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Chernyaeva N. Imagining the Soviet East: Narratives of Popular Ethnography in a Series of Pamphlets,The Female Worker of the East, 1927–1929

N. Chernyaeva
Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography of the Russian Academy of Sciences
St. Petersburg, Russian Federation
ORCID: 0000-0002-8631-454X
E-mail: chernyaeva@kunstkamera.ru

 

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ABSTRACT. The paper analyzes a series of 30 brochures, The Female Worker of the East, published in the USSR from 1927 to 1929, as an example of popular ethnography from this period, i.e., ethnographic knowledge communicated via non-specialized texts for a broad audience. Created by ethnographers affiliated with the Scientific Association of Oriental Studies, the pamphlets used the language of description that drew both on Russian academic ethnography of the Imperial period and the Marxist ideological canon. As a result, the image of the toilers of the East, i.e., Armenian, Uzbek, Yakut, Turkmen, Votyak, Buryat, etc., women, was simultaneously ethnicized by claiming its supposedly unchanging and stable ethnic nature and homogenized through the demonstration of the women’s alleged universal backwardness and unculturedness. The article analyzes textual and visual strategies of representation, which triggered the apparatus of cultural hegemony, contributing to the identification of the reader with civilization, and the peoples described in the brochures — with backwardness. The pamphlet covers and illustrations in the texts reflected a search for visual formulas to imagine new Soviet ethnic subjects.

 

KEYWORDS: USSR, gender politics, visual ethnography, popular ethnography, Soviet ethnography

 

DOI 10.31250/2618-8600-2022-3(17)-149-178
УДК 304:39

 

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