Description

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It is widely assumed that the “nonclassical” nature of the Russian empire and its equally “nonclassical” modernity made Russian intellectuals immune to the racial obsessions of Western Europe and the United States. Homo Imperii corrects this perception by offering the first scholarly history of racial science in prerevolutionary Russia and the early Soviet Union. Marina Mogilner places this story in the context of imperial self-modernization, political and cultural debates of the epoch, different reformist and revolutionary trends, and the growing challenge of modern nationalism. By focusing on the competing centers of race science in different cities and regions of the empire, Homo Imperii introduces to English-language scholars the institutional nexus of racial science in Russia that exhibits the influence of imperial strategic relativism.

Reminiscent of the work of anthropologists of empire such as Ann Stoler and Benedict Anderson, Homo Imperii reveals the complex imperial dynamics of Russian physical anthropology and contributes an important comparative perspective from which to understand the emergence of racial science in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe and America.

About the Author

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Marina Mogilner is the academic director at the Center for the Studies of Nationalism and Empire in Kazan, Russia, and coeditor of the international quarterly Ab Imperio. She is the author of several books, chapters, and articles on late imperial history in Russia.

Praise For…

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"This is a brave, well-written, and scholarly excavation of an important and contested episode in the history of Russian thought that highlights and begins to challenge some of the distortions of the intervening Soviet and post-socialist ideology and historiography."—Dominic Martin, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute