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ON THE RUSSIAN TRADITION OF

ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH*
Serguei V. Sokolovski
In an influential and important contribution to current anthropological
debates, entitled Anthropology as Cultural Critique and published about 15
years ago, two eminent members of the world anthropological community
made the following observation:
"Twentieth-century social and cultural anthropology has promised its still
largely Western readership enlightenment on two fronts. The one has been the
salvaging of distinct cultural forms of life from a process of apparent global
Westernisation. With both its romantic appeal and its scientific intentions,
anthropology has stood for the refusal to accept this conventional perception of
homogenisation towards a dominant Western model. The other promise of
anthropology, one less fully distinguished and attended to than the first, has
been to serve as a form of cultural critique for ourselves. In using portraits of
other cultural patterns to reflect self-critically on our own ways, anthropology
disrupts common sense and makes us re-examine our taken-for-granted assump-
tions."
1

Unlike the situation in world social anthropology, it is hard to find in
Russia the cultural critique sort of anthropology which might be expected in
view of the abundant works written within the framework of salvage
anthropology. Even if you try to look through hundreds of Soviet
anthropological books written within, say, the last three decades, you will
hardly find a single one with a critical pathos a la Mead, directed at the
dominant culture, culture of the majority or cultural establishment. The type
of anthropological critique that might be encountered in Russian libraries is
very different: it is the critique of drawbacks and failures in Soviet and post-
Soviet social engineering projects and developmental schemes. One finds,
for example, scores of books and articles, written recently, as well as in the
past, with all kinds of recommendations on how to improve current policies
towards certain minorities and indigenous peoples, on what are the
advantages, disadvantages and side effects of a certain policy
implementation at a local level, and so on. The sort of cultural critique
Margaret Mead had been looking for was practically absent from Russian
academic publications; it had been relegated to the pages of popular travel
litera-
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ture and journalistic accounts of other civilizations, mostly exotic and often
ancient ones, which were somewhere "out there" and beyond the reach, both
conceptually and practically, of Soviet anthropologists.
How is it that in a discipline with such a consequential imprint of German
romanticism as Russian anthropology, the romantic art of estrangement,
which seems to underlie much of Mead's cultural critique, had been so
marginalized and suppressed? I can provide only a tentative answer to this
question. One of the factors contributing to this marginalization has been the
tight control over writing, which was, at least in anthropology, not so much
ideological, as aesthetic. As such, it was a control over the choice of genre
and style of writing within permitted genre variations. Generations of this
aesthetic censorship and self-censorship produced a sort of dry matter-of-fact
narrative, styled as a neutral and objective account devoid of any emotions
(except, perhaps, anger and irony). That narrative was very well adapted to
the jargon of social engineering. The texts, deviating from the standard, were
either not published, or relegated to non-academic publishing houses, which
practically meant that they were not considered as scholarly achievements,
but rather downgraded to the status of popular reading
2
. It should be
mentioned that in many ways the general lay public was precisely the
intended audience for the sort of cultural critique Margaret Mead resorted to.
In the Soviet Union the situation was different. The Soviet practice of writing
ethnography in thick academic jargon and neutral objective style has been
directed towards social scientists and social engineers; it was not intended for
a general public at all. In terms of choice of style, it meant that either you had
to write 'academically' and try to make your career as a scholar, or, if you
chose to develop your own creative personal style, you would have to pursue
a career as a journalist or a writer of fiction. The style and practice of sorting
out anthropological texts into 'properly scientific' and 'popular' are still very
much with us in Russia, although there may be observed a few attempts to
establish a cultural critique -la-Mead in the Russian academia.
The control over textual production has been responsible for another
characteristic feature of Russian anthropology - its relatively more unified
and less individualistic profile not only in the choice of style, but also in the
selection of methods, theories and paradigmatic fashions in ethnography.
This tendency towards stylistic unification was more pronounced during the
Soviet time and has become less evident now, as a new and somewhat
different generation of scholars enters the academy, but the conformity to the
old style is still strongly felt,
especially if one compares the range of current approaches and permitted
research objects in Russian anthropology and with any of the western
anthropological traditions.
