Late Imperial Russian Ethnography and Russo-American Knowledge Exchange

This paper will explore Russo-American knowledge exchange in the context of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition (1900-1902). This expedition was organised by the famous American anthropologist Franz Boas, and funded by the president of the American Natural History Museum, Morris K. Jesup. It involved fieldwork in both Northwest America and Northeast Siberia. For the latter, Boas employed Vladimir Jochelson and Vladimir Bogoras, two former Russian political exiles who had reinvented themselves as key international experts on the ethnography of Northeast Siberia. Jochelson and Bogoras were both working together with their wives, who did not have backgrounds in ethnography but conducted part of the research. The Russian ethnographers’ work in the Jesup North Pacific Expedition was part of a complex and challenging network of knowledge exchange. Bogoras and Jochelson were committed to the theory of social evolution which held that all human cultures passed through a universal set of stages, from the most ‘savage’ to the most ‘civilised’. On the contrary, Franz Boas was an outspoken anti-evolutionist who studied indigenous cultures through the lens of cultural relativism. Their collaboration was highly productive yet challenging to each side’s core beliefs. This paper will discuss how Bogoras’s and Jochelson’s views were shaped in a fascinating knowledge exchange which included American anthropologists, Russian ethnographers, their wives and the multiple indigenous ethnic groups under investigation.