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Russia, Anthropology in
SERGEI ALYMOV AND SERGEI SOKOLOVSKIY
Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, RAS, Russia

Eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries

Although travelogues as well as information about exotic peoples existed in the

medieval Russian state, the beginning of scientific systematic collection of this infor-
mation can be traced back to the establishment of the Academy of Sciences by Peter the
Great in 1725. The most noteworthy Muscovite precursors of academic ethnography
in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were the cartographer Semen
Remezov and the nobleman Grigorii Novitskii, with their Brief Description of the
Ostiak People (1715). The age of Enlightenment, ushered in by Peter, was also a period
of great academic expeditions which carried on throughout the eighteenth century.
The most well known of these were the expedition of Daniel Gottlieb Messerschmidt
to Siberia (1720–27) and the Great Northern Expedition, led by naval explorer Vitus
Jonassen Bering and with an “academic troop” including Gerhard Friedrich Müller
and Johann Georg Gmelin (1733–43). The “Physical Expedition” headed by Peter
Simon Pallas, which also featured the famous Russian historian Vasilii Tatishchev
k among its organizers, traversed southern Russia and Siberia from the Orenburg Steppe k
to the Transbaikal region (1768–74) and studied the southern borders of the empire.
These expeditions were aimed at collecting mainly knowledge about the natural
resources of the empire’s vast periphery. They studied mineral, botanical, and water
resources; made geographical maps; and discovered new routes. The works that were
published as a result of these expeditions also depicted the diversity of peoples and the
languages they encountered. The findings were conveyed to the imperial authorities
in numerous maps and memos. The scientific results were also published in German,
Russian, and French. According to Vermeulen (2015), one of the main outcomes of
these expeditions was the genesis of ethnography or ethnology as “research programs”
which later resulted in the inception of the term “ethnology.” The German historian
Gerhard Friedrich Müller (1705–83) joined the Academy in St. Petersburg in 1725
and was enlisted in the Bering expedition to study Siberia’s history and geography.
He collected a huge amount of information about the peoples of this land, only part
of which was published in his History of Siberia (1750, 1761–63, etc.). Müller also
suggested terms for a new scientific field such as “history of peoples” (historia gentium)
and “description of peoples” (Völker-Beschreibung). These terms were probably the
prototypes for the term “ethnographia,” coined by Müller’s associate August Ludwig
Schlözer (1735–1809) and his colleagues at Göttingen in the 1760s and 1770s. One of
the major influences behind this development was philosopher G. W. Leibniz’s idea of
historical linguistics as evidence for the “origins of nations,” applied by Müller to his
Siberian material.
The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Edited by Hilary Callan.
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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2 R U SSI A , A NT HR OP OL OGY IN

Apart from Müller’s conceptualizations, the age of great expeditions yielded the first
systematic ethnographic description of the peoples of the empire. Its author, the doctor
and naturalist Johann Gottlieb Georgi (1729–77) took part in the Physical Expedition
and published his Description of All Peoples Living in the Russian State in St. Petersburg
in 1776–77, based on both his own field observations and the works of his predeces-
sors. He also personally consulted Müller and other academics. The book was a series
of essays on the peoples of European Russia, Siberia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia,
classified according to their linguistic affinity. Each essay was organized in a similar way
and contained information on a people’s name, territory, history, physical type, laws,
way of life, material culture, mores, and so on.
The first half of the nineteenth century saw the continuation of geographical
explorations—broadened to include the Americas, the Pacific, and the Far East. The
influence of Romanticism contributed to the development of folklore collection and
interest in the life of the Russian peasantry. Scholars such as Ivan Snegirev (1797–1868),
Ivan Sakharov (1807–63), and Aleksandr Tereshchenko (1806–65) published collec-
tions and analyses of songs, proverbs, and so on.

First institutions

The institutionalization of ethnography as a discipline in Russia is usually dated back to

k 1845, when the Imperial Russian Geographical Society (IRGO), with a department of k
statistics and ethnography, was established. This took place amid the struggle between
two factions: academics and naval officers mostly of German origin and the “Russian
faction,” supported by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. In the first years of its existence
the Department of Statistics and Ethnography was controlled by the naturalist Karl von
Baer (1792–1876), who established its aims in terms of the study of human “races”
with a focus on the non-Russian periphery. Baer was also the first Russian biological
anthropologist who classified crania in the Kunstkamera (Russia’s first museum, also
established by Peter the Great) collection and published papers on craniology.
Baer’s vision was challenged by the philologist and literary critic Nikolai Nadezhdin
(1804–56), who took over as head of the department in 1848. In his first published state-
ment of the goals of Russian ethnography, “About the Ethnographic Study of the Russian
Nationality” (1847), Nadezhdin presented his view, based on the tradition of Johann
Gottfried von Herder and Friedrich Schelling who considered humanity as divided
into “distinct nations, each one animated by a unique and immutable essence which
revealed itself in the creative expression of common folk” (Knight 1998, 120). His vision
of Romantic nationalism combined with his belief in the ability of ethnography to reveal
and present this “essence” in scientific terms. Under Nadezhdin the Department of
Ethnography carried out a vast survey of Russian folklore and traditions based on ques-
tionnaires, completed by local correspondents. The most interesting answers were pub-
lished by IRGO or were included in Aleksandr Afanasiev’s famous collection Russian
Folktales (1855–63). The society also published the first ethnographical map of the Rus-
sian empire in 1851, prepared by Peter Köppen.