Another major characteristic feature of Russian anthropology is its
predominantly 'domestic' character: 90 % of fieldwork research within the
last half a century has been carried out inside the country and, in a certain
sense, within the home society. In the recent past, this basically meant that if
there was such a creature, called "Soviet citizen", then most of the Soviet
anthropology was done from the 'native's point of view'. Contemporary
Russian anthropology has inherited this feature to a large degree. So, instead
of the process of "leaving and coming back home", typical of anthropological
practices in the West, Russian anthropology seems never to have left home,
focussing on regions and societies whose 'otherness' was expressed in terms
of deviation from the Russian urban mainstream; hence its interest towards
rural, 'traditional', non-Russian (in both an ethnic and linguistic senses) and
non-Orthodox groups. Many Russian anthropologists would disagree with
this statement. After all, a number of research institutes and academic
departments were especially established in the past to study the United
States, Canada, Latin American countries, and Africa. The 'East', both in its
home or domestic version of Central Asia and Caucasus, and its across-the-
border foreign 'remainder', has also been the main object of study at various
departments of oriental studies and at the Institute of Oriental Studies within
the Russian Academy of Sciences
3
. In short, there existed and still exists a
sizable network of research institutions and social scientists specializing in
the so-called "foreign research". Nevertheless, any outside observer, even if
s/he were only superficially familiar with the state of social research in
Russia, would notice an almost complete absence of ethnographic works
based on extensive fieldwork abroad. Also, most of the institutions just
mentioned do not have anthropologists among their tenured scholars - these
research bodies specialize mostly in political science, economics, geography
and history of the relevant countries; the sociologists and anthropologists
among their ranks are numbered. Such institutes had been created from the
start as policy-oriented institutions with the principal task of providing
analysis and logistical support for foreign policy practitioners. Those few,
who specialized in cultures and societies beyond the borders of the Soviet
Union, were concentrated in a very limited number of departments at the
Institute of Ethnography and had only a rare chance to spend a few months
abroad. If an opportunity like that came about, the visit abroad would most
likely be devoted to library or

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archival research, instead of going into the field proper. Notable exclusions
were fieldwork seasons in so- called friendly countries (India, Vietnam,
Mongolia etc.). Again, they were a tiny portion of all research being done at
the time, and they always remained marginal. Unfortunately, there is no
significant change in the situation today, and one can hardly speak of a trend
in the Russian anthropology that would call for ethnographers to "leave
home" - maybe with the exception of a limited number of ethnographers
doing their research in Central Asia, who now and then get a chance to
spend a fieldwork season in the so-called Newly Independent States
4
(that is,
former republics of the Soviet Union).
This 'encapsulation' of the discipline within the borders of the country, its
confinement by political boundaries and financial circumstances has told on
its methods, conceptual apparatus, ways of research organization, ethics of
fieldwork and aesthetics of writing. All these activities of Russian
anthropologists bear the stamp of parochialism of a certain kind and imbues
the discipline with peculiar and particularistic traits, which for an outside
observer might appear rather exotic. The isolation, as anyone who has been
in contact with Russian studies is aware of, has been induced not only by the
geography of fieldwork, but by politics and ideology as well. As a result,
many classical anthropological texts have never been translated into Russian
(among translations of the last 20 years or so I recollect only The Nuer by
E.E.Evans-Pritchard, Structural Anthropology by C. Lvi-Strauss, and a
couple of collections of articles by Margaret Mead and Victor Turner
5
). A
number of works could be read in the original in main libraries, mostly in
Moscow and in Leningrad, but the selection was very uneven. This factor
alone could create a barrier of paradigmatic nature, and that barrier was
indeed created and reinforced by manifold processes and venues of isolation
and containment.
