Peoples are Made of People
Finno-Ugrians and Samoyeds in old ethnographic photographs
The exhibition in open from 27th of February till 17th of October 2021.
The 19th century saw the whole of Europe (including Russia) gradually entering the era of nations. Earlier populations had primarily been classified according to their country, religion and social estate. The vast majority of people were peasants, but neither rulers nor scholars were particularly interested in their languages or culture. The educated men of the 19th century, however, began to divide the population into different peoples based on the peasantry’s linguistic and cultural peculiarities. Folk culture became a prominent object of interest and study, and thus ethnography - the science of people and peoples, was born. Statistics started to note people’s ethnicity. Ethnographic maps were compiled in which a country’s population was divided into areas of different colour on the basis of ethnicity. Larger ethnic groups that had educated strata of their own evolved into nations. Ethnography assumed a political dimension and the nationalities question arose. In the wake of World War I, several empires collapsed and a number of new nation states emerged. In the Soviet Union, most indigenous peoples gained autonomous territory of their own.
The photographs from the second half of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century are like single pixels in the giant and continually changing picture sketched above. The photo series selected are intended to serve as small excursions into the history of ethnography, as well as that of the peoples in the photos. The choice is, of course, somewhat random and subjective. I have made an attempt to include all present-day Finno-Ugrian and Samoyed peoples, but this proved difficult. In those early years of photography, not all peoples were photographed to the same extent. Of Nganasans, for example, I was only able to supply photos from a more recent period. Until the 1930s, such a people as ‘Nganasans’ were not even known, and they fell under the indeterminate designation of ‘Samoyeds’.
Most of the photos derive from the collection of the Russian Museum of Ethnography (Российский этнографический музей, REM). The rest I found in the Estonian National Museum (Eesti Rahva Muuseum, ERM), the Ethnographic Museum in Budapest (Néprajzi Múzeum) and the National Museum of Finland (Kansallismuseo). These museums are products of the era of nations and played a dynamic role in shaping its features.
These are ethnographic photographs. Various peoples (including Russians) were the main object of study for Russian ethnographers of the tsarist period, something that remained unchanged during the Soviet era. Estonian, Finnish and Hungarian ethnographers, on the other hand, predominantly studied their own people, as well as their kindred peoples (linguistic relatives). Peoples consist of individual humans, of course, although the ethnographers of those times were primarily interested in human beings as more or less typical representatives of their peoples rather than entities of interest in their own right. Photographers, as a rule, were not concerned with people as individuals, but rather focused on their racial characteristics, folk costumes, traditional activities and so on. Therefore, the names of the people looking back at us from the old photos were not always recorded and they remain anonymous. It is my hope that portrait photographs presented in large scale will help to restore some of their individuality.
Written by Indrek Jääts, Senior Researcher of Estonian National Museum
