Was a Russian Ethnographer in Central Asia a Colonizer?

Abstract

In the essay, I ask myself the following question: why is Russian ethnography, unlike European or American anthropology, completely unprepared to problematize its origins and its status as colonial and postcolonial knowledge? Considering the examples of V.P. Nalivkin and the Khorezm expedition, I argue that the irrelevance of (post) colonial self-criticism in Russian ethnography is the result of its radical de-colonizing detachment from the “West”, including its traumas, and subsequent attempts to build its own self-sufficient and isolationist universalizing ethnographic language. In this conceptual logic, ethnographers’ sympathy and empathy for the «objects» of their research did not require condemnation of their colonial roots and their (post)colonial role, and at some point even began to censor such a view.