The current transformation Russian anthropology has been undergoing
since the late 1980s is part and parcel of the general transformation of the
country, which means that it has not been initiated within anthropology
itself, but has been effected as external pressure for change. Nevertheless, it
has produced noticeable shifts in every aspect of anthropological research
and has been variously labelled as "crisis", "reorientation", "change of
paradigms", "building of a new discipline", etc. An obvious reconfiguration
of power relationships in terms of who now should dictate fashions and
provide theoretical orientations is certainly taking place. Previously, in the
1950-80s, the leading position in the Russian anthropological community
was firmly held by Moscow
institute of Ethnography (with a branch of the same institute in Leningrad) ,
whose more than three hundred strong team of researchers defined
theoretical orientations for the rest of the community and effectively
controlled most of the anthropological publications. Theoretical insights
could be sought elsewhere as well, for example, on the pages of old
influential anthropological classics (such as Edward Tylor, James Frazer,
Russian ethnographers Bogoraz, Iochelson and others), or, beginning with
the 1960s, also in some kind of dialogue with the texts of "established" and
"reasonably reputed" contemporary Western authors, such as the already
mentioned Claude Lvi-Strauss or Margaret Mead (in most cases,
"established" literally meant "translated"; and "translated" in turn meant that
the author was officially approved). However, most of the discussions that
produced research agendas, fashions, and problematizations by and large
centred in and around Moscow or Leningrad.
Today the centres of theoretical orientation in anthropology have
diversified both for a different generation of researchers, and for different
regional institutions or individual researchers. Command of a certain foreign
language, political orientation, age, particular field of specialization, place of
academic training and a combination of other factors all contribute to this
novel diversity, which may be in a simplified manner dissected into a pro-
Western and a "Slavophile" trend. Of course, this rather new situation of
theoretical openness has produced a defensive counter-reaction, especially
on the part of former anthropological fashion legislators. This is another case
of a diehard paradigm, which is said not to die in the face of emerging new
and possibly better solutions for old problems, but to persist and very slowly
dissolute with the pace of the natural mortality of its bearers. Anybody who
tries to review the contents of the leading Russian anthropological
publication Etnograficheskoie obozrenie ("Ethnographic Review") for the last
ten years will see that most of the discussions have been centred around
issues of the disciplines self-identity and the search for a less painful
solution for its integration into the international anthropology. The
atmosphere of this search is still too heated to escape politicisation, but
gradually this is changing for a more balanced evaluation of competing
views. It is probably too early to speak of a real paradigm shift. Perhaps I
will only slightly exaggerate the situation, if I say that a noticeable migration
of academic authority toward the West is happening notwithstanding the
opposition of "Slavophile elders" and activities of numerous "peace-makers"
who are eager to blend western and post-Soviet traditions into a harmonious
new whole.

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This barely observable but strongly felt shift toward the West besides
evident tensions produces a peculiar kind of epistemological situation for
scholars who have chosen to relate to it. In the Soviet time, when the centre
of reference and authority was firmly in place, the comparison of the
situations in various national traditions of anthropological research was
couched in terms of the deviations from the Marxist perspective. A few
exclusions from this rule only accentuated the prevailing trend to downgrade
the experience and results of our colleagues from abroad who, as it seemed
to us, were hopelessly entangled in the tenets of agnosticism and
subjectivism and were unable to climb to the shining heights of objectivist
realism in its Soviet version.
Notwithstanding the sentiments, the schism within the academy, created by
the end of ideological conformity with the perestroika, produces an
epistemologically awkward position for everybody who tries to compare
various strands of thought within the agenda to locate the current position of
Russian anthropology within the global anthropology. The difficulty lies in
finding the "appropriate" angle, a point of view, which could provide such a
panoramic vision of different national traditions with their particular domains,
conceptual histories, thesauri, social contexts and language idiosyncrasies. If
we agree that Russian anthropology constitutes a separate domain, presuming
that a domain is a collection of concepts offered in a particular language
ordered by a set of epistemic authorities, how can we find this vantage point
of comparison with any other anthropological tradition without falling under
the influence of one of these sets of authorities, or without resorting to one of
these particular collections of concepts? This is an old problem of comparing
two presumably incommensurable realities, which is often pragmatically
resolved during a series of trial-and-error attempts. Frankly, I do not share
this pragmatists optimism for, unlike the situations in daily life, when the
trial-and error method seems to work, epistemic difficulties could not be
overcome with such a disarming simplicity, as we do not have the criteria for
judging the result, or, better, we do have the criteria, but we smuggle them
unreflectively from one of the domains. Besides the criteria themselves in
their turn could be as irreconcilable as much as the traditions under
comparison.
