Tatars Say Too Many Russian Ethnographers Now Focusing on Russians; Russians Say Too Few Are

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 8 – Those who study ethnic communities tend to divide between those who believe that only outsiders can bring the independence and critical detachment needed to penetrate what is going on and those who argue that only those who are part of the community they study can have the knowledge necessary for such understanding.

            Not surprisingly, that controversy broke out at the concluding session of the 13^th Congress of Anthropologists and Ethnologists of Russia. It was touched off by Academician Valery Tishkov, former director of the Moscow institute, former nationalities minister, and current advisor on ethnic issues to Vladimir Putin (business-gazeta.ru/article/430708).

            The academician denounced what he called “aboriginal ethnologists,” scholars who study their own ethnic communities and do not have the distance needed for scholarly detachment. He acknowledged that some Russian ethnologists were members of this group and argue that “Russians have only discovered and mastered while others have only attacked and seized.”

            Exactly the same thing can be said, Tishkov continued, “about the works of Tatar ethnographers about Tatars or Yakut ones about Yakuts and so on. In other words, while welcoming the development of ethnological and anthropological research in Russian republics, I do not see in this any essential breakthrough in terms of the enrichment” of the field.

            Such people are representatives of “the sympathizing ethnography about which I wrote 30 years ago,” the academician said, when he discussed “the characteristic aspect of Western sympathizers in the struggle of oppressed minorities,” an attitude now “the dominant discourse among post-Soviet national schools with their exclusive attention only to their own culture.”

            Such an approach, Tishkov continued, “almost certainly” precludes the establishment of the truth. And the theme of anti-colonialism which informs many who practice it “among out colleagues from the countries of the former USSR” will eventually give way, he said, to something more … adequate.”

            The scholar argued that the focus on the uniqueness of the peoples such individuals study “gives rise to a political demand of ‘more rights for the indigenous’” leading to “serious conflicts and tensions.” And he concluded by saying that with the exception of foreign scholars, all those at the congress were members of “one people – the ethnos of Russian anthropologists.”

            Not surprisingly, not everyone was in agreement with the Moscow scholar’s argument.  Damir Iskhakov, a Tatar historian who studies Tatars went up to the microphone to respond to Tishkov, wearing a tubeteika and thus “embodying all the ‘aboriginal ethnology’” that Tishkov had denounced.

            The Tatar scholar said he was concerned that the meeting had not focused on issues now agitating the non-Russian peoples of the Russian Federation, adding that having attended all 12 congresses of Russian ethnologists, he had the impression from this one that there is now “too much talk about the problems of the state-forming nation” and too little about the others.

            “Russians are here, there and everywhere,” Iskhakov said.  The non-Russians and their concerns are neglected as a result.

            Iskhakov’s comments brought a rejoinder from Marina Zhigunova, a scholar at the Siberian division of the Institute of archology and Ethnology. She said Iskhakov was engaging in “fake” news with his claims that the congress hadn’t addressed non-Russian concerns and interethnic relations.

            And she insisted that “overall, the number of ethnologists occupied in the study of the ethnic Russian people is “not large: 80 percent of Chinese ethnologists are studying the Chinese but with us, only in the entire Institute of Ethnology, only on the order of 10 to 15 percent are occupied with the study of ethnic Russians.”

            Perhaps the biggest news to come out of the congress did not involve this issue but another one: the push by Tishkov to include multiple identities as a possible answer to the nationality question on the 2020 census. The government appears to have rejected that, he said.

            “Literally yesterday,” Tishkov says, “I received the questionnaire which has been confirmed for the 2020 census. It completely line by line repeats the questionnaire of the 2010 census, with the exception of certain questions about economic and social indicators.” In short, nothing about multiple identities.