Siberia, Anthropology in

Siberia, Anthropology in DMITRIY FUNK Moscow State University, Russia, and Tomsk State University, Russia The territory of Siberia is constituted by a significant part of North Asia lying east of the Ural Mountains and within the borders of the Russian Federation. In the north, the Arctic Ocean forms its natural border, whereas in the south there is the state border of Russia with Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and China, and in the east there rest the watershed ridges of the Pacific Ocean. The area makes up about 10 million square kilometers, or 9 percent of the earth’s surface. From both the etic and the emic perspectives, Siberia is just over half of the territory referred to above, with the second and slightly smaller part of it being known as the Far East. This entry’s focus is on this whole region, including the so-called Russian North, which has always been an object of study for ethnologists and anthropologists, and has been examined in the context of general issues of circumpolar anthropology. For the reader’s convenience, this entire vast territory will be referred to as Siberia, though any further specific details will be provided where needed. The terms etnografiya (which before the twenty-first century was used in Russian exclusively as the name of a discipline, not of a method) and etnologiya have been long used and sometimes continue to be used as synonyms in Russian academic discourse, and in recent years have also been considered as synonymous with the term antropologiya, which is understood as social and cultural (or sociocultural) anthropology. And yet, many Russian scholars, in accordance with the long-standing interpretation, continue to see the term antropologiya as referring solely to physical anthropology. Herein, the terms “ethnography,” “ethnology,” and “anthropology” will be used interchangeably to mean social and/or cultural anthropology. Siberia is a territory traditionally inhabited by several dozens of indigenous ethnic groups. Some linguistic classifications that also largely reflect the cultural specificities of these groups can be used to combine them into (from west to east) Ugric, Samoyedic, Altai (Turkic), Mongolian, Manchu–Tungus, Chukotko–Kamchatkan, Eskimo–Aleut, and Paleo-Asiatic language families/groups. These groups encompass in total some 1.6 million people, or approximately 6 percent of the entire population of Siberia (excluding the northern portion of European Russia), according to the Russian Census of 2010. The history of Siberian anthropology has been described and analyzed in both its general and specific aspects, including contributions that have proved significant for the field. Among such are the works of Alexander Pypin (1833–1904), who was dedicated to the early stages of the development of ethnography in Siberia (Pypin 1892); Sergey Tokarev (1899–1985), who wrote a history of Russian ethnography (Tokarev 1966); and Han Vermeulen, whose monograph deals with the genesis of ethnography and ethnology (Vermeulen 2015). The series of academic volumes titled Peoples The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Edited by Hilary Callan. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. DOI: 10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea2359 2 S I BE R I A , A NT HR OP OL OGY IN and Cultures (2004–12) contains detailed historiographic reviews on regions and certain ethnic groups of Siberia’s indigenous population. In addition, of particular interest due to the thoroughness of their work are articles by Demitri Shimkin (1916–92; see Shimkin 1990) and by Piers Vitebsky and Anatoliy Alekseev (2015); a well-known book by Yuri Slezkine (1996); and Peter Schweitzer’s dissertation (2001). Virtually all of the history of Siberian anthropology has been international in its character (a good illustration of this is the table of contents of all issues of the journal Sibirica: Interdisciplinary Journal of Siberian Studies)—except for a short period of time under the Soviet Union, from the late 1920s to the early 1960s (by some accounts, into the late 1980s)—and a prominent role has been played by indigenous researchers. From the eighteenth century to the first third of the nineteenth century From the late sixteenth century through the seventeenth century, there was a significant amount of information gathered on the population of Siberia, as the Russian state was extending into this territory. However, up to the end of the seventeenth century, this information had been accumulated almost exclusively for practical, administrative purposes; it therefore had been left unpublished and been kept in the archives. There were some exceptions, though, such as a number of works of the late seventeenth century (hereon, Russian titles are usually presented in English translation): Historia de Siberia (History of Siberia) by Yuriy Krizhanich, A Description of the First Part of the Universe Called Asia by Nikolay Spafariy (1636–1708), and a unique map of Siberia drawn by Semyon Remezov (1642 to after 1721); however, in general, it was not until the eighteenth century that scientific research on Siberia started to appear. The first quarter of the eighteenth century saw two outstanding pieces of research that were published only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In 1715, the first ethnographic monograph on Siberia—and in fact one of the first in the world literature—came out, authored by Grigoriy Novitskiy (died ca. 1725). In his book, entitled A Brief Description of the Ostyak People (written 1715 in Russian; first published in German in 1721), he gave a consistent account of the economy, the way of life, and the material culture of the Ostyaks (Khanty) as well as of their customs and beliefs. Daniel Messerschmidt (1685–1735), a German scholar who had joined the Russian Army in 1716, undertook a seven-year (1720–27) journey across Siberia aiming at exploring the region’s nature, local peoples, languages, and