Full Description
It is widely assumed that the "nonclassical" nature of the Russian empire and its equally "nonclassical" modernity made Russian intellectuals immune to the racial obsessions of Western Europe and the United States. Homo Imperii corrects this perception by offering the first scholarly history of racial science in prerevolutionary Russia and the early Soviet Union. Marina Mogilner places this story in the context of imperial self-modernization, political and cultural debates of the epoch, different reformist and revolutionary trends, and the growing challenge of modern nationalism. By focusing on the competing centers of race science in different cities and regions of the empire, Homo Imperii introduces to English-language scholars the institutional nexus of racial science in Russia that exhibits the influence of imperial strategic relativism.
Reminiscent of the work of anthropologists of empire such as Ann Stoler and Benedict Anderson, Homo Imperii reveals the complex imperial dynamics of Russian physical anthropology and contributes an important comparative perspective from which to understand the emergence of racial science in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe and America.
Contents
List of IllustrationsIntroduction: The Science of Imperial Modernity
Part 1. Paradoxes of Institutionalization1. Academic Genealogy and Social Contexts of the "Atypical Science"2. Anthropology as a "Regular Science": Kafedra3. Anthropology as a Network Science: Society
Part 2. The Liberal Anthropology of Imperial Diversity: Apolitical Politics4. Aleksei Ivanovskii's Anthropological Classification of the Family of "Racial Relatives"5. "Russians" in the Language of Liberal Anthropology6. Dmitrii Anuchin's Liberal Anthropology
Part 3. Anthropology of Russian Imperial Nationalism7. Ivan Sikorsky and His "Imperial Situation"8. Academic Racism and "Russian National Science"
Part 4. Anthropology of Russian Multinationalism9. The Space between "Empire" and "Nation"10. "Jewish Physiognomy," the "Jewish Question," and Russian Race Science between Inclusion and Exclusion11. A "Dysfunctional" Colonial Anthropology of Imperial Brains
Part 5. Russian Military Anthropology: From Army-as-Empire to Army-as-Nation12. Military Mobilization of Diversity Studies13. The Imperial Army through National Lenses14. Nation Instead of Empire
Part 6. Race and Social Imagination15. The Discovery of Population Politics and Sociobiological Discourses in Russia16. Meticization as Modernization, or the Sociobiological Utopias of Ivan Ivanovich Pantiukhov17. The Criminal Anthropology of Imperial SocietyConclusion: Did Russian Physical Anthropology Become Soviet?
Notes
Index
