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

Beyond, against, and with Ethnography: Physical Anthropology as a Science of Russian Modernity

Beyond, against, and with Ethnography: Physical Anthropology as a Science of Russian Modernity Marina Mogilner In sharp contrast to half-forgotten Russian physical anthropology, Russian ethnography has always been a legitimate subject of historical research. In some sense, the focus on ethnography and its cultural categories (such as narodnost’) prevented historians of imperial Russia from noticing and problematizing the influence of the language of race on ethnographic thinking and the politics of knowledge in the empire. According to current widely accepted historiographic wisdom: Not only did the racial paradigm fail to take hold in a substantial way in eighteenth - and early nineteenth-century Russia, the importance of ethnicity was reinforced by the adoption of narodnost’ as a marker of ethnicity. Deeply rooted in the world view of romantic idealism, narodnost’ provided a model of ethnicity that was both essentialist—derived from a concept of immutable identity—and at the same time cultural rather than biological in its manifestations. This is, perhaps, one reason why the racial obsessions of Western Europe throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century evoked (with a few significant exceptions) only a limited response in Russia.1 This conclusion was contested recently by new scholarship reconstructing various political and academic contexts of racial thinking in the Russian Empire.2 Against this trend, the reading of Russian ethnography as an 1 Nathaniel Knight, “Ethnicity, Nationalism and the Masses: Narodnost’ and Modernity in Imperial Russia,” in Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices, eds. David L. Hoffman and Yanni Katsonis (New York: Macmillan, 2000), 57–58. 2 For discussions, see E. Weitz, “Racial Politics without the Concept of Race: Reevaluating Soviet Ethnic and National Purges”; F. Hirsch, “Race without the Practice of Racial Politics ”; A. Weiner, “Nothing but Certainty”; A. Lemon, “Without a ‘Concept’? Race as Discursive Practice”; E. Weitz, “On Certainties and Ambivalences: Reply to My Critics,” Slavic 82 Marina Mogilner almost singular dominant language of human diversity in an empire that was immune to European “racial obsessions” seems to be driven by a Sonderweg perception of Russian history. In what follows, I attempt to challenge this perception by presenting a version of the story as the dynamic coexistence and interaction of racial-biological and cultural models of groupness (exemplified by anthropology and ethnography, respectively ) in late imperial Russia. In the nineteenth century, narodnost’ definitely was not the main concept of Russian human sciences. It coexisted and, in a way, competed for academic prominence with such categories as tribe (plemia), race, and a more politicized category, people (narod).3 In the Russian dictionaries of the 1860s, race was used as a synonym for plemia,4 as both were conceptualized through a limited number of external biological indicators such as the color of skin, hair, and eyes, body height, and so on. Thus understood, race became an integral part of popular as well as academic ethnographic discourses. In the early twentieth century, more and more ethnographers tended to begin their studies with formal racial classifications and brief overviews of “physical types.” Multiple examples illustrate this emerging Review 61, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 1–65; Eli Weinerman, “Racism, Racial Prejudice and Jews in Late Imperial Russia,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 17, no. 3 (1994): 442–495; Hans Rogger, Jewish Policies and Right-Wing Politics in Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Eugene M. Avrutin, “Racial Categories and the Politics of (Jewish) Difference in Late Imperial Russia,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 8, no. 1 (2007); Marina Mogilner, Homo Imperii: A History of Physical Anthropology in Russia (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2013); Svetlana Gorshenina and Sergey Abashin, eds., Turkestan russe: une colonie pas comme les autres? (Paris: Collection de l’IFEAC, 2008). Especially important examples of this new trend, which both establishes the presence of racial thinking in Russian scholarly discourses in a variety of disciplines, from history to Oriental studies, and from philosophy to political theory, and at the same time shows that the meaning of “race” was shifting and contextual, are Karl Hall, “‘Rasovye priznaki koreniatsia glubzhe v prirode chelovecheskogo organizma’: neulovimoe poniatie rasy v Rossiiskoi imperii,” in Poniatia o Rossii. K istoricheskoi semantike imperskogo perioda, vol. 2 (Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2012), 194−258; Vera Tolz, “Diskursy o rase: imperskaia Rossia i ‘Zapad’ v sravnenii,” in ibid., 145−193. Moreover, Tolz convincingly argues that Russia was not unique in such an incoherent and pluralistic application of “race” but rather followed the general European pattern. 3 A sophisticated analysis of this coexistence is...