ancient artifacts and pieces of writing. The five volumes of his field diary (Messerschmidt 1962–77) constitute a valuable source on the history and culture of the Siberian peoples of that time. The whole of this period was marked by the activity of the Russian Academy of Sciences, established in 1725, and by a series of northern expeditions. In the eighteenth century alone there were over fifty journeys organized, two of which are particularly well known: the Great Northern Expedition (or the Second Kamchatka Expedition) of 1733–43 and the Physical Expedition (or the Academic Expedition) of 1768–74. It was in the guidelines these expeditions’ members received and in their works that the fundamental principle of the structure of ethnographic accounts—however static they were at S I BE R I A , A NT HR OP OL OGY IN 3 the time—was introduced; for two centuries, it became a “calling card” of a kind for Russian and particularly Soviet ethnography. The guidelines received by a historian named Gerhard Müller who led the land squad of the Great Northern Expedition prescribed the following: 1) … especially look out for … where the boundaries of each people lie, what these are, and whether peoples of different origins are mixed or not; 2) what the origins of each people are according to their own narratives, what ancient dwellings, settlements, and daily pursuits each people has; 3) what faith each people has and whether they have any natural one; 4) folk, home, marriage rituals, and customs are to be observed; 5) some examples of each people’s language are to be collected, for example, of the Lord’s Prayer, numbers, nouns, and most common names. (cited in Tokarev [1966] 2015, 99) Among the most well-known authors of this time, whose works would be published a century or even two centuries later, are such names as Gerhard Müller (1705–83), Johann Gmelin (1709–55), Jakob Lindenau (1710–95), Stepan Krasheninnikov (1711–55), Johann Georgi (1729–1802), and Peter Pallas (1741–1811). Some of their works are monographic accounts—several of them extremely detailed, such as Lindenau’s description of the Yakut people. Not only were they capable of describing what they had observed but they could also already identify interrelationships between certain cultural phenomena and attempted to interpret them. Thus, exogamy and social stratification were identified in local communities, and certain relationships between geographical conditions and forms of culture as well as between customs and myths were revealed. The principles underlying linguistic classifications were also elaborated and became widely used (albeit in separate forms) by subsequent scholars. In some cases, these works provided information about ethnic groups that had been assimilated by their more numerous neighbors. For example, the book by Georgi (Description of All the Nations of the Russian Empire, 1776–80) contains unique information about Kistim or Tuliber Tatars, the Koibal and Sayat people, Mators, Tubinians, Kamachins, Karakassy, Arintsy, Azans, Kotovtsy, and others. It should be noted that, for all of these groups, Georgi defined their language affiliation. The first attempts to comprehend the essence and origins of Siberian peoples’ shamanic beliefs are also attributed to Georgi. Unlike his predecessors, who considered shamans to be servants of the devil or cheaters, Georgi saw shamanism as a religious system in which, in his view, there were both general notions of natural faith and some rituals from the “Law of Moses.” According to Vermeulen (2015), it was from those expeditions’ research programs that the disciplines of ethnography and ethnology were born. Among the writings of the first third of the nineteenth century that stand out for their authorial thoroughness are the articles by Grigoriy Spasskiy (1783–1864) that were published in his journal Sibirskiy Vestnik (Siberian Newsletter; later known as Aziatskiy Vestnik [Asian Newsletter], 1818–26); also notable in this regard is the two-volume work Istoricheskoe Obozrenie Sibiri (Historical Review of Siberia, 1838–44) by Pyotr Slovtsov (1767–1843). At this time, materials on Siberian peoples’ customary law were collected and some of these were published by Dmitriy Samokvasov (1843–1911) in 1897. Apart from a whole range of unique materials, these works included in-depth observations that were of importance for the development of ethnography in general. For example, 4 S I BE R I A , A NT HR OP OL OGY IN Slovtsov is known to have stressed the importance of studying indigenous languages. He wrote: “Without a thorough study of dialects in use, our ethnography describes only the external part of rituals which seem to be either funny or stupid if we do not look into their hidden foundations” (cited in Tokarev [1966] 2015: 231). As a rule, historiographers had not mentioned other traditions in Siberian studies, except for Russian ones, up until the mid-nineteenth century. However, even if we accept that there is no such thing as a German tradition in Siberian studies and that there is no way to identify any influence of Siberian research on the development of German ethnology or social anthropology, it is difficult to deny the fundamental importance of the early works by German-speaking scholars and travelers for the development of Siberian studies as a stand-alone scientific (sub)discipline along with oriental and African studies. Research done from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century The rise in ethnographic research on Siberia is largely associated with the activity of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society (IRGO), created in St. Petersburg in the autumn of 1845. In 1847, a program (“circular letter”) was compiled and circulated across the country that prompted the collection of ethnographic materials. The IRGO asked all educated Russians to send in descriptions of certain regions. By 1850, around 600 “monographic” descriptions had been received by the IRGO and soon this number rose to several thousands. A significant portion of these was published in Etnograficheskie Sborniki (Ethnographic Collections), and from 1867 they also started to appear in Zapiski IRGO po otdeleniyu etnografii (Notes of the IRGO Department of Ethnography). The comprehensive work by T. de Pauly, Description Ethnographique des Peuples de la Russie (Ethnographic Description of the Peoples of Russia, 1862), wherein there is a lot to be found on the peoples of Siberia, largely draws on the materials collected by the IRGO. In the middle of the century, expedition-driven research was once again on the rise: Alexander von Schrenck (1816–76) and Vladimir Islavin (1818–95) worked among the Nenets, and Matthias Alexander Castrén (1813–52) traveled to the Nenets as well as to other Samoyed groups of Western and Southern Siberia. The main result of Castrén’s many-year work was the accumulation of extensive materials on the languages of Finno–Ugric, Mongolian, Samoyed, Tungus, and Turkic peoples. He paved the way to systematic comparative research on these languages. In addition, Castrén proved the historical relationships between some languages that he grouped as “Altaic” languages. Thanks to Alexander Theodor von Middendorff (1815–94), Richard Maack (1825–86), Nikolay Przhevalskiy (1839–88), and Leopold von Schrenck (1826–94), there were uniquely rich ethnographic materials collected in the north of Eastern Siberia, in the Far Northeast and the Ussuri region, in the lower reaches of the Amur, and on the island of Sakhalin. Ethnographic research programs became ever more detailed and immersion in the observed cultures started to become ever deeper. S I BE R I A , A NT HR OP OL OGY IN 5 In addition to the outstanding people already mentioned, there is one person whose contribution deserves special attention—Wilhelm Radloff (1837–1918). His role in the study of the history and culture of the Turkic peoples of Siberia was utterly remarkable. The materials he gathered during a many-year expedition were published as diaries with extensive ethnographic descriptions and analytical essays (more specifically on shamanism). Moreover, he set up a ten-volume series on the folklore of the Turkic peoples of Siberia (in many cases, the texts published by Radloff and his collaborators were the first ever written samples of the language of the region’s Turkic-speaking groups), compiled a unique dictionary of Turkic languages and dialects, and decoded and published ancient Turkic texts. The number of researchers specializing in cultures of particular regions was gradually growing, and this led to the emergence of truly academic discussions in the country. Radloff’s main academic sparring partner was Vasiliy Verbitskiy (1827–90), a missionary and author of essays on the history, ethnic culture, and folklore of the Altai people as well as of a grammar book and of a professionally compiled dictionary of dialects of the Altaic language. A special role in ethnographic research in Siberia was played by exiled Russian (including Polish) intelligentsia. In 1895–97, with financial support from the gold miner Alexander Sibiryakov, the East-Siberian Department of the IRGO organized an expedition to study indigenous peoples of Yakutia. Fifteen political exiles were involved in this endeavor, among them Vsevolod Ionov (1851–1922), Vladimir Iokhelson (known as Waldemar Jochelson in the English literature) (1855–1937), Nikolay Vitashevskiy (1857–1918), Sergey Yastremskiy (1857–after 1934), Eduard Pekarskiy (1858–1934), Ivan Maynov (1861–1936), and Vladimir Bogoraz (1865–1936). After the expedition, dozens of academic writings came out, including in English, dedicated to the economy, culture, mythology, folklore, and the languages of the Yakuts, Chukchis, and Yukaghirs. Wacław Sieroszewski (Vatslav Seroshevskiy in Russian; 1858–1945), Leo Sternberg (Lev Yakovlevich Shternberg in Russian; 1861–1927; see Kan 2009), Feliks Kon (1864–1941), and Bronisław Piłsudski (1866–1918) did not participate in the Sibiryakov expedition but also found themselves in Siberia due to political exile. Not only did they gather a wealth of ethnographic materials on the Yakut and Khakass people, the Tuvinians and Nivkhs, the Orok people (Uilta), and the Ainu but they also contributed some theoretically important observations and conclusions. Sternberg “undertook the first scientific studies of Gilyak and Tungusic kinship, discovering peculiarities of marriage, sexual access, and avoidance now known to be characteristic of unilineal societies with obligatory inter-clan circulation of women” (Shimkin 1990, 42). From the last decades of the nineteenth century to the 1920s, a whole group of prominent Hungarian and Finnish scholars studied the Siberian peoples’ cultures. In Helsinki in 1883, the Finno–Ugric Society (Suomalais-ugrilainen Seura) was founded; from 1980, Ethnographia started to be published in Hungary, and it continues to be the leading Hungarian journal at present. Researchers of the two national scientific schools became interested in Finno–Ugric and Samoyedic groups. Among the brightest of them were Hungarians—Bernát Munkácsi (1860–1937), János Jankó (1868–1902), and József Pápay (1873–1931)—and Finns—August Engelbrekt Ahlqvist (1826–89), Kustaa Frederik Karjalainen (1871–1919), Uuno Taavi Sirelius (1872–1929), and Kai (Karl) Reinhold Donner (1888–1935)—and there were many others. Their collections of 6 S I BE R I A , A NT HR OP OL OGY IN materials, some of which still remain largely unpublished, are of continued interest; this is confirmed by the fact that contemporary publications (e.g., Donner and Janhunen 2014) and exhibitions are dedicated to their academic undertakings. American anthropology became interested in Siberian studies only in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and the most productive expeditions and publications occurred at the turn of the century. The Jesup North Pacific Expedition (1897–1902) was directed by Franz Boas. Gerard Fowke (1855–1933), Berthold Laufer (1874–1934), and the aforementioned Bogoraz and Iokhelson explored the southern and northern parts of the Russian Far East. At that time, fieldwork was done in the lower reaches of Amur and on Sakhalin as well as in the northeast, among Chukchis and Siberian Yupiks, Koryaks, Yukaghirs, Yakuts, Evens, and Russian old settlers (descendants of the first settlers). Each of the researchers adhered to the norms of anthropological research of the time and collected various materials—“from fishing implements to funeral ceremonies, from shamanism to dog-breeding, and from children’s games to customary law” (Schweitzer 2001, 158). The monographs The Decorative Art of the Amur Tribes (1902) by Laufer, The Chukchee (1904–9) by Bogoraz, and The Koryaks (1908) and The Yukaghir and Yukaghirized Tungus (1926) by Jochelson along with other well-known works on the peoples of Siberia, including many articles, were produced by the participants of that expedition. The Soviet period The Soviet period of anthropological research on Siberia—one of the most significant in terms of accumulating new materials and exploring new themes—was neither homogeneous nor, as it is sometimes referred to, a time of “isolation.” It can quite clearly be divided into two parts: the interwar period and the aftermath of World War II until 1991. The first years after the establishment of Soviet power saw a growing interest in applied research in the North and in Siberia. The Commission for the Study of the Tribal Structure of the Population of Russia and of Neighboring Countries (created in 1917) and particularly the Committee to Assist the Peoples of the Northern Fringe Areas (created in 1924) dealt with a wide range of practical tasks, including, most importantly, drawing up maps and holding the Circumpolar Census 1926–27, arranging scientific expeditions, and publishing journals—Sovetskiy Sever (Soviet North) and Severnaya Aziya (Northern Asia). Both the Department of Ethnography at Leningrad State University and the Department (Faculty) of Ethnology at Moscow State University started to train the first Soviet ethnographers in 1925. The training of specialists within the so-called Leningrad School, headed by the renowned Sternberg and Bogoraz, was of particular importance for the development of Siberian studies. Among the first researchers of Siberia prepared by the Leningrad School were such prominent ethnographers as Georgiy Prokof’ev (1897–1942), Nadezhda Dyrenkova (1899–1941), Leonid Potapov (1905–2000), Sergey Stebnitskiy (1906–41), Yulia Averkieva (1907–80), Innokentiy Vdovin (1907–96), and Grigoriy Verbov (1909–42). S I BE R I A , A NT HR OP OL OGY IN 7 Another important institution was the Institute of the Peoples of the North, founded in Leningrad in 1930. It trained practitioners and educators from among indigenous peoples of the North, and also conducted research. A year of fieldwork and a good command of the languages of the ethnic groups under study were broadly accepted by Russian ethnographers as a minimal requirement to conduct fieldwork. Ethnographer–researchers of Siberia who received training in the first years following the inception of the Soviet state knew several European languages, kept track of scientific literature, and almost up to the beginning of World War II published in European and American anthropology journals. It was not only Leningrad and Moscow that trained researchers of Siberia. There was a Department of Ethnology of Native Tribes at Irkutsk University, where a brilliant ethnographer—Bernhard Petri (1884–1937)—worked. This growth ceased in the 1930s. North-related journals either changed their profile or were closed. In 1930, the Faculty of Ethnology at Moscow State University was shut down, as was the entire university at Irkutsk. The Department of Ethnography at Leningrad State University was closed in 1932, and the Committee to Assist the Peoples of the Northern Fringe Areas ceased to exist in 1934. At around this time, the true Soviet period started. In 1931, in Leningrad, an Institute of Ethnography of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Academy of Sciences was established. The journal Etnografiya, which had been published from 1926 to 1930, now changed its title to Sovetskaya Etnografiya (since 1992 called Etnograficheskoe Obozrenie, or Ethnographic Review). As some scholars of the time recalled later, publishing abroad was increasingly seen as unwanted or even dangerous, though Siberianists continued to take part in the International Congresses of Americanists and publish their papers abroad until the mid-1930s. Within the Soviet Union, all theoretical perspectives on social and particularly on religious matters became reduced to a peculiar interpretation of “Marxism” along with the evolutionary paradigm. The focus was on eliminating the remnants of the old way of life and helping the peoples of the North to “develop” from their “primitive communal system” or “nomadic feudalism” to socialism. The 1930s marked the start of repression (which would last until the early 1950s) against the “enemies of the people”—a category that included many talented ethnographers. Alexander Zolotaryov (1907–43), an outstanding theorist, died in a camp; Glafira Vasilevich (1895–1971), a world-famous expert on the Evenk culture and language, was confined from 1951 to 1954; Erukhim Kreynovich (1906–85), another prominent specialist in the ethnography and languages of Kets, Yukaghirs, and Nivkhs, spent eighteen years in camps, from 1937 to 1955. Some of the brightest anthropologists—for example, Sergey Shirokogorov (1887–1939), the leading specialist in the cultures and languages of the Tungus peoples—had to emigrate after the Revolution of 1917. Some ethnographer–researchers of Siberia, such as Dyrenkova, died during World War II. By the time the Department of Ethnography at Leningrad State University and the Department of Ethnography at Moscow State University reopened in 1938 and 1939 