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R U SSI A , A NT HR OP OL OGY IN 3

The institutionalization of physical/biological anthropology in Russia also took

place in a learned society—in this case, the Society of Amateurs of Natural Sciences,
established in 1863 at Moscow University. In the following year a department of
anthropology was created there, which was renamed the Imperial Society of Amateurs
in Natural Science, Anthropology and Ethnography (OLEAE) in 1867. The driving
force behind this institution for the first few decades was the professor of zoology at
Moscow University, Anatolii Bogdanov (1834–96), whose specialism in anthropology
was craniology. He organized systematic archaeological excavations of burial hills in the
Moscow region and authored the first Russian monograph in biological anthropology
titled The Materials for the Anthropology of the Burial Hills Period in the Moscow Region
(1867). In 1879 the Society opened an international anthropological exhibition and
congress in Moscow, which firmly placed Russia on the map of world anthropology.
In 1889 OLEAE started the first Russian ethnographical journal Etnograficheskoe
obozrenie (Ethnographical Review) to publish folklore and ethnographic materials
collected by the intelligentsia in the provinces, including political exiles, along with the
papers of famous scholars.
In 1887 chairs in geography and ethnography were established in the natural sci-
ences departments of Moscow and St. Petersburg universities. Although lectures in
ethnography featured in the curriculum, it was oriented toward physical anthropol-
ogy. Dmitrii Anuchin (1843–1923) held the chair in Moscow. A student of Bogdanov,
he studied in the 1870s with Pierre-Paul Broca (1824–80), Paul Topinard (1830–1911),
k and Rudolf Virchow (1830–1902). During his long career Anuchin produced a range of k
anthropological studies, the most influential among them being About the Geograph-
ical Distribution of the Body Height of the Male Population of Russia (1889). Anuchin
taught the next generation of Moscow anthropologists and ethnographers (Vladimir
Bogdanov, Viktor Bunak, and Boris Kuftin among others).
The first lecturer of anthropology at St. Petersburg University was Eduard Gottlieb
Petri (1854–99), descended from a Livonian Swedish family, who received his med-
ical education in Berne. His lectures on “Anthropology” were published in two vol-
umes in 1890 and 1895 and became the first course book on the subject in Russian. In
1888 the Russian Anthropological Society at St. Petersburg University was established
(Mogilner 2013). It became the mouthpiece of the school of anthropologists. From
1907 it was led by Fyodor Volkov (Vovk) (1847–1918), a Ukrainian national activist,
anthropologist, archaeologist, and ethnographer, born in Poltava province in southern
Russia/Ukraine. After twenty-five years of exile, which he spent mostly in Paris, he was
allowed to return to the Russian empire and taught anthropology and ethnography at St.
Petersburg University. In 1916 he published his essays on the anthropology and ethnog-
raphy of Ukrainians, which became not only a valuable contribution to scholarship
but also founding texts of the Ukrainian nationalist movement. His disciples Nikolai
Mogilianskii (1871–1933) and Sergei Rudenko (1885–1969) introduced the term etnos
as the core concept for the science of ethnography.
Museums were important for the development of anthropology in Russia. The old-
est, Kunstkamera (German Kunstkammer), was established in 1714 to hold collections
of various “curiosities,” including those acquired by Peter the Great during his “Grand
Embassy” to Europe. Over the following centuries it gathered valuable collections of

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4 R U SSI A , A NT HR OP OL OGY IN

artifacts from travelers and explorers. The Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography
was established on the basis of these collections in 1879. In the early twentieth century
Kunstkamera employed, among others, Vasilii Radlov (1837–1918), Lev Shternberg
(1861–1927), and Vladimir Bogoraz (1865–1936). The ethnographic division of the
Russian Museum of Emperor Alexander III, established in 1902, was a more nationally
oriented institution. Under Dmitry Klements (1847–1914) and Nikolai Mogilianskii
(1871–1933) the division amassed a valuable collection of artifacts of the peoples of
the Russian empire. Ethnography/anthropology in the Russian empire was often pro-
duced by nonprofessional authors, including the local intelligentsia and military and
civic officials.

Fieldwork and theories

If contemporary Russian anthropologists were confronted with the task to name a

symbolic founding father of their discipline, it would be Nikolai Miklukho-Maclay
(1846–88). Born to a family of engineers, Miklukho-Maclay studied zoology in
Germany with the naturalist and Darwinist Ernst Haeckel. Nikolai’s first publications
considered the problem of evolution in sponges and fish. Gradually his interests shifted
toward anthropology. His expedition to Papua New Guinea was financed by IRGO
and included naturalistic, anthropological, and ethnographic tasks, influenced by
k Karl Baer’s ideas on the origins of Papuans. Maclay spent about three years on the k
northwestern shore of New Guinea during his stays in 1871–72, 1876–77, and 1883.
He kept a detailed diary and collected all kinds of information about the nature and
natives of the place, including word lists and many drawings of their material culture.
This was an early example of long-term participant observation fieldwork. Unfortu-
nately, Miklukho-Maclay’s premature death prevented him from summarizing his
findings. Apart from the information contained in the diaries, his main contribution
to anthropology was refuting racist theories, which considered colored people as
intermediate links between Europeans and their animal ancestors. He was also active
in development schemes aimed at protecting Papuans from English and German
colonialism. The scholar tried to convince the tsar and the Russian Minister of Foreign
Affairs to take these territories under Russian protection and even entertained a project
of a Russian settlement modeled on socialist ideas (Tumarkin 1982).
Long-term fieldwork, socialism, and exile are interconnected in the history of
Russian anthropology. A number of future important figures in late-nineteenth and
early twentieth-century anthropology were revolutionary socialists and Marxists,
who turned to fieldwork in Siberia out of necessity or desire to find some intellectual
occupation. Most of them (e.g., Vladimir Bogoraz, Vladimir Iokhelson (1855–1937),
Dmitry Klements, and Lev Shternberg) were champions of peasant socialism (nar-
odniki), and some were Marxists (e.g., Felix Kon). Populist convictions attracted
political exiles to study the Russian peasant commune—the institution they tended to
idealize in their political theory (Ssorin-Chaikov 2008). Most of “political fieldworkers”
were sent to eastern Siberia where they contributed to the study of Yakuts, Chukchi,
and other Siberian peoples. Shternberg and Bogoraz were the founding fathers of

