately apparent regarding the methodology of collection.

Most apparent is the author’s adoption of a categorical list approach to detailing the desired objects for the museum without collection instructions as to how to gather, document, preserve, or store the material. There is also an imbalance in the specificity of certain points; compare the request for means for protection against hail with all kinds of omens. Tomoko Masuzawa suggests, “Victorian anthropologists… eagerly collected, catalogued, compared, and attempted to systematize myths, rituals, and other noteworthy customs and habits that seemed to make a given tribal society unique and peculiar and, at the same time and in another sense, very much like tribal societies found elsewhere.”38 The balance of the specific and the general indicated by

37 Programma dlia sobiraniia etnograficheskikh predmetov, 46. 38 Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions, 16.

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Masuzawa, in relation to Victorian anthropology, resonates with the apparent contradictory nature of the detail provided in this entry and connects to the interplay of the local and the exotic.

It is also worth noting that this programme is specifically for the gathering of objects for the Russian Museum, and yet it is unclear how or with what, one is to collect ‘all kinds of omens’, let alone werewolves, domovoi, leshii, and vodyanoi. Finally, the presentation of the spiritual material in this programme is clearly inclined towards a magical system both in terminology and in the plastic imagining of the spiritual world. In the section from the programme for the Russian Museum, we see both an emphasis on the figure of the witch

(ved’ma) or sorcerer (koldun’ya) and an interest in spiritual material that is functional in its interaction with people and the world (i.e. provoking love, preventing illness, and granting good luck on hunts). While not addressing shamanism in the programme, this 1902 Programme for

Gathering Ethnographic Materials for the Russian Museum articulates the perceived centrality of spiritual material in ethnographic museum collecting.

The extent of a systematic ethnographic collection was, however, not limited to spiritual material. In the Programme for Gathering Ethnographic Materials for the Russian Museum, published by the Ethnographic Department of the Russian Museum of Emperor Alexander III in

1902, the “true” nature of the ethnographic museum was explored: “In the ethnographic museum the foremost position is held by the person, the people, who created one particular object or another.”39 This simple statement draws out an important connection between the cultural subject and the created object—it is the person as a creative subject that is important; and yet, while a person or a people might stand at the forefront of the ethnographic museum, it is their

39 Programma dlia sobiraniia etnograficheskikh predmetov, 6.

173 cultural objects that will stand in for them. This phrase from the Russian Museum also eliminates a clear distinction between the person and the people, mirroring the movement between the shaman as specifically rooted in a local exotic and the shaman as a more trans-Siberian religious figure within the imperial context that reforms the local as a remote elsewhere that offers a more general shamanic figure.

4.4 Collecting Shamanism

4.4.1 Coats and Drums: Desired

The two most iconic objects associated with Siberian shamanism are the coat and the drum. These objects have a long history in the western iconographic repertoire of shamanic images tracing back to the engraving of the horned and clawed shaman in Nicolaes Witsen’s

Noord en Oost Tartarye from 1687.40 Shamans’ coats are also often at the centre of museum displays of Siberian shamanism which tend to favour the more elaborately decorated coats that are most spectacular and ornate in their presentation.41 The American Museum of Natural

History, the Musée du quai Branly, the Irkutsk Museum, the Museum of Ethnography in

Hamburg, and the Krasnoyarsk Regional Museum all prominently feature Siberian shamans’ coats and drums in their displays reflecting the persistence of these materials as the metonymic objects that stand in as parts for the whole of shamanism.

40 See chapter 2 for a more sustained discussion of this image. 41 See chapter 5 for a discussion of the shamans’ coats in the Kunstkamera’s late Imperial collections.

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Across Siberia, shamanic coats are quite distinctive in the regional and cultural variation in their construction and appearance, though they are often made of animal skins (either leather or fish intestine) and occasionally from silks and other textiles in the more southern regions near

Mongolia and China. Different regional styles are reflected in the shamanic coats that help to locate shamanic coats to particular cultural traditions. For example, the Sakha shamanic coats tend to have extensive ornamentation in metal, which reflects the close relationship between the shamans and the blacksmiths; the Nivkh shamans, an Indigenous population living predominantly on Sakhalin Island and along the lower Amur River, had painted gut-skin coats; and the Chukchi had relatively undecorated reindeer hide shamanic coats, and would sometimes perform naked or partially naked during their rituals.42 A shaman’s drum, or tambourine (as it is often called in Russian, though rarely in English), was often used during ritual though drums were used more broadly in many Siberian Indigenous musical traditions and are not limited to shamanic performance. The drums are often decorated with paintings, textiles, metal ornaments, and leather straps, these additions are interpreted, like drums themselves, as complex symbols that have multiple interpretations embedded in both personal and local traditions.43

42 Bogoras, The Chukchee; Gundolf Krüger, Brigitta Hauser-Schäublin, and Gerry Barton, eds., Siberia and Russian America: Culture and Art from the 1700s, the Asch Collection, Göttingen Sibirien Und Russisch-Amerika: Kultur Und Kunst Des 18. Jahrhunderts, Die Sammlung von Asch, Göttingen (New York: Prestel, 2007); V. M. Gorbacheva, Marina Federova, and Marine Le Berre-Semenov, The Peoples of the Great North: Art and Civilisation of Siberia (New York: Parkstone Press, 2000); William W. Fitzhugh, Aron Crowell, and National Museum of Natural History (U.S.), eds., Crossroads of Continents: Cultures of Siberia and Alaska (Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988); Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, ed., Shamanic Worlds: Rituals and Lore of Siberia and Central Asia (Armonk, NY: North Castle Books, 1997); Jill Oakes, Spirit of Siberia: Traditional Native Life, Clothing, and Footwear (Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998). 43 Jouko Keski-Säntti et al., “The Drum as Map: Western Knowledge Systems and Northern Indigenous Map Making,” Imago Mundi 55 (2003): 120–25; Marilyn Walker, “Music as Knowledge in Shamanism and Other Healing Traditions of Siberia,” Arctic Anthropology 40, no. 2 (2003): 40–48; Galina Lindquist, “Loyalty and Command: Shamans, Lamas, and Spirits in a Siberian Ritual,” Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice 52, no. 1 (2008): 111–126.

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There has been a substantial body of academic work on the interpretation of the different designs and ornamentations of the shamans’ coat and drum that attempt to frame these in both universal and culturally specific repertoires of images. Eliade, in Shamanism: Archaic

Techniques of Ecstasy goes so far as to state, “The shaman’s costume itself constitutes a religious hierophany and cosmology; it discloses not only a sacred presence, but also cosmic symbols and metaphysical itineraries. Properly studied, it reveals the system of shamanism as clearly as do the shamanic myths and techniques.”44 While this is an extensive claim, various aspects of the individual shaman’s practice and the system of shamanism more broadly are represented through different aspects of the shaman’s coat. On some Sakha shamans’ coats the large metal circle with a hole is the earth left behind when the shaman travels to other worlds and the metal lines on the arms are the bones of bird wings.45

The pairing of the shaman’s coat and drum as directly associated objects is also seen, for example, in the 1883 Program for the Gathering of Ethnographic Materials for the Eastern

Siberian Division of the Imperial Russian Geographic Society where the entry reads “The costume of shamans: the hat, the fur coat, with decorations, staff, and drum.”46 Here these objects are explicitly connected as forming the costume of the shaman with the drum as part of the dress and not as a separate instrument or religious technology used by shamans in ritual contexts. In other programmes, the objects become separated into different categories. A. I.

Popov, for example, requests these two categories in his 1887 Programme for the Gathering of

44 Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 145. 45 Shamanskii kostium iz sobiraniia Irkutskogo oblastnogo kraevedcheskogo muzeia. (Irkutsk: Art izdat, 2004): 51; 21. 46 N. N. Agapitov, “Opyt programmy dlia izucheniia verovanii inorodtsev Sibiri (tak nazivaemogo shamanstva” Izvestiia Vostochno-Sibirskogo Otdela Imperatorskogo russkogo geograficheskogo obshchestva XIV, no. 4-5 (1884), 4.

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Objects for the Museum, Proposed to be Constructed by the Yakutsk Regional Statistical

Committee. He writes,

10) Apparel. a) General clothing of indigenous production (male, female, girls, and children), with an attached piece of the rough material from which it is made. b) Special clothing, by the nationalities (Yakut, Chukchi, Lamut, etc.).

c) Footwear for summer and winter. d) Costumes for dances, games, and holidays. e) Shamanic costumes.47

20) Samples of Folk Musical Instruments and of instruments used in religious (religioznyy) rituals by shamans.48

These are the only two references to shamanism in Popov’s programme that retain the link between them. Both the drum and coat are connected specifically with the shamans themselves, rather than pointing outward towards a shamanic community or tradition more broadly, as seen in the ethnographic information collection programmes. Both objects also appear as subcategories within the more general ones of apparel and musical instruments. Shamanism is not connected here to the shamans themselves in the categories of collection.

4.4.2 Coats and Drums: Collected

On September 25, 1890 a priest named Vinokurov living in Yakutsk wrote to the Eastern-

Siberian Department of the Geographic Society to offer them a Tungus shaman’s coat that he had purchased and wanted to donate to the Irkutsk museum. The Priest Vinokurov writes,

Having purchased this year from the Tungus a costume of a Tungus shamaness, sewn from hide, plated/woven with velvet from hide and hung with pendants representing people, fish, and animals (the costume consists of an upper clothing in the form of a short

47 Ibid., 5. 48 Ibid., 7.

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coat with sleeves, an apron, a belt, hat, copper mask and tambourine) I would like to send it as a gift to the Museum in Irkutsk, if the costume is of interest for the museum, I ask that you inform me so that I may send it to the museum.49

This coat and its associated drum were, in fact, sent to the Irkutsk Museum and are currently part of their permanent collection. The coat itself is a long robe with fringe hanging from the waist and the sleeves with steel and copper water birds and figures decorating the front piece, at the back of the coat is a shoulder piece with deer antlers, and various pendants depicting a bird, humans, and fish. The Irkutsk Museum’s catalogue of their shaman costumes explains that these decorative elements speak to the connection with water that this particular shaman maintained.50

In the account contained in the letter, there is a clear articulation that the coat was acquired through purchase from the ‘Tungus’, which most likely refers either to the Evenki or Evens who are the larger Tungusic groups in the Yakutsk region. Despite paying for the coat, Vinokurov does not appear to request payment in this letter, suggesting the objects were donated as a gift.51

In this letter, it is also noteworthy that Vinokurov uses the feminine form of the term shaman

(shamanka) indicating the gender, which is rarely noted in the documents despite the fact that females were also shamans within many Siberian communities. Finally, there is an unanswered question as to why Vinokurov wanted to send the coat to Irkutsk and not the Yakutsk museum which was also collecting materials and had also requested shamans’ coats as part of their stated collection programme. This is, perhaps, suggestive of the higher status of the Irkutsk museum

49 SAIO F. 293 Op. 1 Ed. Xp. 68 50 Shamanskie kostiumy iz kolektsii Irkytskogo oblastnogo kraevedcheskogo Muzeia, 26-27. 51 Julia Fein notes that museums struggled to be able to purchase items from the public, often peasants, and she discusses the Minusinsk Museum, which maintained a policy wherein they would list their prices publicly and would pay over the market value to encourage sellers to keep the objects local (Fein, “Cultural Curators and Provincial Publics,” 97).

178 that had a new museum building managed by the Geographical Society and a larger community of researchers than the Yakutsk Museum that was in a shop space in the gostinyi dvor.

