From Where is Russian Ethnology and Where is it Going? A Personal View in Global Perspective

Abstract

The article presents an overview of major trends in, and challenges of, the Russian ethnology for the past three decades. This is an examination of the state of the art from an intra-disciplinary perspective insofar as the author had a privilege to be in the center of Russian academic and public life for many years. He initiated and influenced academic strategies and institutional transformations as the long-term director of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Russian Academy of Sciences. This is also an outlook on Russia’s national school of ethnology presented in the context of broader theoretical shifts and disciplinary changes in social/cultural anthropology and ethnology in the world. The key issues discussed are: a) the professional disciplinary inertia and a hard road to the reassessment of the Soviet legacies; b) the constraining effects of public practices on the choice of theoretical stances or concepts, such as social constructivism; c) the contradictory influence on the academic community on the part of the dominant discourse of ethnonationalism and the practices of “postcolonial” or indigenous anthropology; d) the integration of the traditional ethnographic method and innovative approaches and the prospects for looking into cultural commonalities as opposed to the long-lived anthropological obsession with establishing cultural differences. The article discusses a nation-building project based on the vision of Russia as a multiethnic civic nation and the mission of anthropology in this endeavor. The author evaluates the post-Soviet period as the most fruitful one from the viewpoint of opening new research fields, as well as of thematic and geographic expansions. The article is supplemented with comments by O. Artemova, D. Anderson, D. Arzyutov, M. M. Balzer, A Golovnev, V. Filippov, and P. Schweitzer, and with the author’s response.