David Sneath has written an interesting piece summarizing both his book and the critical literature on the categories of analysis in contemporary and historical anthropology of Inner Asian societies. Sneath’s argument, which suggests that the use of terms like “tribe” and “clan” is the outcome of the evolutionist politics of othering, is not entirely new. As Andre Béteille argued some time ago, “tribe” has been on the retreat in studies of “exotic” societies, and a range of new terms has emerged to replace it (e.g., “indigenous peoples”).^[1] In Sneath’s view, the description of Inner Asian societies using the genetic concepts of “tribe” and “clan” has obscured the way in which these societies were governed. According to Sneath, Inner Asian genealogies and descent groups were not a reflection of kinship ties but rather represented “aristocratic orders” exercising functions that, in the European context, scholars habitually ascribe to states.
Sneath’s argument rests on two assumptions, both derived from critical studies of the production of knowledge in the colonial contexts of Western empires. The first has to do with the ways in which colonial states institutionalized the allegedly invented genetic units as administrative clusters. The second assumption has to do with anthropological scholarship enshrining these genetic units in an evolutionary picture of the development of humanity. While Sneath does not really dwell on connections between the two, his critique suggests that it was colonial practice and prejudice that informed evolutionary science privileging “tribe” and “clan” and that it was the evolutionism itself that helped to sustain and legitimize the imperial practices.
It is exactly in this connection that most scholars of the Russian empire will find Sneath’s argument wanting. Of course, to deny a link between the mechanisms of European colonial power and modern social sciences would be futile. Such a connection has been pointed out numerous times in many convincing studies. The question is not so much about the presence of power in the processes of naming and classifying populations as about the specific historical conditions in which it occurs. In this sense, imperial societies of the 19th century present a puzzling picture, far remote from simple narratives of domination and subjugation that describe them today. In each imperial society, the politics of the production of knowledge about human diversity was a discursive battlefield, in which different forces struggled to define terms and classifications with a variety of goals. To dismiss the language of tribe and clan in 19th century Russian empire as simply and unequivocally “colonialist” is to brush aside the complexity of the situation in which administrative and scholarly languages about Asian peoples developed.
For example, a careful student of Russian administrative practices will find that the term “rod” (clan) had entered the administrative apparatus of the Russian empire in the early 19th century, well before evolutionism or Hegel’s vision of the emergence of state relations in place of immediate familial relations came to occupy a central place in scholars’ vision of the social world. While we see the term used in 18th century documents, in 1822 Mikhail Speranskii’s code for the administration of Siberian peoples explicitly created “rod” (clan) as an administrative unit of Siberian natives’ system of administration.^[2] Usually, “rod” represented the basic social unit headed by “rodovaia uprava,” or clan administration (contrary to Sneath’s distinction between the two). While the “wandering” Siberian native peoples were only given clan administrations, larger, often nomadic or “semi-nomadic” peoples, such as the Buriats or Iakuts, were provided with a more complex tripartite system of “rod-nasleg-ulus.” In this system, the clan was the lowest, the most immediate social and political institution for Siberian peoples. Leaving aside the question of whether the Russian imperial administration imposed the term upon some preexisting native realities, one has to recognize that Speranskii’s sytem of governance, inspired as it was by European notions of the ladder of civilization, was simultaneously an outcome of political demands by native elites, who as early as the late 17th century repeatedly presented Moscow with requests for greater autonomy and power within their respective societies.
These requests, numerous and well documented, reflect an interesting change during the reign of Catherine the Great. Likely influenced by Catherinian codification of the nobility in the Russian Empire, native elites began to cast their requests in terms that stressed their own noble origins. Rejecting the Russian diminutive form “kniazets” (princeling) established in the 17th century for native leaders in Siberia, Iakut spokesmen referred to themselves as “people who had been rewarded with the status of the nobility by Peter the Great and preserved charters proving that.” In the Iakut case, for example, representatives of the Iakut elite presented their genealogies as derived from the semi-legendary Tygyn, a 17th century warlord, to substantiate their claim to power and the rights of the Russian nobility.^[3] One has to be cautious about describing this group as an aristocratic one simply because the language of aristocratic descent was less reflective of the group’s position and function as it was of its political aspirations.
There is no doubt that as early as the 18th century Russian travelers and scholars had begun to describe Inner Asian peoples as located on a lower plane of civilizational development. But such “colonialist” descriptions were often contradicted by the pragmatic politics of an accommodating empire. Thus, Speranskii’s Statute was a recognition of customary law as the only realistic basis for the administration of native society in Siberia by its own leaders (however the latter attempted to describe themselves). A sign of that pragmatism can be found in the very language of Speransky’s Statute, which provided for an unprecedented diversity of forms of governance: for instance, native leaders were to be elected or were to inherit their administrative positions depending on a particular group’s local custom.
Sneath takes on the Soviet tradition of ethnography and its key concept, “ethnos.” Very few scholars dealing with Soviet history have passed up a chance to deliver a scathing remark about essentialist and exclusivist Soviet ethnography, and often rightly so. Yet, it should be noted that Soviet ethnographic tradition was not limited to Lev Gumilev or Yuri Bromley, regardless of how influential these two might have been. Throughout the 1930s and even 1950s, other ethnographers, including the very influential S. A. Tokarev, saw ethnos in the light of both Soviet anticolonial rhetoric and nationalities policies and Nikolai Marr’s linguistic conceptions. Both suggested a historically contingent nature of ethnos, and its developing and fluid character. According to Tokarev, Soviet ethnography had to study not some methaphysical, ever existing entity, but a changing social phenomenon.^[4] To be sure, Tokarev and other ethnographers followed a Marxist evolutionary scheme and believed the tribe to be an important constitutive bloc of “primitive” societies. Yet, in their studies of Turkic peoples, Tokarev and his followers attempted to demonstrate the class character of social formation and thus critiqued “genetic” images of unity as much as possible.
Of course, the difficulty of deconstructing “clan” and “tribe” in the context of the Russian Empire is also complicated by the semantic fields of each of these terms. For instance, the term “tribe” (plemia) was not used exclusively in application to Asian peoples. The expression “tribal distinctions” (plemennye razlichiia) could be found in discourses opposing these differences, for instance, between Russians and Ukrainians, to the overarching and expected loyalty to the empire. The term “clan” (rod) invokes not just the “primitive” societies of Inner Asia or Siberia but also the aristocratic house of European nobility (dvorianskii rod). The most explicitly evolutionist treatment of “rod” in the 19th century belonged to the de facto founder of Russian sociology, Maksim Maksimovich Kovalevskii. Kovalevskii was probably the most important scholar of ethnic diversity in the Russian empire, and his work and life remain to be researched.^[5] A founder and propagator of sociology in imperial Russia, Kovalevskii unequivocally subscribed to contemporary evolutionary theories. Moreover, he saw the task of Russian scholarship in providing ethnographic material for the worldwide ethnographic “mapping of mankind.”^[6] Taking part in a transimperial exchange of data on human diversity, Kovalevskii also subscribed to a political vision of empire in which “barbarian and savage tribes” were excluded from the realm of modern citizenship.^[7] In Kovalevskii’s view, the Russian Empire’s political modernization implied a separation of the political space into a metropole whose citizens would be endowed with a range of political rights and a “colonial part,” whose subjects were not yet ready for full-fledged political emancipation.
In the context of late imperial Russia, Kovalevskii’s ethnographic scholarship was often the main point of reference for ethnographers studying the outlying regions of empire, while the latter’s work informed Kovalevskii’s global ambitions for Russian imperial ethnography. Thus, in his European presentations, Kovalevskii relied on data provided by revolutionary exiles turned ethnographers in Siberia, for instance, V. Iokhelson and W. Sieroszewski. In doing so, Kovevskii actually misinterpreted the ethnographers’ work, in particular that of Sieroszewski, who subjected the notion of clan atavisms among the Turkic Iakuts to serious scrutiny and came to the conclusion that the social organization of the Iakuts was in many ways the product of imperial administration and land management rather than of the surviving kinship structures.^[8]
The politics of the work of Sieroszewski and other exiled ethographers was, indeed, democratic and sympathetic to the cause of non-Russian populations. It argued for the treatment of native communities as Russian peasant communes, historically evolved and socially rather than genetically based groupings. Rather paradoxically, such an approach was well suited to the efforts in late imperial Russia to equalize the “inorodtsy” with Russian peasants, a policy, or, rather, aspiration derived from two sources. One was the sense of relative development of certain “inorodtsy” groups vis-à-vis Russian peasants, and hence their readiness to move on to the next stage of “grazhdanstvennost’.” The second source, much more utilitarian, was the need to abolish special rights and privileges (often cast in clan and tribe terms) of the “inorodtsy,” in order to reduce land allotments secured for the “inorodtsy” population, and to free land resources for mass peasant colonization, increasingly seen as the key to the empire’s problem of social and economic progress.^[9] Hence, scholars such as E. K. Pekarsky, a former exile turned linguist, supported equalization on the basis of ethnographic data suggesting that Iakut communities are no longer primitive kinship groups but rather socially and economically constituted units.
To be sure, David Sneath’s argument regarding political relations in societies with no visible “heads” is potentially fascinating in its implications. It can help us to analyze what appears to be the ever-shifting degree of shared sovereignty held by the groups incorporated by the Russian Empire through conquest and expansion. One can also imagine – and that would be to the author’s chagrin, I trust – how Sneath’s conception, should it be translated into Russian, can dramatically change the dynamics of nationalist debates in some autonomous republics of the Russian Federation, where “precolonial statehood” is, perhaps, the most hotly debated issue.^[10] Sneath’s work might even compete with Gumilev’s for influencing some ethnic elites!