respectively, anthropology in Siberia had substantially changed. This was also true of the entire field of Soviet anthropology (ethnography). At that point, the Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Ethnography had already taken the lead. In consequence, the research agenda was largely dominated by the interests of 8 S I BE R I A , A NT HR OP OL OGY IN researchers working at the Institute’s Moscow Department of the North (Siberia) and at the Institute’s Leningrad Department. The researchers of the Moscow Department of the North (Siberia) were in constant contact with the Division of the North (Division for the Development of the Economy and Culture of the Peoples of the North), affiliated directly with the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic Council of Ministers. They fulfilled the tasks set by the council and were involved in preparing and reviewing governmental decisions and programs for the social and economic development of the peoples of the North. Academic research conducted at the Moscow Department of the North (Siberia) dealt with the study of historical ethnography, with such themes as ethno-genesis, ethnic history, traditional economy and way of life, traditional material and spiritual culture, social and family structure, religious worldview, cults, and ritual practices dominating the agenda. Despite the department’s declared emphasis on practical tasks, it was this academic agenda that preoccupied its researchers the most. This is evident from an examination of the number of monographs and collections of articles produced by these researchers: around fifty academic writings had come out by 1990. Among the most well-known works are (titles given in English translation) The Clan-Based and Tribal Composition of the Peoples of Siberia in the Seventeenth Century (1960) by Boris Dolgikh (1904–71), The Tozhu Tuvinians (1961) by Sevyan Vainshtein (1926–2008), The Material Culture of the Saami in the Kola Peninsula in the late Nineteenth to the Twentieth centuries (1971) by Tatyana Lukyanchenko (1932–2016), The Culture of Reindeer Hunters in Northern Eurasia (1976) by Yuriy Simchenko (1935–95), The Culture of the Northern Yakut Reindeer Herders (1977) by Ilya Gurvich (1919–92), The Problems of Genesis of the North-Samoyed Peoples (1979) by Vladimir Vasiliev (1936–93), The Folk Choreographic Art of the Indigenous Population in the North-East of Siberia (1983) by Maria Zhornitskaya (1921–95), Social Organization of the Khanty and Mansi in the Eighteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries (The Issue of Phratry and Clan) (1983) by Zoya Sokolova (b. 1930), Ethnic Processes in the Peoples of the Lower Amur and Sakhalin (1984) by Anna Smolyak (1920–2003), and The Tungus People (Evens and Evenks) of Middle and Western Siberia (1985) by Vladilen Tugolukov (1924–86). In the aftermath of World War II, academic research at the Leningrad Department of Ethnography (Institute of Ethnography, Soviet Academy of Sciences) developed in two directions. However, there was less applied research conducted. First, comprehensive research on various peoples continued; this allowed the creation of a panorama of the history of the traditional cultures of Siberia. That, in turn, contributed to the development of a unified structure of “monographic descriptions of peoples” (limited to the period from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries), a model that was reproduced for many decades in dissertations and books. Second, the focus shifted to comparative–historical and comparative–typological methods in the analysis of materials. A series of works came out that became classics in Soviet ethnography: The Peoples of Siberia (1956; translated into English in 1964) and Istoriko-Etnograficheskiy Atlas Sibiri (Historico-Ethnographic Atlas of Siberia, 1961). Both books were edited by Maxim Levin (1904–63) and Leonid Potapov. Equally important were descriptions of the Siberian peoples’ tradition of weaving described by Andrey Popov and published in 1955, and an edited volume, Clothes of the Peoples of Siberia (1971), and a series of S I BE R I A , A NT HR OP OL OGY IN 9 monographs by Sergey Ivanov (1895–1986) on the art of Siberian peoples, published between 1954 and 1970. The department’s research fellows also did much research on certain regions of Siberia and on general topics. In the late 1950s, under the leadership of Potapov, the Tuvinian Integrated Archaeological and Ethnographic Expedition was launched. It produced three volumes of academic works (published in 1960, 1966, and 1970) as well as several monographs: Essays on the Tuvinian People’s Everyday Life by Potapov (1969), The Tuvinian Funeral Rite as a Historical and Ethnographic Source by Vera Dyakonova (1975), and others. Unlike their Moscow colleagues, who started to study religion, and more specifically shamanism, in the 1980s–1990s, the Leningrad researchers of Siberia had turned to this topic as early as the mid-1950s and it became one of their research priorities. In many respects, this difference in research interests between the two teams was determined by the fact that nearly all of the Leningrad researchers had a good command of Siberian languages. In 1976, 1979, and 1981 respectively, three books came out edited by Vdovin that continue to be of academic importance today: Nature and Man in Religious Ideas of the Peoples of Siberia and the North, Christianity and Lamaism among the Indigenous Population of Siberia, and Issues in the History of Social Consciousness of the Siberian Aboriginals. Another reason behind the Leningrad researchers’ focus on religious matters may be their international contacts from the late 1950s to the early 1960s. At least two European researchers of those topics were well known to them at that time: Vilmos Diószegi (1923–72), an outstanding Hungarian researcher of shamanism, and Ulla Johansen (born 1927), who later became one of the most celebrated ethnologists and organizers of postwar