Cruise Ships and Prison Camps: Reflections from the Russian Far East on Museums and the Crafting of History

Abstract

In formerly socialist societies the state has dominated sites like museums viewed as critical for producing a national past, but in the case of the Russian Federation these same institutions often are being utilized now to critically examine the past. For many in the emerging market economy of the Russian Federation, formerly state-dominated sites like museums have become important economic resources as well as new sites for representing shifting concepts of history. In this article I examine the museum as an artifact of socialist and postsocialist society and consider how distinct political economies shape the ways in which cultural practices, as well as national and local histories, are depicted.THE BROAD LITERATURE ON anthropology museums and museum displays that has burgeoned in the past decade often situates its critique in terms of the West and the "Other." This literature has defined the acquisition of objects from the periphery and the portrayal of peoples under glass as both representative of and an affirmation of the hegemony of the metropole (Stocking 1985, Clifford 1990, Hinsley 1992. Recently, however, scholars are taking note of the divergent aims and functions of museums as they operate in diverse national and local contexts. As a range of scholars has emphasized, museums are a potent force in forging and maintaining identities for newly emerging nations and for groups in postcolonial contexts (Kaplan 1994, Price and Price 1995, Schildkrout 1999.The inadequacy of a model of cultural hegemony to describe the function of anthropology museums overall is especially revealed in socialist or recently socialist contexts. ("Anthropology museums" is used here to indicate a wide range of museums that could be identified as natural history, ethnography,

Post-Post-Transition Theories: Walking on Multiple Paths

“…Related to violence, the politics of rewriting history, acquiring knowledge, and reconfiguring identity have concerned many anthropologists (Bloch 2000(Bloch , 2001Bloch & Kendall 2004;Borneman 2004;Boyer 2005;Empson 2007;Grant 1995;Ssorin-Chaikov 2003). Kaplonski's (2004) study of social memory in Mongolia in the midst of shifting and controversial identity formation demonstrated that memory is based on the identities of historical heroes rather than on spaces or places.…”

“…The cultural developments among the colonized people of the former Russian Empire differ from those among the people from the European part of Russia. The colonial past of the former is embedded in ambiguous resistance to the Soviet past, which is mediated through rituals, folk medicine, and attitudes toward the state (Balzer 1996(Balzer , 1999(Balzer , 2001(Balzer , 2005Bloch 2001;Rethman 2001). Sabloff (2001) argued that Mongolia has its own concept of democracy from its distant history.…”