Page date:1 October
2004
Alexia Bloch and Laurel Kendall. 2004. The Museum at the End of the World:
Encounters in the Russian Far East. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press.
A little over a century ago the American Museum of Natural History launched
its ambitious Jesup North Pacific Expedition to learn more about the peoples
inhabiting the remote easternmost extension of Siberia and the northwest coast
of North America. In The Museum at the End of the World: Encounters in the
Russian Far East, anthropologists Alexia Bloch and Laurel Kendall tell the
story of their journey through this same part of the world in 1998, retracing
the old expedition as they link the expedition legacy of artifacts, photographs,
and archival material from the museum in New York to the present-day descendants
of its subjects.
Contrasting the time of the Jesup expedition with their own travel, the
authors reveal a physical and cultural landscape that was profoundly shaken over
the past century, first by Soviet control and then by that empire's unraveling.
The Museum at the End of the World is not the story of a heroic adventure
but rather a series of conversations about Siberian culture with museum workers,
native scholars, performers and artisans, and a great variety of ordinary
people. They reveal a strong concern about past legacies, cultural preservation,
and their uncertain future as they struggle to reinvent themselves.
The authors' combination of travelers' curiosity and professional inquiry
provide a compelling portrait of life in the Russian Far East and a meditation
on the fate of culture and tradition in the face of hard economic times and
sudden autonomy after decades of state control.
Alexia Bloch teaches anthropology at the University of British
Columbia. She is the author of Red Ties and Residential Schools: Indigenous
Siberians in a Post-Soviet State, also available from the University of
Pennsylvania Press.
Laurel Kendall is Curator of Asian Ethnographic Collections at the
American Museum of Natural History. She is the author of Shamans, Housewives,
and Other Restless Spirits, The Life and Hard Times of a Korean Shaman,
and Getting Married in Korea: Of Gender, Morality, and Modernity.
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Table of Contents
Preface: The Museum at the End of Whose World?
Note on Transliteration
Map of the Russian Far East
1. Across the Bering Strait and Through the Looking Glass
2. Chukotka: At the Edge of a Crumbling Empire
3. Magadan: The End of History
4. Anadyr: Tundra Town in Pastel
5. Khabarovsk: Embroidering the Border
6. Petropavlovsk: Once Almost a Boom Town
7. Esso and the Way There
8. In the Entourage of the Fisher King
9. Again Petropavlovsk
Notes
Selected Sources
Index
256 pages, 6 x 9, 41 illustrations
Cloth, 0-8122-3799-4, $55.00/£36.00
Paper, 0-8122-1878-7, $24.95/£16.50