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Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology
Homo Imperii

Homo Imperii

A History of Physical Anthropology in Russia

by Marina Mogilner

Translated by Marina Mogilner

Published by: University of Nebraska Press

Series: Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology

Imprint: University of Nebraska Press

504 Pages, 152.00 × 229.00 mm, 38 photographs, 4 illustrations, 4 maps

Hardcover
9780803239784
Published: July 2013

£68.00

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Description
Contents
Authors
Praise

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.

List of Illustrations

Introduction: The Science of Imperial Modernity

Part 1. Paradoxes of Institutionalization

1. Academic Genealogy and Social Contexts of the “Atypical Science”

2. Anthropology as a “Regular Science”: Kafedra

3. Anthropology as a Network Science: Society

Part 2. The Liberal Anthropology of Imperial Diversity: Apolitical Politics

4. Aleksei Ivanovskii’s Anthropological Classification of the Family of “Racial Relatives”

5. “Russians” in the Language of Liberal Anthropology

6. Dmitrii Anuchin’s Liberal Anthropology

Part 3. Anthropology of Russian Imperial Nationalism

7. Ivan Sikorsky and His “Imperial Situation”

8. Academic Racism and “Russian National Science”

Part 4. Anthropology of Russian Multinationalism

9. The Space between “Empire” and “Nation”

10. “Jewish Physiognomy,” the “Jewish Question,” and Russian Race Science between Inclusion and Exclusion

11. A “Dysfunctional” Colonial Anthropology of Imperial Brains

Part 5. Russian Military Anthropology: From Army-as-Empire to Army-as-Nation

12. Military Mobilization of Diversity Studies

13. The Imperial Army through National Lenses

14. Nation Instead of Empire

Part 6. Race and Social Imagination

15. The Discovery of Population Politics and Sociobiological Discourses in Russia

16. Meticization as Modernization, or the Sociobiological Utopias of Ivan Ivanovich Pantiukhov

17. The Criminal Anthropology of Imperial Society

Conclusion: Did Russian Physical Anthropology Become Soviet?

Notes

Index

Marina Mogilner is the academic director at the Center for the Studies of Nationalism and Empire in Kazan, Russia, and coeditor of the international quarterly Ab Imperio. She is the author of several books, chapters, and articles on late imperial history in Russia.

"This is a brave, well-written, and scholarly excavation of an important and contested episode in the history of Russian thought that highlights and begins to challenge some of the distortions of the intervening Soviet and post-socialist ideology and historiography."—Dominic Martin, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute