| Summary: | This dissertation is an intellectual history of the ethnographic naming and systematising of Siberian shamanic materials by collectors for late imperial Russian museums, between approximately 1880-1910. The late imperial era was a time of social and political change in the Russian Empire, during which there was a dramatic increase in the number of local Siberian museums founded. This project approaches Siberia and the local Siberian museums within the context of late imperial Russian scientific modernity to argue that these museums were constructing a new local Siberian intellectual and scientific network of researchers who were defining shamanism through their collections. This project focuses on collectors and the museum communities in the cities of Yakutsk, Irkutsk, and St. Petersburg. It approaches these sites as increasingly interconnected through the academic and personal networks and infrastructural developments that brought increasing numbers of people, willingly and unwillingly, to Siberia at the turn of the century. Specifically looking at collection programmes, a form of desiderata, this dissertation traces what types of objects and categories of information were understood as shamanic in order to explore how the category circulated and became defined within the ethnographic museums in Siberia and in European Russia. Ph.D.
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