Paper Short Abstract:

This paper rereads the Finnish travel narratives related to the West Siberian natives and suggests that they share a metadiscourse that declines the modernity of the natives, but identifies them as non-modern selves.

Paper Abstract:

At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, numerous Finnish researchers travelled in the peripheries of the Russian Empire in order to collect linguistic, ethnological and folkloristic materials concerning communities speaking Finno-Ugric languages. While most of the travels headed in the areas where Karelian was spoken, several expeditions directed further east. The researchers tended to write travel narratives that were mainly published by the Finno-Ugrian Society based in Helsinki. These narratives often commented the social circumstances of the field work beyond the actual research aims, and they illuminate extremely interesting implicit points of departure of the research paradigm.

In my paper, I will interpret the travel narration related to the field work done in Western Siberia. Contrary to the earlier interpretations emphasising the national context of the research paradigm, I will use the colonial frame to reread the recurring tendency to avoid or understate the modernisation in the fieldwork. Instead, the researchers framed the modernisation as Russification, harmful to the natives. The aim of the paper is to discuss this as a metadiscourse that hindered to perceive the Finno-Ugric speaking natives of Siberia as modern selves, but instead systematically identified them as non-modern and backward.