Roland Czvetkovski & Alexis Hoffmeister, An Empire of Others: Creating Ethnographic Knowledge in Imperial Russia and the USSR, Central European University Press, Budapest, 2014
Journal Title: Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology - Year 2015, Vol 6, Issue 1
Abstract
Since the onset of de-colonization, scholars have begun to question the role played by anthropologists and ethnographers in Western imperial projects. Similar analyses of the role played of these disciplines in Tsarist Russia had to wait for the end of the Cold War to take place. Multiple causes impeded such efforts. For one thing, Russian anthropology and ethnography received relatively low attention during the epoch, despite the fact that scholarly exchanges between researchers from the West and those from the USSR proved fruitful for both sides. Furthermore, in the black & white world of Sovietology, and works that challenged the status quo, as the case of the revisionist historians prove, were vehemently challenged on non-academic grounds and their authors subject to ad hominem attacks. If one was to compare the Soviet regime with that of other countries, it was to be with either that of Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy, not with those of the West. The fall of communism, however, made it possible for authors to approach Soviet history in a new light. In recent years, works by authors such as Slezkine (1996), Hirsch (2005), van der Oye (2010), Kan (2009), and Northrop (2003) have greatly improved of our understanding of Soviet policy regarding minorities and the role played by scholarly knowledge in its implementation. A number of questions continue to linger in the field as various scholars tend to question whether one can apply or not ideas and concepts from post-colonialism to Russia and the Soviet Union.
Authors and Affiliations
Alin Constantin
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