Anthropology in Russia: From Nineteenth-Century Ethnography to the New Post-Soviet Anthropology

Abstract

There is a long tradition of ethnographic studies in Russia, dating back to the nineteenth century when voyagers travelling through Siberia and Alaska (former Russian territory) wrote surveys and reports on native societies. Further contributions came from intellectual opponents of the tzarist regime sentenced to exile in Siberia, where they devoted themselves to ethnographic observation. During the soviet period the ethnographic studies kept the previous bias, focusing on native Siberian cultures and Russian folklore. The post-soviet scholars try to detach themselves from the theories and issues of the ‘traditional’ ethnography, devoted to the study of the so-called primitive societies and peasants’ beliefs and practices, and aim at building innovative and promising perspectives, facing the problems of the post-soviet society: migration from the former soviet republics, xenophobia, political authoritarianism, gulf between rich and poor, fast-changing life style and diffusion of imported luxury commodities, mechanisms of social control, Russian living in the ‘near abroad’ (previous soviet republics).