SUMMARY:

In their introduction to the forum “Archie Phinney, Early Soviet Ethnography, and a Native American’s Visions of Progress,” Sergey Glebov and Marina Mogilner highlight the role of the Soviet Union as Eldorado for life scientists and Mecca for anticolonial and anti-imperialist intellectuals in the 1920s. They stress Phinney’s reinterpretation of Soviet nation-building in light of Boasian antiracist cultural anthropology and his political preferences. Therefore, in discussing the mutual perspectives of scholars from the United States and the Soviet Union, the authors employ the metaphor of “mirrors” instead of “transfers” and “borrowings.” This interpretation suggests that an open-ended cultural paradigm in anthropology remained relevant for various intellectuals working under different political regimes and interested in finding novel solutions to uneven human diversity. They either believed or were keenly interested in the Soviet promise to carry out an anticolonial project within the framework of a supranational polity that came to replace the old empire. Above all, the story of Phinney exposes the persistence of the “imperial situation” – the irregularity of the social, cultural, and political spaces in the most striking and pronounced postimperial moments in world history.