Siberia

Siberia is the continental region of north Asia; located in the Russian Federation, it extends from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. Noted for its unforgiving climate and expansive boreal forests, or taiga, Siberia has contributed much to ethnological research, including studies of its indigenous peoples and languages, shamanism, and processes surrounding Russian colonization. Having been inhabited since the Pleistocene, Siberia is important to comparative research in old world prehistory and Paleolithic ecology. Research in Siberia today is integral to the anthropological study of Eurasia as it undergoes political and economic change after socialism.

Research on Siberia significant to anthropology includes a great deal of work on the history and ethnography of its native peoples. The history of Russian interaction with native peoples of Siberia, including the rapid expansion of the Russian Empire and its tribute and administrative systems, has been an important topic in comparative political economy and world systems theory. Studies of Siberian kinship and shamanism have influenced ethnological theories of social organization and religion. Soviet anthropologists had their own theoretical and applied developments relating to Siberia that flourished under the Marxist-Leninist prerequisites of the Soviet Union. Anthropological research in the circumpolar region, Beringia, and theories on the peopling of the New World involve Siberia. Property and identity transformations in Siberia have spawned a rich collection of ethnographic research in Eurasia since the 1991 cessation of the USSR. The documentation of endangered languages and practices of Siberia is an important area of applied anthropological research.

Archaeological studies have shown early peoples inhabited Siberia at least 20,000 to 8,000 years before present. Wide areas of the Eurasian Arctic coastline inhabited earlier are now submerged, including Beringia, the “land bridge” to North America. Anthropologists have made comparisons between the northwest coast of North America and the northeast coast of Asia that show striking ethnographic commonalities. Human interactions with big game, such as mammoths and other ungulates like reindeer and caribou, in Siberia and the New World are an important focus for paleoecological and human-rangifer comparisons across the circumpolar zone.

Modern ethnographic investigations of Siberia began under the direction of Russian anthropologists who published in Russian and English. Waldemar G. Bogoras (1865–1936) conducted ethnographic research with the Chukchee, Siberian Eskimo, Koryak, and Yukagir. One of his most influential studies, The Chukchee, was published in the Jesup North Pacific Expedition series edited by Franz Boas. A contemporary of Bogoras, Lev Iakovlevich Shternberg (1861–1927)worked in southeast Siberia with the Gilyak, Orochi, Goldi, Negedals, and Ainu. Shternberg's ethnography on the social organization and sexual life of the Gilyak influenced Claude Lévi-Strauss's thinking on kinship and marriage. Waldemar Jochelson (1855–1937),a contemporary of Bogoras and Shternberg, worked with Aleuts,Kamchadals, Koryak, Yakuts, and Yukagir. Jochelson's Peoples of Asiatic Russia was published in 1928 by the American Museum of Natural History. Bogoras established ethnography as a discipline in Russia and the Soviet Union with his colleague Shternberg. After the revolution, Jochelson emigrated to New York. Sergei Mikhailovich Shirokogorov (1887–1939), another Bolshevik refugee working in northern China and southern Siberia, published influential studies on the Social Organization of the Northern Tungus (1929) and the Psychomental Complex of the Tungus (1935), adding to anthropological interest in Siberian kinship and shamanism.

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