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the Leningrad school of ethnographers that emerged in the 1920s. Experienced

fieldworkers themselves, they championed the long-term fieldwork method among
their students who were supposed to spend at least a year among the people under
study, usually combining this with teaching, compiling textbooks, organizing soviets
and cooperatives, and other forms of Soviet political activism.
At the turn of the century theoretically minded anthropologists in Russia inclined
toward evolutionism. Shternberg is the best example of this trend. His first anthro-
pological publication analyzed Gilyak (Nivkh) clan structure and presented it as
a proof of Morgan’s idea of group marriage. As such it was noticed and praised
by Friedrich Engels. Shternberg remained faithful to evolutionism throughout his
life, although was open to new trends in anthropological theory, especially to Boas,
with whom Shternberg, Bogoraz, and Iokhelson collaborated in the Jesup North
Pacific Expedition (Kan 2009). Evolutionism was the guiding light of the lectures of
Moscow ethnographer Nikolai Kharuzin (1865–1900), which were published in four
volumes in 1901–5. Sociologist, historian, and liberal politician Maxim Kovalevskii
(1851–1916) wrote influential evolutionist tracts on law and customs among Caucasus
peoples, as well as on the origins of family and property. Among other theories,
Ratzel’s anthropogeography was popularized by Dmitry Koropchevskii, who held
the chair of geography and ethnography at St. Petersburg in the early years of the
twentieth century. Diffusionism was popularized by Bogoraz in his Diffusion of Culture
on Earth: The Basics of Ethno-geography (1928). The most consistent critique of
k evolutionism in Russian pre-revolutionary thought was presented by another former k
exile-turned-anthropologist, Aleksandr Maximov (1872–1941).

The Soviet period

There were a lot of former revolutionaries and liberals among anthropologists and the
intelligentsia at large who, like Shternberg, hailed the February Revolution of 1917 but
were rather skeptical about the October one. The most well-known anthropologists
who left Soviet Russia were Vladimir Iokhelson and Sergei Shirokogorov (1887–1939).
Shirokogorov settled in China and published all his works in English, including the
monumental Psychomental complex of the Tungus (1935). While in the West he is mostly
known as an expert in shamanism and Evenki culture, in Russia his theory of etnos has
had a long history of suppression and revival.
The nexus between anthropology and the new regime was provided by the Bolshe-
viks’ politics of affirmative action toward the former colonized and oppressed nation-
alities. The language for this politics developed within the Commission for the Study
of Tribal Composition of Russia (KIPS) at the Russian Geographical Society. This com-
mission grew out of the Commission for Ethnographic Maps of Russia at the IRGO,
organized in 1910. The commission drew up an ambitious plan of compiling maps
showing the distribution of elements of culture and of physical anthropological features
for the whole empire. Fyodor Volkov (1847–1918) and his students David Zolotarev
(1885–1935) and Sergei Rudenko played a leading part in the project. They were also
active in the KIPS, which was instrumental in producing ethnic maps of the Soviet

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6 R U SSI A , A NT HR OP OL OGY IN

Union and in preparing lists of nationalities for censuses in the 1920s–1930s (Hirsh
2005). Another Soviet governing body that engaged ethnographers was the Committee
of the North (1924–35), which developed numerous projects of modernization and of
the Sovietization of the life of the peoples of the north (Slezkine 1996).
The 1920s were a decade of comparable tolerance of the regime toward intellectual
life. Anthropologists also benefited from an increasing number of jobs in academic
and applied spheres. Ethnography finally institutionalized as an independent univer-
sity discipline, with departments established in Moscow and Leningrad universities.
The Faculty of Ethnology (1925–31) in Moscow was headed by the historian P. Preo-
brazhenskii (1894–1941), whose Course of Ethnology (1929) was critical of evolutionism
and championed the historicizing of ethnology. The leading professors at the Depart-
ment of Ethnography at Petrograd/Leningrad University were Shternberg, Bogoraz, and
the expert in Slavic ethnography Dmitry Zelenin (1878–1954).
The Cultural Revolution of the late 1920s to early 1930s left its mark on the history
of Soviet anthropology. The introduction of Marxism into the discipline was dramatic.
There was a period of ideological critique that stigmatized ethnology as a “bourgeois
science” and its key concepts—culture and ethnos—as race thinly disguised. These
accusations were especially pronounced in 1929 at the Conference of Ethnographers
of Leningrad and Moscow. The leading critic was a proponent of the linguist Nikolai
Marr’s (1865–1934) new theory of language and a lecturer in Marxist theory at Moscow
State University) Valerian Aptekar (1899–1937). He called for the study of essential-
k ized “timeless” cultures to be abandoned and for a turn to “actual societies,” with k
their class divisions and struggles. Another all-union meeting of ethnographers and
archaeologists took place in 1932. This meeting proclaimed that the project of creating
Marxist ethnography and archaeology had failed. The classification of disciplines
according to the source data was labeled “bourgeois.” All former ethnographers were
supposed to become historians of pre-class or early class formations who use fieldwork
along with other sources. The purported “abolishment” of ethnography/anthropology
did not hold. After a series of reorganizations, KIPS morphed into the Institute for
Anthropology, Archaeology and Ethnography (IAAE), established in 1933. A new
generation of ethnographers produced a series of Marxist studies of “actual societies”
and their social stratification, using the theory of social strata as their main analytic
tool (Alymov 2014).
The Great Purge of the second half of the 1930s took its toll on Soviet anthropology.
According to one account, up to 500 persons related to ethnography were repressed,
including the leader of Marxist ethnography and director of the IAAE, Nikolai Matorin
(1898–1936). Repressions applied both to old-school pre-revolutionary scholars and
their Marxist critics. Proponents of ethnology abolishment such as Marrist–Marxist
critics Valerian Aptekar and Sergei Bykovskii (1896–1936) were shot. Volkov’s students
Sergei Rudenko and David Zolotarev were exiled. Rudenko survived the Gulag and later
became famous for his archaeological findings in Altai and Chukotka. The university
teaching of ethnography was abandoned, although postgraduate education at the insti-
tute, as well as museum ethnographic work, continued. The 1920s–1930s were also a
period when innovative approaches such as structuralism emerged in the works of folk-
lorist Vladimir Propp (1895–1970) and ethnographer Aleksandr Zolotarev (1907–43).