German ethnology. Diószegi had access to the Institute of Ethnography’s Leningrad Department archives, where he could obtain copies of almost all early twentieth-century manuscripts of Andrey Anokhin (1869–1931) on the shamanism of the South Siberian Turkic people. Some of his field observations were made among various groups of the Altai and Khakass people, as well as among the Tuvinians, Tofalars, and Buryats, and were published in a book, entitled Tracing Shamans in Siberia: The Story of an Ethnographical Research Expedition (1968). But the main portion of his manuscripts is kept at the archives of the Institute of Ethnography (Hungarian Academy of Sciences) in Budapest. Johansen drew on Siberian material, studying Yakut ornaments (in a PhD dissertation in 1953) and then the Tuvinian shaman costume (in a postdoctoral thesis, 1968, and an unpublished monograph, Die Schamanentracht bei den Tuvanern: Vorschläge zur Methodik der Schamanismusforschung [The Shaman’s Costume of the Tuva: Proposals on the Methodology of Shamanism Research]). She could not do fieldwork in Siberia. However, in 1960 and 1961, she was a senior research fellow at the Institute of Ethnography (Soviet Academy of Sciences) and maintained communication with all ethnographers in the Siberian department at Leningrad. The example of Diószegi shows not only that international scholars could have access to Soviet museums and archives but also that they did short-term fieldwork in the country. Other examples are Caroline Humphrey, a British anthropologist who conducted field research in one of the Buryat kolkhozes (collective farms) in 1967 and 1975 (Humphrey 1983), and Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, a US scholar who did a summer 1976 field trip to the Khanty area. But it should be noted that European researchers’ 10 S I BE R I A , A NT HR OP OL OGY IN publications remained practically unknown to their Soviet/Russian fellow researchers during the postwar Soviet period. From time to time, Siberian studies underwent a change in its theoretical basis, as did Soviet ethnography in general. Characteristic of the anthropology of Siberia at that time were the so-called ethno-sociological research and the preoccupation with the “theory of ethnos” as interpreted by Yulian Bromley (1921–90) (who directed the Institute of Ethnography from 1966 to 1990) as well as the rhetoric on the “development of the Peoples of the North.” The organizational structure of the anthropology of Siberia in the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods Toward the end of the Soviet Union, in the second half of the 1980s, almost all of the ethnography done on indigenous ethnic groups of Siberia—the topic that ethnography/ethnology mostly dealt with—was done in the Soviet Union and in the Russian language. Research on Siberia was carried out at the Moscow and Leningrad departments of the Institute of Ethnography; at the Institute of History, Archaeology and Ethnography (Siberian branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences) at Novosibirsk; and at the Institute of History, Archaeology and Ethnography of the Peoples of the Far East of the Russian Academy of Sciences at Vladivostok, as well as at major museums, including the State Museum of Ethnography of the Peoples of the USSR at Leningrad. Moreover, in the national republics—from west to east, Karelia, Altai, Khakassia, Tuva, Buryatia, and Yakutia—there operated local institutes for research in the humanities (or institutes of language, literature, and history), local history museums, and university museums that focused on the history, language, folklore, and ethnography of their “own” regions. There were also smaller research groups and other researchers of Siberia who worked at universities or nonspecialized institutes, and at regional museums, for example in Irkutsk, Kemerovo, Magadan, Tomsk, Yekaterinburg, and some other cities. Among academic research groups affiliated with Siberian universities, the Department of Ethnography created at Omsk in 1985, the only specialized Soviet university-affiliated department beyond the Ural Mountains, was particularly well known, due to its work in Western Siberia. In total, according to some rough estimates, no fewer than 200 holders of “candidate of sciences” degrees (equivalent to PhD) or—though in rare cases—of “doctor of sciences” degrees (comparable to the second doctoral degree, or habilitation, in the German-speaking countries) devoted themselves to the ethnography of Siberia and of the Russian North in the Soviet Union. Siberian studies abroad were not so diverse, especially taking into account those researchers who did (or rather, could do) fieldwork in the Soviet Union. Despite the fact that in the early 1980s US (under the Fulbright Program) and Western European scholars could be invited to visit Russian universities, only a few people actually worked “in the field” in Siberia even in the late 1980s. Well known for her ethnographic, folkloric, and linguistic work is Éva Schmidt (1948–2002), a Hungarian researcher who worked for several years among the Khanty, and the aforementioned US scholar Marjorie Balzer, S I BE R I A , A NT HR OP OL OGY IN 11 who worked in Yakutia. There were also a number of valuable anthropological publications and a few PhD dissertations based on literature research that dealt with Siberia, but “there was no perceivable influence of these ‘outside’ approaches on mainstream Soviet studies of Siberia” (Schweitzer 2001, 240). The decade that followed—from around 1988–91 to 1998–2000—changed the anthropology of Siberia beyond recognition. The shift in Soviet politics and the subsequent collapse of the country meant that the borders were open and new opportunities appeared for Western researchers to do long-term research in Siberia. In 1988, a British scholar, Piers Vitebsky, came to study shamanism among the Evens; in 1989, Anna Kerttula, a US anthropologist, embarked on eighteen months of research among Eskimos