In another account of a priest collection in Yakutsk there is strange record of a failed acquisition of a Sakha shaman’s coat. In the ‘Yakutian Expedition’ notes collected by N. A.

Vitashevskii, an exile to Siberia and researcher of Yakut language and ethnography who worked at the museum in a curatorial capacity, a story is recounted “in the words of the Priest Innokentii

Neustroev on May 2nd, 1894.”52 This story is an account of the Yakutian shaman Kÿbä Yola:

The famous shaman of the district, Kÿbä Yola53 (from Etekhtvie), was summoned a few years ago to Alexander Neustroev in Oimyakon, who was tormented by the abaasy54 (devils) wanting to force him to become a shaman. Neustroev said with fury to Kÿbä Yola apparently after the shamanic event: ‘you are not a real shaman, abandon this occupation.’ Returning from Oimyakon, Kÿbä Yola got his cloths (his shamanic ones) and tambourine and hung them on the tree to dry. Suddenly the rain struck, and everyone set off in a hurry, because there, due to the stony soil, the streams and rivulets quickly fill with water from the rains and block the way sometimes for a whole week. Kÿbä Yola forgot his shamanistic regalia in the tree and remembered it when the travellers had crossed the river, which had already blocked the way of their return. But Kÿbä Yola didn’t worry about his clothes: He decided that Aleksandar Neustroev had done all this, and what’s more, intentionally, and that he needed, in fact, to abandon his craft. He was left without clothes and without a tambourine— he passed on this whole story to the narrator, when the latter asked him for his shaman clothes for the Yakutsk Museum. It is doubtful that all this would have been made up by Kÿbä Yola, since the narrator immediately indicated another shaman (of Teleisk), from whom one could get the clothes and tambourine (such is the confidence the priest-narrator enjoys among the Yakuts—this outstanding personality among the urban inhabitants!) Alas, this man fell victim to the passion for wine—a common fate of all prominent Russian people dissatisfied with reality! As for the observation, that Kÿbä Yola had only recently performed a shamanic act, the narrator received this answer from him that he had borrowed clothes to do this. Kÿbä Yola consistently refused to show the narrator his actions under the pretext that he did not have his own clothes, and without them it would not be a real act. 55

52 IRA. F. 293 Op. 1 Ed. Xp. 476. L. 513. 53 Note that Kÿbä Yola’s name is written in Sakha and not Russian. 54 The abaasy are one-eyed and one-legged evil beings that live in the underworld. They are discussed in the Yakutian epic Olonkho. The text translated here provides both the Sakha word and a Russian gloss as devils. 55 IRA. F. 293 Op. 1 Ed. Xp. 476. L. 513-513op. Parenthetical comments in original.

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This story presents a narrative account of a failed attempt at acquiring shamanic regalia for the

Yakutsk Museum, and draws the reader into the uncomfortable space wherein museum acquisition and practices of collection are clearly grounded in the removal of cultural material from another community. For the Yakutsk museum to get Kÿbä Yola’s shamanic costume, it would have to be taken from him and he would, according to this account, no longer be able to perform real shamanic acts.

In one reading of this story, the account presents a rather tragic account of how Kÿbä

Yola forgot his wet shamanic clothing and drum after a failed shamanic healing ritual. Kÿbä

Yola suggests that the loss of his clothing was caused by supernatural intervention by Aleksandar

Neustroev, who was suffering from the shamanic calling. The emphasis on his inability to get to these items implies that Kÿbä Yola wanted his things back but was simply unable to get them perhaps due to the interventions of a different not-quite shaman. While Kÿbä Yola initially rejected his shamanic craft when he abandoned his clothing—“…he no longer cared about his clothes: He decided that…he needed to abandon his craft”—it appears by the end of the account that he was attempting to continue his practice in the clothing of another shaman, though it appears rather ambiguous whether this would constitute a real shamanic act in the borrowed clothes.56 In this version of the story, Kÿbä Yola appears as a victim of bad luck, supernatural trickery, and lost shamanic abilities, and the Yakutsk Museum’s failed acquisition of his shamanic costume as a potential source of their collections is grounded in Kÿbä Yola’s loss of these items in his own life.

56 IRA. F. 293 Op. 1 Ed. Xp. 476. L. 513.

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A different reading of this story, however, could be done if we accept Kÿbä Yola as an self-preservationist narrator. During this time in the city of Yakutsk the police and the clergy were burning shamans’ coats.57 With this in mind, Kÿbä Yola’s elaborate and supernatural account of how he lost his coat and drum could seem like a charade to avoid having his things taken by the priest. This interpretation seems hinted at in the narrators’ notes at the end that relay that Kÿbä Yola was still practicing despite stating that he could not without his proper equipment, and that he refused to allow this priest to witness the rituals in the borrowed clothing

“…under the pretext that he did not have his own clothes.”58 In this reading Kÿbä Yola appears as a more active figure, resisting the authority of the priest and the loss of his shamanic costume.

While Kÿbä Yola’s coat and drum did not enter into the museum collections, five other shamanic costumes, three from Evenki and two from Sakha shamans, were in the collection by

1894, perhaps one of them having belonged to the shaman from Teleisk who Kÿbä Yola said would be willing to sell his clothes.59 Both the Yakutsk and the Irkutsk museum managed to acquire shamanic coats and drums during this period and maintained displays of them as part of their collections of local ethnographic materials. In the ethnographic information programmes and the broader shamanic scholarship of the period there is an awareness of the symbolic richness and the sacredness of these items. Priklonsky noted in “Shamanism Amongst the Yakut” that because of how expensive and difficult it is to produce shaman’s coats, not all shamans have a costume and that there are few left in Yakutsk due to the poverty of the shamans and the

57 V. L. Priklonsky, “O Shamanstvo u Iakutov” Izvestiia Vostochno-Sibirskogo Otdela Imperatorskogo russkogo geograficheskogo obshchestva XVII, no. 1-2 (1886): 99-100. 58 IRA. F. 293 Op. 1 Ed. Xp. 476. L. 513. 59 Stefanovich, Ia. “Na Shamanstve” Zemlevedenie 1-2 (1897): 29-47. Cited in A. Znamenski, Shamanism in Siberia: Russian Records of Indigenous Spirituality (Norwell: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003).

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Church’s destruction of the ones they had been able to acquire.60 Priklonsky explains that the coats are the work of skilled blacksmiths, and would be valuable pieces both as ritual garments and as goods within an economic market. He expands on the reasons for both their scarcity and their value, writing: “the shamanic costume is quite expensive since all its ornamentations must be forged from iron and then engraved; the quality, size, and shape of all the costume’s decoration must be met with meticulous precision, set by time and custom. Not every blacksmith can forge all of the decorations for the costume, nor is willing to take on this work for even 40 roubles.”61 For museums to have multiple examples of these coats would have been a valuable collection and the intricacy of the pieces would have made an intriguing display.

Shamans’ coats in museum collections became featured on the promotional postcards produced by museums that circulated in late imperial Russia suggesting that these were draws for the public to visit the museums. The images of the coats on these postcards sit in the liminal space of the local exotic: without exposition on the postcard the image must be recognizable to the public but also intriguing enough to draw in visitors.62 At the centre of the object collection, the ethnographic displays, and the museum postcards were the objects associated with shamans themselves, their ritual costumes displayed on mannequins, disconnected from shamanism as a larger tradition and their communities as a broader cultural context.

60 V. L. Priklonsky, “O Shamanstve u Iakutov” Izvestiia Vostochno-Sibirskogo Otdela Imperatorskogo russkogo geograficheskogo obshchestva XVII, no. 1-2 (1886): 99-100. 61 Ibid., 99. 62 These postcards are styled in a similar manner to the genre of the “ethnographic type” photograph discussed in Ekaterina Emeliantseva’s “Introduction: The Sacred Before the Camera: Religious Representation and the Medium of Photography in Late Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union.” In this article she addresses the formal aspects of ethnographic type photography in Russia and the ways in which the staging of objects and background landscapes were used as visual exposition to support the ethnographic subject on display. While the postcards are not ethnographic type photographs, partially because the coats are mounted on mannequins and partially because of the lack of background landscape, they are posed and framed like many of these ethnographic type photographs from the period.

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4.4.3 Accessories of the Cult: Desired

Where shamanism as a larger category enters into the museum collection programmes is through the category ‘accessories of the cult.’ This category may be inclusive of shamanic costumes and drums, but also includes items variously termed idols, fetishes, amulets, and images. Often these items would have been called ongon (in Buryat and Mongolian) or tyus (in

Turko-Siberian languages).63 An ongon (or tyus) is a category of shamanic material culture that references both a vessel and a spirit that inhabits it. Caroline Humphrey, a scholar of Mongolian shamanism, explains,

The word ongon (literally ‘vessel’) refers to both the spirit itself and to the material container or amulet the spirit resides in (or can be called into). Among Buryats of the early twentieth century, ongon in this latter sense were made of cloth, ribbons, hair, beads, bits of wood, feathers, buttons, animal pelts, felt, etc. and they usually included small human figures cut out of tin or painted on the cloth… It seems that people use what materials they have to hand in order to provide containers for each kind of ongon spirit. These spirits are essentially tragic—human beings (men and women, the aged and children, and especially shamans) who either led extraordinary lives or died in some abnormal, misfortunate way and consequently tend to be dissatisfied and vengeful after death as ongons for their groups of people… On the other hand, there are the shamans’ ongons, named, narrativised and familiar, which have to be cared for constantly. If given offerings and ritual blandishments they can bring fertility, good health, and other benefits; if they are neglected they can also wreak misfortune and take threatening, insidious forms.64

While the ongons are, in some cases, the spirits of shamans, they are multifarious in nature, containing various other types of spirits not limited to shamans and interacting with different

63 See chapter 5 for a discussion of tyus in the Kunstkamera’s permanent collection. 64 Caroline Humphrey, “Inside and Outside the Mirror: Mongolian Shamans’ Mirrors as Instruments of Perspectivism,” Inner Asia 9, no. 2 (January 1, 2007), 183.

183 personal and community concerns such as healing, fertility, hunting, and objects of veneration.65

The ongons and other materials that fall under the subcategory ‘Accessories of the cult’ are particular examples of the broader shamanic tradition that extends beyond the shaman and into the community at large. While related to shamanism through the broader category of the cult, these objects make important interjections into the representation of shamanism as extending beyond the isolated and atomised figure of the shaman. It is, however, relevant to note that they are, within the museum collection documents, not referred to explicitly as being shamanic, reinforcing the image of shamanism as being that which is associated with the shamans themselves—their coats, drums, staves, masks, etc.—and the cult as forming the more general community landscape in which this religious figure is located.

The breadth of the objects contained within the category ‘accessories of the cult’ is reflected in the collection programmes that present lists of different materials from which the items could be made. For example, in the 1883 VSORGO programme the author writes:

XIII) ACCESSORIES OF THE CULT. 1) Idols from metal, wood, stone, material with drawings, pelts of animals hung like in its dwelling, as well as in other various natural forms. 2) The costume of shamans: the hat, the fur coat, with decorations, staff, and drum 3) Images from amulets, worn on the neck for health or for luck. 4) Images from wood and stone, which possess medicinal, in folk belief, power.66

Here the shamanic costume is part of the accessories of the cult together with the amulets, idols, and images. Popov, in his later programme for the Yakutsk museum, adapts this list and

65 See Pedersen, Not Quite Shamans, 158-159 for a discussion of hunters’ ongons and the Irkutsk Regional Studies Museum, Dikhi predkoe v zbukakh bybna, 3-4 for a more general discussion on ongons. 66 “Programma dlia sobiraniia etnograficheskikh predmetov dlia muzeia Vostochno Sibirskogo Otdela Imperatorskogo Russkogo Geograficheskogo Obshchestva” Izvestiia Vostochno-Sibirskogo Otdela imperatorskogo russkogo geograficheskogo obshchestva XIV, no. 1-2 (1883), 4.

184 separates the shamanic coats and drums out of this category and lists these objects as their own category:

17) Accessories of the Cult a.) Idols from metal, wood, stone, bone, pelts of animals hung like in its dwelling, as well as in other various natural forms. b.) Images from amulets, worn on the neck for health or for luck (talisman) c.) Images from wood and stone, which possess medicinal, in folk belief, power, or which have meaning of sacred objects.67

For Popov, however, the cult is no longer explicitly connected to shamanism and it is only through its connection to the 1883 VSORGO programme that it can be clearly established as referencing shamanic materials. The category of the cult becomes a term used to identify the larger shamanic tradition in which the shamans are located, with the Russian term shaman and its related forms shamantsvo, shamanskii, etc. being used specifically in reference to the shaman as an individual.68

The term cult (kult in Russian) is a term debated in religious studies scholarship; there is a widespread pejorative or archaic connotation to the term, which often undermines the perceived veracity or integrity of the religious community and its continued vitality. Critically, it is not a neutral term, which makes it problematic in translation.69 The negative connotations of the term are often associated with its usage for describing new religious movements, and not the term in its reference to specific forms of worship in antiquity, such as the cult of Dionysus, or to

67 Ibid., 6. 68 See Chapter 5 for an examination of this within the context of the Kunstkamera’s permanent collection 69 Eugene V. Gallagher, The New Religious Movements Experience in America, The American Religious Experience (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2004); Eugene V. Gallagher, “‘Cults’ and ‘New Religious Movements,’” History of Religions 47, no. 2/3 (2007): 205–20; Eileen Barker, The Making of a Moonie: Choice or Brainwashing? (New York: Blackwell, 1984); James D. Tabor and Eugene V. Gallagher, Why Waco? Cults and the Battle for Religious Freedom in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Lorne L. Dawson, Comprehending Cults: The Sociology of New Religious Movements (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

185 differentiate between a sect and an unrecognised group.70 The cult in the context of late imperial

Russian ethnography is connected with religious, or spiritual, matters; even in the Popov programme we can see sacred (svyashchennyy) being used to describe objects related to the cult.

Further, the classification of the cult under ethnography suggests that this was not perceived as a cult of antiquity, but rather a term used for contemporary and active communities.

More broadly in museum texts from the late imperial era, the term cult appears as a general comparative term used for communities around the world, unlike shamanism, which appears as a more restrictive term localised to Asian Russia and North America. Additionally, it generally appears as a term to designate а specific subject of worship rather than a broad religious system, such as the ‘cult of the ancestors’ in China71 and the ‘cult of the dead’ in

Sumatra.72 Critically, however, it is perceived as less developed than a religious system. In describing Indonesian beliefs, a 1904 Guidebook for the Ethnographic Museum of the Imperial

Academy of Science for Anthropology and Ethnography states, “There, where there was no longer Brahmanism, Buddhism, or Islam, religion is reduced to the worship of spirits in which a cult of ancestors plays the principle role.”73 The Russian ethnographic usage of cult appears to reference an active religious tradition that is understood as primitive and specifically tied to a subject (ancestors, the dead, shamans, the bear, etc.). Further, the separation of the shaman and the cult reinforces the image of the shaman as disassociated from a religious tradition of

70 Gallagher, “‘Cults’ and ‘New Religious Movements,’” 212. 71 Putevoditel’ po muzeiu imperatorskoi akademii nauk” antropologii i etnografii. (St. Petersburg: 1904): 110. 72 Ibid., 146. 73 Ibid., 137.

186 shamanism—the shaman is a ritual figure, but the community is part of a bear cult or a cult of inau (shaved staves used in Ainu religious practices) not shamanism.74

4.4.4 Accessories of the Cult: Collected

The Irkutsk museum maintains a large collection of ongon and often provides specific information on the type of spirit they are associated with. They date their collection of ongons principally to the end of the nineteenth century with the collection principally coming from those pieces gathered by the Buryat scholars M. N. Khangalov and N. N. Agapitov.75 The Jesup

Expedition also brought ongon back to the American Museum of Natural History and provided some to the Irkutsk Museum as well. A carved bear from the Nivkha used to help heal rheumatism which was collected by Berthold Laufer in 1900 is currently on display at the

American Museum of Natural History, and is identified only as “charm” in the catalogue.76

Dmitiri Klements acquired various shamanic materials for the Irkutsk museum, and in his letter from the 12th of August, 1890 states that during his travel in the Trans-Baikal region he “… reserved some shamanic images and several items belonging to the shamanic cult that our museum lacks. The cost of these reserved items is 25 roubles silver. Since these articles mentioned can greatly increase our museum collections… I request that you do not decline me in

74 In the 1891 and 1904 Guidebooks to the Kunstkamera, the ‘cult of the staves of shaved wood’ is the name given to the religious traditions of the Ainu and the cult of the bear is ascribed widely to Northern Siberian communities. For the Ainu entry see: Putevoditel’ po muzeiu imperatorskoi akademii nauk” antropologii i etnografii. (St. Petersburg: 1904), 42; for the Cult of the Bear see: Putevoditel’ po muzeiu imperatorskoi akademii nauk” antropologii i etnografii (St. Petersburg: 1891), 10.) 75 Irkustk Regional Studies Musuem, Dukhi predkov v Zbykakh bubna, (Irkutsk: Artizdat, N.D.): 3. 76 American Museum of Natural History Collections Database: Division of Anthropology (Charm no. 70/702 ; accessed February 16, 2019), https://anthro.amnh.org/collections.

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[illegible] the requested 25 roubles for the payment of this order.”77 The price of 25 roubles for several images associated with the ‘shamanic cult’ is substantially less than the cost suggested by

Priklonskii for the shaman’s coat. These were not items featured in promotional postcards for the museums, but they were part of the broader context of shamanism within the collections and were included in both the collection programmes and in the displays at museums.78

Unlike the shaman’s coats and drums, these ongon had less immediate impact as exotic spectacles in the local collections. They require more contextual support to be recognizable as specifically related to shamanism, or even as ‘spiritual material’ in the terms of the Russian

Museum’s programme. The shaman, and the associated objects that formed the visual and material repertoire, were at once familiar and unfamiliar within Russian visual and material cultural history. As examples of local inorodtsy religious life, the shaman was a figure that circulated in Russia and in local Russian communities as part of the local cultural landscape.

However, these images were also exotic as ethnographic specimens of the spiritual life of non-

Russians and conformed to an image of the shaman that drew from a long visual and material history of the shaman as an alien magician that was brought into the Russian court, museums, literature, and geography as exotic and foreign tricksters.

77 SAIO F.293 Op. 1 Ed. Xp 68 L. 52-52op. 78 See Chapter 5 for a discussion of the tyus in the Kunstkamera’s 1904 exhibition on shamanism.

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4.5 Conclusion

The practices of ethnographic collection for museums in late imperial Russia relied upon systems of classification and categorisation. Objects sent to the museum were expected to arrive enumerated and identified; an object without proper documentation would not be accepted as an ethnographic sample. In the museums’ object collection programmes and in visual print media, the materiality of Siberian shamanism centred on the coats and drums of the shaman as the iconic objects. The ongon and the accessories of the cult became the stand-in for the larger shamanic tradition. The large scope of the ethnographic information programmes, which included questions about animals, stories, the stars, medicine, and festivals are not seen amongst the desired objects in the collection programmes. The solidification of the repertoire of objects that were able to serve as metonyms for shamanism as a larger cultural practice and religious tradition limited the collections to three categories: the coat, the drum, and the ongon.

Throughout these documents there was a move towards limiting the identifier of shamanic to material associated with the shaman as an individual (such as the shamans’ coats, drums, and staves) with cult (kult) serving as a more generic category for objects associated with lay shamanic communities (such as amulet, or pictorial and figurative depictions of deities or spirits). These categories inform how the object was conceptualised and are not neutral or inherent to the material itself. This distinction between items classified as shamanic and those classified as cult continues to be seen in the ethnographic displays, as will be discussed in the coming chapter. This localising of shamanism in the figure of the shaman leaves out the lay population within shamanic communities and renders as generically cultic the cultural practices such as festivals, stories, medicinal knowledge, cosmological systems, and other aspects of shamanism we saw in the ethnographic information collection material from the previous

189 chapter. In the next chapter, these three categories of object are seen in the permanent collection of the Kunstkamera, and their increasing general categorization becomes mobilized as a collective identity that served to provide a unifying trans-Siberian Indigenous culture.

5 Chapter Five: The Impermanent Collection of Satiated Desire

5.1 Introduction

This chapter centres on the Museum of the Academy of Science for Anthropology and

Ethnography (the Kunstkamera) in St. Petersburg as the flagship ethnographic museum of the late imperial era. Unlike the prior two chapters, which focused on the anticipatory moment of desire articulated through the collection programmes, this final chapter moves to a different moment in the chronology of collection during with objects have been acquired and have become part of museum collections. While the collection programmes name and systematize shamanism within their lists, these categorizations do not remain stable within the museum. This chapter continues to focus on the public classifications that were intended to circulated beyond the professional community of the museums, and that were expected to be legible to a general public. Therefore, rather than addressing the permanent collection as a whole, I focus instead on the public galleries and the naming systems and organization of the objects employed by the museum through a series of guidebooks produced by the Academy of Science for visitors.

The Kunstkamera was not unique in the production of such guidebooks, which were common for European Museums throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Carol Paul notes that these guidebooks were not illustrated and were not intended to function as a ‘virtual museum’ by providing a two dimensional presentation of the collection (as she suggests catalogues were able

190 191 to do).1 Unlike a catalogue that could offer documentation of the museum’s collection without reference to the physical space of the galleries themselves, the guidebooks offer a close-up view for the visitor to, quite literally, carry the volume through the museum as a printed docent. The early 19th century was a renaissance for the guidebook as a genre. Julie A. Buckler notes that this was the time when John Murray, Karl Baedeker, and Thomas Cook’s Tours all began producing guidebooks.2 Buckler suggests that guidebooks to the city of St. Petersburg also began at this time, citing Fedor Shreder’s Noveishii putevoditel’ po Sankt-peterburgu from 1820, and Pavel

Svin’in’s multiple volume Dostopamiantnosti Sankt-Peterburga i ego okrestnostei from 1816-

1828.3 The latter of these she describes as aimed more towards “armchair travelling” than actual touring of the city, similar to the image of the catalogue as the virtual museum.4 However, this chapter is not addressing these guidebooks in order to reconstruct the visitor’s experience within the galleries, nor the curatorial practices; rather, these guidebooks offer an opportunity to explore the names and categories used to identify and systematize Siberian materials.

The chapter begins by first addressing the Kunstkamera within the networks of late imperial Russian museums, and then turns to address the idea of the permanent collection and the systems of classification that structure the lives of objects in the museum. Within a chronology of collection, the accessioning of materials by museums follows the stage of anticipatory desire of the collection programmes. By examining the permanent collection through a series of guidebooks for visitors, the second part of the chapter provides a diachronic analysis of the

1 Carole Paul, ed., The First Modern Museums of Art: The Birth of an Institution in 18th- and Early-19th-Century Europe (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2012), xvii. 2 Julie A. Buckler, Mapping St. Petersburg: Imperial Text and Cityshape (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 90. 3 Buckler, Mapping St. Petersburg, 92. 4 Buckler, Mapping St. Petersburg, 93.

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Siberian collection at the Kunstkamera between 1891 and 1904. Through this analysis of the collection, I contrast the Kunstkamera’s presentation of shamanism with that of the local

Siberian museums. At the Kunstkamera, the shaman is once again abstracted from the larger shamanic tradition that the local studies were able to articulate through their deeply contextualized articulation of shamanism. The shaman as an individual figure is presented as common across all of Siberia and as part of an exotically remote and foreign space isolated form larger shamanic lay communities or cultural systems.

The repertoire of shamanic museum objects established through the object collection practices of late imperial museums and academic societies drew upon a longer tradition of visual and material records of shamanism within European society that focused on the shaman as an individual identifiable by his costume and his drum.5 While the local ethnographic study of shamanism in this period provided a broader perspective on shamanism that expanded beyond the shaman as an individual, this was often not represented within the object collection record in this period of Russian ethnographic museology. The stories of the first blacksmith learning to weld or the bat rejecting the rule of both the lion and the eagle were part of shamanism in the local ethnographic collection programmes, but bats and blacksmithing became separated from shamanism once specimens of ironworking and zoology were requested for museum collections.

Museums divide and categorize materials, placing them into literal and metaphorical boxes in galleries and in storage. At the Kunstkamera this led to a loss of the local within the imperial projection of Siberian shamanism and an emphasizing of the exotic that articulated the shamanic

5 While there were female and gender non-binary shamans, it was most often male shamans who were depicted and discussed within the early European scholarship and visual print media, thus I have opted to use the male pronouns in characterizing this image of the shaman that emerged in western scholarship since the seventeenth century.

193 religious traditions of Siberia as non-Russian, primitive, and limited to the individual figure of the shaman without the contextualization of the local traditions.

5.2 A Museum of the Imperial Centre

The Kunstkamera was established in 1714 by Peter the Great in the new imperial capital of St. Petersburg and became the first museum in Russia.6 This museum was established as an imperial cabinet of curiosities, but was soon transferred to the Academy of Science in 1724 and transformed into a public scientific museum. While the Kunstkamera was a fixture in the St.

Petersburg landscape since its establishment on the banks of the Neva, it was the late imperial period that was regarded by the museum as its “golden age.” This was when the collection expanded dramatically and numerous expeditions were funded by the museum to facilitate this growth.7 The ethnographic collections were international in scope, with materials from North

America, East Asia, Africa, the Pacific Islands, etc. The museum also maintained a substantial collection of Siberian ethnographic materials; while this was a domestic collection, these objects were foreign within the European Russian context of St. Petersburg and the museum was not part of the local museum system seen in Siberia. During the earlier years of late imperial era, the

Siberian collection was classified within the Russian ethnographic collection which mostly contained materials of other ethnically non-Russian populations of the empire in Central Asia,

6 A part of this chapter was presented at the “Asia in the Russian Imagination” conference at University of Utah on March 23rd, 2017, and will be appearing in an upcoming volume of Sibirica: Interdisciplinary Journal of Siberian Studies. I would like to thank the conference participants for their feedback on this material. 7 “Istoria Kunstkamery,” Kunstkamera Museum, accessed October 2, 2018, http://www.kunstkamera.ru/exposition/kunst_hist/.

194 parts of European Russia, and the Caucuses and by 1904 the Siberian collection would be reclassified as Asian ethnography. 8

The Siberian collection at the Kunstkamera benefited from the infrastructures of the empire that constructed St. Petersburg as a metropole. The Academy of Science and the Imperial

Geographical Society maintained their central bureaucratic institutions in St. Petersburg, from which they oversaw expeditions, as well as educational and cultural institutions. The local networks throughout Siberia were increasingly supporting regional museums, scientific societies, and academic researchers, but the imperial centre remained in European Russia. As Nikolai

Vakhtin explains, remoteness is not a geographic condition, but an infrastructural question wherein certain areas are “not properly linked to the dominant zone.”9 In Siberia, museums, scholars, and collectors increasingly were developing an internal network; nevertheless, these

Siberian networks were not independent from the imperial and colonial infrastructures that supported the gathering and centralizing of intellectual capital within the metropole. The work of the scholars, collectors, and museum professionals, many of whom were in Siberia in exile, returned to the capitals as ethnographies, collection programmes, and acquired objects travelling back to the centre along roads and railways built by prisoners and fellow exiles.

8 Notably, the 1891 Guidebook does list one display of Russian peasant materials, but these were removed by 1898 and do not reappear within the late imperial guidebook’s account of the permanent collection. See section on the 1891 Guidebook for more details of this Russian material. Putevoditel’ po muzeiu imperatorskoi akademii nauk” antropologii i etnografii (St. Petersburg: 1891), 6; Putevoditel’ po muzeiu imperatorskoi akademii nauk” antropologii i etnografii (St. Petersburg: 1904), 20. 9 Edwin Ardener, “Remote Areas: Some Theoretical Considerations” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2, no. 1 (2012): 532 quoted in Nikolai Vakhtin, “Mobility and Infrastructure in the Russia Arctic Das Sein Bestimmt Das Bewusstsein,” Sibirica 16, no. 3 (Winter 2017), 7.

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5.2.1 The Siberian Collection in St. Petersburg: An Imperial Projection

The Siberian collection at the Kunstkamera did not document a local space, but rather a domestic one that reached across the territory of the Russia Empire. If the Siberian museums traded in a local exotic grounded in the regional Indigenous cultural and religious traditions, the

Kunstkamera exhibited a contiguous imperial exotic that emphasized the spread of Russian territory eastward to the Pacific Ocean. The Kunstkamera’s Siberian collection was not contextualized within local spaces of particularized Siberian regions, cultures, linguistic communities, or religious traditions. The trans-Siberian scope of the Kunstkamera’s collection relied upon general systems of classification that made reference to the Sakha, Ainu, Buryat, and

Yukaghir collections. This allowed for a sense of consistent Siberian identity, a familiarity with the categories of analysis that did not require the knowledge of specific languages, geographies, or traditions.

This geographical proximity of Siberia, as an imperial territory, was expressed through the not-fully-unfamiliar imagining of Siberia. As Nathanial Knight writes, “Russia was an empire in a world of imperialism. But it was a peculiar empire. Set apart by its vast territorial expanse and human diversity from the continental dynastic empires to which it was closest akin politically, Russia also differed intrinsically from the maritime colonial empires of Western

Europe in the patterns, motives and consequences of its expansion.”10 Knight, and other scholars of Russian imperialism, articulates the uniqueness of Russian colonialism, but Knight explains that the Russian Empire still employed the colonialist rhetoric of orientalism, primitivism, and

10 Knight, “Was Russia Its Own Orient?: Reflections on the Contributions of Etkind and Schimmelpenninck to the Debate on Orientalism,” 299.

196 ethno-hierarchy that privileged the European centre.11 David Schimmelpenninck maintains that

Russia’s own tenuous position as European meant that Russia itself was orientalised leading to a more ambivalent perspective of the non-Russian populations.12 Alexander Etkind challenges this characterisation of Russian colonial politics by arguing that, regardless of the positioning of

Russia vis-à-vis Europe, the politics of cultural distancing that were maintained between the

Russians and the non-Russians in the empire served to construct an hierarchical relationship that often rests at the heart of colonial politics.13

Russian imperialism has, in many ways, benefited from what Bruce Robbins calls the

“Blue Water principle” in which colonialism was characterized as occurring across water, making Russian and Chinese imperial expansion simply nation building.14 The overland nature of the Russian Empire has allowed it to be something other than the model of European colonialism in South Asia, West Africa, or North America. Edward Said, explaining his decision not to address Russia in Culture and Imperialism, wrote:

These omissions [Russian, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, etc.], however, are not at all meant to suggest that Russia’s domination over Central Asia and Eastern Europe, Istanbul’s rule over the Arab world…. have been either benign (and hence approved of) or any less imperialist. What I am saying about the British, France, and American imperial experience is that it has a unique coherence and a special cultural centrality.15

This centrality has to do with the competitive nature of imperialism between Britain and France

11 Ibid. 12 David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, Russian Orientalism. 13 Aleksandr Etkind, Internal Colonization; Knight, “Was Russia Its Own Orient?,” 299. 14 Bruce Robbins, “Blue Water. A Thesis,” RIAS 8, no. 1 (2015): 48. 15 Said, Culture and Imperialism, xxii.

197 that were both attempting to stake the claim at being “bigger, grander, [and] more imposing” as empires in the world, with America emerging in the latter half of the twentieth century after the end of British and French colonial governance.16 The water-space separating the colonizer and the colonized becomes, for Said, a physical demarcation of separation that allowed for greater projections of distance. Said wrote: “overseas rule—jumping beyond adjacent territories to very distant lands—has a privileged status in these cultures. This idea has a lot to do with projections, whether in fiction or geography or art, and it acquires a continuous presence through actual expansion, administration, investment, and commitment…”17 For Said, Russia’s overland colonialism meant that these projections were simply not as “far-flung” as other examples of imperialism.18

Said’s positioning of Russia provides a middle ground between Etkind’s staunch interpretation of Russian colonial othering and Schimmelpenninck’s milder interpretation that depends upon Russia’s own marginal position in Europe. This allows a space to state that Russia participated in imperial and colonial politics, ideologies, and expansion like other European empires, but its projections of colonized space were closer than that of the blue water colonial empires. In short, there was a domestic character to Russian imperialism that allowed the projections—or in the case of the museums, the visual and material collections and presentations—of the inorodtsy to be at once familiar and unfamiliar, domestic and exotic.

The projection of shamanism at the Kunstkamera for the St. Petersburg public was an imperial one that seemed to desire some of this far-flung space to imagine Siberia as further

16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., xxiii. 18 Ibid., 10.

198 removed from European Russian. The projection of Siberia was no longer grounded in the nearness of the local exotic particularised to a specific Indigenous cultural or a religious tradition grounded in a distinct region, community, or people. Siberia becomes something apart, something non-Russian, and in this the specific objects in the collection metonymically point not towards any specific local, but towards a general category of shamanism as a trans-Siberian— and, by 1904, an Asian—religious tradition.

5.3 The Kunstkamera’s Displayed Collection of Siberian Shamanic Materials: A Diachronic Analysis

The permanent collection, as a name, conjures an image of a static collection at the foundation of a museum; however, this is not an accurate characterization of a museum’s collection, and, as scholars such as Catherine Nicholes, Susan Pearce, and Francine Hirsh have demonstrated, systems of trading, loaning, institutional policies, state politics, deaccessioning, donations, theft, repatriation, decay, and acquisitions all shape and reshape a museum’s collection.19 The scholarship that destabilizes this permanency presents the museum in movement and brings to the forefront the labor, communities, and objects that form the museum and its collections.20 The impermanence of collections is rooted in both the nature of many

19 Catherine A. Nichols, “The Smithsonian Institution’s ‘Greatest Treasures’: Valuing Museum Objects in the Specimen Exchange Industry,” Museum Anthropology 41, no. 1 (March 1, 2018): 13–29; Susan M. Pearce, ed., Interpreting Objects and Collections, Leicester Readers in Museum Studies (London: Routledge, 1994); Francine Hirsch, “Getting to Know ‘The Peoples of the USSR’: Ethnographic Exhibits as Soviet Virtual Tourism, 1923- 1934,” Slavic Review 62, no. 4 (2003): 683–709. 20; Marilena Alivizatou, Intangible Heritage and the Museum: New Perspectives on Cultural Preservation (Walnut Creek, California: Left Coast Press, 2012); Julia Fein, “Talking Rocks in the Irkutsk Museum: Networks of Science in Late Imperial Siberia,” The Russian Review 72, no. 3 (June 2013): 409–26; Janet Ulph, “Frozen in Time: Orphans and Uncollected Objects in Museum Collections,” International Journal of Cultural Property 24, no. 1 (2017): 3– 30; Hannah Turner, “The Computerization Of Material Culture Catalogues: Objects and Infrastructure in the

199 objects as ephemeral or perishable and in museum policies and ideologies that value newness and growth in collections.21

Collections are critical to museums, and continued acquisition is conceptualized as a positively marked mechanism of collection change, unlike deaccessioning or object death that is negatively inflected.22 Tomislav Šola, however, examines the topic of continued museum acquisition and diagnoses it as an illness, writing “…[with museums] drawing lifeblood from their acquisitiveness, it is suggested that they will die when they stop adding to their collections or when they have no collection policy. But perhaps what museums perceive as an organ is really a cancer.”23 In this model, we are presented with a gluttonous museum over-stuffed with objects that are then left to sit under-processed in the bowels of museum storages. While Šola is addressing the contemporary museum in his article, this collection-mania can be traced backwards in time to characterize the salvage ethnographic collecting of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The late imperial Russian museums’ desire for collecting and

Smithsonian Institution’s Department of Anthropology,” Museum Anthropology 39, no. 2 (2016): 163–177; R. Eric Hollinger et al., “Tlingit-Smithsonian Collaborations with 3D Digitization of Cultural Objects,” Museum Anthropology Review 7, no. 1–2 (2013): 201–253; Bruce Altshuler, ed., Collecting the New: Museums and Contemporary Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 21 Marilena Alivizatou, Intangible Heritage and the Museum; Glenn Wharton “The Challenges of Conserving Contemporary Art,” in Collecting the New: Museums and Contemporary Art, ed. Bruce Altshuler (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2005); Tomislav Šola, “Redefining Collecting” in Museums and the Future of Collecting, ed. Simon J. Knell (New York: Routledge, 2016). 22 Object death is discussed by Glenn Wharton in “The Challenges of Conserving Contemporary Art,” as the point at which an object has decayed to the point that it no longer conveys the original creators intent. However, this term can be used more broadly than the modern art context of Wharton’s work to include, for example, the moth eaten ethnographic and taxidermied specimens at the Yakutsk Museum (discussed in chapter 4). 23 Sola, “Redefining Collecting,” 252.

200 documenting Indigenous Siberia was in part rooted in the beliefs that these cultural and religious traditions could not survive in the modern, industrial, and increasingly Russifying Empire.24

The rapacious collection and documentation of Siberian Indigenous materials is reflected in the rapid expansion of the Siberian collections at the Kunstkamera in the late imperial era.

Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Siberian collection changed dramatically and the museum provided increasing attention to these materials in their guidebooks for visitors, rendering it a central focus of the museum’s permanent collection. Despite the

Kunstkamera’s geographic distance from Siberia, the circulation of knowledge and objects from

Siberia back to the imperial centre and the territorial expansion of Russian Empire across to the

Pacific allowed this distance to be mitigated, though not eliminated. The Kunstkamera serves as a specific site of analysis that is not regional or local in its collection. Unlike the local museums that were offering a regional perspective, the Kunstkamera offers an imperial one that encompasses the breadth of the Asian colonial territory.

5.3.1 Guidebooks as a Technology of Classification

The principle categories of shamanic objects desired in the collection programmes (the coat, the drum, and the ongon) also were the primary categories of the Kunstkamera’s collection.

However, in their life as museum objects, these desired things have moved from anticipatory

24 V. M. Mikhailovskii, “Shamanism in Siberia and European Russia, Being the Second Part of ‘Shamanstvo,’” trans. Oliver Wardrop, The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 24 (1895): 62-100; Han F. Vermeulen, Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment, Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015); Roland Cvetkovski and Alexis Hofmeister, eds., An Empire of Others: Creating Ethnographic Knowledge in Imperial Russia and the USSR (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2014); Jacob W. Gruber, “Ethnographic Salvage and the Shaping of Anthropology,” American Anthropologist 72, no. 6 (1970): 1289–1299; Harry Whitehead, “The Agency of Yearning on the Northwest Coast of Canada: Franz Boas, George Hunt and the Salvage of Autochthonous Culture,” Memory Studies 3, no. 3 (July 1, 2010): 215–223; Susan Hegerman, “Franz Boas and Professional Anthropology: On Mapping the Borders of the ‘Modern,’” Victorian Studies 41, no. 3 (Spring 1998): 455–483.

201 categories to acquired objects. With the accessioning of specific objects the metonymic reference is inversed—rather than a collection programme’s identification of categorical type that pointed towards a specific object, the acquired object points back to the categorical type—a shaman’s coat is desired in the collection programmes as a type of object to be collected, but once collected it is desired as a representation of that general type.

The Kunstkamera maintained, in the late imperial era, a substantial collection of religious materials as part of the permanent exhibitions. Religion was considered a critical aspect of the culture to be documented for the ethnographically curious visitor to the museum. To assist visitors to the Kunstkamera, the Imperial Academy of Science produced guidebooks that provided a tour through the exhibitions, offering identifications and explanations of the collections contained in the various cabinets and displays. The Academy of Science produced several editions of these guidebooks that were formatted to be carried easily by a visitor while touring the collection. The guidebooks were small paperback volumes ranging between 70 and

191 pages in length with no illustrations or maps.25 The guidebooks were organized into large sections that showed divisions between the different halls and floors. Each cabinet was numbered, the objects inside identified and, in some cases, described. Generally, the objects were identified by type, by their position on numbered shelves within a cabinet, general location (i.e. on top or bottom of the cabinet), by the manner of presentation (i.e. hung on the wall or lying on the shelf, etc.). The guidebooks cost 30 kopeks, and offered a substantial overview of the museum and introduction to the collection presented.

The Kunstkamera’s ethnographic collection was divided into several galleries which the visitors could tour with their guidebooks in hand. The Kunstkamera’s galleries were divided into

25 Notably, the guidebooks to the Zoological Museum of the Imperial Academy of Science’s from 1904 and 1910 do include maps and photographs.

202 geographic regions, with divisions between ethno-cultural groups organizing the content of the specific cabinets. While the collection was not internally classified into religious and non- religious objects, religious materials did consistently occupy a place at the forefront of the collections.26 In the Siberian section of the museum’s collection, this resulted in shamanism holding a place of primacy in the gallery. The figure of the shaman, in particular, as a religious leader within shamanic traditions, offers one of the few thematic links that drew the different

Indigenous communities of Siberia together into a collective category of Siberian, rather than as separate ethno-cultural categories such as Even, Yukaghir, Tungus, etc.27 While in the 1890s the

Siberian collection was classified as a Russian ethnographic collection, by 1904 the museum had dismantled the gallery and now presented the Siberian collection as an Asian collection. The collection was divided into displays of specific ethnic groups internally, and there was a separate gallery space for shamanic materials from across the Siberian and Central Asian territory.

The 1891 and the 1904 editions are the most disparate examples and are the earliest and latest editions of the late imperial guidebooks that address the Siberian collection.28 While these

26 Similar to my note regarding the usage of spiritual in the Programma dlia sobiraniia etnograficheskikh predmetov, it is worthy of mention that in the various editions of the Putevoditel’ po muzeiu imperatorskoi akademii nauk” antropologii i etnografii the term religion or religious is rarely used to describe the shamanic material within the collection, or religious materials from other Indigenous religious traditions across Siberia, North America, Africa, and other regions represented in the collections. Tomoko Masuzawa notes in her book The Invention of World Religions: Or How European Universalism was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism, the 19th century saw a divide between the great religions (Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, etc.) and the little traditions that were typically Indigenous religions that were named by various generic lower-case names, like shamanism, animism, fetishism, totemism, etc. To differentiate them, place names were generally ascribed to modify the generic name— thus, we have Siberian shamanism with both a place name and an uncapitalized general category that has been applied to everyone from Korean shaman kings of the Silla period around the fifth century to Indigenous groups in contemporary Columbia to Michael Harner’s New Age Core Shamanism taught at the Foundation for Shamanic Studies run out of California. 27 I have opted to use the names of the Siberian ethnic groups according to those mentioned in the late Imperial Russian museum documents (i.e. Yakut rather than Sakha) in order to be consistent with source material and to make it easier for the reader to move between my prose and the original text. 28 It remains unclear how many editions of Putevoditel’ po muzeiu imperatorskoi akademii nauk” antropologii i etnografii were produced, and I have only located editions from 1891, 1898, 1900, and 1904. Select galleries also had separate guidebooks published in 1915-1917 (though none that include the Siberian materials).

203 guidebooks offer insights into the displays of the Kunstkamera as an exhibitionary space, they also provide a means of exploring the classification systems categorizing Siberian shamanism within the larger ethnographic enterprise of the museum and invited visitors to approach this foreign space as simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar. Siberian shamanism retained a position of importance as a trans-Siberian category, whereas the objects associated with the non-religious aspects of Siberian material culture were associated with specific cultures and operated to differentiate the Siberian Indigenous communities, creating a Siberia that was at once united and divided in its cultural practices. Critically, however, this image of a trans-Siberian religion was aided by the removal of both the Russian ethnographic collection and all European Russian ethnographic artefacts and the relocation of the Siberian collections to the Asia collection. Thus,

Siberia was presented as unified in its shamanic culture but separated from the Russian space of the St. Petersburg audiences. This was now an Asian region and an Asian religion that was both unified and domestic yet also separate and foreign. There was here an emphasis on Siberia as separated and distanced, with different local traditions collectively classified within the category of shamanism. Unlike the local exotic of the Siberian museums, this trans-Siberian ‘imperial exotic’ drew upon imperial projections that employed the more common images of distancing and exotification despite the lack of ‘blue water’ between European Russia and Asian Siberia.

5.3.2 The 1891 Collection

The Guidebook to the Museum of the Imperial Academy of Science for Anthropology and

Ethnography organized the Kunstkamera’s permanent collection in two exhibition halls, displaying ethnography as the more substantial collection taking over the first hall, and half of the second, with the anthropological collections sharing space in the other half. The anthropological collections publically displayed referred to what would now be classified as

204 physical anthropological and archaeological collections, and was made up of the Department of

Antiquities of the Stone Age and the Department of Human Skulls and Skeletons. The cabinets containing anthropological artefacts were organized by location of origin, and included, for example, in cabinet four “The Central and Eastern parts of European Russia: remains found together with mammoth bones,”29 or cabinet 29 “Europe Ancient skulls, artificially elongated.

The custom of skull mutilation in childhood exists among some peoples even now. Skeletons of infants.”30 The ethnographic collections in the halls were organized by regions (Russia, Asia,

Africa, Australia, and America), with various further subdivisions to specify the countries and communities of origin. The Russian collection in specific was further divided into ‘Antiquities’ and the ‘Collection on the Ethnography of Russia,’ the latter of which was the substantially larger collection.

The ‘Collection on the Ethnography of Russia’ consisted primarily of Siberian materials, though some of the cabinets towards the end of the hall displayed collections from Central Asia.

The gallery began with cabinet one, which displayed Sakha “Clothes, miscellaneous weapons, and handicrafts made of bone.” In this first area, there was also “Russian peasant needlework from Olonets and Tver regions and wooden utensils from Vyatka.”31 These were the only pieces from European Russia included in the ethnographic collection, and they were removed by the time of the 1898 Guidebook, thereby restricting the Russian ethnographic section to non-

European communities within the Russian Empire. The Kunstkamera often the entries simply provided identification information of the general contents of a cabinet, as seen in the previous

29 Note that the bold text is in the original. In general, I have attempted to preserve the original presentation of the archival material. This includes bold text, parenthetical comments, sentence structure, and punctuation. 30 Putevoditel’ po muzeiu imperatorskoi akademii nauk” antropologii i etnografii (St. Petersburg: 1891), 66-67. 31 Ibid., 6.

205 examples; however, others have more detailed listings of the contents. For example, for cabinet seven, visitors were provided descriptions to accompany the objects and to help distinguish one from another: “Accessories of the Koryak: from the same bone—smoking pipes, decorated on top with groups of animals; the figure of a woman with a box on her back carrying produce, and also children; images of a wild mountain goat, a deer, and a bear; a bone blade for raking snow, also used by the Chukchi.”32 While the level of detail in the various sections of the guidebooks varied, the emphasis remained on identification—noting what something was and where it came from. This latter aspect, the place of origin, is particularly emphasized within the text and was usually bolded, which I have maintained in my translations.

In the 1891 guidebook, Siberian Indigenous materials were distinguished from one another by their specific cultural origin, and the Siberian territory was divided into distinct ethnic groups, rather than geographic regions. The exception to this pattern was the cabinet displaying shamanic materials. Cabinet two contained, “Clothing of Siberian shamans with accessories of their rites—drums and short wooden spikes with iron rattles.”33 Here, rather than the classification of ethno-cultural or geographic region information appearing in bold it is the term shaman. Additionally, unlike the other entries in the guidebook, no specific information is provided regarding which Siberian community the clothing was from; rather, it is the general identification as Siberian that operates as the sole geographic or cultural designation, and it is the only occasion in the Russian ethnographic collection where this broad category appears as a means of identification. In the entirety of the Russian ethnographic section there is only one additional example of a bolded word that is not a designation of provenance, which is the term

32 Ibid., 8. 33 Ibid.

206 musical instruments that was used to identify the objects located in cabinet three.34 However, in the section on musical instruments the specific instruments contained therein are identified as being from Kamchatka, Bukharin, the Samoyeds, the Voguls, and the Ostiaks.35 The inclusion of these details permitted the musical instruments to remain particularized, unlike the Siberian shamanic display that stood as the sole example of a display understood as trans-Siberian and part of a more generalized cultural and geographic region.

Aside from the display of the Siberian shamans’ clothing, a second example of shamanic material appeared in the Russian ethnography section. The 1891 guidebook featured a short expository piece to accompany objects scattered across several cabinets and shelves that were identified as shamanic idols and fetishes. This expository piece, “Idols and fetishes of the Ostyak and Orok peoples (gift of I. S. Polyakov), and of the Gilyak, Tungus, and Samoyed peoples (the last gift of F. N. Chernyshev)” provided substantially more specific and culturally localized information regarding shamanism, while also presenting an overview of practices that connected six different Indigenous Siberian peoples (listed as the Gilyak, Orok, Ostyak, Samoyed, Tungus, and Yakut) from across North and Eastern Siberia. 36 The essay opens with a general introductory statement regarding shamanic beliefs, “They (the idols and fetishes) depict spirits and demons which, according to shamanistic beliefs, influence human destinies, which can be

34 Ibid., 11. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., 9-10. Note, increasingly within the guidebooks there is an emphasis on listing the donors or the expedition that brought the items on display to the museum. This provides valuable information concerning who was involved in the museum community at this point, and also can help establish more specific information on provenance, particularly when expeditions are mentioned. Further, in considering the interwoven history of imperialism and of museum collection we can read these names as also tracking the removal of Indigenous cultural materials from Siberia for the imperial metropole. However, this is also complicated by the reliance on exile labor in Siberian ethnographic work and object collection, which complicates the strict colonizer/colonized dichotomy and the perception of the European ethnographer as an agent of empire building.

207 appeased by sacrifices in the form of food, delicacies, etc.”37 Following the introduction to the material spiritual culture of shamanism, the author explained that the Gilyak have a tradition of making shamanic idols in the form of human figures cut from trees to heal certain ailments and aid in the medicinal practices of the community.38 The description in the essay provides the reader with an explanation of these Gilyak figures as being part of a system of sympathetic medicine. In this system, a figure would be cut from a tree with visible indications of the kind of ailment the person was suffering from; for example, a consumptive person could be indicated by extreme emaciation and a person suffering from ‘water illness’ was shown through the depiction of a bloated stomach. Once the figure was cut out of the tree, the empty space in the trunk would be filled in with an offering of food and the ‘idol’ could then be carried away and used for healing the various ailments.39

The specificity of the expository writing on the Gilyak is counterweighted with the essay’s second section that focuses on the bear festival in Siberia, offering a more general assessment of the bear in northern Siberian cultures. The essay introduces the bear festival as a general northern Siberian religious ritual and states, ‘In the beliefs of the northern inorodtsy, the primary role among the ‘sacred’ animals is played by the chief predator of the north—the bear.”40 The bear and the bear festival are seen as aspects of Siberian shamanic practice, but, rather than examining the specific religious practices, there is instead a turn towards trans- regional practices and beliefs to contextualize the objects located in different cabinets within the

37 Putevoditel’ po muzeiu imperatorskoi akademii nauk” antropologii i etnografii (1891), 10. 38 The guidebooks do not list the names of any authors, rather the authorship appears collectively as the Imperial Academy of Science. 39 Putevoditel’ po muzeiu imperatorskoi akademii nauk” antropologii i etnografii (1891), 10. 40 Ibid.

208 gallery that are localized within particular ethno-cultural groupings. For example, a bear skull and a “large, long handled, wooden spoon for feeding the bear before his slaughter” are both identified as Gilyak, while also connected to this larger cultural category of the ‘northern inorodtsy.’ 41 Shamanism appears as locally specific, while simultaneously common across

Siberia. The breadth of imperial territory contained within the Kunstkamera’s Russian collection allowed the museum to gather objects from different Siberian Indigenous religious traditions, but the translation of these materials into museum objects for a European Russian public saw their specific classification give way to a broader one suggested by the Siberian shaman and the trans- regional shamanism associated with the bear festival.

This movement between the specific and the general characterizes the guidebook essay’s approach to shamanism and is indicative of the general vacillation within the museum collection between Siberia as a general region, and the various communities within it as separate and distinctive ethno-cultural and linguistic groups. “Shamanic” is the only category to be used as a principle classification marker on par with the geographic divisions, and the subject of the only expository piece in the Russian ethnographic section.

5.3.3 Interlude: The 1898 and 1901 Collections

The 1898 and 1901 collections remain quite similar to the 1891 collection in content and organization. The most substantial changes include the addition of shamanic materials from

Central Asia and an increasing focus on including collector information within the identifications of the objects on display. These reflect the broad imperial focus of the collections at the

Kunstkamera, and the community involved in the museum’s collection practices that shifts away

41 Ibid., 14.

209 from the broader community donations of the local Siberian museums and towards more formal associations (i.e. the Geographic Society), expeditions, or members of the aristocracy or military with resources to bring objects from Siberia to the metropoles.

The 1900 Guidebook includes Central Asian shamanic material from the Russian ethnographic collection. While Central Asian materials were part of the earlier collections, the expansion of shamanism from Siberia to Central Asia extends the Siberian category throughout the Asian territory of the Russian Empire. In the cabinet displaying “Folk musical instruments of

Russians and inorodtsy”, donated by the Imperial Russian Geographic Society, there was a

“Kyrgyz kobuz, used by Kyrgyz shamans (Bakshi).”42 This usage of an emic term (bakshi) for the shaman is unusual for the classification of shamanism in the collection, suggesting a regional distinction between the Siberian shamans and the Central Asian Bakshi. In the Kunstkamera’s collection, the other place where the shamanic categories are commonly used outside of Russia is in the North American collections, which, while not connected over land, have a history of

Russian and Siberian Indigenous settlement down the Pacific coastline from Alaska to

California.43 The references to North American shamanism were typically localized to the northern communities on the Kodiak, Admiralty, and Aleutian Islands off the coast of Alaska.44

42 Putevoditel’ po muzeiu imperatorskoi akademii nauk” antropologii i etnografii (St. Petersburg: 1900), 10. 43 Today, the Kunstkamera no longer maintains a Russian or Siberian exhibitionary space, and so the only shamanic artefacts on display are those in their North American gallery from California and Alaska. The Kukshui feather coat from California is one of only two such examples of this type of garment, the other being held at the Smithsonian. It is unclear which Californian Indigenous community it originates from, though Travis Hudson and Craig D. Bates suggest in their book Treasures from Native California that the possibilities include the Pomo, the Northwestern Valley Maidu, and the Coastal Miwok communities (Bates and Hudson, Treasures from Native California. 136). The only other shamanic materials currently on display at the Kunstkamera are from Alaskan communities; there is a Yup’ik coat and several Tlingit shamanic masks and accessories. 44 Putevoditel’ po muzeiu imperatorskoi akademii nauk” antropologii i etnografii (1900), 73; 80.

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However, a shaman’s coat from California was on display as a more southern Pacific coastal example.45

The increasing donor information provided in these guidebooks provides a sense of the

Kunstkamera as a prestigious imperial institution. Items were donated by established scholars, including substantial shamanic collections from A. I. Schrenk, a mineralogist, I. S. Polyakov, a zoologist and geographer, or F. N. Chernishov, a renowned geologist after whom the Central

Scientific Research Geological Survey Museum in Saint Petersburg was named, who donated a collection of “Samoyed idols.”46 There are also items listed as from the collection of Tsar

Nicholas the II, following in the long-standing tradition of the Tsars’ support of imperial museums.47 Unlike the collection histories at the local museums in Siberia where village priests, exiles, and community members were active donors to the museum, the Kunstkamera’s collection often came from established political, social, and academic communities. While materials to the Kunstkamera were also donated by the Imperial Russia Geographic Society, and may well have been collected by some of the same local researchers who were contributing to the Irkutsk museum, their individual identities (and VSORGO in general as a regional branch) were subsumed within the official title of the society.

The 1898 and 1901 guidebooks are indicative of the expansion of the Kunstkamera’s collection during this ‘golden age.’ As a result, the guidebooks were covering an increasing number of objects and were becoming longer and more detailed. The density and visually

45 Ibid., 79. 46 Putevoditel’ po muzeiu imperatorskoi akademii nauk” antropologii i etnografii (1898), 11; 15. Nadezhda Igorevna Platonova, Istoriia Arkheologicheskoi Mysli v Rossii. Vtoraia Polovina XIX—Pervaia Tret’ XX Veka (St. Petersburg: Nestor-History, 2010). 47 This traces back to Peter the Great establishing the Kunstkamera, and continues with, for example, Catherine the Great’s art collection at the Hermitage, concluding with the final Tsar Nicholas the II who established the Russian Museum of Ethnography Named for Tsar Alexander III.

211 cluttered structure of these guidebooks makes the revisions in the 1904 guidebook even more pronounced in the museum’s radical restructuring of the Siberian collection. Shamanism, in the three earlier editions (1891, 1898, and 1901) of the guidebook, is a central focus of the Siberian collection and receives more expository support and classificatory emphasis than other ethnographic categories represented in the collection. While the collections were systematized to emphasize the specific cultural and geographic origins of the different objects on display, the shamanic coat was the only object identified as “Siberian” and the expository essays introduce shamanism as locally distinctive, but also as common across the Siberian territory. This was an approach that became increasingly prominent in the 1904 collection, when the collection was reorganized according to specific cultural groups and a new section specifically on shamanism was introduced.

5.3.4 The 1904 Guidebook

By 1904, the localization of shamanic material in the Siberian collection became more pronounced than in 1891. By this point, the Kunstkamera’s collection had undergone a radical reorganization and the guidebook itself had grown to just under 200 pages in length (approx. 120 pages longer than the 1891 edition). The museum collection had been re-divided into nine main parts—eight large geographic areas (Asia, East Asia, Africa, Australia, Oceania, Indonesia,

South America, and North America) and a thematic gallery on ‘The Buddhist World.’ The result of this reorganization was that the gallery of Russian ethnography (which has, since the 1898 guidebook, only contained non-European collections) had been reclassified as the Asia gallery, a separate gallery from the East Asia one that housed the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean collections. The reorganization was part of a larger shift in the collections towards an ethno- cultural typology framework that offered a comparative narrative of cultural progress to the

212 collections.48 In this context, the reframing of the Siberian collection as Asian appears not only to distance the region geographically, but evolutionarily. The Buryat collection was housed in the East Asia section of the museum under the subheading ‘Mongolian Nomads’. All the other

Siberian and central Asian materials had been gathered together to form the newly titled Asia collection. This collection, in turn, was further subdivided into categories of specific ethno- cultural and linguistic groups with associated cabinets for displaying the corresponding materials. The exception to this was the creation of an additional new area titled ‘The Practice of

Shamanism and Shamans.’49

Unlike in 1891, when the Siberian materials were classified as Russian and a small number of European Russian materials were included within the collection, the Indigenous

Siberian ethnographic collection was no longer explicitly connected to a Russian context. The addition of the ‘The Practice of Shamanism and Shamans’ gallery established a focus on shamanism within the Asia collection, but shamanic materials also remained part of the specific cultural displays for the different Siberian groups. The Asia collection’s internal divisions of

Siberian collections emphasized the distinctive identities of different ethnic groups (i.e. Yakut,

Ainu, Gilyak, Yukaghir, Lamut, etc.). These ethno-cultural groups’ specific displays provided a clearer demarcation between the cultural products of different communities across the vast area of Siberia. Each display had, in the guidebook, a specific introductory text that offered a survey of general information for the localization and classification of the group. As an example of these texts, the introduction to the section on the Ainu community reads:

48 Sergei Kan, “Evolutionism and Historical Particularism at the St. Petersburg Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography,” Museum Anthropology 31, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 28–46. 49 In Russian, the title of this exhibition is “shamanstvo i shamani.” I have chosen to translate shamanstvo as the “practice of shamanism” to distinguish it from shamanizm, which is also commonly used in documents of this period. This is also done to highlight a connotative distinction between shamanizm as emphasizing an abstract belief system and shamanstvo as the actual practice of shamanism.

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Aboriginals of the Japanese archipelago were gradually displaced to the north by the Japanese— to Yeso Island [Hokkaido] and the southern part of Sakhalin. A type noted for clearly pronounced mongoloid facial features, especially in women, they are distinguished by their hirsuteness. Their main occupation is fishing and hunting. The draft animal is a dog.

By culture they are above their neighbors, the Gilyak, because they are familiar with weaving, although the loom is very primitive. Pottery has, apparently, been forgotten by them, as clay pots are found on their territory. Peculiarities of their life - material from nettles and elm fiber, and the cult of staves of shaved wood (inau) and peculiar ornament.50

The introductions to other sections of the gallery dedicated to different Indigenous Siberian communities follow a similar format and contain similar topics addressed in this introduction to the Ainu collection. In both its form and its content, the guidebook presented easily accessible systematization of the Siberian people that allowed for immediate and readily apparent specification and localization. However, with the increased separation of the Indigenous communities there was also a focus on comparative approaches to ethnography that drew into the guidebook an ethnographic system of comparison based on ideas of cultural evolution. In the introductory text on the Ainu, visitors would have been presented with an assessment that the

Ainu were culturally more advanced than the Gilyaks due to the fact that they were at that point familiar with the technology of weaving and had a “primitive” loom.51

The format of this introductory text included notes on the religions of the different communities as part of the general summary of the different communities. For the Ainu, this was presented in the introduction of the ‘cult of the staves of shaved wood’ or the inau. In the displayed collections associated with the Ainu and in this introductory text various objects were presented as religious and part of the inau ‘cult’—examples provided in the guidebook included

50 Putevoditel’ po muzeiu imperatorskoi akademii nauk” antropologii i etnografii. (St. Petersburg: 1904), 42. 51 Ibid.

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“a curative inau, hanging over the bed of a sick old woman, ” “an image of a bear tied with inau and leather,” “a leather collar with bells for a little bear,” and a “shamanic drum.”52 While the religious system of the Ainu is referenced in the guidebook’s introductory text as the cult of the inau, shamanic materials were presented as part of this tradition and appeared within the collection, both specifically in the Ainu collection and in those of the other Siberian groups in the Asia gallery. For example, amongst the Gilyak material there was a “shaman drum from fish skin with a beater,” the collection of material from the Golds had a “shaman’s amulet,” and the

Tungus collection had several displays of “the accessories of the practice of shamanism among the Tungus people.” 53

Shamanic materials were dispersed throughout the ethnographic collections and classified within the displays dedicated to specific Siberian cultures as part of their religious traditions.

Unlike the general labeling of the Siberian shaman’s coat from 1898, these objects were localized to specific cultural groups within the Asia collection, though also appearing generally across the different religious systems as a consistent category. Internal to these culturally specific displays (like the Ainu one above), shamanism itself was not the specific category often used to identify the religious objects and the term ‘cult,’ seen in the introduction to the Ainu collection, becomes the word most often used as the general classification of the religious traditions of the Indigenous Siberian peoples.54While cult became a widely used category within

Siberian materials, shamanic materials often fell within the larger collections of the religious

‘cult’ objects from the different Siberian ethno-cultural communities.

52 Ibid., 46. 53 Ibid., 34; 42; 50. 54 See chapter 4 for a more sustained discussion of the term cult to describe Indigenous religious traditions within Siberia.

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Aside from the scattered references to shamanism as part of the various cults, the

Kunstkamera had added an additional gallery titled ‘The Practice of Shamanism and Shamans’ as a subsection within the Asia collection. This was the only thematic section of the Asia collection. Together with the ‘Buddhist World’ collection, which retained its position as an independent gallery not contained within the Asian or East Asian collections, religious materials formed the only thematic collection within the otherwise geographically categorized collection of the Kunstkamera. Both of these thematic collections presented religion as trans-cultural and trans-regional phenomena. The Buddhist World contained materials from “Ceylon, Burma, Siam and Annam (Southern Buddhists), the population of Nepal, Tibet, China, Korea, Mongolia, and

Japan, parts of the Transbaikal region, the Privolga region, and the Don Kalmyks (Northern

Buddhists).”55 The expository text in the guidebook that introduces the gallery on shamanism opened with the assertion, “Without exception, all Siberian inorodtsy who have not converted to

Christianity or who have not accepted Islam are devoted to shamanism.”56 Shamanism was explicitly presented to visitors as a unifying thread that could connect the different Siberian peoples to a trans-Siberian category. This was qualified in the guidebook with the note,

“shamanism does not represent a uniform belief and is not the same for all nations.”57 Thus, despite allowing for diversity in the specifics of beliefs, shamanism was, in the end, able to encompass such differences and continue operating as a general category for the religious beliefs of Indigenous Siberians.

The introductory text in the guidebook to the shamanic collection offered a general explanation of what this trans-Siberian shamanism consisted of in terms of beliefs and practices.

55 Putevoditel’ po muzeiu imperatorskoi akademii nauk” antropologii i etnografii. (1904), 77. 56 Ibid., 55. 57 Ibid.

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The introduction provided the visitor with an explanation of a tripartite shamanic cosmological system consisting of upper, middle, and lower worlds. This was then used to explain the role of shamans as the mediators “…whose souls have the ability while leaving the body on the ground, to temporarily move to the upper and lower worlds.”58 In the guidebook, the shaman’s role is primarily discussed as that of a healer and as a Charon-like figure, who carries the souls of the dead into the “realm of shadows.” The author does note that the shaman may also act to predict the future and to help find things that are lost.59 Unlike the expository text on shamanism in the

1891 guidebook, which drew together specific Siberian shamanic practices from the Gilyak,

Orok, Ostyak, Samoyed, Tungus, and Yakut peoples to provide an introduction to the shamanic materials on display, this new text did not ground shamanism in any specific cultural or ethnic groups. Instead, it presented a general Siberian shamanic system that remains untethered from localized practice. Shamanism was introduced in the guidebook as not being uniform across

Siberia; nevertheless, it is consistently presented as having prevailing general characteristics that were able to unite the practices across the Siberian territory into the category of shamanism. It was through the presentation of shamanism as a trans-Siberian religious tradition that a collective

Siberian cultural identity became articulated in the museum.

The objects associated with the collection of shamanic materials primarily consisted of drums and beaters, together with shamans’ coats and tyus (this being the Turkic word the ongon—the spirit and its vessel of containment within Siberian shamanic traditions—also known

58 Ibid., 56. 59 Ibid.

217 as a kheg in Samoyed languages).60 The material in this collection is identified in the guidebook according to various systems locating the place of origin at varying levels of specificity. These included using city names (i.e. Abakan), ethnic group (i.e. Beltir), general areas (i.e. “a figure of a Turkic shaman from Eastern Siberia”),61 or particular subgroup (i.e. “the Altai Soyots from

Tolbnor62 Lake”).63 These objects are contextualized not within a local space, but rather in the category of shamanism and their metonymic role becomes one of participating in a trans-local category of shamanism of the contiguous Asian territory of imperial Russia.

In the Kunstkamera’s collection of Siberian material, the shamanic objects were able to provide a trans-regional identity that drew together the otherwise atomized collection of objects from the different groups of Indigenous Siberian nations to construct the shaman as a general

Siberian cultural figure. The specific inclusions of expository text indicated a particular desire on the part of the Kunstkamera and the Academy of Science to have shamanism appear as a central topic of the collection. This also suggests that there was a need for more sustained explanation to make the shamanic objects displayed in the galleries understandable to a visiting public.

Shamanism operated within the collection as both culturally specific and trans-regionally generic. This plasticity in scope allowed for larger narratives of shamanism to be grounded within specific objects and material without apparent contradiction, while also offering an elision of the specific Siberian peoples into a collective conceptual grouping.

