L'anthropologie Soviétique Des Années 20-30. Configuration D'une Rupture

Frederic Bertrand. L'anthropologie sovietique des annees 20-30. Configuration d'une rupture. Pessac, France : Presses universitaires de Bordeaux, 2002. 344 pp. euro 28.00, paper.By his own account, French anthropologist Frederic Bertrand arrived in St. Petersburg with a black-and-white mental image of Russian social science in first two decades of Soviet power: there was science, and there was state-imposed ideology; on one hand genuine scholars, on other, apparatchiks and informers. As he was reading though archives of venerable Peter Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, a staff member invited him to her office for tea. Bertrand's conversations with her, her colleagues, and a handful of surviving eyewitnesses ofthat turbulent period of Soviet history (notably, Central Asian specialist Leonid P. Potapov, and French agronomist and linguist Andre-Georges Haudricourt, who spent a year in Russia in 1934-35) led him to refoeus his investigation and rethink his presuppositions.Bertrand identifies three further sources which, as it were, overdctermine binarist representation of evolution of ethnography in Russia: (1) official Soviet discourse of rupture with practices and ideologies of bourgeois, tsarist past; (2) identity-forging strategies of Soviet actors themselves, especially in form of retroactive spin applied to Stalin-era events and personalities a half-century or more after fact; (3) Kuhnian models of revolutions, shifts, and normal versus anomalous science used by historians. Unlike all too many researchers who refit their data according to preset categories of analysis, Bertrand retools his version of post-Kuhnian sociology of science to accommodate realities of practice of ethnography in Stalin's USSR. he allows for juxtaposition of paradigms as well as their succession; notions of paradigm and scientific revolution are nuanced to reflect the permeability of constraints and porosity of norms (p. 25). He also adapts Gregory Bateson's concept of bind to pathogenic ideological atmosphere within which his subjects were obliged to work out their own salvations-or, for most, mere survival-in fear and trembling. Bertrand's double contrainte captures necessity for individuals to formulate a favourable and legitimate line of conduct, despite contradictory categories of dominant discourse to which they must appear to adhere, and nearly inevitable reprimand following any initiative (p. 34).Bertrand's monograph comprises three chapters, a brief conclusion, and forty pages of useful appendices, including chronologies and brief sketches of individuals and institutions. In first chapter, Bertrand contrasts discourses of rupture with past and Marxization of Soviet science with practice of translation, by which academics attempt to reconcile seemingly contradictory traditions or doctrines. A case in point is ethnographer and museum director Nikolai M. Matorin-one of two individuals around whom Bertrand structures his history-who attempted to retain certain notions from preRevolutionary social science, despite opposition of radical followers of N.Ia. Marr. Marr-the other central figure-and Marrists come to forefront in second chapter, on normalization of ethnographic discourse. The key events of period covered by Bertrand are two congresses of ethnographers, held in 1929 and 1932, at which Marr and his followers, notably zealots V.B. Aptekar' and F.V. Kiparisov, played a prominent role. In third chapter, on competition among projects, Bertrand goes back to nineteenth century antecedents of Russian ethnography. Some of finest field anthropologists of late tsarist period were in fact political prisoners, exiled to remote corners of Siberia. …

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