Alexia Bloch and Laurel Kendall have given us a book that is well-worth the effort but which presents many interesting problems to anthropologists. The book covers a considerable terrain: travel, museum, historical ethnography, Siberian daily lives, and anthropological concerns of (former) tribal elites attempting to salvage remnants of their vanishing culture. As such, it is a volume of interest to different scholars and East European, especially Russian and Siberian, specialists who wish to understand more about the transnational connections between the Euro-American museum culture and those of much smaller local museums at the "end of the world." This phrase is not a category of distance but that of time. The two authors have followed in the footsteps of two early twentieth-century Russian ethnographers, Waldemar Jochelson and Waldemar Bogoras, who researched the Far Eastern region of the tsarist empire. Nobody should expect then to read here historical or traditional ethnography per se. It is, as the authors justly claim, a travelogue, a semi-fictional travel diary describing one month in 1998.
Reading the book and figuring out who is doing what requires at least a glass of wine sitting next to the fireplace, a way I had to proceed. The book reveals a complex panoply of personalities, as in one sentence we read how Laurel manages to call her husband in New York, then how Alexia notices native-looking people in the airport, then suddenly the voice shifts to the plural "we." Such interplays of impressions and feelings of the two researchers in Siberia are well-documented throughout the entire book. We learn a great deal of what "Alexia" does, how "Laurel" thinks, or rather "wonders," as they execute many errands: meet with local hosts and various officials from schools and museums, chat with travelers and tourists, exchange views with cab drivers and a whole variety of ordinary citizens that come in and out of the chapters. This personalized -- should I say "self-reflective"? -- view is very strong, perhaps even a bit overwhelming, leaving less space for the other side. A sample: "Later in the afternoon, Laurel curls up in front of the space heater to read and write, relishing the warmth and solitude. Alexia goes off to play tennis (p. 47)." Similar ambiance is plenty: "The next morning Alexia goes running in the nearby park" (p. 112).
Actually, this constant switching of voices and personal feelings raises the questions whether this book should be read as a co-authored or a multi-authored work. The two anthropologists do take the center stage, however, but we learn that Laurel Kendall's handwritten notes were transcribed by three aides, and Alexia Bloch's laptop notes were transcribed by yet another person who then was responsible for "integrating them with Laurel's" (xvii). So the dilemma is: who authored this travel book? In fact, this is much more than a travelogue or a diary. I do not mean this as a criticism but as a statement of fact. "The tale is in the travel" (p. xv) the authors assure us in the beginning, and this sentence well-describes the purpose of their work.
Throughout the book, the two travelers' stories are intertwined with snippets of descriptions by Bogoras and Jochelson, and switching back and forth between these travels and occasionally into even earlier historical times is a common occurrence. This timelessness creates a fascinating but at times convoluted reading. This is especially so since many of the references to pre-19th century eras seem like impressionistic and elusive side-marks. For example, on page 113 there is a short paragraph describing Yerofey Khabarov the Russian colonial officer who led the bloody intrusion into the Amur River region in 1651, and whose name the city Khabarovsk now preserves. Similarly, a few sentences describe the mid-19th century and the Crimean War as an aspect highlighting Chinese and Russian imperial relations resulting in gaining some lands by the tsar from China. This cannot really stand for history. However superficial and shorthand, such notes do serve the purpose of offering refined explanations to readers who are not familiar with Siberian history. It also manages to unsettle us from the daily realities described by the anthropologists-travelers.
With such insights, there are weaknesses that will be immediately obvious to readers. One has to do with the portentous naiveté of the authors. There are plenty of examples. In the beginning of their trip, the two anthropologists go to exchange money in the town of Providenia, but to their dismay they are told that denominations less than hundred-dollars are preferred. Since our travelers are stacked up with hundred dollars bills this "produces a ripple of anxiety" among them (p. 16). Anyone who conducted fieldwork in Eastern Europe knows this well -- I have experienced this in 1995 in Tyumen and Khanty-Mansisk myself - but I also met taxi drivers in New York who do not take hundred dollar bills either! Another example is telling as well. Viewing a local dance group's performance, the authors write the following: "The eldest girl does throat singing, producing sounds that might resemble a locomotive mating with a whistling tea cattle" (p. 87). Poetic? Not really. Anthropological? Hardly. And finally, the authors come to a conclusion that museums both in NYC and in Siberia face similar difficulties as private donors and governmental cuts force them to downsize. Yet, I am sure that no museums in Siberia can even be compared to those in NYC, let alone to the American Museum of Natural History.
The two maps -- one showing where the two anthropologists visited in 1998 and the other a hand-drawn illustration of the wide-ranging travels of Jochelson and Bogoras -- should have been printed side-by-side in order to highlight the locations (and their disappearances) between the two research periods. The historical map in the collection of the American Museum of Natural History deserves a much better presentation than what is in the book. I had to use a magnifying glass in order to read the places of those historic visits.
Reading the book's many faceted incursions into various Siberian personal stories and lifeways, I was struck by how little the two authors wanted us to know the visual material housed at local museums. After all this is what the book aspires to achieve: almost all the historical pictures are from the Jochelson-Bogoras expedition in the possession of the American Museum of Natural History! This book would have been the ideal place to offer a unique possibility to bring to 'western' readers some of the artifacts in these local collections. This is even more urgent since local museums, like the one described in Providenia, store a fascinating photo collection that is not archived properly (i.e. the photos are stacked into high acid envelopes). As it is, this book is very much an American product as most of the photos from the 1998 trip are by Kendall even though the majority of vignettes rely on the actions and stories of the numerous informants who appear on the pages of this travel account. Undoubtedly, the historical photos are stunning and of incredible historical value. However, many of the original field photographs of Bogoras among the Chukcki and the Eskimos, and those of Jochelson among the Koryak, Yakut, Tungus (Evenki) and Yukagir were published by the American Museum of Natural History in the early decades of the twentieth century. A more recent collection was published in 1997, a remarkable picture book that L. Kendall also assisted in bringing to light. Yet, there are books that present a healthier balance of visual multi-authorship that I have in mind (J. Oakes and R. Riewe's Spirit of Siberia published in 1998).
Having said all that, I am not about to dismiss this book by Bloch and Kendall as unexciting or without its own merits. On the contrary, I enjoyed reading these miniature accounts describing local life in a diversity of Siberian settings. They can be read leisurely either chapter by chapter or even separately from one another. As it is written, "The museum at the end of the world" does not require from the reader a great deal of detailed background information on Siberian history or post-Soviet transformation. This will, no doubt, please undergraduate readers. The small number of notes and the entirely English-language sources listed at the end are also convincing that this travelogue is designed for them. Doctoral students and Siberian specialists, however, will have to read the book for reasons other than these and in conjunction with other ethnographies. They will enjoy, as I have done, the poetic reflections of two North American anthropologists as they tumble across eastern Siberia in search for museums at the end of the world. Moreover, the book's short epilogue can be read as a warning to anthropologists. The authors stress that the future of cultural life in the Russian Far East is in the hands of concerned native elites. Not only they, the authors of this book, are also responsible, and their book nicely illustrates this.