Sibirica

The article focuses on the imprisonment of elite women from the Russian metropole and women of mixed ethnic backgrounds on the Siberian frontier in the mid-eighteenth-century. Female prisoners and their monastic jailors responded to ascribed identities, positions, and circumstances dictated by imperial policies within the walls of the Dalmatov Vvedenskii Convent, which complicates our understanding of imperial interaction, gender, and empire in Siberia.

In the late imperial era, the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (the Kunstkamera) in St. Petersburg produced a series of guidebooks for visitors that provided an account of the changes in the gallery spaces and collections within the museum. Among the changes was a reorganization of the collection that brought about the removal of a gallery dedicated to Russian ethnography, which had housed Siberian, Central Asian, and a small number of European Russian objects. Siberian and Central Asian materials were then presented by the museum in an Asian ethnographic collection. In this new Asian collection, shamanism emerged as a category that operated to unify Russia in Asia as a culturally contiguous space located in an imperial elsewhere east of the Urals.

This article is focused on several themes connected with the history of photography, political exile in Imperial Russia, exploration and representations of Siberia in the late 19th–early 20th centuries. Photography became an essential tool in numerous geographic, topographic and ethnographic expeditions to Siberia in the late 19th century; well-known scientists started to master photography or were accompanied by professional photographers in their expeditions, including ones organized by the Russian Imperial Geographic Society, which resulted in the photographic records, reports, publications and exhibitions. Photography was rapidly spreading across Asian Russia and by the end of the 19th century there was a photo studio (or several ones) in almost every Siberian town. Political exiles were often among Siberian photographers, making photography their new profession, business, a way of getting a social status in the local society, and a means of surviving financially as well as intellectually and emotionally. They contributed significantly to the museum's collections by photographing indigenous people in Siberia and even traveling to Mongolia and China, displaying “types” as a part of anthropological research in Asia and presenting “views” of the Russian empire's borderlands. The visual representation of Siberia corresponded with general perceptions of an exotic East, populated by “primitive” peoples devoid of civilization, a trope reinforced by numerous photographs and depictions of Siberia as an untamed natural world, later transformed and modernized by the railroads construction.

This article explores Russian political caricatures regarding the Boxer Uprising (1900) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5) that appeared in two of the empire's largest newspapers, Novoe vremia (The new times) and Russkoe slovo (The Russian word). The article argues that caricaturists both poked fun at international politics and crafted visual identities for their readers of Russia's European, Chinese, and Japanese neighbors. The images examined here sketch out the crowded and dangerous stage of global imperialism, while also pointing toward Russia's place within it. In the process, they articulate stylized notions of Europeanness and Asianness that had important connotations for how each periodical depicted the actors in each conflict.