An Empire of Others: Creating Ethnographic Knowledge in Imperial Russia and the USSR ed. by Roland Cvetkovski and Alexis Hofmeister (review)

Over the past two decades, the study of the power-knowledge nexus in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union has come to the fore of Anglophone scholarship. Specifically, scholars are looking into the broader social and political ramifications of the development of disciplines such as anthropology and ethnography, history and archaeology, Oriental studies and linguistics. This approach relativizes otherwise academically clear disciplinary boundaries, and thus the recent collected volume An Empire of Others: Creating Ethnographic Knowledge in Imperial Russia and the USSR is not restricted to the history of ethnography. The volume includes a variety of case studies using different methodological frameworks. This disciplinary pluralism notwithstanding, the contributors pursue a similar approach toward the study of knowledge and nationalism, marked with regular references to Edward Said and Benedict Anderson. The editors formulate their overall goal as an attempt to “address ethnographic knowledge as a prism through which to look at Russian history” (P. 6). To this end, the volume bridges the divide of 1917 in tracing the evolution of scholarship and the changing ways it interacted with politics. More specifically, the editors wanted to analyze the language of ethnographic knowledge in historical perspective with an emphasis on “the different epistemic conditions in which the ethnic categories appeared” (P. 7). Rather than narrowing the focus on the direct involvement of ethnography with servicing the interests of the state, the editors are interested in reconstructing specific contexts and elaborated modes of producing implicitly politicized knowledge about the empire’s population. In practical terms, they distinguish three planes of analysis that inform the tripartite structure of the volume: Part 1, “Paradigms,” reviews theoretical debates about what constituted the essence of ethnography; part 2, “Representations,” analyzes the formats and models for making sense of the study of the empire’s diverse population; part 3, “Peoples,” discusses the role of ethnography in “creating” and cataloging the groups recognized as ethnographic entities.

In the “paradigmatic” part, Alexis Hofmeister compares Russian and British approaches to ethnography and makes the important observation that one should “carefully differentiate between the sometimes anti-imperial purpose of Russian ethnography and its obvious imperial function” (P. 37). To substantiate this argument, Hofmeister turns to a very important practice of imperial scholarship – academic expeditions – a phenomenon mentioned in passing in several chapters of the volume, but never conceptualized specifically as an influential practice of imperial scholarship. This is a remarkable oversight, given that expeditions certainly functioned as a vehicle for cultural interaction between scholars and the objects of their study. Stressing the impressive amount of data collected during those expeditions and formidable resources spent on them, Hofmeister concludes that “quantity” did not transform into “quality” in Russia: ethnographers did not put as much effort into conceptualization of their findings, even though they were aware of theoretical approaches employed by their Western colleagues (P. 43). On the other hand, even the “exiled intellectuals” (such as von Strahlenberg), despite their oppositional political views, eventually served the interests of imperial elites, because they had to work in the imperial setting.

Several subsequent articles deal with the discursive field that proved formative for the very definition of ethnographic knowledge. Alexei Elfimov analyzes a contradiction between ethnographers’ claims to represent social science and the prevalence of descriptive approaches in their work. On the example of Nikolai Nadezhdin, Elfimov demonstrates the centrality of geography and language in the imperial ethnographers’ efforts to classify and systematize. He argues that the debates over ethnos as a central scientific category of Soviet ethnography were driven by its claim for the status of social science, which ultimately failed (P. 78).

Conversely, in her chapter on the interplay of ethnography and physical anthropology in imperial Russia, Marina Mogilner finds a commonality between Western and Russian scholarly approaches by telling a story of “coexistence and interaction...