Pisʹmo iz temnoty: retsentzia na knigu: Sergei Kan, ‘Lev Shternberg: ėtnolog, narodnik, borets za prava evreev’ (2023)

The present review of the Russian translation of Sergei Kan’s book Lev Shternberg: Anthropologist, Russian Socialist, Jewish Activist constitutes a literary experiment. It endeavors to engage in a dialogue, presented in the form of a letter, with the central figure of the book, Lev Shternberg, the co-founder of Soviet and Russian anthropology, regarding the significant transformations it has undergone throughout the 20th century and the first two decades of the 21st. The author pays close attention to the social and political contexts of these changes and how they affected the interpretations of Shternberg’s persona and ideas in Soviet times and today. This experiment extends the author’s reflections on the necessity of revisiting the history of anthropology and reintegrating it into the field itself. As American anthropologist Alfred Irving Hallowell suggested in the 1960s, we should conceptualize “the history of anthropology as an anthropological problem.” By this, the author intends to reconstruct a dialogue between the history of anthropology and the communities with whom anthropologists have engaged, as well as to foster connections between the history of anthropological ideas and ongoing discussions both within and beyond the discipline. These changes, as the author argues, have the potential to significantly expand the styles of anthropological writing and reveal new genealogies of anthropological knowledge.