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Propp’s famous Morphology of the Tale (1928) and Historical Roots of the Fairy Tale
(1946) identified the structure of the tales’ plots and offered interpretations about its
roots in the primitive society. Aleksandr Zolotorev’s most important theoretical work,
The Dual Organization of Primitive Peoples and the Origins of Dualistic Cosmogonies, was
completed by 1941 but was published posthumously only in 1964. Drawing on wide
comparative material, the author observed the universal character of dualistic myths
and hypothesized “dual organization” as the earliest form of social life.
The state–science nexus reemerged during the years of World War II. In the last days
of 1942 the Moscow group of the Institute of Ethnography (IE) was created, headed
by the ethnographer and archaeologist Sergei Tolstov (1907–76) A student of Preo-
brazhenskii and Kuftin, he became one of enthusiasts of Marxist ethnography in the
late 1920s and early 1930s. His main scientific achievement was the Khorezm expe-
dition to Central Asia, which yielded numerous archaeological findings. The volume
Ancient Khorezm (1948), based on these findings, also contained anthropological inter-
pretations of Central Asian myths and religion, which were in tune with Zolotorev’s
views on dual organization. During World War II the work at the Moscow branch cen-
tered on the Department for Ethnic Statistics and Cartography. Its task was to provide
memos and maps on ethnic composition and ethnic borders of the territories to the
west of the Soviet border for the Red Army and the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs.
They were never published. The head of the department, Pavel Kushner (1889–1968),
published his influential book Ethnic Territories and Ethnic Borders (1951) on the basis
k on this research. k
After the war the Moscow group was made the center of the Institute of Ethnog-
raphy, and the Leningrad group, based in Kunstkamera—its branch. Departments of
ethnography at Moscow and Leningrad universities resumed their activity. The head
of the centralized institute Sergei Tolstov proclaimed a Soviet school of ethnography.
In his formulation, ethnography was “a branch of history that studies cultural char-
acteristics of various peoples in their historical development, problems of origins and
cultural and historical relations of these peoples, and reconstructs the history of their
geographical movements” (Tolstov 1946, 3, author’s translation). This formula fore-
grounded the study of “ethnogenesis” (the historical roots of peoples and nations) as
the discipline’s principal task. In correlation with this task, the main form of field-
work in the 1950s–1960s was the interdisciplinary complex expedition, which included
ethnographical, biological anthropology, and archaeological “troops.” Another task was
to study contemporary socialist culture, for example through producing monographs
about a certain village or kolkhoz. A principal form of anthropological knowledge dur-
ing the postwar period became a monograph about a certain people or etnos, which
described its ethnogenesis and culture from archaeological prehistory up to the present.
The IE’s activity and organization was structured around the project of a new syn-
thesis of anthropological knowledge, which was conceived in the 1930s but realized
only after the war. This was a series of thirteen volumes (in eighteen books) entitled
The Peoples of the World. The first volume, The Peoples of Africa, was published in 1954
and the last one, The Peoples of South-eastern Asia, in 1966. The series was considered
a major statement of Soviet ethnography, whose main features were Marxist analysis,
antiracism, and anticolonialism. The series became part of the Cold War ideological

