Russian Ethnography Research Articles

Особенности национальной одежды алтайцев

Introduction. With reference to works by Russian ethnographers and collected field materials, the paper presents the first insight into specific features of Altaian traditional clothes and changes the latter undergo in the modern period. Goals. The work primarily seeks to reveal transformations of Altaian national garments in the late 20th – early 21st centuries. Materials. The study examines data from field expeditions to Ust-Kansky, Shebalinsky and other districts of the Altai Republic in 2017-2019. The research data collection methods included those of questionnaires and interviews among local communities of the mentioned districts of the region. Results. The paper highlights various aspects of men’s and women’s clothes represented mainly by outer garments, such as sheepskin coats, e.g., nekey ton (a sheepskin coat a with long thick fur), akar ton (a coat sheepskin with short thick fur), kyptu ton (a coat with fabric-trimmed upper elements), tortok ton (a short sheepskin coat), and also sleeveless jackets (kögÿspek) and national gowns (chekpen). The work describes caps worn both by men and women (tÿlkÿ bychkak börÿk, talbañ börÿk, kish börÿk, bolchok börÿk), shoes made of fur (skin) from animals’ lower legs (bychkak ödÿk) or leather ones (katu/ köm ödÿk, charyk ödÿk, shiri ödÿk) usually decorated with upright pointed toes. Special attention is paid to women’s wedding and festal clothes, namely: dresses with wide sleeves and long cuffs that were to completely cover hands, the former decorated with buttons, beads, and ornaments to be worn under a full-length silk sleeveless jacket. The research explains differences between the classical and contemporary conventionalized chegedek full-length sleeveless jackets worn by women over a special dress during wedding ceremonies. Chegedek communicates a symbolic message that a girl acquires the new status of a married woman. Some attention is given to men’s undergarments, such as regular shirts (chamcha) mostly worn untucked with woolen trousers (shtan). Conclusions. The Altaian clothes have underwent certain changes but some centuries-old traditions survive till nowadays, e.g., women’s dresses are distinguished by special sleeves (ushtuktar) and ‘wings’ (kanattar). However, it is noteworthy that the tradition of selecting colors for garments with due regard of age and sex is lost, and layout of decorative elements has also changed. The loss of ethnic features in national clothes results from the wide use of commercial cloths and services of tailor shops.

Традиция в условиях военной экстремальности: народные способы осмысления и «преодоления» Великой Отечественной войны

Introduction. In the study the authors consider the ways of understanding and overcoming the extreme conditions of the Great Patriotic The task is to define the forms and ways of “overcoming” the war conditions and its traumatizing consequences developed by Russians and to identify their connection with traditional types of worldview and folk ritual practices. Methods and materials. The analysis of folk stories recorded among different generations and rural Russian areas as well as memories about the wartime and the period after the Great Patriotic War compose the base of the article. According to the main task the authors use the method widely used in the Russian Ethnography which is called the “inside the tradition” view, or analysis from the position of its bearers. Analysis. The natural alternation of periods of prosperity and crises explains the inevitability of war, but according to popular beliefs, the impoverishment of the sacred sphere of life is the main factor of a tragedy. On the contrary, human turning to God and his / her repentance determine the possibility of overcoming a tragedy. The concept of “a rule” (and its violation) as well as the concept of “a destiny” (a shared fate) which must be restored and redistributed under the crisis according to popular beliefs play an important role in the mechanism of developing ways to “overcome” the war among the Russians during the wartime. Wartime ritual practices including baking and cutting bread, redistributing it to the front line, organizing joint meals, etc. confirm the statement. The process of the revival of religious (Orthodox) practices, and the formation of a collective memory of the war and the fallen heroes was inspired from below, from the masses. This initiative included folk forms of veneration and remembrance of the dead, the creation of sacred places associated with the war and the memory about it. Women, who became the main keepers of the tradition, who took upon themselves the functions of harmonizing the socio-psychological situation in rural areas during the difficult war and postwar years, were especially active in these processes. Results. The authors confirm the particular role of traditional types of worldview influencing the modern collective memory as well as social practices during both extreme conditions and everyday life. Ordinary people preferred to turn to centuries-old spiritual traditions of overcoming war traumas and to use the experience of preserving collective memory of them formed in the pre-revolutionary time within the peasant and Cossack communities.

ЭТНОГРАФИЧЕСКИЕ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЯ В ОБЩЕСТВЕННОМ КРАЕВЕДЕНИИ АЛТАЯ (XIX – НАЧАЛО XX В.)

