"Do in the tundra as the tundra-dwellers do" : Maria Czaplicka, her Yenisei Expedition (1914-15), and My Siberian Year (1916)

• Main Author: Kubica-Heller, Grażyna
• Format: Other/Unknown Material
• Language: English
• Published: Berghahn Books 2022
• Subjects: ethnography; Siberia; Maria Czaplicka; intersubjectivity; literary ethnographic writing; Evenk; Tundra
• Online Access: https://ruj.uj.edu.pl/xmlui/handle/item/293368

The Polish-British anthropologist Maria Czaplicka (1884-1921) organised and led the Yenisei Expedition to study the Evenk (Tungus) in the vast territory between the Yenisei and Lena rivers, which aimed at collecting ethnographic data, gathering collections for museums, and making anthropometric measurements. Czaplicka wrote several academic articles using ethnographic data collected during the research, published her travelogue My Siberian Year (1916), and a series of magazine articles. Within this constellation of genres, from academic papers to her travelogue as a reflexive ethnography and to handwritten archival material, including her correspondence, one can depict anthropological issues that were rarely addressed by contemporary anthropological monographs, such as: the everyday experience of fieldwork, the role of local collaborators (Sibiriaks, Aboriginals and political exiles), and the anthropologist's relations with indigenous people. If Czaplicka's legacy invites to a historiographical contextualisation, it also inspires contemporary questions about the intersubjective experience of fieldwork as presented in her various ethnographic texts, whether academic or popular. If her strong authorial "I" is always present, it actually serves to highlight her engaging in telling stories to her hosts in exchange for theirs, her following the "natives", staying with them, establishing a good rapport by entertaining them, and only later gathering ethnographic material, measurements and photographs. Engaging and evocative, but also informative, sometimes educational, her writings reveal intensive tones in spite of the extensive nature of an expeditionary survey. The concept of multi-sited fieldwork might be appropriate here, as she was actually doing participant observation in different times and places of her expedition "On the track of the Tungus." This was the title of one of her articles, published in 1917, which encapsulates these intertwined dimensions and is therefore a good starting point to unveil those ...