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struggle. While Soviet authors were proud of their attention to contemporary life and
the processes of modernization, Western readers doubted their objectivity in portray-
ing socialist achievements of the peoples of the Soviet Union (Anderson and Arzyutov
2016). An important synthesis of the study of traditional cultures by Soviet ethnog-
raphers was the theory of economic–cultural types and historical–ethnographic areas,
formulated by Maxim Levin and Nikolai Cheboksarov in 1955. Their work offered an
outline of the geographical classification of ways of subsistence and of cultural areas.
The late 1960s saw the reemergence of ethnos thinking in Soviet ethnography. The
new director of the IE, Yulian Bromley (1921–90), was initially a historian of medieval
Croatia, but after his appointment he emerged as a theoretician of ethnography who
established etnos as the main theoretical construct for the discipline. He defined ethnos
as “historically constituted group of people with common and stable cultural charac-
teristics (including language) and psychology and aware of their unity and distinction
from other groups” (Bromlei 1973, 37). Another branch of ethnos theory was devel-
oped by historian and orientologist Lev Gumilev (1912–92), who reclaimed the term
“ethnology” for his theory of etnos as a biosocial organism, whose life circle is prede-
termined by natural laws. His main theoretical treatise, Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere
of the Earth, was written in the late 1970s but published only in 1989. Gumilev’s bioso-
cial theory was criticized by official ethnographers during the Soviet period but became
highly popular among intelligentsia and general public, especially in the 1990s (Bassin
2016). Variants of the official theory of etnos were produced by Sergei Arutyunov and
k Nikolai Cheboksarov, Viktor Kozlov, Vladimir Pimenov, and others. k
According to Bromley, ethnography was supposed to study the similarities and dif-
ferences between peoples, etnoses, and the changes of these characteristics in time, that
is, ethnic processes (Bromley and Kozlov 1989). The study of kolkhoz peasantry, which
started in the late 1940s, developed into a full-fledged subdiscipline of ethnosociology
whose task was to observe the transformations of traditional culture and the mod-
ernization of ways of life of ethnic groups, peoples, and nations. The prevailing view
was that ethnic particularity was quickly giving way to a uniform way of life of the
Soviet people. Ethnographers distinguished three major ethnic processes: ethnic con-
solidation, ethnic assimilation, and intraethnic integration. The Department for con-
crete Social Research”(later renamed Ethnosociology) emerged at the IE in 1966. For
several decades the head of it was Yuri Arutyunian (1929–2016), one of the pioneers
of sociological study of the Soviet village. The most famous result of the work of the
department was the monograph The Social and the National (1973), which illustrated
the process of homogenization of Soviet nations’ culture and social structure with the
example of Tatars and Russians of the Tatar Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic.
Another old, vast, and thriving research domain in Russian anthropology is the
anthropology of religion, which overlaps with religious studies, especially in relation to
regional specializations. For example, most anthropologists with area specializations
in Caucasus, Volga, or Central Asian studies contribute to the study of Islam and
pre-Islamic “survivals,” while many Siberianists pursue research on shamanism, and
folklorists studying various local groups of Russians often have good knowledge of
Orthodox rites. The discipline is not institutionalized in current Russian anthropology,
except for regular publications and occasional university courses, but, as the study

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of rituals and customs continues to be the backbone of much field ethnography,

the anthropology of religion remains a subject that many Russian anthropologists
could claim as their own. Physical anthropology (the only subdiscipline in the Soviet
academia that actually held the name of anthropology) was a small but thriving group
of scholars. The most well known among them were Nikolai Cheboksarov, Mikhail
Gerasimov, Maxim Levin, and Valerii Alekseev. Their main specializations were
origins of ethnic groups (ethnogenesis) and race, and anthropogenesis. Soviet physical
anthropologists accepted and defended the reality of racial differences but denied
any social or cultural relevance of these differences and constantly proclaimed their
opposition to racism.
The 1970s and 1980s saw the expansion of subdisciplines with the prefix “ethno”:
ethnosociology, ethnogeography, ethnolinguistics, ethnopsychology, ethnoecology,
and so on. There were achievements in all of them. Thus, the linguist Yuri Knorozov
from Kunstkamera deciphered Mayan script. Ethnoecologists carried out international
multidisciplinary research into the causes of human longevity in the Caucasus. The
characteristic feature of the period was the collective and interdisciplinary nature of
research projects. The most ambitious and probably the most time consuming project
was ethnographic atlases, which had already reappeared in the 1950s. The work of
whole departments at the IE and at institutes in the republics was guided by the task
of collecting material (primarily traditional material culture) for cartography. Only
the ethnographic atlases of Siberia and “the Russians” were finalized. There were
k collective research projects that resulted in a series of books on ethnic pedagogy and k
the anthropology of childhood, a traditional calendar of the peoples of the world, for
example. The study of traditional culture and folklore in this period was also influenced
by structuralism and Yuri Lotman’s (1922–93) semiotics in the works of Boris Putilov,
Albert Baiburin, and others.
Finally, the history of primitive society was a subfield that tried to integrate Marxist
theory, paleoanthropology, and social/cultural anthropology to create a seamless nar-
rative about the stages of physical and social development of humanity. The most note-
worthy authors in this tradition were Valery Alekseev, Boris Porshnev, Yuri Semenov,
and Abram Pershits. This field was an arena of intense discussion about clan structure
and the mode of production in primitive society, which lasted throughout the 1970s.
The group of “revisionists,” including Nikolai Butinov, Mikhail Chlenov, and Vladimir
Kabo, opposed the orthodox Marxist narrative of the development of primitive society.
In the post-Soviet period Semenov produced an all-encompassing theory of history,
based on Marxism and world-systems theory.

Post-Soviet developments

The social turmoil of the decade 1986–95, with its radical changes, demanded a
sharp turn in the social sciences and the humanities from Marxist dogma to more
liberal approaches. In Soviet etnografia this demand brought about the birth of
political anthropology (although politically applied research, such as the mapping and
demography of ethnic groups had existed throughout the Soviet period) and ethnic