Drawing on the example of ethnographic studies of Altai, the paper traces a process of collecting initial empiric material – mostly by forces of local historians; that fact defined public format in this sector of scientific activity which substantially contributed to Russian ethnography, enriched this branch of science with facts considered as sources for theoretical analysis. The author considers methods, problems of ethnographic studies, a relation between them and tasks of public and state development that defines logic of scientific search. The paper shows a contribution made by researchers in creating ethnographic heritage of Altai, analyses scientific and humanistic value of the phenomenon.

Рукопись Е. Д. Прокофьевой «Рыболовство тазовско-туруханских селькупов» из архива Музея антропологии и этнографии (Кунсткамера) РАН как источник по истории и этнографии Сибири. 1920-1960-е гг.

In the archive of the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera) of the Russian Academy of Sciences, in the collection of famous ethnographers and researchers of Siberia, employees of the MAE RAS G.N. Prokofiev and E.D. Prokofieva there is an incomplete manuscript of an article by Ekaterina Dmitrievna Prokofieva “Fishing in the Taz-Turukhansk Selkups” (AMAE, fond 6, series 1, no. 104). In the first part of the manuscript, the author provides purely ethnographic data on traditional fishing methods among the population of the Taz River, characterizing the state of fishing in the region on the eve of Soviet modernization. The second part contains information about socialist changes that had taken place in the Taza region from the 1920s to the early 1960s: the transformation of the traditional culture of the local peoples, the change in the anthropogenic landscape, and the formation of the industrial fishing. The material, on which the work is based, was collected by E.D. Prokofieva during the expedition of 1962 to the Krasnoselkup district of the Tyumen region. The expedition was her last trip to the Northern Selkups. Alongside E.D. Prokofieva in the expedition there worked a young graduate student A.M. Reshetov, in future, well-known sinologist, historian of Russian ethnography, head of the department of East and Southeast Asia, and party organizer of the MAE RAS. The materials included in the text of the manuscript were obtained from direct participants and witnesses of the events or were taken from the economic documentation available at that time in the organizations of the district. The generation of informants has since changed, and the complex of documentation with which the researcher worked has become fragmented, scattered in the archives, and partially lost. This makes the manuscript a valuable source containing rare materials on unexplored issues of ethnography and history of the Taz lands of the era of intensive Soviet transformations. The purpose of this and several previous publications by the author, written on the basis of E.D. Prokofieva’s manuscript , is to introduce into the scientific use new data on the history, ethnography, and historiography of Siberia.

Материалы И. М. Пульнера по этнографии грузинских евреев в архиве Российского этнографического музея. 1926-1929 гг.

The article introduces one of the documentary sources on the history and ethnography of the Georgian Jews stored in the archive of the Russian Ethnographic Museum – field materials collected by I. M. Pulner in his expeditions to Georgia in 1926, 1928, and 1929. The introductory part of the article provides a brief summary of the main stages of his professional activity, wherein his study of the Georgian Jews ethnography dates back to his student years. The expeditions he carried out at that time were the first experience of purposeful ethnographic study of this Jewish ethnic group. Pulner's field materials accrue special scientific value as they contain real facts and people’s statements, as well as ethnographer’s direct observations, which give a fairly objective idea of everyday culture and socio-economic conditions of the Georgian Jews in the second half of the 1920s. The documents of the archive include expedition journal and report, as well as separate notes on various areas of Georgian Jewish culture. Most notes date from Pulner’s first trip to Kutaisi; in the following two years, he mostly visited villages where the Georgian Jews lived, but the archive of the Museum contains only several his recordings of weather wisdom, culinary recipes, and song lyrics written down in these trips. The article chiefly analyses Pulner’s Kutaisi materials. Drawing on them, methods and peculiarities of his ethnographic work among the local Jews are revealed; areas in which he collected his data are described; certain information is cited concerning occupation, material situation, organization of religious life, specificity of religious rituals performed in synagogue, Sabbath celebration, state of Jewish education following the closure of Jewish schools during the Soviet era, attitude to the ideas of Zionism among the youth, relations (including matrimony) between the mountain Jews, Ashkenazi, and Georgians Jews, traditional dwelling and its decoration, festive and everyday food, clothing, folk sayings, wedding ceremonial rites, etc. Among all occupations, Pulner underscored trade, which remained the main occupation of the Jews of Kutaisi, although it fell into decay under the Soviet rule, forcing Jews to master new professions of porters and water sellers, which were considered lowly occupations in Georgia. Talking about the synagogue, he drew attention to the fact that among the Georgian Jews it was not just a place for performing religious rites, but also the center of the Jewish quarter residents’ social life; he noted the leading role of cantor in synagogue service and detailed its procedure. There are interesting materials about relationship between the Georgian Jews and the Jews of other ethnic groups (mountain, Ashkenazi) demonstrating their distancing, as well as materials on their close cooperation with the Georgians in everyday life. Information on material culture is brief and concerns mainly clothing worn by men and women. Of the wedding rituals, Pulner managed to record only matchmaking rites. He did not succeed in continuing a full-scale study the eorgian Jews, and those materials he collected during his student expeditions remain rare evidence of the Georgian Jews in the Soviet era.

