Shading, lines, colors: mapping ethnographic taxonomies of European Russia

Abstract

This article explores the role of maps in the construction and development of ethnographic taxonomies in the mid-century Russian Empire. A close reading of two ethnographic maps of “European Russia” produced by members of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society, Petr Keppen (1851) and Aleksander Rittikh (1875), is used to shine a spotlight on the cartographical methods and techniques (lines, shading, color, hatching, legends, text, etc.) employed to depict, construct, and communicate these taxonomies. In doing so, this article draws our attention to how maps impacted visual and spatial thinking about the categories of ethnicity and nationality, and their application to specific contexts and political purposes within the Empire. Through an examination of Keppen’s and Rittikh’s maps, this article addresses the broader question of why cartography came to be regarded as such a powerful medium through which to communicate and consolidate particular visions of an ethnographic landscape.

Keywords:

• ethnographic cartography
• nationalism
• Russian Empire
• Petr Keppen
• Aleksandr Rittikh

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Stéphane Van Damme, Tomasz Kamusella, Christian Lotz, Vytautas Petronis, Ismay Milford, Mari Hauge Torsdotter, the members of the EUI Nationalism working group, and the two anonymous reviewers for their critical comments on earlier drafts on this article, which greatly enriched the text.

ORCID

Catherine Gibson http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8564-1223

Notes

1. I do not mean to suggest that maps are not textual. Aside from containing many elements of text, maps can also be “read” as “cultural texts” (Harley and Laxton 2002, 33–35). Rather, I want to draw attention to role played by graphical modes of thinking in disseminating and legitimizing particular spatialized ways of categorizing the world.

2. The term “ethnoschematization” is a coinage by Seegel (2012).

3. In the 1990s and 2000s, the historiography on cartography was dominated by Foucauldian readings of maps in terms of discourse and power relations (Harley and Laxton 2002). However, as the articles in the journal of the history of cartography, Imago Mundi, testify, there has been a conceptual shift in recent years to thinking about maps as discursive instruments in light of their materiality.

4. The literature on imperial and colonial mapping activities is vast. Some classic works on the British Empire include Edney (1997) and Driver (2001).

5. Another important figure in the development of demographic statistics in the Russian Empire was Konstantin Arsen’ev (1789–1865) (see Smith-Peter 2007). For a full account of Keppen’s life, see Sukhova (1993) and the biography written by one of his sons (Keppen 1911).

6. As Marina Loskutova has argued, Keppen was representative of a “particular group of ministerial ‘experts,’ who occupied a liminal position between a very small circle of academic scholars (affiliated mostly with the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg and much less with universities, medical academies and other institutions of higher learning) and a rapidly expanding civil service” (Loskutova 2014, 24).

7. Between 1845 and 1849, the society was named the Russian Geographical Society.

8. A common issue for historians using cartographical sources is that the cartouches usually attribute authorship to a single person (in this case Keppen, the member of IRGO who was responsible for the project), when we know that map-making was an intensely collaborative process. The publication of a map of this scale combined the labors of those involved in the gathering and aggregation of the data, designers, draftsmen, colorists, and printers. The input and creativity of these people is lost as one of the “silences” embodied in the map (Harley 1988). Nevertheless, for the sake of clarity, in this article I refer to the maps by the names of their titular authors.

9. A legal category established in 1822 to designate a set of minorities – mostly eastern nomadic or semi-nomadic peoples – within the Russian Empire who were allowed to preserve their local customs and had certain privileges, such as exemption from military service. In 1835, this category was extended to Jews and thereafter gradually came to be used to refer (often in a pejorative sense) to all the non-Russian inhabitants of the Empire (Slocum 1998). Keppen used the term in the latter sense in the title of his index of the ethnic groups of western Russia (Keppen 1861).

10. Rittikh continued to develop this idea in his later publications, especially his book Slavic World (Slavianskii mir), where he argued for the unification of all Slavs under the umbrella of the Russian Empire (Rittikh 1885).

11. In his address to the British Royal Geographical Society in May 1875, Sir Henry Rawlinson referred to Rittikh’s map as “the most important and best executed work” (Rawlinson 1874, 424). Rittikh’s map also won first prize for his contributions to anthropology and ethnography at the International Congress of Geographical Sciences in Paris in August 1875 (Société de géographie 1875, 311–313).

12. Rittikh cited this as his motivation for publishing of a detailed confessional and ethnographic map of the Baltic provinces in 1873.

13. Keppen also shaded the sea in light grey, but it is far less visually prominent that the brightly colored areas denoting the distribution of different ethnographic groups.

14. The way in which a single author could present different images of an ethnographic landscape across various media and directed towards different audiences has been noted by Jutta Faehndrich and Sophie Perthus (2013, 61) and Christian Lotz (2017, 10).

15. Importantly, the process of translating data from one medium to another does not stop with the map. For instance, information about distance and elevation can be obtained from maps and then used to produce text or data tables.

16. In the case of maps, it is perhaps more helpful to think in terms of two-dimensional diversity.

17. Topographical maps from the period, such as Carl Gottlieb Rücker’s Specialcharte von Livland in 6 Blättern (1839), often included dots, points, and symbols to indicate variations in types of arable land, but this iconographic practice was not widely adopted in ethnographic mapping in the mid-nineteenth century.

18. On the concept of “wide” or “thick” frontiers, see Dullin (2014).

19. That the British Empire was often shaded in pink or red on maps has been widely observed, but there is no consensus among historians as to how or why this came to be the norm.

20. For a more in-depth discussion of the concept of the “great circle of interior Russia,” see Gorizontov (2007).

21. While this may have been Rittikh’s intention, it arguably had the opposite effect of maximizing nationality in the region by graphically depicting the ethnographic threat.

22. Rittikh unusually uses the term litva (meaning space and state-territory) as opposed to Russian-language ethnographic term litovtsy (Lithuanians in the ethno-cultural sense). This is the only instance where he defines a group in terms of a historical region instead of the ethnolinguistic character of the population.

23. Keppen’s expertise in imperial statistics accounts for his cognizance of specialized legal-administrative categories. Keppen defines Tepteri (Teptiari) as a “sort of cross between” (nichto srednee mezhdu) peasants and “Bashkir-Мishar Tatar troops.” He describes how they were “outlaws” (begletsov) of Tatar origin who arrived in Bashir after the destruction of Kazan in the sixteenth century. Elsewhere, they are classified as a separate “nationality” (narodnost’) (Brokgaus and Efron 1901, vol. 64). Keppen uses the term Bobyli to describe a social class-cum-ethnic group of “outlaws” (begletsov) of Finnic origin. In a legal context, this term was used to denote a landless peasant in the western provinces in the Empire (Brokgaus and Efron 1891, vol. 4).

24. Nineteenth-century Vil’na, for instance, was mostly inhabited by Jews and Poles (Catholics and nobles), whereas the surrounding countryside was inhabited by a Belarusian-speaking majority (Orthodox Christians and serfs-turned-peasants) (Weeks 2015).

25. On the Uniate issue in the Western provinces, see Weeks (1996).