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conflicts studies, subdisciplines that had hitherto been absent from the Soviet research
tradition, barring (in the case of political anthropology) the studies of early statehood,
mostly done by Africanists (notably, Dmitry Olderogge and Lev Kubbel and their
students).
The official ethnos theory in the version of Bromley and his colleagues also came
under attack as a scholastic and sterile armchair exercise and was replaced with con-
structivist conceptions of ethnicity, based on Western scholarship and field research.
One of the leading figures of the emerging post-Soviet Russian anthropology was Valery
Tishkov (b. 1941), an Americanist historian by training, who was director (1989–2015)
of the major anthropological institution within the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS),
the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology (IEA, former the IE). He published an
essay with a suggestive title “The Crisis in Soviet Ethnography” and concluded that the
crisis had to do “not so much with the social conditions under which [it] operates as
with the discipline itself, including its central authoritative body, the IEA RAS” (Tishkov
1992, 371). However, at the same time as etnos, the core concept of the discipline, came
under attack, was reconceptualized and reimagined, and, later on, discarded altogether,
new “ethno”-prefixed anthropological subdisciplines continued to emerge and prolifer-
ate. In a way this was predetermined by the existing system of academic labor division,
according to which research at the Institute of Sociology at RAS should be focused on
contemporary society and ongoing social changes, whereas IEA-RAS should have on
its research agenda everything “ethnic,” from purported “ethnic conflicts” and “ethnic
k processes” to “ethnic characteristics of gender relations” and “ethnic ecology.” k
It took most of the next two decades for the gradual switch to take place from this
preoccupation with everything ethnic toward a broader agenda of social and cultural
anthropology concerns. This shift was also discernible in other (not “ethno” prefixed)
research fields within the changing field Russian anthropology, such as urban and visual
anthropology and folklore studies. In urban anthropology, which started in the early
1950s as the study of working-class culture and which later mutated into urban eth-
nosociology, there was a noticeable shift from ethnosociological interests to youth and
professional subcultures research and from “traditional” culture to its contemporary
incarnations, that is, from customs and rituals to habits and daily routine practices.
In part, this was also a reaction to the previous preoccupation with ethnic traditional
culture to the exclusion of other legitimate objects of anthropological research.
Visual anthropology of the Soviet period is often linked to the name of Dziga Vertov
(1896–1954) and his documentary film theory of the 1920s. However, most contempo-
rary Russian visual anthropologists (aside from field photography and the occasional
filming of rituals, which had been considered as a mere instrumental “fixation” of field
materials, along with pencil drawings, diary writing, and audio recording) date their
discipline’s birth to the summer of 1987, when the first Soviet ethnographic film festi-
val was held in Pärnu, Estonia. It took about ten years for Russian visual anthropology
to mature, before the first Russian anthropological film festival took place in Salekhard,
in August 1998. In 2002 the Moscow International Visual Anthropology Festival was
organized and later became a regular biennial event. Now, in addition to the Centre
for Visual Anthropology at Moscow State University and a department at IEA-RAS,

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R U SSI A , A NT HR OP OL OGY IN 11

there are groups of enthusiastic visual anthropologists at Saratov Technological Univer-

sity, as well as in Izhevsk (Udmurt Republic), Perm, Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, and St.
Petersburg.
Linguistic anthropology in Russia belongs more to linguistics than to the range
of anthropological subdisciplines, with a focus on sociolinguistic research. There
are several academic research centers that have units for ethno-linguistic research,
situated in linguistics (at Novosibirsk, Tomsk, and Chita universities) or anthropology
departments (at European University in St. Petersburg) and at institutes of the Russian
Academy (such as the Institute of Linguistics in Moscow and the Institute of Linguistic
Studies in St. Petersburg). In the 1960s to 1980s there was a group for the study of
onomastics (the study of proper names, including ethnonymy and toponymy) at the
Institute of Ethnography, as onomastics data were thought to be important for groups’
ethnogenesis and ancient ethnic migrations reconstructions, but, with the decline of
ethnogenetic studies, this kind of linguistic inquiry ceased to be used as a source for
anthropological research.
Western anthropologists, mostly from the United Kingdom, the United States,
France, and Germany (including Dmitry Gorenburg, Bruce Grant, Francine Hirsch,
Catriona Kelly, Marlène Laruelle, Alaina Lemon, Margaret Paxson, Hilary Pilkington,
and Nancy Ries), used the new opportunities opened in the tumultuous period of
the 1990s to the 2000s for field and archival research in various regions of Russia.
They exerted a positive influence on local ethnographic research practices by bringing
k new methodological toolkits, observation vocabularies, and a broader range of what k
might count as proper anthropological research topics. This, as well as the involvement
of Russian anthropologists in international projects and student training abroad,
contributed to the recommencement and development of such subdisciplines as legal
and economic anthropology, which for ideological reasons had suffered from political
pressure to adapt to Leninist dogma during the Soviet period or had been dropped
altogether, and to the emergence of new domains for Russian anthropology such as
medical anthropology (previously associated mostly with medical profession).
While Soviet ethnographers paid attention to traditional medicine and healing
practices, professional medicine had never been considered as a legitimate subject
for anthropological research. This situation started to change in the mid-1980s in the
context of multidisciplinary aging and longevity studies, when Soviet ethnographers
and physical anthropologists worked in close collaboration with geriatricians. Most
of the issues a medical anthropologist deals with were studied at that period in social
hygiene, medical geography, and the history of medicine. The institutionalization of
medical anthropology as a part of sociocultural anthropology started only in the early
2000s, when a specialized research group, turned later into a department at IEA-RAS
chaired by Valentina Kharitonova, initiated regular conferences that consolidated
researchers across the country. Now medical anthropology is taught and practiced
at several university centers (also in Saratov and Tomsk, besides Moscow and St.
Petersburg), but it remains a relatively small community, encompassing perhaps
several dozens of anthropologists, who are actively involved in the relevant research
projects, combining mainstream medical anthropology concerns with the study of
shamanic trance and illness.

