Since the
18th century, researchers and scientists have
traveled the Russian Far East. Many of them were
of German origin and had been commissioned by the
Russian government to perform specific tasks.
Their exhaustive descriptions and detailed reports
are still considered some of the most valuable
documents on the ethnography of the indigenous
peoples of that part of the world. These works
inform us about living conditions and particular
ways of natural resource use at various times, and
provide us with valuable background information
for current assessment.
As the first
profound anthropological descriptions of that
region, the publications of the Jesup North
Pacific Expedition, undertaken in the first years
of the 20th century, marked the beginning of a new
era of research in Russia. They represented a
shift of the already existing transnational
research networks toward North America. Bogoras’s
work The Chukchee was an important
milestone for Russian and North American
anthropology that provides to this day a unique
contribution to thoroughly understanding the
cultures of the North Pacific rim.
PDF
(Download of
the original edition from the Digital Library of
the American Museum of Natural History)
Foreword by
Igor Krupnik:
Waldemar Bogoras and the Chukchee: A Maestro and a
Classical Ethnography.
PDF (701
KB)