Article ID: CBB724939608

Missing Links. Indigenous Life and Evolutionary Thought in the History of Russian Ethnography (2020)

unapi

The history of Russian social anthropology has long been best known for the work of three, late nineteenth-century “exile ethnographers,” each sent to the Russian Far East for their anti-tsarist activities as students. All three men—Vladimir Bogoraz, Vladimir Iokhel'son, and Lev Shternberg—produced voluminous and celebrated works on Russian far eastern indigenous life, but it was the young Shternberg who had perhaps the most profound effect on setting the agenda for the canonic evolutionist line soon to take hold in late Russian imperial and early Soviet ethnography. This essay draws on archival, library, and field research to revisit the life and work of Shternberg in order to tell the story of “group marriage” that he documented for the life of one Sakhalin Island indigenous people, Gilyaks (or Nivkhgu, Nivkhi). Documented in this way by Shternberg, the Nivkh kinship system proved a crucial “missing link” for Friedrich Engels, who had long been eager to provide evidence of primitive communism as man's natural state. For Gilyaks, the die was cast. Their role as the quintessential savages of Engels’ favor made them famous in Russian and Soviet ethnographic literature, and significantly enhanced their importance to Soviet government planners. This essay tracks that episode and its aftermaths as a pivotal moment in the history of Russian social anthropology and of evolutionist thought more broadly.

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Authors & Contributors
Adgemis, Philip
Bradley, John K.
Brookes, Barbara L.
Carpenter, Carol
Darnell, Regna
Dove, Michael F.
Journals
History and Anthropology
American Historical Review
Antiquity
Health and History
Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History
Otechestvennaia istoriia
Publishers
Harvard University Press
Harvard University
Duke University
Blackwell Publishers
University of Nebraska Press
University of California, Riverside
Concepts
Cultural anthropology
Indigenous peoples; indigeneity
Ethnography
Anthropology
Ethnology
Science and race
People
Boas, Franz
Cook, James
Darwin, Charles Robert
De Martino, Ernesto
Hurston, Zora Neale
Kharuzin, Nikolai
Time Periods
20th century
19th century
20th century, early
18th century
Places
Russia
Soviet Union
Australia
Mexico
United States
Arctic regions
Institutions
University of California
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