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12 R U SSI A , A NT HR OP OL OGY IN

Economic anthropology in the country is in its initial period of institutional-

ization, although there are university courses and textbooks. This is a paradox, as
world-renowned economic anthropologists such as Alexander Chayanov (1888–1937)
lived and worked in Russia. Marxist Soviet etnografia paid much attention to “economic
base,” production, exchange, and consumption but mainly at a theoretical level, while
most of the research had been done by economists specializing in applied economics.
However, Soviet ethnographers did research on many economic issues, although it
was often fragmented and dispersed. For example, the typology of economic–cultural
types demanded a thorough knowledge of the economy of societies. Material culture
studies contained much information on traditional economies of the societies studied.
There was an animated discussion in anthropological publications on economic
formations and on the Marxist concept of the Asiatic mode of production; modes of
production were part of the research agenda at the Department of Prehistoric Societies
which was created at the Academy of Sciences in 1967. Theoretical contributions to
research on preindustrial economies made by the staff members of that department
(Abram Pershits, Yuri Semyonov, Lev Kubbel, Vladimir Kabo, Viktor Shnirelman,
and Olga Artemova), as well as a series of translations into Russian of the works that
became classics in economic anthropology (those by Henry Morgan, Marcel Mauss,
Bronisław Malinowski, Maurice Godelier, and Marshall Sahlins, among others) attest
to the rich tradition of economic–anthropological research in the country. Attempts
to institutionalize the discipline continue at several university centers, including
k the Higher School of Economics. A Commission for Economic Anthropology has k
recently been created at the Russian Anthropological and Ethnological Association to
encourage the development of this field.
The study of customs and customary law or legal anthropology was an inalienable
part of ethnological research in Russia since its inception in the eighteenth century (for
details see Vermeulen 2015). However, it was not constituted as a distinct anthropo-
logical discipline until the mid-1990s, when anthropologists and jurists joined their
efforts to establish a set of teaching courses, summer schools, and conferences and a
series of publications, mainly in the form of conference reports, article and documen-
tary collections, and occasional monographs focusing mainly on indigenous peoples,
minority group rights, or the study of sharia law and adats as forms of customary law.
Russian anthropologists specializing in these subjects (Vladimir Bobrovnikov, Natalia
Novikova, and Sergei Sokolovskiy, among others) often act as consultants or experts
in the legislation process in cases that concern nationality policy issues or in courts
that deal with violations of indigenous and minority rights or with xenophobia and
intolerance. Studies of xenophobia and intolerance, viewed either as a part of ethnopsy-
chological studies (e.g., Nadezhda Lebedeva, Galina Soldatova, Tatiana Stefanenko) or
as a part of historical research (e.g., Viktor Shnirelman) remain a separate and impor-
tant specialization in Russian anthropological research.
The post-Soviet period put an end to the overcentralized character of Soviet
etnografia. Previously there were ethnography chairs only at Moscow, Leningrad, and
Kazan universities and an ethnography chair at Yerevan University in Armenia, a
former Soviet republic). Now there are anthropology or ethnology departments in
more than twenty universities across the country (see Sokolovskiy 2012, 37–43). In

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R U SSI A , A NT HR OP OL OGY IN 13

place of a single specialized journal Etnograficheskoe obozrenie (Ethnographic Review),

there are now more than twenty-five academic journals that regularly publish papers in
anthropology, with at least three journals competing to be the flagship anthropological
journal: besides “EO,” there is the St. Petersburg-based Anthropologicheskii Forum
(Forum for Anthropology and Culture) and Archaeology, Ethnology and Anthropology
of Eurasia, published quarterly in Novosibirsk. The number of anthropological research
centers has also increased to include, in addition to old centers in Moscow, St. Peters-
burg, Novosibirsk, and Kazan, cities such as Abakan, Irkutsk, Krasnodar, Makhachkala,
Omsk, Rostov-on-Don, Perm, Petrozavodsk, Saratov, Stavropol, Syktyvkar, Tomsk,
Vladivostok, Volgograd, Ufa, Ulan-Ude, Yakutsk, and Yekaterinburg. This fact alone
has drastically transformed the character of regional ethnography and anthropological
fieldwork. Where most of the field research had previously been coordinated from
Moscow and Leningrad and on a smaller scale from Kazan and Novosibirsk, and
most research had been planned and orchestrated from metropolitan centers, regional
scholars now successfully compete with their colleagues from the capitals in developing
innovative research, some of which are world renowned, for example, the discovery
of Homo denisova fossil remains in Denisova Cave, Altai, southwestern Siberia, by
anthropologists and archaeologists from the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography
of the Siberian Branch of the RAS (Novosibirsk).
Furthermore, many of the new research domains and venues, innovative methods,
k writing styles, and experimental approaches within Russian anthropology are associ- k
ated more often than not with new anthropological research centers based at universi-
ties beyond the capitals. Among such domains and objects, which are quite new for the
traditional ethnology that remains predominant in many old anthropological research
institutions, are the anthropology of professions and leisure, the anthropology of the
state, the anthropology of science and technology, and the anthropology of perception
(or sensorial anthropology), and the anthropology of body and movement studies.
The rise of the anthropology of the professions is usually traced to the work of sociolo-
gists based at the chair for social anthropology and social work of Saratov Technological
University and to the anthropologists at the Center for Social Policy and Social Research
in Saratov. They conducted a score of thematic conferences and summer schools and
published several volumes of article collections on various professions, occupations,
and trades that contained a plethora of case studies, based on fieldwork among taxi
drivers and policemen, ballet dancers and foundry workers, cemetery workers and den-
tists, lawyers and urban healers.
The emergent research field of anthropology of the state, a subdiscipline related to the
anthropology of organizations and business, involves both anthropologists and histori-
ans. The field is institutionalized as a network of researchers operating from the Social
Sciences and Humanities School within St. Petersburg’s branch of the Higher School
of Economics and the Anthropological Department of the European University in St.
Petersburg (see Abashin 2012; Ssorin-Chaikov 2003). This research is complemented by
comparative studies in the quantitative history of state building in preindustrial soci-
eties, which relies mostly on archival research and cross-tabulation of ethnographic

