6. Order out of Chaos: Anthropology and Politics of Sergei M. Shirokogoroff

The Etnos Archipelago

“…Meanwhile, the DNA and other advances of modern biology made it possible for critics and enthusiasts of etnos alike to hail the long-awaited possibility of distinguishing ethnic groups on the basis of hard science data. Shirokogoroff 's etnos theory, as the authors show, matured in times of civil wars and collapses of states (Arzyutov 2019). It is telling nowadays that not only Shirokogoroff's contributions to linguistics, ethnography, and the study of shamanism are highly valued in Russia but also that his name appears in the context of "ethnopolitics" and international security (Kuznetsov and Shih 2016).…”

“…Having read a large sheaf of Shirokogoroff's published and unpublished works, we are struck by the way that he, like many others, juggled a numbers of "vocabularies" of identity (Hirsch 2005:35-36) to communicate with different audiences. In his academic writing, he preferred to use the term etnos, while reserving the terms natsii ͡ a and narod in his political pamphlets (Arzyutov 2019). Yuri Slezkine (1994) has a classic article that describes the late Soviet state as being like a "communal apartment" that manages to provision a variety of ethnic groups with very basic living conditions.…”