The practice demonstrated, that in many cases ready-made theories from
the West do not easily lend themselves to translation into the Russian
experience. One of such cases is that of minorities and minority research. Let
me dwell on this particular case as a practical example of discursive
miscommunication that frequently occurs between Russian and western
communities of anthropologists. In most of the
successor states of the Soviet Union, the criteria of minority status are
ambiguous at best and substantially deviate from the standard usage found in
Western sociology and anthropology. I will briefly clarify the peculiarities of
the minority concept as it is employed in Russia and other Soviet successor
states. One conceptual difficulty is that it is highly uncertain whether it is
appropriate to make use of the very concept 'minority' in the analysis of
social situations in contemporary Russia and ex-Soviet states. This
conceptual predicament concerns first and foremost Russia's and other ex-
Soviet states' claims to democracy. The core of the matter is simple: if
Russia were a democratic country, than the term 'minority' could be applied
in a sociologically correct way. The term implies an idea of distributive
justice, according to which a minority is deficient in only one respect in
order to fully and equally participate in political and social/cultural
processes, namely, in its numerical strength. Minority groups, lacking such a
powerful resource as the necessary numerical strength to guarantee the
protection of their interests through voting, need special additional measures
from the state, controlled by the majority. Hence 'minority' is a term presup-
posing democratic context. In non-democracies the group's numerical
strength does not constitute a political resource. What constitutes it is the
group's access to power, wealth, arms and other means of coercive social
control. So in the case of totalitarian societies it is better to speak of ruling
and deprived groups, or of elites and disenfranchised masses. The concept
'minority', if used to analyse the situation in such societies, would be
misleading. As for contemporary Russia, the question of whether we can
legitimately use the term 'minority' could be viewed as disputable at best.
The term can only be used very cautiously, as the numerical strength of a
group in most cases does not automatically imply the democratic dimension.
Local decision-making in many regions bears a traditional autocratic stamp.
The numerical inferiority principle, if formally applied to the Russian
Federation, would mean that all non-Russians should belong to the minorities,
as Russians constitute more than 80% of country's population. As the Russian
Federation is based on the so-called ethno-territorial principle, the relational
aspect of numerical inferiority of minorities 'to the rest of the population'
becomes dubious. The republics and provinces within the Russian Federation
with territories comprising about 60% of the entire territory of the state and
having various degrees of sovereignty and self-government, are often viewed
and portray themselves as 'ethnic homelands' for the minority groups they are
named after (Tatarstan for the Tatars, Bashkortostan for the

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Bashkirs, etc.), thus dividing their populations into 'titular' and 'non-titular'
groups
6
.
Moreover, their dominant positions within their republics or provinces
turn them politically and sociologically into national elites, rather than
minorities in the usual sense of the term. This is one of the reasons why
Russian legislators, politicians, and social scientists often use two referential
planes at once while assessing the numerical strength of ethnic minorities -
ethno-territorial and federal. Most of the so-called 'titular groups' (often
termed as 'nations' or 'peoples', though remaining numerically inferior to the
state population) are not included in federal and local minority rights
protection regimes. Moreover, some political scientists and sociologists
argue that Russians turn into effective minorities in political, legal and
sociological terms in the territories of some republics. The situation is
further complicated by the treatment of the "national minorities". A complex
and intricate system of ethnic categories exists in practically all former
Soviet states; every such system is unique and resists generalization. That is
why an analysis, couched in terms of 'minority-majority' relations is always
an over-simplification, suited for international law and similar types of
discourse. In Russia every constituent republic has its own ethnic group
hierarchy, which finds its expression in local legislation. The Caucasian
republic of Daghestan with its population divided into more than 30
'indigenous peoples' provides a good example.
How, then, can we compare disciplines, national traditions, and par-
adigms? My pessimistic diagnosis is that we perennially create illusions, a
sort of conceptual simulacra which being only partially of the domains
compared, enable us to produce politically, ethically, or aesthetically
satisfactory results, covering the middle ground and veiling the paradigmatic
Heideggerian Riss by a thin layer of strenuously polite misinterpretations.
