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- Convenors:
-
Sergei Alymov
(Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Russian Academy of Sciences)
David Anderson (University of Aberdeen)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Friday 10 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Several "waves" of decolonizing have given us a vision in which the power hierarchies of centre/periphery, "local"/"global", would be flattenedd. It is time to take stock of our understanding of the various "national" traditions and the imagined future(s) of world anthropology.
Long Abstract:
Anthropologists have discussed the embeddedness of anthropology in Western colonialism for decades (Asad 1973, Kucklick 1993, Stocking 1991), giving us a vision of the future in which power hierarchies would be flattened or erased. Current work on "Cold War anthropology" may serve as a pertinent example (Price 2004, 2008, 2016; Wax, 2009). The concept is starkly USA-centred and rarely takes into account activity of scholars from rival camps. Conveners of this panel claim it is high time to take stock of our understanding of the nature of relations between various "national" traditions and how they shaped our future (Bošković, Hann 2013). This panel seeks contributions from anthropologists as well as historians of anthropology, which reflect on historical, political, and epistemological contexts (Stocking) of production of anthropological knowledge, including but not limited to those of the Cold War epoch. We are interested in accounts of both confrontations and collaborations of anthropologists from different national traditions and ideological "camps". We are especially interested in still poorly researched histories of collaborations between scholars of the second and third worlds in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. However, one should not collapse ideological and geographical space: leftist anthropologists in the West and "revisionists" in the East encountered similar issues in dealing with establishment. Another important line of research we look forward to deals with similarities and differences of decolonizing tendencies in the East and West and the role anthropologists play in them.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 10 June, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
History of the coexistence of Russian and American anthropologies cannot be described as plain. Once upon a time, Russian anthropologists, focusing on European trends, did not notice their American colleagues who were just taking initial steps. Then, after the crucial political change, scholars in the Soviet Union felt themselves in a besieged fortress, and their ideological speculations, on the contrary, lost all attractiveness to the American audience.
Paper long abstract:
The paper is devoted to a narrow, but extremely important period, when both traditions came closest. The US has just begun to establish academic exchanges projects with Soviet Russia, and Franz Boas had Julia Averkieva as one of his students. He even took the young Russian researcher to accompany him for fieldwork amongst Kwakwaka’wakw. The advanced age of the ‘heroic mentor’ and the impending Cold War were to blame for their communication quickly ended. Averkieva would soon become the founder of American Indian studies in the USSR, in which Boasian legacy would be doomed to oblivion. The topic of her own doctoral dissertation will change from one to another, in the spirit of the Marxist classist approach. And all this will happen despite her personal sympathy for Papa Franz. Averkieva survived Mordovia camps, a decade in Siberia, and she was only able to return to New World for the International Congress of Anthropological and Etiological Sciences in Chicago during the Thaw in 1973. Paradoxically, the effect of Marxist ethnography’s short-term intervention began to show in Pacific Northwest studies mostly after the collapse of the country that Averkieva served. The sharp confrontation of two political systems faded away; what Soviet scientists and their few Western supporters did ceased to be a bogey or an example of how not to conduct research.
Paper short abstract:
Lloyd A Fallers was a leading Chicago University anthropologist specialized in East African legal and political systems. Almost completely forgotten today however is that he later chose Turkey as his second geographical area of study and worked on Turkish political and religious lifeworld from the early 1960s until he died in 1974.
Paper long abstract:
His illness and untimely death at a very young age prevented Fallers from publishing his findings based on two semesters of living and teaching in Konya and Ankara a year long ethnography in Edremit and several short visits. Apart from mainly unnoticed two articles and a book chapter Fallers Turkey work has so far remained untouched in the special collection archives of the University of Chicago Library. Based on his unpublished letters speeches and articles in the archives as well as my oral history interviews this paper unearths behind the scene politics of ethnography in Turkey in 1965-70 through the experiences of Fallers and his students. Fallers conducted fieldwork in exceptional times. The world turned upside down between his three month stay in Konya in fall of 1964 and his fieldwork in Edremit in 1968-69. At home Chicago University was shaken by student mobilization on the one hand and the discipline of anthropology was put on trial for its involvement in Western imperialist policies on the other. In his new field site Turkish American relationship almost suddenly retrogressed culturally from its golden age into an atmosphere of distrust while the Leftist movement powerfully came in sight in the university campuses and on the street with its strong anti-American dimension. In this conjecture Fallers struggled on many fronts. He with his students Meeker and Benedict strove against the Turkish bureaucracy for fieldwork permissions while also criticizing American policy in Turkey which he disputed with U S diplomats such as Komer. He wrote on the futility of Vietnam War yet disapproved the radical student movements. He was impressed by intellectualism of Turkish scholars but stood aloof from their Marxist tendencies. He was deeply sensitive about ethics of fieldwork however he never took seriously the discussions in anthropology about its relationship to imperialism In his non academic speeches he tried to accommodate his passion for modern science and his devoted Christianity. He was progressive and conservative patriotic and universalist modernist and traditionalist all at the same time Fallers story unfolds paradoxes and uncertainties of the Cold War era.
Paper short abstract:
In 1956 two Australian Marxist scientists briefly communicated with each other from abroad. One was in London, the other had recently arrived behind the Iron Curtain in the GDR.
