Assistant Professor; Fellow, Michigan Society of Fellows
About
Tentatively titled Modernity in Motion: Towards a Nomadic Archaeology of the Russian Empire and the Early USSR my book is the first attempt to reconstruct the scholarly field of nomadic archaeology that emerged in the Russian Empire in the late 19th century and to chart its historical development, change over time, and global networks.
The project brings together sources in several languages and from archival collections in today’s Siberia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Finland, and the US, and draws on them to identify the compound central paradox of Nomadic Archaeology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: On the one hand, turn-of-the-century science understood nomads and nomadic cultures as “primitive”, “transient”, and implicitly incapable of historicity. On the other hand, archaeology as a science aimed precisely to prove historical rootedness and historicity of a given group through “objective” material evidence. In the turn-of-the-century Russian Empire, nomads – the “atavistic survivals” of bygone eras - were also a part of the diverse mix of imperial subjects in a rapidly modernizing polity. I argue that “nomadic archaeology” thus became simultaneously a language of imperial modernity and an impediment to it for many imperial subjects, undergoing liberalization and nationalization from above and responding to the rising subaltern nationalisms from below.
I am happy to consult students working on Eurasian topics.