This is probably the underlying reason why Russian adherents of post-
structuralism and social realists of the Marxist tradition have been
consistently talking past each other during the last ten years in their
discussions of ethnicity and minorities. In my opinion, that was also the
reason why Russian and western anthropologists have been consistently
missing each others' points. However, this is again a wrong proposition,
made on the assumption that it is possible just "to know" to make the
comparison work. The elusive Geist of Russian and any other national
tradition research endeavours, the transient and ever changing feeling of
what it is to be part of uniquely situated and different communities,
effectively opposes this sort of reduction.
The question of what is happening with Russian anthropology nev-
ertheless remains. Why has not its crisis, if we presume that any crisis in the
social sciences leads nowadays to the search for new vistas of theoretic
vision and philosophical revelations, why has not this crisis so far produced
anything of the kind, and why do the current discussions, in an antiphase of
theoretical pendulum, repeat the debates within American anthropology of
early 1980s on a lesser (you could say more primitive and less sophisticated)
level? These are the questions that are easier to pose than to answer... My
personal guess would be that a certain "unproductiveness" of the current
crisis is the outcome of two interrelated factors, one of a sociological and
another of institutional nature. The sociological factor is often mentioned:
the ideological crisis has coincided with the economic downfall, with the
result that we lost a generation of young researchers, who went elsewhere to
earn a living. The institutional one is defined by a particular configuration of
interdisciplinary links. Russian anthropology in the decades preceding the
crisis has established links with sociology, psychology, ecology,
demography, geography, religious studies, all of which were dominated by
positivist ideology. The mutual interests of anthropologists, philosophers and
literary critics have been very weak, if they existed at all, and this lack of
interest resulted in the current disability to properly understand what is being
said in Western anthropology. Now we have translations in Russian at least
of some of the basic texts of contemporary French and American
philosophers, but they are not read by anthropologists. One needs a certain
training, which is sadly lacking, to be able to read any philosophy. This lack
of philosophical sophistication is reflected in the ways in which we work out
our research agendas, focus on our fieldwork, and situate our discipline.
In philosophical and political terms Russian anthropology remains a
strange mixture of predominantly romantic concerns with an objec-tivist
methodology after the fashion of "hard sciences". As is well known, pre-
revolutionary Russian and Soviet ethnography has been inspired by the
nineteenth century romanticism and nurtured by positivism in its Marxist
version. Being inspired by "romantic sensibilities", it has been primarily
oriented to study subordinate others (pagans and religious dissenters,
peasants, non-Russian peoples etc.), in other words, to the so-called
"primitives within". Given the party control over the production of scientific
texts, especially in the field of social sciences, any attempts at interpretation
of the "observable social reality" were dangerous, whereas descriptions were
relatively safer. This has practically produced the tactics of avoidance of
low-level theories and con-

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ceptualisations for the sake of scholastic grand schemes or mere classi-
fications of objects and phenomena.
The result was that by the end of 1970s we have extensive catalogues of
cultural traits and artefacts, mapped in atlases, pictured in ethnographical
surveys and textbooks, and placed in museums. The so-called "material
culture" of every ethnic group, including costumes and dwellings,
instruments and utensils, cuisine and means of transport, as well as "spiritual
culture" (which covered customs, rituals, folklore and religion) had been
blended in standard integrated accounts of ethnic cultures of these groups.
All this recapitulates what early Boasians were trying to do one hundred
years ago. In the case of Russia, this has been a particular kind of
structuralism, derived from the nineteenth century German ideal of scientific
research and reinforced by modern tactics of evading the risks of
interpretations. The structuralist accounts were, however, supplemented by
vocabularies of change: the usual opposition between modernity and
tradition, old folk traditions and modern urban styles. I should, perhaps,
mention as well, that ethnography in Russia has been always considered a
subdiscipline of history, which practically meant that every case study had
an obligatory historical part, serving as an instrument of contextualization or
just as a particular slot for situating "a piece of knowledge" among other
"pieces", provided by other researchers. This explains also why
preoccupation with ethnic processes, ethnohistory and ethnogenesis has
played so prominent a role, and to a certain extent continues to be important
in Russian anthropology.
On the other hand, the processual side of "evolving structures" of
difference (all aforementioned cultural repertoires of traits) has been always
represented in a very general manner; you would hardly find a first-hand
account of human interaction firmly located in space and time in works
published prior to the 1970s. Psychologically, and I am speaking here from
my personal perception, this scholasticism of Soviet anthropological research
has served as a refuge from the immediate pressures of Soviet ideological
control, a sort of "ivory tower", and had a similar aura as, say, the writings of
Anselm of Canterbury or Saint Augustine, dated but respected, with a
flavour of vintage classicism (probably imparted by its predominantly
ancient Greek and Latin terminology). The taste of it has not been bad at all;
and bitter, sour and rotten flavours of reality have been removed, refined and
ennobled in the act of transubstantiation of coarse matters of daily life into
high materia of academic contemplation. For many people the preoccupation
with this apparent sophistry was a kind of therapy, an escape, a sal-
vation, like a game of chess played mentally by a life-serving convict in a
prison cell. Please, excuse me if these metaphors are too extreme, but they
seem to reflect the atmosphere of late 1970s - early 1980s, when I had been
initiated into the Russian anthropology community. So, in a way, at least for
a part of this community, the demolition of the tower, the destruction of the
prison walls insulating the anthropological gaze from raw reality, has befcn
more like an onslaught of barbarous hordes than a welcome freedom. This is
not a correction, but a supplementary commentary to the often-made
observation, that Soviet anthropology has been scholastic. Again, I do not
support scholasticism with all its phantasms and simulacra. All I argue for is
to treat it in its immediate context of Soviet realities, and take into
consideration the privileged position from which it is labelled as such.
The "Ivory tower" perspective, with its concomitant sense of temporary
escape from, harsher realities, has evident limitations, for it distanced the
discipline's practitioners not only from ideological involvement in the
cultivation of party spirit (parttiinost'), which was rather the rule than
exception in the disciplines of history and philosophy, but it also effectively
blocked the closer description of realities in the field. The distancing
techniques included defamiliarisation, estrangement, exoticisation,
reconceptualisation often to the point when description of ethnic cultures
read like tales about little green men. Conceptual and political distancing
from "outer realities" by implication demanded physical distance between
academics and their objects of research. This distance often ranged with the
status of a researcher: few of the chosen could travel far, and the distance of
travel stood in inverse proportion to the numbers of researchers travelling,
though it was directly related to their relevant position within
anthropological community. This characteristic feature of research
organization has been institutionalised: tenured members of the Russian
Academy of Sciences had more choices, whereas anthropologists in regional
and "hence" less prominent centres had to work within the administrative
boundaries of their regions.
This complex hierarchy of persons, places, and objects of research was
mirrored in the editing practices of editorial boards. All kinds of editorial
"filters" discouraged fieldworkers to theorize on their findings, and most of
them usually confined themselves to descriptions within classificatory
frameworks elaborated by "theoreticians". This has caused the gap between
theory and the field, and gave birth to a number of armchair theorists who
were specializing, after the manner of the great 19
th
century precursors, in
theoretical generalization and

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elaboration of grand evolutionary and comparative schemes. I am trying to restrain
myself from making the inference that institutionalised hierarchy bred scholasticism,
for it could certainly be bred in other intellectual environments, on the one hand, and
it does not automatically follow from the hierarchical organization of research and
analysis, on the other.
As I have mentioned, this scholastic encapsulation within the Greco-Latin
vocabulary of early 1980s had an abrupt termination with the coming of a more open
atmosphere of the mid- and late-1980s. One of the more noticeable changes that
occurred at the time was the turn from portraying culture change almost exclusively
in terms of accommodation to mainstream, to the study of resistance. Conflict
studies, irrespective of the dominant Marxist paradigm of class struggle, have been
non-existent during the Soviet times (with exception of personal psychology and
international relations studies); now this is a vast and flourishing field of research. A
semiotic approach, previously restricted to literary criticism (as exemplified in the
works of Yuri Lotman) has proliferated into a narrow but very active research field
7
.
Young researchers experiment with new styles of writing and try to master
interpretive and reflexive anthropology approaches. These attempts do not, however,
constitute the mainstream of Russian anthropology, which is still struggling to find
its own identity.
