IHS Symposium: The Curious Case of Race in the Russian Empire (16-19cc)

Описание: "Racial Imaginary and Images of Tatars in Early Modern Russia (1560s-1690s)"
Valerie Kivelson
Thomas N. Tentler Collegiate Professor and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of History, University of Michigan

Theorists of race often assert that race is a modern invention and that we are imposing modern categories when we attempt to find race in pre-modern history. Drawings from the sixteenth-century Illustrated Chronicle Compilation and seventeenth-century illustrated saints’ lives allow us to explore the question of Muscovite racial awareness by looking at depictions of people we today might designate as racially (as well as religiously) distinct from Russians.

"Prehistorical Archeology and the Making of ‘Race’ In Imperial Russia"
Louise McReynolds
Cary C. Boshamer Distinguished Professor, Department of History, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Prehistorical archeology played a fundamental role in turning “race” into a “science” in the 19th century. Race-making, though, was at heart a political program that each society adopted differently, in correspondence with its own cultural parameters. Some Russian prehistorical archeologists studied in Western Europe; all were familiar with the European literature. But the political imperatives that fueled scientific race-making in the West were simply not portable into the Russian imperial environment. There was no shortage of bias and legal discrimination in the Russian empire, against Jews and Muslims for instance, but for archeologists, race proved unhelpful to finding the origins of the empire or explaining Russia’s own forms of difference and predominance.

Joan Neuberger, Moderator
Earl E. Sheffield Regents Professor of History
The University of Texas at Austin

Sponsored by: Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies; Department of Religious Studies; Department of Anthropology; Department of History; and Institute for Historical Studies.

Note - The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions