Russian Colonialism and the Asiatic Mode of Production: (Post-)Soviet Ethnography Goes to Alaska

Abstract

This article discusses the concept of politarism (politarizm), developed by die Soviet ethnographer Iu. I. Semenov as an elaboration on Marx's Asiatic mode of production. Presenting both its origin in the revisionist debates of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras and its recent application in an innovative analysis of Russian colonialism in Alaska by the ethnohistorian A. V. Grinev, Sonja Luehrmann attempts to grasp the intellectual complexity of Semenov's work. While the Soviet debate on the Asiatic mode of production has been read as Aesopian criticism of the USSR, it may more fruitfully be seen as an argument against a strict five-stage scheme of historical evolution that opened up new possibilities of concrete empirical analysis and a new theoretical role for ethnography as the science of noncapitalist societies. Grinev's use of politarism in the 1990s shows the lasting explanatory value of the concept as well as the need to understand the origins of Soviet intellectual traditions in order to critically engage with them.

Antagonistic Insights: Evolving Soviet Atheist Critiques of Religion and Why They Matter for Anthropology

“…In spite of resistance from philosophers who held that empirical research could add no new insights to the truths expounded by Marxism-Leninism, this was a time when empirical sociology and ethnography were re-emerging as legitimate academic disciplines after having been virtually stamped out in the 1930s (First 2008;Luehrmann 2005;Slezkine 1991).…”

Unfinished conversations: A tribute to Sonja Luehrmann (1975–2019)

“…You're kidding, right?' But she was not kidding at all, and it wasn't long before the Slavic Review published Sonja's 'Russian Colonialism and the Asiatic Mode of Production: (Post-) Soviet Ethnography Goes to Alaska' (Luehrmann 2005). In the first sentence of this article, Sonja diplomatically sets aside the then-popular questions of how Soviet ethnography and Soviet nationalities policy were tightly entangled.…”

“…This was a landmark period in her estimation, since, by this time, atheism had become the 'normative way of being' (Luehrmann 2016, 80). In contrast to those who might attribute the post-Soviet Orthodox revival either to late-Soviet religious searches among urban intellectuals, Soviet dissidents, or any potentially-existing networks of underground faith communities, Sonja looked instead to the lived experiences of active proponents of atheism who subsequently became the newly-converted religious activists in the early post-Soviet period (Luehrmann 2005. In doing so, she reminds us that post-Soviet Orthodox Christianity was intertwined with Soviet atheism in complex and not always immediately evident ways.…”