Indigenous Peoples and Late Soviet Local History (Kraevedenie): Representation and Heritage Production at the Taimyr Museum

Abstract

This article examines museum practices relating to indigenous cultures at the Taimyr Museum of Local History (kraevedcheskiy muzey) during the period 1970–1985. Drawing on archival and museum materials, published memoirs, interviews, and personal documents that preserve oral history, the author approaches the museum space and its associated discourses as a “contact zone”, where state nationalities policy, expert interests, and the cultural work of indigenous community members intersected. Within this space, voices carried unequal weight, certain objects existed simultaneously in the “overcome past”; and the “socialist present” and diverse statements were produced in the course of studying and constructing indigenous culture and identity. Particular attention is paid to the role of those designated as the “national intelligentsia” — indigenous people who acted not merely as informants for visiting researchers or local experts, but as active agents of cultural production, creating hybrid forms of representation of traditional culture within the Soviet canon. The author analyses the contradictory processes of archaisation and actualisation of traditional practices, examining cases of powerful religious objects transferred to the museum, histories connected to indigenous art, and work with folklore. The study shows how, under ideological constraints, distinctive forms of cultural representation emerged in which members of indigenous communities appropriated Soviet cultural institutions and developed new instruments for expressing their own subjectivity. These practices are today recognised by scholars as constitutive of heritage production.