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14 R U SSI A , A NT HR OP OL OGY IN

traits analysis in the manner of George Murdock’s Atlas of World Cultures and as exem-
plified in the work of anthropologists such as Andrei Korotayev, Nikolay Kradin, and
Dmitry Bondarenko.
There is no neat division of labor between, on the one hand, anthropologists who spe-
cialize in fields such as the anthropology of business and organizations, of science and
technology, of medicine, of transport, of youth subcultures, or of tourism and, on the
other hand, those who are involved in research on the anthropology of professions and
leisure. Not only do all these research fields overlap significantly but there is substantial
similarity in the methodology and conceptual toolkits used, as well as a degree of min-
gling and mixing of terminology. Predictably, these new research fields involve younger
scholars, and all the centers that pursue this kind of research are not the research insti-
tutes of the Academy of Sciences or old anthropological departments but relatively new
university centers (Saratov University, European University in St. Petersburg, Tomsk
University, and the Higher School of Economics with its branches in Moscow and St.
Petersburg). The students are often trained as sociologists, who come to anthropology
for their PhD research or postdoctoral fellowships.
The anthropology of science and technology is a recently formed research area in
Russia that has not yet gained the status of an anthropological subdiscipline or any insti-
tutionalization beyond the occasional university course or article collection. There are
notable exceptions in terms of sustainable research networks that coalesced around such
topics as the anthropology of the academy (on which there is a book series, initiated
k by Galina Komarova and published at IEA-RAS) or actor-network theory applications k
to material culture research. There is also the Institute for the History of Natural Sci-
ences and Technology at RAS, which conducts and coordinates research in the relevant
research fields and publishes several journals and series of themed article collections.
As for the anthropology of the senses, body, and movement, this is an emerging
area of anthropological research, drawing anthropologists’ attention to other channels
of perception besides the visual and to kinaesthetics. In the Soviet period, only dance
studies were among the traditional objects of the ethnographer’s attention. A number
of article collections on the anthropology of smell, taste, and touch, as well as on body
and movement, have recently been published.

Research communities, organizations, and networks

The most inclusive community is the Association of Anthropologists and Ethnologists

of Russia, which has more than 1,000 members and conducts biannual conventions in
various cities (the Eleventh Congress took place in Yekaterinburg in 2015; the twelfth in
Izhevsk, the capital of the Udmurt Republic, in 2017). Russian medical anthropologists
have their own association which conducts annual conferences and regular seminars,
publishes its own journal, Medical Anthropology and Bio-ethics, and has a website (www.
medanthro.ru).
There is also a number of formal and informal networks that bring together Rus-
sian anthropologists from various thematic or area specializations. Among the former
(formal thematic network) is EAWARN or Network for Ethnic Monitoring and Early

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R U SSI A , A NT HR OP OL OGY IN 15

Warning of Conflicts with headquarters at IEA-RAS (led by Valery Tishkov), uniting

over forty regional correspondents, mostly from various regions of Russia but also from
Armenia, Belarus, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, and Tajikistan. The network, created in
the early 1990s, publishes bulletins and annual reports and conducts regular seminars
on interethnic-relations monitoring and conflict prevention. There are also a number of
informal networks that function as coordinators for such subdisciplines such as visual
(http://visant.etnos.ru) and legal anthropology (www.ethnoconsulting.ru).
Area studies, such as the anthropology of the Caucasus, Central Asia, Volga–Urals,
and Siberia are better institutionalized: there are special departments in both capitals
at IEA-RAS, Kunstkamera, Institute for Oriental Studies, RAS; Moscow State Insti-
tute for International Relations, as well as in various regional institutions and research
centers—for example, in Novosibirsk, Tyumen, Ufa, Ulan-Ude, and Yakutsk.
The Russian anthropological community, besides its fragmentation into subdisci-
plines and area studies, seems at present to be divided into two large research domains.
Members of the first engage in politically applied research, such as federal and regional
government’s nationalities policy and legislation consultancy, ethnic relations monitor-
ing, migration studies, language policy, and education reform. Anthropologists of the
second category tend to concentrate their efforts on folklore and religious studies, with
particular emphasis on traditional culture and its transformations. Both categories of
scholars publish the results of their respective research in different academic publica-
tions (journals and book series).
k However, if one takes into consideration the demographic dimension, that is, both k
the age strata and the demographic strengths of various specializations, the future of the
discipline as a whole seems to lie in the innovative research directions, as exemplified in
hybrid fields such as the anthropology of science and technology, of sport and leisure, of
styles of life, or of bioethics, as their practitioners tend to be younger than the adherents
of more conservative and currently mainstream research fields.

wbiea1729 SEE ALSO: Medical Anthropology; Dance, Anthropology of; Religion, Marxism,
wbiea1799
wbiea1802 and Ideology; Marxism; Visual Anthropology; Evolutionism; World Anthropologies;
wbiea1860
wbiea1969 Enlightenment, the; Economic Anthropology; Siberia, Anthropology in; Postsocialist
wbiea2045
wbiea2119
Europe, Anthropology in
wbiea2149
wbiea2194
wbiea2359
wbiea2370
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Please note that the abstract and keywords will not be included in the printed book,
but are required for the online presentation of this book which will be published on
Wiley’s own online publishing platform.
If the abstract and keywords are not present below, please take this opportunity to
add them now.
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there should be at least 3 keywords.

ABSTRACT
The entry provides the description of the main periods in the history of Russian anthro-
pology from the early eighteenth century to the present time, with special attention
to the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, its institutional structure, current subdivisions
into subdisciplines and research fields, thematic differentiation, area specializations,
and current development trends.

KEYWORDS
k k
anthropological subdisciplines; anthropology; area studies; history; history of anthro-
pology; Russia; Russian anthropology; Soviet anthropology; world anthropologies