Book review: Siberia: a history of the people

Abstract

This volume joins a growing literature on the history of ethnography in Russia and the Soviet Union. The collection includes essays by scholars from German, Russian, American, Swiss, British,and Austrian institutions. As a whole, the book is meant to offer a new approach to the history ofethnography, what Roland Cvetkovski in his introduction calls “knowledge history” (p. 7). Drawingupon post-colonial theory, this approach is designed to uncover a plurality of imperial situations inlocal and regional settings that affected the creation of ethnographic knowledge, as well as thereciprocal influence of center and periphery during the process. Rather than focusing on whatconstituted ethnographic knowledge or how it was used, authors emphasize the generation andcirculation of such knowledge as processes that changed over time.