Pictures from the Arctic: The Colonized Draw Back

• In Event: Visual Ambiguity in Early Modern Muscovy: Ruler and the Ruled in Context

Abstract

Valerie Kivelson’s paper turns us from pictures of the ruler to pictures made by his subjects in dialog with the tsarist state. The talk focuses on pictorial signature marks drawn by Yakut, Iukagir, Kamchadal, and other Indigenous people of the eastern reaches of the Far North. Their sketches forced subtle but meaningful changes on a mighty Bureaucracy. Signing with collectivist, spiritually charged tribal marks, the people of the north inscribed themselves in the tsarist system and demanded recognition as members of collective lineages of humans and their animal progenitors. An expansive vision of nature and of human society crept into the narrow heart of Muscovite bureaucracy. The great machine of tsarist red tape bowed (ever so slightly) before local visual practices, acknowledging them and accepting them as legally binding. Taking the visual record of non-Russians seriously, this discussion gives voice to the people of the Arctic, who are rarely acknowledged by history.

Author

• Valerie Ann Kivelson, U of Michigan