Selected Paper/ Paper Seleccionado

Northern dances on the Soviet screen, or what cultural heritage is preserved in academic archives

Abstract (English)
For various reasons, the camera was not a familiar tool for Soviet ethnographers. Ethnographic films produced in the Soviet Union were usually made by professional directors, with scholars employed as consultants. These were films that were intended to show the ethnic diversity of the country and reflect the ideology of ‘friendship of peoples’. The creative search for cinematic language in such films was inevitably embedded in ideological canons of depicting the peripheries and minorities, with visual conventions constructed from patterns of colonial representation and the Soviet thesis of creating a new society. The Institute of Ethnography (now the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology) of the Russian Academy of Sciences was hardly the only place where regular field surveys were conducted. These materials are stored in the Institute's archive, but until recently they were virtually inaccessible to a wide audience.
I would like to refer to the most ambitious project of the 1970s - a series of filming of the archaeographic art of the indigenous peoples of the North (Chukchi, Eskimos, Evenks, Koryaks, Itelmen). The purpose of the filming was to document the traditional art of dance, describing and preserving its peculiarities. However, the project participants did not so much record authentic indigenous dances as construct them in accordance with the ideological tasks set before them. Most of the filmed dances were performed by organized folklore groups outside the real everyday context. They were staged performances by dancers dressed in stage costumes, and the subjects of the dances reflected Soviet reality.
The digitized film materials posted on publicly accessible online platforms have attracted the interest of contemporary members of indigenous communities, who have come to see these materials as part of their cultural heritage. In this paper, I would like to analyze the role and strategies of Soviet scholars in the creation of ‘authentic’ indigenous knowledge, but with a particular focus on contemporary reactions and interpretations of the documented communities.
Keywords (Ingles)
Soviet ethnographic cinema, indigenous communities, decolonization of archives
presenters
    Elena Danilko

    Nationality: Russian Federation

    Residence: Russian Federation

    The Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of The Russian Academic Science

    Presence:Face to Face/ On Site