in Chukotka; and in 1990, Bruce Grant, a Canadian anthropologist, did his field research on Sakhalin—to name only a few examples. The same social and political shift, though, led to a drastic reduction of financial support for ethnographic research in Russia. Many institutes and departments had to stop their field trips. However, in those same years (starting from 1992), the Russian Foundation for Basic Research was established. In 1993–94, it supported no fewer than ten three-year research projects on ethnography, history, archaeology, folklore, and the demographics of Siberia. In 1994, the foundation’s divisions for the humanities and social sciences were transferred to the Russian Foundation for the Humanities, created in that same year. It would later regain its original name—Russian Foundation for Basic Research—in 2017. Over 20 percent of the ethnological applications supported by the foundation in all kinds of competitions (e.g., related to research, publishing, or field expeditions) are related to Siberia. What characterizes this period in terms of European and North American research outcomes is the high output of anthropological PhD dissertations. Thus, Schweitzer (2001), focusing on Germany, Britain, and the United States, counted sixteen dissertations defended between 1990 and 2000. In spite of the seeming stagnation in Russian ethnological research, over ninety dissertations on Siberia- and North-related themes were defended during that decade in the Russian language, specifically within the subject area “ethnography, ethnology, and anthropology” (the official contemporary name of anthropology in Russia). This figure was calculated through the “E-Library of Dissertations” of the Russian State Library (http://diss.rsl.ru/?menu=disscatalog), without taking into account dozens of dissertations on pedagogy, political science, history, geography, sociology, economics, philosophy, medicine, and technology that also dealt with Siberian materials. The years 1998–2000 constituted another milestone in the development of the anthropology of Siberia. During this time, Siberian studies was rejuvenated by younger people entering the newly attractive department and there began an intensive international collaboration with the Department of the North at the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IEA RAS) in Moscow. Also, the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Germany) created a Siberian group in 2000. The following years—until the end of 2013—were largely influenced by projects and publications developed and authored by researchers representing the abovementioned research groups, namely, Elena Batianova, Ludek Broz, Brian Donahoe, Stephan Dudeck, Radjana Dugarova, Dmitriy Funk, Katharina Gernet, Patty Gray, Joachim Otto Habeck, Agnieszka Halemba, Kyrill Istomin, Erich Kasten, Alex 12 S I BE R I A , A NT HR OP OL OGY IN King, Elena Liarskaya, Nadezhda Mamontova, Natalia Novikova, Jaroslava Panáková, Eleanor Peers, Olga Povoroznyuk, István Sántha, Kyrill Shakhovtsov, Anna Sirina, Florian Stammler, Virginie Vaté, Aimar Ventsel, Vladislava Vladimirova, John Ziker, and others. At around the same time, several academic centers became active in the field of Siberian studies, among them the Scott Polar Research Institute (established in 1920) and the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit (founded in 1986) at the University of Cambridge (Piers Vitebsky, Caroline Humphrey, and their students); the Anthropology of the North group at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland (Tim Ingold, David Anderson, and others); the Arctic Centre at the University of Lapland, Finland (through projects run by Bruce Forbes); and the Center for Ainu and Indigenous Studies at Hokkaido University, Japan. In addition, social anthropologists at Uppsala University (led by Hugh Beach) initiated and implemented a number of important projects on Siberia, including ones with an international scope. Fellow researchers from the Centre d’Études Mongoles et Sibériennes (Center for Mongolian and Siberian Studies, established in Paris in 1970) continued to be actively involved as well. After the closure of the Siberian Studies Centre at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, anthropological research done on Siberia within the German-speaking world moved to Vienna, to the Austrian Polar Research Institute. In Russia, after 2013, the role of the IEA RAS Department of the North weakened, whereas anthropological research on Siberia gained momentum and an international dimension at universities such as the European University at St. Petersburg (with its research program “Northern Studies” launched at the Department of Anthropology in 2010), Moscow State University (Department of Ethnology), and National Research Tomsk State University (and its Laboratory for Social and Anthropological Research, created in 2013). The number of journals on Siberian, Arctic, or Northern themes has clearly risen, and that has been an important development in terms of consolidation of the field. The journals with a long-standing history—such as Acta Borealia, Arctic Anthropology, Inuit Studies, and Études mongoles & sibériennes, centrasiatiques & tibétaines (Mongolian & Siberian, Central Asian & Tibetan Studies)—were joined by new ones: Archaeology, Ethnology and Anthropology of Eurasia (since 2000), Sibirica (started in 1993 and published regularly since 2002), and Siberian Historical Research (since 2013). The actual number of platforms where Siberian anthropological research is discussed is higher, though, as journals such as the Estonian Folklore and the Russian Etnograficheskoe Obozrenie (Ethnographic Review), among others, regularly release special issues on those themes as well. This region has been distinguished by a number of valuable serial publications, exemplified by the Russian–German series Quellen zur Geschichte Sibiriens und Alaskas aus Russischen Archiven (Sources for the History of Siberia and Alaska from Russian Archives) (seven volumes in German and five in Russian released since 1998); the IEA RAS Russian-language series Narody i Kultury (Peoples and Cultures) (twenty-seven volumes since 1997); and a bilingual (in both Russian and indigenous languages) multivolume series Monuments of Folklore of the Peoples of Siberia and the Far East (thirty-three volumes issued by the Siberian branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences since 1990). There are a number of other serial publications with S I BE R I A , A NT HR OP OL OGY IN 13 a focus on certain themes or regions that partly or fully draw on Siberian materials as well: Bibliotheca Kamtschatica (Kamchatka Library, of which there are six volumes, 2011–13), published by Kulturstiftung Sibirien; Ethnological Studies of Shamanism and Other Indigenous Spiritual Beliefs and Practices (seventeen volumes, produced by the IEA RAS between 1995 and 2012); and a few others. Contemporary anthropological research themes related to Siberia The largest part of anthropological research in Siberia is funded by scientific foundations and therefore is limited to one-, two-, or three-year periods. Themes vary considerably: in addition to static descriptive “ethnographic” works on ethnoses, ethno-genesis, traditional cultures, and worldviews (which still tend to be published in Russian), there is a significant amount of purely anthropological or historical– anthropological research as well. Today, topics that draw the most attention include the relationships between the state, business, and indigenous groups; ethnic politics and the use of resources; forced migrations; social impact assessment (in the Russian literature, often referred to as “ethnological assessment”); modernization and new forms of cultural and social adaptation; traditional social structures in contemporary local power relations; various aspects of urban and linguistic anthropology; education (more specifically, nomadic schools and new methods for the revitalization of indigenous languages); gender; family; the relationship between humans and new technologies; humans and animals; humans and spirits; shamanism; new religious practices; and folklore traditions. Interesting works have come out on the history of certain cultural phenomena as well as on the history of anthropology (e.g., on repressed anthropologists). The variety of research interests is gradually expanding and covers not only rural indigenous populations but also city dwellers, including both non-Russian indigenous groups and Russian old settlers and old believers (Orthodox, rejecting the church reform undertaken in the 1650s and 1660s) as well as those who constitute the main part of the population of today’s Siberia, including not only “permanent” but also recent migrant populations. Another notable trend associated with the entrance of Western researchers into the “Siberian field” is the strong interest in reindeer herders inhabiting various territories—from the Kola Peninsula to Northeast Asian Russia—with a particular focus on contemporary social and economic transformations of nonurban societies. This trend has started to change, though. Some special issues of journals and individual articles have been produced dedicated to the Northern dwellers’ urban way of life, and the area of purely “reindeer-herder-oriented” research has also become more diversified, including such topics as identities, kinship and property, boarding schools, youth culture in the tundra, and so on. The increased amount of international research collaboration appears to be the most significant step in the development of the anthropology of Siberia. More and more 14 S I BE R I A , A NT HR OP OL OGY IN publications are being published jointly by international and Siberian researchers, including researchers from indigenous ethnic groups. SEE ALSO: Boas, Franz (1858–1942); Postsocialist Europe, Anthropology in; Russia, Anthropology in; Siberian Cosmologies; World Anthropologies REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING Abaeva, Liubov, and Natalia Zhukovskaia, eds. 2004. Buriaty [Buriats]. Moscow: Nauka. Alekseev, Nikolai, Yekaterina Romanova, and Zoya Sokolova, eds. 2012. Yakuty (Sakha) [Yakuts (Sakha)]. Moscow: Nauka. Anderson, David G., and Dmitry V. Arzyutov. 2016. “The Construction of Soviet Ethnography and ‘The Peoples of Siberia.’” History and Anthropology 27 (2): 183–209. Batianova, Elena, and Vadim Turaev, eds. 2010. Narody Severo-Vostoka Sibiri [The Peoples of the Northeast of Siberia]. Moscow: Nauka. Donner, Joakim, and Juha Janhunen, eds, and Peter Sandberg, photo ed. 2014. Kai Donner: Linguist, Ethnographer, Photographer. Helsinki: Société Finno-Ougrienne, National Board of Antiquities. Funk, Dmitriy. 2009. “In Search of a ‘Roster of 26 Smaller Peoples of the North’ of Russia.” In Passageways: From Hungarian Ethnography to European Ethnology and Sociocultural Anthropology, edited by Gábor Vargyas, 315–29. Budapest: University of Pécs / L’Harmattan. Funk, Dmitriy, and Nikolai Alekseev, eds. 2008. Tiurkskie narody Vostochnoi Sibiri [The Turkic Peoples of East Siberia]. 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Belorussiya i Sibir’ [Belorussia and Siberia]. Vol. 4 of Istoria russkoi etnografii [History of Russian Ethnography]. St. Petersburg: M. M. Stasyulevich. Schweitzer, Peter. 2001. “Siberia and Anthropology: National Traditions and Transnational Moments in the History of Research.” Habilitation thesis, University of Vienna. Shimkin, Demitri. 1990. “Siberian Ethnography: Historical Sketch and Evaluation.” Arctic Anthropology 27 (1): 36–52. Slezkine, Yuri. 1996. Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Tokarev, Sergei. (1966) 2015. Istoria russkoi etnografii [History of Russian Ethnography]. Moscow: Institute of Russian Civilization. Vermeulen, Han. 2015. Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Vitebsky, Piers, and Anatoly Alekseev. 2015. “Siberia.” Annual Review of Anthropology 44: 439–55.