Volga-Kama Region’s Missionaries and the Discourse of Barbarism in the 19th-Century Russian Empire

• In Event: Toward the History of Imperial Ethnography: Missionary Ethnography in the Russian Empire

Abstract

The paper explores the activities of missionaries among the Finno-Ugric populations of the Volga-Kama region, paying special attention to ethnographic aspects of missionary reports and the place of “barbarism” in them. The starting point for the analysis is the clash of two ethnographic paradigms ̶ the local missionary ethnography versus modern academic ethnography ̶ in the Mutlan case courtroom (1892-96). They clashed over the reality of human sacrifice as a living practice among the region’s Votiak (Udmurt) population. Being constructed by modern theory-oriented ethnographers, inspired by E.B. Tylor, Henry Maine and others, the human sacrifice was never confirmed by the missionary “field” ethnographers, which contradicts the widespread view of the latter as the originators of ethnographic barbarism discourse. The paper dwells on this contradiction in order to make sense of missionary ethnography as an imperial rather than colonial phenomenon.

Author

• Marina B. Mogilner, U of Illinois at Chicago