In lieu of a conclusion I would like to say, that I perceive all the statements I have
made as impressionistic. They are not the result of a contemplative and discerning
gaze, but more an outcome of attempts to recount the feel of what it was and what it
is to be an anthropologist in Russia. This meta-position, which has enabled me to
assess the scanty and fragmented results I managed to derive from this peculiar
channel of perception, makes me notice that there are many contradictions in my
statements. I have been reproaching, for example, my fellow anthropologists for their
presumable adherence to trait collection and classification, but at the same time I
have been manufacturing another trait enumeration of characteristic features of
Russian anthropology. I am also aware of my own romantic flirtation with late Soviet
anthropological scholasticism, which had been inculcated in me during the early
phase of my anthropological career. Finally, jumping back into the skin of a Russian
anthropologist, I am beginning to suspect my own critical poise, or the privileged site
of this sort of critique, as being critically unbalanced and in a way irresponsible.
Balancing between these two positions of interpretation, I step on the shaky middle
ground with no authority to cling to. All this restless dodging from
position to position might in their turn be interpreted as a subjective projection of my
own indecisiveness and, yet, they seem to reflect the present state of the Russian
anthropology in general, the collective indecisiveness of Russian anthropological
community with an identity whose constitutive features are yet to be crafted.
*This is a preliminary and partial result of my research project 'Fin-de-Sicle History
of Russian Anthropology and Nationality Policy', and I gratefully acknowledge the
support of the Research Support Scheme of the Open Society Support Foundation
(grant No.1005/2000).
NOTES
1 Marcus, G.M. and Fischer M.M.J. (1986). Anthropology as Cultural Critique. An
Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, p.l.
2 One of the first books specifically written 'for popular reading' and published by
the academic publishing house Nauka has been the book 'Through the Eyes of
Ethnographers' (Glazami etnografov. Moscow, 1982), but till now such books remain
notable exceptions in academic publications and if published in 'serious collections'
are considered experimental.
3 I will not comment on 'orientalism' of Russian 'oriental studies', as the strategy of
exoticisation has been expressed practically in every other direction of
anthropological research, with possible exclusion of urban anthropology, wherein
urban mainstream (though predominantly non-Russian) became the main object of
research and effectively resisted ethnographic representation as portrayal of
predominantly exotic groups.
4 In the annual research report of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology for the
year 2000, among fieldwork sites there have been mentioned about 15 regions of
Russia and six foreign countries (Byelorussia, Moldova, Estonia, Kyrgyzstan,
Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan), all of which are situated within the territory of the
former USSR (IEA Annual Report. Moscow 2001, p.l7).
5 The series of translations entitled Etnograficheskaia Biblioteka (Ethnographic
Library) had been started with the translation of L.H. Morgan's League of the Ho-de-
no-sau-nee, or Iroquois (in Russian, Moscow, 1983) and C. Lvi-Strauss and
included as well translations of W. Radloff (Moscow, 1989), D. Zelenin (Moscow,
1991), M. Mauss (Moscow, 1996), and A. van Gennep (Moscow, 2000); with the
exception of Mead's autobiography included in the collection and Lvi-Strauss's
major work, all the translated works belong to the 19th and early 20
th
cc.
6 A "titular group" in the Soviet and post Soviet contexts means a group, which has
applied its ethnic name to the respective administrative and political unit, or state, such
as Kazakhs and Latvians in Kazakhstan and Latvia. A titular group, being often a
numerical minority within its own state, could use at the

126 127
same time its top positions in the regional power hierarchy and effectively be a
majority (or power elite) having appropriated for the majority political behav-
ior patterns.
7 I have in mind here mainly the works by St.-Petersburg anthropologists
A.K. Baiburin on Russian traditions and rituals (Baiburin A.K (1990). Ritual:
Ours and Theirs, in Folklore and Ethnography. Problems of Traditional Culture Facts
Reconstruction, pp.3-17. Leningrad. Ibid. 1983. Dwelling in Rituals and
Representations of the Eastern Slavs. Leningrad. See also T. Schepanskaia on
magic in Russian North and rituals among hippies (Schepanskaia 1993). The
Names of the Social, in Ethnoses and Ethnic Processes, pp.329-41. Moscow. Ibid.
(1987). Ritualization in Youth Subculture. Sovietskaia etnografiia (5): 5-24).
128

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