Who owns Siberian ethnography? A critical assessment of a re-internationalized field

Abstract

Although Siberian ethnography was an open and international field at the turn of the 20th century, from about 1930 until the late 1980s Siberia was for the most part closed to foreigners and therefore to Western ethnographers. This allowed Soviet ethnographers to establish a virtual monopoly on Siberian field sites. Soviet and Western anthropology developed during that period in relative isolation from one another, allowing methodologies and theoretical approaches to diverge. During glasnost' and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Siberian field was reopened and field studies were conducted by several Western ethnographers. The resulting encounter between Western and former Soviet ethnographers in the 1980s and 1990s produced a degree of cultural shock as well new challenges and opportunities on both sides. This is an experiential account of the mood of these newly reunited colleagues at the turn of the 21 st century.

Introduction: growing research on youth in Siberia

“…Evaluating the results of a previous workshop of Siberianists in Halle, Gray, Vakhtin and Schweitzer (2003) urged anthropologists to take a more analytical approach to Siberian ethnography: 'what is needed is not mere description, but analytical study of the practices of people' (ibid., p. 203). They also argued 'that non-indigenous and even urban populations in Siberian cities should become the subject of anthropological research to no less a degree than indigenous and rural populations' (ibid., p. 204).…”

“…Research on traditional forms of land use, particularly hunting and reindeer herding, has constituted the main contribution of Siberian studies to general anthropology in recent years (Gray, Vakhtin, and Schweitzer, 2003). Over the last 15 years, anthropologists have documented a dramatic loss of traditional knowledge and practices of land use among the indigenous peoples of Siberia alongside attempts at restoration of indigenous land use and cultural revival (vozrozhdenie).…”

The Concept of the “Field” in Early Soviet Ethnography: A Northern Perspective

“…Besides, it is significant that the field as a detailed description and the field as a corporeal experience were slowly leaving the ethnographic scene, being replaced with a new wave of European anthropologists who included Siberian materials in anthropology of the North, as a strand of world social anthropology, rely ing primarily on the longitudinal field experience. This can be viewed as a new stage in the internationalization of the field (see Gray et al 2004;Vakhtin 2006). Dmitry V. Arzyutov is a research fellow at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen, UK, and at the Department of Siberian Ethnography at Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera), Russia.…”

The Anthropology of Ontology in Siberia: A Critical Review

“…Closed to foreign researchers since the rise of Stalinism in the 1930s (with very few exceptions), Siberia was opened again in the 1990s, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Anthropologists from North America, Western Europe, and Japan, most of them young scholars, augmented the ranks of their Russian and East European colleagues, bringing with them their own favored theories and methods (Alymov and Sokolovskiy 2018;Funk 2018;Gray, Vakhtin, and Schweitzer 2003;Vakhtin 2006;Vitebsky and Alekseyev 2015). This occurred just as a number of new trends emerged in the field of anthropology, one of which was the turn to ontology by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Philippe Descola.…”