Paper long abstract:
The first was Vere Gordon Childe (1892-1957), already a world famous archaeologist and author. The other was a virtually unknown anthropologist, apart from his controversial appearance before the Royal Commission into Espionage in Australia 1954-1955. His name was Frederick G. G. Rose (1915- 1991). He was an English anthropologist who had graduated from Cambridge University in 1937 and travelled to the far north of Australia to study marriage, kinship and the social organization of the Anindilyakwa people of Groote Eylandt. In his letter to V Gordon Childe on 24th Sept 1956 regarding his planned lectures, Rose requested a list of selected reading representative of contemporary schools of thought, to which he received a very odd reply. Both men had romantic notions about the USSR and both had their dreams about a "socialist heaven" crushed by the Soviet orthodoxies of the academy. This examination of their brief correspondence raises questions about the impact on their lives of contemporary Soviet scholarship and political forces in the Soviet bloc and in the West. Like Rose, Childe's academic career in Australia was stymied by conservative university authorities and Australia's military spies, as a new biography explains. Questions surrounding his death in the Blue Mountains in New South Wales still linger. Despite his Marxist ideological background and popularity among archaeologists from communist countries Childe was sadly considered in a pejorative way as a "bourgeois archaeologist" by some in the USSR which explains his complex reception by the Soviets, his final rejection of their science, and the dramatic denouement of his "romance" with the USSR in 1956, the year before his death. Rose had left it too late for guidance from this chosen mentor but despite being side-lined by the Soviet academy, he persisted with his own style of Marxist anthropological analysis, however his masterpiece of innovative field research: "The Classification of Kin . . . " (1960) was never published in the Soviet Union.
Paper short abstract:
This paper was co-authored by Andrey Tutorski. In our paper we seek to explore the theoretical and conceptual links between culture area studies in Soviet ethnography and US anthropology. Drawing on the works of Alfred Kroeber and Clark Wissler on the one hand and Sergey Tolstov, Vladimir Nikolsky, Nikolay Cheboksarov and Petr Preobrazhensky on the other hand we integrate their ideas into the intellectual landscape of the 1920 1950s.
Paper long abstract:
In Soviet ethnography the problem of geographic determination (forms of influence of environment upon culture) were discussed mostly in 1920s by Preobrazhensky and Nikolsky. The only article on this topic was published by Sergei Tolstov in 1932. However the topic was forgotten until in 1955 Levin and Cheboksarov published their article about economic cultural types. We argue that the Soviet and American traditions form a comprehensive intellectual background during this time. Furthermore, though Soviet ethnography after the 1920s is usually associated with the Marxist paradigm, Cheboksarov and Tolstov were adepts of area studies while occupying notable administrative positions. Although this is not entirely visible in their published works, we draw on the unpublished text of Tolstov s lectures for the students of MSU s Faculty of History to make this point. Both schools of thought seeked to place culture traits in a historical context to study their evolution and spatial movement. We compare the ethnological method in Nikolsky s works with Wissler s take on how the concept of the culture area came to life within the study of culture traits in American Indian tribes. Both the Soviet and the American academic traditions of studying culture areas stemmed from the intent of explaining the nature of cultural differences. It is a sort of general opinion that Soviet ethnography was mainly isolated from the Western tradition. But the case of area studies shows an interesting intellectual genealogy. We argue that German diffusionism can be considered an antecesor for both the Soviet and the American area studies. Nonetheless this link was not straightforward. We explore how and if the works of German diffusionists are cited contested and conceptualized. We also consider the way anthropologists placed their ideas in a larger social and political context. In our opinion Soviet and American area studies both placed an emphasis on the study of the internal Other: Siberian peoples and Native Americans.
Paper short abstract:
Was the Soviet Union an empire? Terry Martin (2001) considers the Soviet Union a non-classical empire and calls it the “affirmative action empire” which means it did not oppress peripheries but gave them rights and privileges by creating nations.
Paper long abstract:
Francine Hirsch asserts that the Soviet Union was an empire shaped by the ethnographical practices creating nations. At the same time, the Soviet Union officially supported anticolonial ideology in both domestic and foreign policies: struggling against “imperialism” and supporting national elites (Gerasimov et al. 2014). David Moore (2001) juxtaposes colonial and decolonial aspects of Soviet politics in equal proportions but finally concludes that it was colonial from “an Uzbek, Lithuanian, or Hungarian perspective” (Moore 2001: 124). Yulia Gradskova (2013) names Soviet rhetoric “(anti)colonial”, inclining mostly to the colonial part of the term. Epp Annus calls such ambiguity as colonialism “in camouflage” (Annus 2017), Walter Mignolo and Madina Tlostanova name it “a caricature half-way decolonization” (Tlostanova, Mignolo 2009: 137), Douglas Northrop’s asserts that “a colonial state aimed at anticolonial and emancipatory legitimacy” (Northrop 2003: 29) In this paper, I want to look at the Soviet ambiguous colonial/anticolonial experience from the perspective of one Soviet ethnographer Boris Dolgikh who was involved in knowledge production through practices of ethnohistorical classifications. I argue that we cannot distinguish colonial from decolonial (or anticolonial) in his work. The colonial knowledge production including colonial classifications of people figuring out their place in modern history could have decolonial motivation on an individual level of a researcher and be colonial and decolonial at the same time. Using Dolgikh’s archival and published materials on indigenous peoples of the Taimyr Peninsula, precisely Nganasans, I show that the ethnographer’s ethnohistorical classifications – ethnic and folklore categorizations – that he had been developing throughout his life were closely intertwined and shaped his vision of ethnohistorical processes in the Arctic. I consider Dolgikh’s ethnohistorical classifications as individual classificatory habits and colonial techniques of Soviet modernity and coloniality. At the same time, the Soviet anticolonial rhetoric against the Russian Empire and other foreign states allows me to suggest that these techniques were not considered by the ethnographer as colonial and aimed from his perspective at decolonization of indigenous peoples, as also Sergei Alymov’s research shows (Alymov 2014: 134-135). It was the specific Soviet “(de)colonization”, where colonial and decolonial were inseparably connected.