Since the
18th century, researchers and scientists have
traveled the peninsula of Kamchatka in 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.
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. Jochelson’s work The Yakut, for
which he
also draws on results of his earlier fieldwork
in that area, was an important milestone for
Russian and North American anthropology that
provides to this day a unique contribution to
thoroughly understanding the cultures of
northeastern Siberia.
PDF
(27,2 MB)
Foreword
by Tat'iana Argounova-Low:
Incidental
Ethnography: Waldemar Jochelson and his
monograph The Yakut