Shades of Russian Orientalism: Comparing Imperial Russian Entanglements with Islamic and Buddhist Easts

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Ever since Edward Said’s Orientalism was published in 1978, the Saidian paradigm has served as an influential departure point for debates about the relationship between the East and the West. In Russian and Eurasian studies, scholars have debated whether or not Said’s critique of Anglo-American and French Orientalism could be applied to the Russian case, especially after the “imperial turn” in the 1990s, when scholars started to view Russia as a modernizing multiethnic empire with distinct technologies of managing difference on the ground. In the past few decades, the field has expanded its geographical horizons and has produced clusters of scholarship addressing the complex relationship between Russia and the multiple Easts—both internal and external ones.

Our panel reflects upon the nuances behind the Russian Empire's approaches to the Islamic East and the Buddhist East. How do we explain the simultaneity of epistemic homogenization and compartmentalization in the empire’s conceptualization of different Easts? The papers capture the geographical and ethnic diversity of Russian Orientalism: from Persia to the Kirghiz (Kazakh) steppes, Transbaikalia, and Manchuria. The panel as a whole interrogates how the synergy of ethnography, medicine, and religion in different regions of the empire brought forth various shades of Russian Orientalism, both discursive and embodied. By bringing together scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds (history of religion and medicine, literature, art history, and anthropology), the panel will shed new light on the latest trends in Russian Orientalism studies.

Sub Unit

• History: 1800-1900

Chair

• Michael Khodarkovsky, Loyola U Chicago

Papers

• Ethnography as a Colonial Enterprise in 'The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar' - Anna Valeri Aydinyan, Kenyon College

• 'East of the Orient': Roman Tsyrenpilov and the Challenges of Knowledge Production in the Imperial Situation - Ismael Biyashev, U of Michigan

• Russia’s Buddhist Dilemma: Between Orientalist Fascination and Colonial Anxiety - Nikolay Tsyrempilov, Nazarbayev U (Kazakhstan)

• Eastern Healing in the Nervous Age: Tibetan Medicine, Kumys Cure, and Varieties of Embodied Orientalism in Fin-de-siècle Russia - Liya Xie, Princeton U

Discussant

• Maria Taroutina, Brown U