Our Notes & References

The first published report of the famous Sibiriakov expedition to Yakutia: “the first appearance in print of the accurate numerical data on the anthropology of the Yakuts” (Stroeva, our translation here and elsewhere).

A very good copy of the first edition, in its original wrappers and interestingly illustrated with ethnographical photographs.

Scarce: although we could locate a few copies in WorldCat, with 5 locations in the US (NYPL, Princeton, Harvard, Hawaii, Alaska Fairbanks), the book is very rare on the market, as we couldn’t find any copy at auction in recent decades (including Russia).

The scholar Naum Gekker (1861-1920) was also a revolutionary, and as such was arrested in 1881 and sentenced to 10 years of hard labour in Siberia. When in prison, Gekker protested against corporal punishment and attempted suicide by shooting himself in the head in 1889; he survived however but was challenged by various health issues afterwards. In 1892 he was transferred to Yakutia, and from 1895 (when still in exile), was recruited to conduct research in the ethnographic expedition of the East Siberian Department of the Russian Geographical Society. The expedition was initiated by the gold industrialist and philanthropist Innokentii Sibiriakov in 1888 to collect data about the native Yakut population and to explore the effects of gold mining on local peoples.

Delayed by bureaucratic obstacles, the expedition took place only in 1894-96. The organisers resolved to engage in the expedition the exiled who had spent several years in the region and had time to get to know the locals, gain their trust, and become acquainted with the Yakut language. Only with the assistance of high authorities, including the President of the Geographical Society Petr Semenov, did the East Siberian Department obtain permission to engage such an unusual group of participants. As a result, the Department collected a diverse material, “more extensive than anybody could expect when organising the expedition, […] extracted from the depths of Yakut land, which could not be penetrated by previous researchers and travellers who visited the region only by passing through and observed its life, so to speak, from above, rather than from within” (Stroeva).

The expedition materials were thought to be published in 13 large volumes but Sibiriakov’s mental illness and turn towards monasticism disrupted the plans and left the project without sufficient funding. The East Siberian Department therefore could publish only a few separate books in the coming years, and Gekker’s was the first such report from the famous expedition. “Before the publication of materials of the Yakut expedition by S.E. Schreiber via the USSR Academy of Sciences, no other work on this subject appeared, except for a small article by Mainov, compiled from the additional documentation by Gekker [after the present work]. For this reason, both the Russian and foreign authors used Gekker’s materials when characterising the somatic type of the Yakuts” (Stroeva).

Gekker’s work gives thorough anthropometric data about 139 Yakuts and 30 Amga peasants from the settlements within 200 km around Yakutsk (also Iakutsk). In the preface, Gekker overviews with great attention most of the earlier studies of Yakuts and neighbouring peoples and states that in these works, one can find various descriptions “available to the outside observer, but they are too subjective and superficial to have any scientific value; you would search in vain for any data characterising the Yakut type in the anthropological literature.” The work was published in the series titled “Notes of the Eastern Siberian Department of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society” and was awarded the prize of the Society of Devotees of Natural Science, Anthropology, and Ethnography.

Bibliography

Z. G. Stroeva, “Sibiriakovskaia ekspeditsiia 1894-96 gg.”, Iaktskii gosudarstvennyi obiedinennyi muzei istorii i kultury narodov Severa im. Em. Iaroslavskogo.