Literature and “Ethnographic Primitivism” in the Russian Empire/Early USSR

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel contributes to newer scholarship on Russian imperial ethnography by revisiting the role of literature in formulating and disseminating ethnographic knowledge, terms, and concepts and in informing scholarly debates at the time when ethnography claimed the status of a modern, comparative, classificatory science. By exploring how literary plots evolve into ethnographic facts and how ethnographic events inform literary “realism,” the panel offers new ways of considering relationships between literature and ethnography during the empire’s transformation into a nationalizing empire and toward the “ethnographic state” model.

Sub Unit

• History: 1900-1945

Chair

• Ivan Sablin, Institute of Contemporary History, Ljubljana (Slovenia) / Heidelberg U (Germany)

Papers

• Imperial Grotesque: Reimagining the Kazakh Steppe - Olga Y. Maiorova, U of Michigan

• Vladimir Korolenko’s Votiaks, Poor Makars, Ukrainian Uniates, and Russian Giants against Modern Anthropology - Marina B. Mogilner, U of Illinois at Chicago

• 'The Canine Madonna': The Horrors of Serfdom in Cultural Mythology and Ethnography - Ilya Vinitsky, Princeton U

Discussant

• Bruce Grant, New York U