«РАСТЕТ ИНДУСТРИАЛЬНЫЙ БИРОБИДЖАН»: ДВЕ ВЫСТАВКИ, ПОСВЯЩЕННЫЕ ЕВРЕЙСКОМУ ХОЗЯЙСТВЕННОМУ И КУЛЬТУРНОМУ СТРОИТЕЛЬСТВУ В СССР, РАБОТАВШИЕ В МОСКВЕ И ЛЕНИНГРАДЕ В 1930-Е ГГ.

The author of the article considers two exhibitions dedicated to the Soviet propaganda project for the radical reconstruction of the Russian Jewry socio-economic structure. The first one – «Birobidzhan» – was held in 1933 in a pavilion of the Maxim Gorky Central Park of Culture and Rest in Moscow. Another exhibition – «Jews in Tsarist Russia and in the USSR», organized by the Jewish section of the State Museum of Ethnography (now – the Russian Ethnographic Museum) was working in Leningrad for the period from 1939 to 1941. Based on the documents stored in the Scientific Archive of the Russian Ethnographic Museum, the author shows how the Soviet propaganda machine used the demonstration material of museums in 1930s. The entire arsenal of exhibition was used to demonstrate «the achievements of the Leninist-Stalinist national policy among the Jews of the USSR», a creation of the Jewish Autonomous Region in the Soviet Far East being a major one.

Ареальные исследования в российской этнографии: традиции и современное состояние

Ареальные исследования в российской этнографии: традиции и современное состояние

“BETWEEN EUROPE AND ASIA.” ORIENTALIST NARRATIVES OF ALEXANDRA FUCHS: THE RHETORIC OF WRITING AND THE AUTHOR’S POSITION

The article discusses ethnographic essays and novellas in the poems by Alexandra Andreevna Fuchs. The wife of a famous professor Karl Fuchs, she was resident of Kazan, hosted a literary salon, which was frequented by many local and visiting writers and poets, and met with Alexander Pushkin during his stay in the town. Alexandra Fuchs became the first Russian ethnographer writer; she purposefully traveled to places where the Chuvash, Mari (Cheremis), and Udmurts (Votyaks) lived, and wrote essays about the life, daily routine, manners and customs of these peoples drawing on her personal observations. Her essays took the form of letters and were often accompanied by response letters from her husband. They were published in the Kazan magazine Zavolzhsky Muravey [Zavolzhsky Ant], in the regional newspaper Kazanskie gubernskie vedomosti [Kazan Provincial Gazette], as well as in a number of separate books. The article analyzes the rhetorical peculiarities and author’s position of Alexandra Fuks’ essay writing. The analysis also involves ethnographic-fiction novellas (poems) by A. Fuchs, taken, according to her, “from the Tatar tradition”: ‘Princess Habiba’, ‘Founding of the city of Kazan’, a comment to which was written by her husband. These works fit into the tradition of the “Eastern novella”, popular in Russia since the eighteenth century. Depicting the exotic life of ancient Tatars and the peoples neighboring Kazan, Alexandra Fuchs sought to reconcile the orientation of the region to the East with the Orthodox-Imperial ideology which (in her view) was more advanced and progressive. Her sympathies as the author lay with female characters who contradicted traditional Muslim customs. Alexandra Fuchs’ essays and tales played a considerable role in awakening the interest of a Russian reader to the peoples of the empire, which preceded the mid-19th century rise of ethnography in science and literature.

