Talking Rocks in the Irkutsk Museum: Networks of Science in Late Imperial Siberia

Abstract

This article critically examines the intervention of a collection of geological specimens into local politics in Irkutsk in imperial Russia's constitutional period. Gathered for research on the Circumbaikal (Krugobaikal'skaia) Railroad in 1904, these rocks were donated to the museum of the East Siberian Section of the Imperial Russian Geographic Society in Irkutsk; but were subsequently removed from the storage tower, taken to European Russia by train, and pulverized in a laboratory in order to test their weight‐bearing potential and open them up to chemical examination under a microscope. The ensuing conflict in Irkutsk over their removal divided local men of science into factions, both of which called on the rocks to “talk” for them in different ways. The culmination of the conflict was the publication in a local newspaper of a traditionally formatted “grievance” voiced by those rocks that remained in storage in the museum. This grievance played on assumptions by Siberian elites about the superior moral authenticity of the local over abstract central authority. I argue, however, that while this was a savvy political move by the defenders of the rocks as museum property, this conflict was not actually a case of resistance to central crushing of local agency, nor should it be understood as a linear ascendency of professionals over amateurs. Rather, it was a conflict between overlapping and competing scientific networks, both of which had ties to the region around Irkutsk as well as to agencies in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and both of which depended on the circulation of things, people, and values to make the local meaningful. Both sides depended on the possession of objects for the legitimacy of their science, and appealed to the concreteness of rocks to make a case for the objective correctness of their points of view. Thinking about rocks as participants in an assemblage of human actors; tectonic (and political) instability; indigenous markers of place; museum storage rooms; railroads; newspapers; and laboratory instruments enables us to conceive of late Imperial Russian culture and politics as embodied, vibrant, and in constant motion.