Sibirica

Based on materials from expeditions to the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug during 2006 and 2007, this article discusses the role of a small museum in the local society of a district administrative center. The article focuses on a specific class of sacred Nenets objects in the museum's collection, called locally babushka (grandmother) and a “working model“ of a sacred site that is itself a sacred site for local residents, both indigenous and Russian, to explore the social relationships forged by the museum and its collection among local residents of all ethnicities. The museum and its objects are not removed from social life and rendered dead and preserved under glass. They remain alive in a network of relationships between human and non-human persons.

The ostracizing of mentally and physically disabled individuals is a cross-cultural phenomenon that amounts to what Henri-Jacques Stiker calls a “murderous system,“ which does not kill such individuals outright, but instead indirectly. This as well as Foucault's notions about the construction of madness and deviancy serve as a departure point for understanding tsarist Russia's murderous system of deporting the disabled to Siberia. This article charts this system's operation over the longue durée, from the midsixteenth to the late nineteenth century; describes the motivations and factors conditioning those powerbrokers who exiled the disabled; and provides data on the number of disabled exiles and describes conditions they faced. I argue that the state's exploitation of the peasantry, the peasantry's inculcation of commodifying economic imperatives, and the availability of Siberia's expanses combined to make Russia's a uniquely murderous system that lasted for centuries.

Veniamin (Blagonravov), Bishop of Selenginsk (1862-1868) and Archbishop of Irkutsk and Nerchinsk (1873-1892), was for almost three decades the leading missionary in the Transbaikal. A strong believer in Christian and Russian/Western superiority he actively introduced Christianization and Russification to Transbaikalian Buriats. Veniamin understood both processes as crucial for the Russian raison d'état in Asia. Baptized Buriats were supposed to accept a Russian lifestyle and identify themselves as Russians. Perceiving Buddhist lamas as vicious competitors he accused them of delaying the process of the development of the native people. Veniamin perceived Buddhism as a heathen Asian tradition and, as such, inferior to the religion and culture offered to the converts by the Orthodox Christian missionaries. Images of “heathens,“ his way of portraying Buddhists, differed noticeably from the comprehensive and complex understanding of Buddhism presented by his predecessor, Archbishop Nil.

Alexei Yurchenko and Jens Petter Nielsen, eds., In the North My Nest Is Made: Studies in the History of the Murman Colonization, 1860-1940 Michael Pretes

P. L. Kazar’ian, Plan P. F. Kuzmishcheva 1834 goda o peredache Okhotsko-Kamchatskogo kraia Rossiisko-Amerikanskoi kompanii Paul Dukes

Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, ed., Religion and Politics in Russia: A Reader Anna Bara

Sergei Kan, Lev Shternberg: Anthropologist, Russian Socialist, Jewish Activist Tanya Argounova-Low

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