ИЛЬЯ САМУИЛОВИЧ ГУРВИЧ: УРОКИ УЧЕНОГО. ОТ ЭТНОГРАФИИ К СОВРЕМЕННОЙ ПРАКТИЧЕСКОЙ АНТРОПОЛОГИИ

In this article, the daughter of I.S. Gurvich discusses his legacy as a scientist, his contagious enthusiasm for ethnography, and his impact on her. She describes how his behavior, stories, and reminiscences sparked her initial interest in different cultures and reflects on how his research and work influenced her decision to become an anthropologist and researcher herself. She sees many parallels in her current work as a UX Researcher and corporate anthropologist with that of her father. This article also offers a short history of anthropology's entry into corporate practice, mirroring her own journey from academia, and discusses the relevance of the experiences of Soviet and Russian ethnographers for the contemporary global community of anthropologists involved in developing technology products and innovations.

Из истории формирования иранских коллекций в собрании Российского этнографического музея

The mechanisms of formation of the Iranian funds of the Russian Ethnographic Museum are analyzed in the article. The series of collections acquired at the beginning of the 20th century for this collection, indicates the relevant interest towards the multi-ethnic culture of Iran, in which female images, with an outstandingly exotic character for Europeans, have a special place. The accompanying archival materials of the collections, in particular, the correspondence between expeditionist-collector S. Ter-Avetisyan, a student of the Imperial St. Petersburg university, and the curator of the museum K. Inostrantsev, demonstrate, on the one hand, the wide range of research programs of the orientalist s tudents at the beginning of the last century, and on the other, a researcher’s high status in the Russian Empire

Ernst Haeckel, Nikolai Miklucho-Maclay and the racial controversy over the Papuans

BackgroundThe “German Darwin” Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) was a key figure during the first “Darwinian revolution“, a time when the foundations of the modern evolutionary theory were laid. It was Haeckel, who crucially contributed to the visualization of the Darwinian theory by designing “genealogical-trees” illustrating the evolution of various species, including humans. Although the idea of explaining human evolution by natural selection belongs to Darwin, Haeckel was the first who attempted to create a new exact anthropology based on the Darwinian method.DiscussionTrying to immediately reconstruct human evolution proceeding from the description of modern populations led Haeckel to the views which, from the contemporary perspective, are definitely racist. Haeckel created racial anthropology intending to prove human origins from a lower organism, but without the intention of establishing a discriminatory racial praxis. Although hierarchical in its outcome, the Haeckelian method did not presuppose the necessity of a racial hierarchy of currently living humans. It is crucial to grasp in what sense Haeckel’s theoretical explorations in human evolution were racist, and in what sense they were not. Our argument flows as follows. One of Haeckel’s pupils was the Russian ethnographer, anthropologist and zoologist Nikolai Nikolajewitsch Miklucho-Maclay (1846–1888). Maclay and Haeckel worked closely together for several years; they traveled jointly and Maclay had enough time to learn the major methodological principles of Haeckel’s research. Yet in contrast to Haeckel, Maclay is regarded as one of the first scientific anti-racists, who came to anti-racist views using empirical field studies in Papua-New Guinea.ConclusionsWe claim that while conducting these studies Maclay applied scientific principles to a significant extent acquired from Haeckel. The paper contributes to the view that Haeckel’s theoretical racism did not follow the Darwinian method he used.

K.A. INOSTRANTZEV СOLLECTION ON TRADITIONAL NOGAI CULTURE IN THE COLLECTIONS OF THE RUSSIAN ETHNOGRAPHIC MUSEUM

The article discusses a small, but rather rich in content, collection of objects from the Department of Ethnography of the Peoples of the Caucasus, Central Asia and Kazakhstan of the Russian Ethnographic Museum for Nogai Culture of the North-East Caucasus (Karanogais), which was collected at the beginning of the last century by K.A. Inostrantzev. This collection under stock number 333 is the very first museum collection on traditional Nogai culture. The collection fully demonstrates the features of the traditional culture and art of the people. It contains unique materials that have long been lost in the environment of everyday life and do not have originals in the central and regional museums of the country and in private collections. These are the interior items of the yurt, items of male and female costume, wedding arba, wedding yurt and felt decorations of the wedding yurt of the late XIX - early XX centuries.
 The main objective of the study is to consider museum objects of the collection 333 as objects of historical and cultural heritage, to identify and study them as an independent scientific source. This formulation of the problem was primarily due to modern trends, when in the era of digital computer technology in the humanities, interest in the latest research practices is growing. The study of objects of traditional culture using modern techniques would allow to reveal already seemingly sufficiently studied material from a new point of view. In this sense, museum collections play a significant role and sometimes are the only source for studying objects of traditional material culture and art of some peoples. And therefore, the allocation of the specifics of the information resource of museum material for its further analysis is one of the urgent tasks today, both in historical disciplines and in the field of related sciences.
 As part of this study, a detailed analysis of museum objects was carried out, the attribution of things was compiled, a classification was created.

A Visitor's Guide to Shamans and Shamanism

In the late imperial era, the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (the Kunstkamera) in St. Petersburg produced a series of guidebooks for visitors that provided an account of the changes in the gallery spaces and collections within the museum. Among the changes was a reorganization of the collection that brought about the removal of a gallery dedicated to Russian ethnography, which had housed Siberian, Central Asian, and a small number of European Russian objects. Siberian and Central Asian materials were then presented by the museum in an Asian ethnographic collection. In this new Asian collection, shamanism emerged as a category that operated to unify Russia in Asia as a culturally contiguous space located in an imperial elsewhere east of the Urals.

Missing Links. Indigenous Life and Evolutionary Thought in the History of Russian Ethnography.

The history of Russian social anthropology has long been best known for the work of three, late nineteenth-century "exile ethnographers," each sent to the Russian Far East for their anti-tsarist activities as students. All three men-Vladimir Bogoraz, Vladimir Iokhel'son, and Lev Shternberg-produced voluminous and celebrated works on Russian far eastern indigenous life, but it was the young Shternberg who had perhaps the most profound effect on setting the agenda for the canonic evolutionist line soon to take hold in late Russian imperial and early Soviet ethnography. This essay draws on archival, library, and field research to revisit the life and work of Shternberg in order to tell the story of "group marriage" that he documented for the life of one Sakhalin Island indigenous people, Gilyaks (or Nivkhgu, Nivkhi). Documented in this way by Shternberg, the Nivkh kinship system proved a crucial "missing link" for Friedrich Engels, who had long been eager to provide evidence of primitive communism as man's natural state. For Gilyaks, the die was cast. Their role as the quintessential savages of Engels' favor made them famous in Russian and Soviet ethnographic literature, and significantly enhanced their importance to Soviet government planners. This essay tracks that episode and its aftermaths as a pivotal moment in the history of Russian social anthropology and of evolutionist thought more broadly.

New data on accounts of the 1908 Tunguska event

AbstractThere has been a longstanding debate about the nature of the 1908 Tunguska event. Many eyewitness accounts were collected more than half of a century after the event. Among these are many second‐hand oral accounts after the generation of eyewitnesses faded away. However, several years ago, two valuable publications appeared containing first‐hand eyewitness accounts collected by a Russian ethnographer, Sev'yan Vainshtein, during an expedition to the settlement of Sulomay in 1948. This paper presents additional details of these accounts, based on the author's discussions with Vainshtein before he died in 2008, and demonstrates how these accounts shed new light on what happened in Tunguska in June 1908.

ДИАЛЕКТОЛОГИЧЕСКИЕ МАТЕРИАЛЫ В СОСТАВЕ АРХИВА А.Д. ГРИГОРЬЕВА (ПРАЖСКАЯ СЛАВЯНСКАЯ БИБЛИОТЕКА)

The article presents an analytical description of the Siberian dialectological materials of the founder of the Tomsk Dialectological School Alexander Dmitrievich Grigoriev, a Russian ethnographer, historian, dialectologist, folklorist, and public figure. Grigoriev’s dialectological materials are records of the Russian Siberian dialect speech of the first third of the 20th century. They have practically not been described in the domestic studies and have not been introduced into the research discourse. Grigoriev’s research and teaching activities at Tomsk University are Siberian dialectological studies. He investigates the Russian dialects of Siberia, organizes expeditions and actively participates in them. The materials collected during these expeditions were the basis for further research of the Russian dialects of Siberia, which Grigoriev continued in Czechoslovakia. His personal handwritten and typewritten archival fund is stored in Prague. Part of Grigoriev’s Prague archive is housed in the Slavonic Library, a division of the National Library of the Czech Republic (Clementinum, Prague). It is here that the Siberian dialectological materials this article describes are located. The archive under study includes (1) several copies of the publication Program for Collecting Information Necessary for Compiling a Dialectological Map of the Russian Language in Siberia: North Great Russian and Middle Great Russian Dialects by A.D. Grigoriev, and (2) handwritten records of the speech of Siberians made during dialectological expeditions. The Program was analyzed for its content and the nature of handwritten notes, including researchers’ and respondents ones. The expedition materials were analyzed for the information they contain and for the organization of their recording. As a result, it has been revealed that Grigoriev’s dialectological materials consistently reflect the specifics of the research paradigm linguistics used at the origins of dialectological studies. The notes that are significant for the study can also be used for solving modern dialectological problems. The materials of the studied archive correspond to the initial stage of the formation of methods of field linguistics.

