Res Publica Literaria Frant͡sa Boasa, ili kak postroitʹ transnat͡sionalʹnui͡u antropologii͡u s pomoshchʹi͡u pisem

In our paper, we aim to re-examine the history of relationships between the pioneer of American anthropology Franz Boas and his Russian colleagues and friends of the period between 1897 and 1942. For this purpose, we employ two epistemically intertwined concepts: the newly emerged notions of “paper tools” and “paper technologies”, and the well-established but rarely applicable to the history of anthropology concept of Res Publica Literaria. If the former has a very strong material and pragmatic dimension in understanding knowledge production, the latter adds to it a tendency to expand our horizons beyond national borders. As historians of science remind us, writing, sending and receiving letters were an essential part of producing scientific knowledge in intellectual circles of Renascence and early modern Europe and remained the same in later epochs. By merging these notions together, we argue that the voluminous collection of letters of Franz Boas, Waldemar Bogoras, Waldemar Jochelson and some other American and Russian anthropologists materially constituted the pre-war Arctic and Siberian anthropology as a certain Res Publica Literaria. The careful reading of those letters by generations of historians of anthropology not only revealed the networks of friends and zones of tensions but also shaped the genealogy of the field. In other words, the letters were a cosmopolitan means of transnational communication of like-minded scholars who epistemically constructed transnational ethnographic regions such as the Arctic. The very material meaning of knowledge production and circulation allowed the letters to intersect the public and the private, the national and the transnational and as a result to re-imagine the intellectual life of Arctic anthropology.