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
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP41038
- DOI -
- Views 248
- Downloads 0
Words leaking from objects: thinking with absent photographs
The possibilities within notions of the object constitute a special area of interest in my research. As I have come to see it, the object is bounded by - and yet comes to alter- views of representation/re-presentation;...
Parental involvement in schools. A study of resources, mobilization, and inherent inequality
In this article I explore issues of parental involvement in school activities in former communist countries of South Eastern Europe. Although parents with higher socio-economic status feel more efficacious and thus get...
Nationalism versus patriotism, or the floating border? National identification and ethnic exclusion in post-communist Bulgaria
The paper deals with different aspects of national identification and their relations to ethnic exclusion in post-communist Bulgaria. The emphasis is placed on theoretical approaches that refer to nationalism as a soci...
Bruce Schneier (2015) Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World, London & New York, W. W. Norton & Company.
Scepticism was the attitude governing my state of mind when I stared reading this book but it vanished as soon as I realized it challenged one of my deepest beliefs, namely: My life is so ordinary that no one, in their...
Get real: Narrative and gameplay in The Last of Us
This essay addresses problems of ludonarrative dissonance in the 2013 video game The Last of Us. Much of the game’s production is well executed and very realistic, both in terms of graphics and storytelling; however, a...