60 Brokgauza and Yefrona, Entsiklopedicheskiy slovar'. ed. 34. “Tyus.” (St. Petersburg, 1902), 368. For an in-depth discussion of ongon see Caroline Humphrey, “Inside and Outside the Mirror: Mongolian Shamans’ Mirrors as Instruments of Perspectivism,” Inner Asia 9, no. 2 (January 1, 2007): 173–195. 61 Putevoditel’ po muzeiu imperatorskoi akademii nauk” antropologii i etnografii (1904), 58. 62 Please note that in the original document the author has written the name of the lake as ozera tolbnor; however, it would appear that the author mistook the nuur morpheme in Mongolian for lake as part of the name itself, thus writing ‘Lake Tolbo Lake’ in the Russian, thus I have amended this in my translation to Tolbo Lake in order that it may be more easily located. 63 Ibid., 59.

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5.3.5 Guidebooks and Classificatory Systems

Museums rely upon classification in order to systematize their collections, and these guidebooks preserve a record of the different and changing systems of classification used within the Siberian collection of the Imperial Russian Academy of Science made public in the galleries of the Kunstkamera. However, classification is neither natural nor neutral. Rather, it is the product of intellectual systematization that, as Bowker and Star note in Sorting Things Out:

Classification and its Consequences, seeks a spatial and temporal segmentation of the world into

“… a set of boxes (metaphorical or literal) into which things can be put to then do some kind of work—bureaucratic or knowledge production.”64 This idea that classificatory systematization of material can itself be productive of knowledge is critical to understanding the importance of the category of shamanism at the Kunstkamera. The exposition of shamanism and the various identifications of specific shamanic materials within the guidebooks classify the objects for the reader/visitor and construct their knowledge about the material.

Siberian shamanism appears as a dominant theme within the Russian, and later, Asian collections of Siberian ethnographic materials and it was the only material presented as Siberian, rather than as belonging to a single ethnic community within the Siberian region. The reclassification of the Siberian collections from a gallery of the ethnography of Russia to one of

Asia, emphasized the separation between Russia in Europe and Russia in Asia. The inclusion of materials from Olonets, Tver, and Vyatka in the 1891 Russian ethnographic collection together

64 Bowker and Star, Sorting Things Out, 10.

219 with the Siberian material emphasized a sense of the region as distinctive from European Russia and culturally connected across the Asian territory.

By 1904, shamanism was classified as general across Siberia, and was an Asian religion separated from European Russia. The Asian continent is mapped out through the Kunstkamera’s collections—shamanic Asia sits north of the so-called Buddhist world located in South and East

Asia. Religion as a means of categorization overlaps and overlays geographic regions within the collection, and it is through this that the Siberian landmass is drawn together. The shaman becomes the figurehead of Siberia in the gallery. The Siberian shamans’ coat listed in the 1891 guidebook without any specific provenance can then be reread not as an oddity within the collection, but rather as indicative of the conceptualisation of Siberian shamanism as a collective category of the Asian imperial territory rather than as Sakha, Ainu, or Tungus.

5.4 Conclusion

The Kunstkamera, as the principle ethnographic museum in the imperial capital of St.

Petersburg, brought together objects from across the Russian Empire and had to classify and systematize this collection such that it was manageable and understandable to the museum’s visitors and researchers. The collection was expanded greatly during this ‘golden age’ of the museum and also underwent substantial reorganization, particularly of the Siberian collection that formed and reformed the ethnographic collection throughout the late imperial period.

The late imperial era guidebooks to the Kunstkamera provide an introduction to the shamanic collections held at the museum and demonstrate classificatory systems used to name and sort the materials. Unlike the collection programmes, these are no longer anticipatory objects

220 of desire, but acquired ones that are in a different moment in the life of a collection. Across these different points in the chronology of collection, the categories of shamanic materials anticipated in the collection programmes, the coat, the drum, and the ongon, or tyus, appear again as the principle categories of shamanic objects displayed at the Kunstkamera. These objects at the

Kunstkamera, however, become disconnected from their specific local origins and are instead drawn into a narrative of trans-Siberian identity that is exotically distant and decontextualized.

The loss of the context of shamans and shamanism facilitated an imperial projection of a distant exotic located in a remote and collectively configured colonial space, which, despite the lack of

‘blue water’, was still separate as Asian and inorodtsy.

Conclusion: Desired Images

The infrastructures of classification, documentation, and articulated desire advanced the movement of shamanic materials throughout the Russian Empire into the collections of imperial museums. The desires articulated in the collection programs I have described became material, with coats, drums, and ongon physically travelling along the pathways of the Russian Empire.

The shaman, in the imperial ethnographic imagination, had historically existed in the tenebrous space of the Siberian remote; however, as Siberia developed new networks and infrastructures that connected it more closely to the European Russia and internally to cities and communities, this vision of remoteness became increasingly untenable. For museums across Siberia, the documentation of shamanism became part of their scientific study of the local. This drew shamanism into an increasingly familiar space, positioning the shamanic figure in late imperial

Russian ethnography at the intersection of the authenticity of the local and authority of the colonial in which ideas of the exotic and the primitive still retained power. In a local context,

Russian ethnographers, many of whom were exiles, spent considerable time learning Indigenous languages, observing cultural and religious traditions, and sharing living spaces Indigenous

Siberians. This allowed for an extended fieldwork methodology to be a happenstantial by- product of the exile system. This sustained engagement with shamanic traditions fostered an understanding of the larger context of shamanism that extended beyond and challenged the shaman as an individual isolated figure.

Beyond the confines of the local sphere, however, shamanism was able to become a trans-Siberian imperial category that the Academy of Science mobilized to unify the distinct

Indigenous nations within the galleries. The Kunstkamera, as the ethnographic museum of the

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Academy of Science and located in the imperial capital, viewed Siberia not as local, but rather as a domestic imperial territory. This mediated foreignness allowed the shaman to be translatable in the European Russian context, but continued a colonial framing of Siberia and the Indigenous people as non-Russian, primitive, and fundamentally other than the European Russians of the empire.

The relative nearness of the contiguous colonized spaces of the Russian, Ottoman, and

Chinese empires did not render the Russian state benign or “any less imperialist,” as Edward

Said cautioned.1 Rather, unlike the far-flung, projected imaginings of the British and French

Empires, the Russian Empire was restrained by a closeness that projected not fantastical images, but desirous ones, that mirror back something of the Russian Empire’s own self-conscious modernity. The imperial Russians needed the primitive as a comparative idea against which to articulate their modernity, and this alongside the wider culture of colonialism within nineteenth- century European intellectual history informed the perspectives of the ethnographers, exiles, and collectors in Siberia who were documenting shamanism.

However, this desire-based knowledge production was not the only force working on the imaginations of ethnographers. The longue durée of exile forced many of these researchers to engage in sustained fieldwork that allowed them to learn the languages, stories, cultural practices, and religious traditions of Indigenous Siberians in a more intimate and local manner.

Shamanism, as the subject of imperial ethnographic desire, was translated into an imperial

Russian vernacular and a colonial system, but the ethnographers strove to classify and document it as embedded in specific communities and traditions rather than as a colonial archetypal

1 Said, Culture and Imperialism, xxii.

223 projection. However, as the documentation moved increasingly into museum object records, there is a collapsing of this larger shamanic world back into the established repertoire of the shaman. The desired image of shamanism as a communal tradition retreats into the shaman as individual exemplified by objects collected in his name: the coat the drum, and the ongon.

The ambiguous nature of late imperial Russian modernity as at once looking forward into a revolutionary future and backward into a traditional past is echoed in the unsettled position of shamanism. The prevalence of exile-ethnographers (such as Vladimir Bogoraz and Dimitri

Klements) and the participation of Indigenous ethnographers (such as Nikolai Nikolaevich

Agapitov and Matvei Nikolaevich Khangalov) complicate a clear colonizer-colonized division within the local collection context. However, the imperial Russian presentation of Siberia, and

Siberian shamanism, remained inextricably immersed within the larger ideological narrative of a

European imperial imaging of Indigenous people.2

In A Gathering of Names, I place Siberia within the context of late imperial Russian modernity not as a passive projection of a colonial imagination but as a space where communities were actively articulating their own local identities and constructing a Siberian intellectual network. Similar to Julia Fein, I challenge the idea of the local as disconnected from larger Russian networks, and instead frame the local as part of a larger discourse of modernity and scientific study that draws the history of Siberian museums into a larger discourse of Russian and nineteenth-century museum history.3 The collection and documentation of Siberian shamanism by and for these museums became part of a discourse of imperial and scientific

2 Bassin, “Inventing Siberia”, 764. 3 Fein, “Cultural Curators and Provincial Publics: Local Museums and Social Change in Siberia, 1887-1941”; Fein, “Talking Rocks in the Irkutsk Museum: Networks of Science in Late Imperial Siberia.”

224 modernity that was often narrated by revolutionaries, exiles, and local Siberians who were dissident voices inside the empire.4

The politics of orientalism, imperial infrastructure, and intellectual authority are at the centre of my engagement with Russian colonialism, but rather than looking at these topics through broader intellectual histories as seen in the works of David Schimmelpenninck van der

Oye or Aleksandr Etkin, I have approached them through the specific material records of ethnographic collections. In my intellectual and cultural history, I am influenced by Ryan Tucker

Jones’ work on marine animal resource extraction in the North Pacific, Christine Ruane’s writing on the fashion industry in imperial Russia, and, outside of Russia, Tomoko Masuzawa’s engagement with textbooks of world religions.5 Alongside these works, my investigation presents a narrative of imperialism and modernity through the historiography and bureaucracy of a particular case study. While not a microhistory, my work is nevertheless pulling on a single thread amongst the larger network of late imperial modernity and intellectual history to tell a specific story of shamanism and museums.

When Grishkovets writes about the “Italian copper needles for gramophones in beautiful boxes” he is describing his modern Siberian city where even at the Soviet Torgsin shops one could buy international goods and become part of a global culture of technology, luxury consumption, and modernity.6 This image of the needles circles around my work as I write about

4 Znamenski, The Beauty of the Primitive; Tomášková, Wayward Shamans. 5 Jones, Empire of Extinction; Ruane, The Empire’s New Clothes; Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions. 6 Grishkovets, “Rivers, A Story,”: 3. Note: Torgsin, a contraction of torgovlia s inostrantsami (trade with foreigners), was a name for the state-run Soviet shops that supplied foreign goods for purchase with hard currency. Elena A. Osokina, “The Alchemy of Stalin’s Industrialization: Torgsin,” Rivista Storica Italiana 130, no. 2 (August 2018): 437–472; Elena A. Osokina, “Torgsin, Zoloto Dlia Industrializatsii,” Cahiers Du Monde Russe 47, no. 4 (2006): 715–747.

225 a Siberia that is part of larger imperial and international networks and scholarship, and that participates in the articulation of late imperial Russian modernity. Grishkovets continues along the etched lines of his memory and recalls, “None of my grandfather’s friends had gramophones, but they bought the needles because they only cost kopeks, and they were beautiful things.”7

While the local ethnographers and local museums were collecting and documenting for their own communities, the infrastructures and desires of the empire held a privileged authority over these spaces. Siberia remained apart from the dominant spaces of European Russia and larger international networks of scholarship. The questions of who these documents were for and what purpose the documents served overlap with questions about empire and modernity. The desired images of Siberian shamanism as at once local and exotic, familiar and unfamiliar reflected

Siberia’s own ambiguous place within imperial and colonial modernity. These images mirrored back the ethnographers’ and collectors’ desires that had come—little by little—to saturate the objects of their collections and shape their images of shamanism.

7 Grishkovets, “Rivers, A Story,” 3.

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