Census as a Technology of Empire

Abstract

Silver, "The Ethnic and Language Dimensions," 72. lxxxv TsSK, Obshchii svod po imperii, Chast' II, ii. Gozulov claimed that data on native language over-represented the number of Russians in the population, especially as Udmurts, Mordvinians, Komi and others were undergoing linguistic Russification. See Gozulov, Perepisi naseleniia SSSR i kapitalisticheskikh stran, 201-2 Silver, "The Ethnic and Language Dimensions," 72.

Crafting Good Indicators

“…We second extant understandings of censuses as collections of material semiotic practices with and around numbers (Verran 2012), through which ideas of futurity are made amenable to intervention. Yet we do not locate data politics mainly in expert operations of tabulating, encoding, calibrating, sieving and classifying (Anderson 2015;Darrow 2002;Emigh et al 2016;Lanata-Briones et al 2022;Mezey 2003;Ruppert 2007;Ruppert and Scheel 2021;Scott 1998;Thorvaldsen 2017). Instead, we follow traces of data politics in everyday affective negotiations around the work of fraud-detecting algorithms.…”

Constructing Identities, Ascribing Nationalities: The Polish Minority in Ukraine During Late-imperial and Early-Soviet Rule

“…Therefore, regardless of claims of objectivity, as David W. Darrow points out, census taking is a political act, inextricably linked to questions of power and identity. 6 Fundamentally, it is the state's interests that gain pre-eminence in the process of gathering, processing, and interpreting statistical data. As the Soviet strategy of positive discrimination came to replace the imperial ethnic bias, the tendency to magnify the number of Poles in the Soviet-Polish borderland outpaced the authorities' propensity to reduce it.…”

“…In the absence of a clearly defined category for nationality, any data obtained was open to easy manipulation, error, and abuse; those recording the results, aware of the various political necessities underpinning their work, were ultimately granted exclusive power over defining who belonged to which nationality. 21 From the outset, it was recognized that language remained the most useful criterion for obtaining data on nationality. However, translating any data on language into evidence of an inherent sense of national identity was far from straightforward, with the category of "native language" (rodnoy yazyk) itself allowing substantial room for interpretation.…”

Shading, lines, colors: mapping ethnographic taxonomies of European Russia

“…Most literature on the development of ethnic and national taxonomies in Central and Eastern Europe has concentrated on textual sources, such as published scholarly works and encyclopedias (Kamusella 2005;Maxwell 2015) or censuses (Darrow 2002;Kertzer and Arel 2002;Cadiot 2007;Staliunas 2009).1 These studies focus on topics such as ethnic and national nomenclature, or the characteristics and variables, such as religion or language, used to subdivide and differentiate populations. There have only been several works dealing specifically with the role of ethnographic maps in proposing "ethnoschematizations" in the Russian Empire (Psianchin 2004;Petronis 2007;Krasnikova 2011;Seegel 2012; cf.…”