Toward the History of Imperial Ethnography: Missionary Ethnography in the Russian Empire

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

In addition to offering case-studies of missionary ethnography in the Russian Empire – a greatly understudied topic in our field, the panel considers theoretical frameworks for making sense of this phenomenon. The papers interrogate missionary ethnographic discourses, identifications and positionalities, trying to locate them along the continuum marked by two opposing views. One has been articulated most famously by Nicolas Dirks, who held missionaries responsible for constructing the original discourse of barbarism and claimed that modern anthropology appropriated ethnographic barbarism from the missionaries. He thus framed them as agents of colonialism par excellence. The other extreme emerges from historical and anthropological studies of the Russian Empire (Il’minsky system; missionizing in Alaska, and so on) that emphasize conflicting nature of state and missionary projects and the lack of state support for the mission. These studies also point to missionaries’ non-Russian ethnicities as well as low social prestige of their service. Having established these two extremes, the panel asks whether missionary ethnography was the enabler of the Russian Empire as an ethnographic state?

Sub Unit

• History: 1900-1945

Chair

• Andrei Znamenski, U of Memphis

Papers

• Volga-Kama Region’s Missionaries and the Discourse of Barbarism in the 19th-Century Russian Empire - Marina B. Mogilner, U of Illinois at Chicago

• Alaska Natives as Portrayed by a Late Nineteenth Century Russian Orthodox Missionary Ethnographer - Sergei A. Kan, Dartmouth College

• Missionaries as Ethnographers and Ethnographers as Missionaries: Dilemmas in Understanding the Indigenous Ritualized Resistance in Siberian Altai, 1900s-1930s - Dmitry Arzyutov, Ohio State U

Discussant

• James Meador, Columbia U