'Embracing the Otherness: Maria Czaplicka's Aboriginal Siberia (1914) in the context of Russian imperial ethnography

In this lecture, I would like to investigate one particular case from the history of the Russian imperial ethnography and the ethnographic studies of Siberia: the work by British-Polish anthropologist Maria Czaplicka (1884-1921). This figure is quite special due to multiple factors that shaped her biography: born the Russian Poland, Czaplicka has left the Russian Empire to become a social anthropologist by defending a PhD thesis in Oxford. Her thesis being dedicated to the Aboriginal Siberia (the monograph published in 1915), she has subsequently become the first author to introduce an abundant corpus of the Russian-language studies on Siberia to the English reader. This demarche couldn’t possibly go without being politicized: a woman, a Polish person, funded by the academic institution of a rival power (the British Empire) dares to write on “our inorodtsy”! The only way for the Polish intellectuals to become a recognized ethnographers of Siberia, was, de facto, by means of political exile in this region (as it was the case for so many of them, W. Sieroszewski being the most known). And more importantly, the tacit law of monopoly of the Russians on the inorodtsy of Siberia was viewed by Russian officials and intellectuals as an ideological and political matter: having their own “aboriginals” to civilize, was a necessary condition for Russia to be considered as a “proper” western Empire, spreading the European civilization further to the East.
While the official review of Czaplicka’s work in Russian academic milieu (written by W. Jochelson) was condescendingly recognizing a “fair quality” of “this purely compilation work”, the British one (by prof. Marret) has underlined a “high degree of innovation” and recognized the importance of Czaplicka’s theory of shamanism (as a “third gender”), as well as her classification of Siberian peoples.
But even those political circumstances left aside, what was truly provocative, is the way the book was written. The narrative about the indigenous populations Czaplicka creates, didn’t fit the paradigm of Russian institutional ethnography, with it well-defined and developed language, operating with several types of metaphors, concepts and implications. To the contrast of persistent in Russian ethnography “naïve”, “unreasonable” and “emotional” inorodtsy, those becoming the figures of Czaplicka’s narrative, are systematically called “pragmatic” and “cold-blooded”. Where in the Russian paradigm, the reader finds the history of a “big Russian family” with its “cadets narodnosti”, Czaplicka reveals dramatic conflicts of hate, insurrection and attempts to fight back.
During the lecture, I’ll attempt to analyse those issues within a comparative close-reading approach to Czaplicka’s English language book The Aboriginal Siberia and several texts of Russian institutional ethnography. This analysis will uncover certain characteristics of Russian ethnographic discourse (often remaining peripheral) and will bring light onto the role of the first female professor of anthropology in Oxford, Maria Czaplicka, in the Russian scientific and political contexts of the pre-revolutionary period.

SPEAKER

Dr Galina Durinova van der Hallen is studying the historical semantics of Russian socio-political language (18th-19th centuries). In her PhD thesis (2015) she investigated the history of concepts “citizen” and “society” in Russian language in the light of the influence of French political concepts of Enlightenment. Her current project is about the conceptual history of diversity in Russian Empire with a focus on Siberia region. She studies the evolution of political subjectivity in imperial temporality. During her stay at IRES, she works on a book proposal with a preliminary title “I remained a good citizen”: towards a conceptual history of diversity and imperial membership in Russian Empire (second half of the 18th – 19th centuries).