The Fifth Thule Expedition’s Siberian Legacy

Alaska Journal of Anthropology vol. 19, no. 1&2. P. 194-210, 2021

This paper offers an overview of Knud Rasmussen's short visit to Chukotka, Russia, which took place on September 17-18, 1924, during the final weeks of the Fifth Thule Expedition. Since Rasmussen did not receive official permission to visit Russia, his trip was abruptly terminated, and he could complete only a small portion of the research he envisioned. Though Rasmussen's trip was described in his popular narrative of the Fifth Thule Expedition, and in other publications based on his diaries, little has been known about the local communities he visited, Dezhnevo and Uelen, and the people he met there. This paper incorporates Russian sources to cover the history of the Russian-Chukchi trading village of Dezhnevo, where Rasmussen landed and from which he was deported to Alaska after a 10hour stay in the nearby district hub of Uelen, where he interacted with Russian officials, local traders, and Native residents.

Canadian Slavonic Papers, 2011

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Sibirica, 2006

This article gives an overview of the primary records of the 1926-1927 Turukhansk Polar Census Expedition. The author argues that rather than being an exercise in statistical surveillance, the expedition can be better characterized as a classical expedition of discovery. The article describes the structure of the expedition and the documents that were collected, places the expedition in a history of the surveillance of aboriginal peoples, and presents a research program for re-analyzing the data in light of the contemporary interests of Siberian indigenous peoples.

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 1983

Abstract. The history of exploration has hitherto focused largely on the description of the explorations themselves and on an analysis of their scientific-geographical findings. The fact that such exploration often is intrinsically related to political and social factors characterizing the society out of ...

Folklore (Tartu), 2000

2009

In the September-October 2007 issue of'The Earth Observer [volume 19, Number 4, pp. 13-21] we presented an article entitled "Expedition to Siberia: A Firsthand Account." In that article we shared excerpts from a blog that chronicled the adventures of a team of scientists from NASA and Russia's Academy of Science as they embarked on a three-week adventure in the wilds of Siberia in hopes of collecting measurements to validate data from satellites flying 700 km overhead. The same team, plus a couple new participants, headed back to Siberia this past sumner and we are now pleased to present the continuation of their story. For more background details on the expedition to Siberia or if you missed the first part of the story, please refer to the previous article.

Annual Review of Museum Anthropology

The article examines the process, methods and results of a 3-year-long research project (2016-2019) concerning the 19th century Siberian collection from the resources of the Ethnographic Museum in Kraków which was donated by political prisoners, scientists and travellers. The authors discuss how the contemporary knowledge of many local experts from different ethnic groups (such as local residents, reindeer herders, whale hunters, museum staff, donators’ families) combined with archival sources could help to understand the unique connections between the past and the future of such heritage and its consequences in our lives. After the research, the collection is now accessible in a digital repository along with audio and visual materials from the fieldwork and the available archive data. Some of the stories are presented also in the exhibition “Siberia. Voices from the North”

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 1983

The history of exploration has hitherto focused largely on the description of the explorations themselves and on an analysis of their scientific-geographical findings. The fact that such exploration often is intrinsically related to political and social factors characterizing the society out of which it originates is consequently obscured, if not entirely neglected. This paper attempts to demonstrate that the genesis and the very purpose of the Great Siberian Expedition cannot be understood apart from the political and ideological climate of the 1840s and 1850s in Russia. It shows that the rapid and powerful growth of nationalist sentiment at this time was the main inspiration for the work of the young Russian Geographical Society. This sentiment dictated the exclusive task for geographers to study the Russian fatherland and, more specifically, it lent a special imperative to the study of Russian Asia. Members of the Society came to see this latter endeavor as a means for them to fulfill their patriotic responsibilities. Russia's acquisition of the Amur and Ussuri regions in the 1850s became closely associated with the general nationalist movement for Russia's renovation and resurrection, and thus geographical exploration of the terra incognita of southeastern Siberia offered a perfect opportunity for the members of the Geographical Society, in their unique capacity as geographers, t o consummate actively their devotion to this cause. It is further suggested that the Great Siberian Expedition is not unique in its responsiveness to prevailing political sentiments and needs, but rather that this pattern is characteristic for much of geographical exploration, both in Russia and elsewhere. A more detailed consideration of these interrelationships in the history of exploration will lead to a deeper and more nearly complete understanding of the subject.

Polar Record, 2007

Alexander Theodor von Middendorff's name is closely associated with the exploration of Siberia and research on the natural history of the Russian Arctic. Yet it is surprising that, in the extensive literature in Russian and German on the environment of those regions, there are no specific analyses of Middendorff's important contribution to these areas of research. He is barely mentioned in English language studies on the history of exploration and science in Siberia and there are very few accounts of his life and work. The present paper is largely based on a number of newly discovered archival documents and contemporary literary sources and is an attempt to fill this lacuna. In this account, all dates are given according to the new style calendar.

Writing Arctic Disaster: Authorship and Exploration (Cambridge UP), 2016

presided over two disasters: the first during his first Arctic command in 1819-21, when only six of his sixteen men survived, the others succumbing to murder, starvation and cannibalism. The second, during his final quest for the Northwest Passage in 1845, when his ships Erebus and Terror disappeared with all 129 crew. Spurred on by Franklin's formidable widow, Jane Franklin, dozens of search and retrieval expeditions were launched beginning in 1848, a well-known story in which a poorly planned exercise in imperial hubris was elevated to an international cause célèbre. It is this second disaster, the largest in exploration history, that transformed how the world has seen the North American Arctic ever since, and that after the 2014 discovery of Erebus promises to play an even larger role in the general public's understanding of the Arctic. Franklin's 1845 expedition played the leading role in shaping the "British imagination" of the Arctic, the view from the nineteenth century that as I argued in the Introduction we must particularize with greater care. In panoramas and dioramas, stereographs and paintings, plays and melodramas, dances and songs, and a range of popular and elite printed texts, record numbers of domestic spectators and readers could enjoy at their leisure the Arctic sublime in which Franklin's men perished. We are familiar with such approaches highlighting how Europeans represented Arctic peoples and places, and what Europeans took from the Arctic (people, animals, resources, knowledge). We also have a growing body of accounts based on Inuit oral histories describing their encounters with a large number of nineteenth-century European Arctic explorers. 1 Drawing on these traditional histories of British exploration, visual culture, and literary imagination, and on postcolonial, anthropological, and indigenous accounts that shift our attention away from the Eurocentrism of exploration histories and toward the "hidden histories of exploration," 2 this chapter offers a cultural history of an unexamined material dimension of these encounters, that of the "Franklin Relics" collected by American and British voyagers searching for Franklin's missing expedition.