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Paper short abstract

How did events in the Soviet Union shape anthropological research about Siberia? What can we learn today by examining the polarization that characterized the field at that time? We explore the long-term effects of official policies and ideologies on ethnographic research in Siberia and beyond.

Paper long abstract

Throughout its history, and especially since the 1917 October Revolution, the anthropology of Siberia has known periods of opening and closure in access to field sites and transnational collaboration. In the 1920s, Russia became the main centre of anthropological research in Siberia thanks to the work of scholars who had been exiled to Siberia in the last years of the Czarist era. Under Soviet rule, however, they and their students were soon accused of bourgeois tendencies. In the purges of the 1930s, some of them perished, while others had to fit their ethnographic research into the theoretical straitjacket provided by the state. A transition to new paradigms came in the 1960s. Several émigré scholars and a small number of researchers from Western countries wrote about Siberia, without being able to visit the region. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 came a turbulent time of remarkable openness and transnational intellectual exchange. But Russia’s aggression in Ukraine brought this period to a close – not only internationally but also within Russia’s community of anthropologists. Whether at home or abroad, it became impossible for anthropologists to avoid taking a stand, politically. In this context, the events of the 1920s are widely present in the memory and discourse of anthropologists today. How does the current situation of anthropological scholarship on Siberia connect, ideologically and institutionally, with that of the early 20th century? What can we learn from the events that shaped the discipline one hundred years ago?