Theodore Fiyelstrup's Photographic Materials on Ethnography of Kazakhs from IEA RAS Archive (Trip of 1926—1927)

The case from 167 photos made by the Russian ethnographer F. A. Fiyelstrup in 1926 and 1927 during its trips to the Western and East Kazakhstan is presented in article. They are stored in IEA RAS archive (F. 94). In its field records and photos the last years of full existence of traditional culture of Kazakhs which in the most part was lost during the subsequent periods under the pressure of transformations of Soviet period are imprinted. Photos are in detail passported by F. A. Fiyelstrup. They reflect the diverse parties of everyday life of Kazakhs of the 1920th: economic classes, material culture, family life. The clothes, including breeding differences in female headdresses, and the dwelling, including valuable images of types of marching inhabited constructions are especially fully presented. During the trip of 1927 F. A. Fiyelstrup met the famous Kazakh poet, the historian and the philosopher Shakarim Kudayberdiyev who was depicted in one of photos. The hand-written field materials Fiyelstrupa which are also stored in IEA RAS archive supplement photos and together represent the valuable source allowing to recreate the material and social environment of Kazakhstan of the 1920th.

Events in the world of Russian ethnography at the turn of the twentieth century as reflected in the Italian journal Archive for Anthropology and Ethnography

Events in the world of Russian ethnography at the turn of the twentieth century as reflected in the Italian journal Archive for Anthropology and Ethnography

ВОЗВРАЩЕНИЕ ИЗ НЕБЫТИЯ: ПУБЛИКАЦИИ О Н.М. МАТОРИНЕ (1898-1936) И ЕГО НАУЧНОЙ И ОРГАНИЗАЦИОННОЙ ДЕЯТЕЛЬНОСТИ

The author analyzes the reasons for the hard return of Nikolay Matorin (1898-1936) creative works to Russian historiography of the post-Soviet period. She sees them not only in the withdrawal of Matorin’s works from libraries in the Stalin era, but also in the opinion of the modern academic community that he was only a “provincial propagandist of atheism”, a party nominee who was not engaged in research, who completely denied expeditionary collecting work, who sought to destroy ethnography and the science of religion, replacing it with a struggle with religious remnants. This opinion arose under the influence of some early post-Soviet publications, which appeared on the wave of an understandable desire to update Russian ethnography and this desire caused the denying of the right of Marxism to exist as a theoretical basis for research. The article is accompanied by the publication of three letters to the daughter of N. Matorin, written in the mid-1960s, shedding light on the appearance of the first publications about him.

"American Dreams" of Early Soviet Ethnography: Some Reflections on Bogoras's Legacy

Dmitry Arzyutov discusses a phenomenon that he defines as "American dreams" of Russian ethnography in the early twentieth century based on the example of Waldemar Bogoras, one of the founders of early Soviet ethnography. The essay highlights three specific cases that frame the development of this discipline not through the familiar narrative of gradual isolation but as a story of sometimes problematic contacts and exchanges with American anthropologists. The contacts that were established during the joint Jesup North Pacific Expedition (1897–1902) led by Franz Boas continued into the 1920s. Arzyutov shows that the main concepts of Soviet ethnography, such as "ethnogenesis" and "ethnic history," were products of the debates about the origin of the peoples of Arctica and Siberia between Franz Boas and the Russian expedition participants, Bogoras and, to a lesser degree, Lev Shternberg. The second case addresses Bogoras's unrealized project of establishing nature reserves-cum-reservations for the native peoples of Siberia. These were to combine the prerevolutionary idea of nature reserves (popular among Bogoras's geographer colleagues) with the North American practice of Indian reservations. Finally, the third case compares trajectories of the two students of Bogoras and Boas, Julia Averkieva and Archie Phinney. Their stories show how Marxism might have been differently understood and deployed in the transnational context, and how this difference could have generated intellectual and personal disagreements and conflicting versions of identity politics. The three cases taken together testify to the importance of shifting the optics of the history of anthropology from reconstructing national traditions and local genealogies toward tracing dialogue and mutual borrowings.