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islaw Pilsudski-appears in both, but only briefly. This is unfortunate since Maijewicz has been working on Pllsud- ski, who left the best ethnography on the Sakhalin Ainu. His work is to be published in English translation as CoUected Works of Bronidaw Pitsudski.

Hans Dieter Olschleger rightfully presents a critical assessment of Batchelor’s contribution. Firmly in belief of the 19th-century evolutionary theory and the monotheism of Christianity, t h missionary’s massive writings about the Hokkaido Ainu unfortunately remain problematic as ethnographic accounts.

The third section on Ainu museum collections in Europe is quite useful, offering the h t o r y of the collec- tion. It is curious, however, that Jane Wilkinson’s article on Gordon Munro, a medical doctor who is a major figure in Hokkaido Ainu ethnography, is included in this section, with introduction of some of his ethnographic contribu- tions but with afocus on his collection of material objects.

The fourth section, “Plctorial Materials as Ethno- graphic Sources,” accompanied by numerous photos, pre- sents a fascinating series of paintings of the Ainu as eth- nographic sources, without deliberations on the nature of representation. Sasaki Toshikazu, curator of the National Museum in Ueno, Tokyo, is the foremost authority on the Ainu-e, a genre of paintings of the Ainu by the Japanese. This article, unfortunately, is a much scaled down trans- lation of his original work, and his enormously insightful remarks about these paintings as representation are not included.

Professor Kreiner should be commended in editing this significant volume, which brings together recent ef- forts on the Ainu study (with an appendix listing collec- tions of Ainu artifacts) and introduces them to a broader audience than Ainu specialists. The primary audience for this book is those interested in museum collections and the history of research on the Ainu. Those interested in sustained discussion of Ainu ethnography will be some- what disappointed. W

Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the SmaU Peoples of the North. Yuri Slezkine. Ithacx Cornell University Press, 1994.456 pp.

ALMA U I ~ I KING Univcrsitg of Virginia

In this great book, Slezkine has provided us with a comprehensive history of the encounter between the Rus- sians and the indigenous peoples of the Arctic and north- western Pacific. He brings us new material from Russian and Soviet archives previously unavailable to researchers. Based on original sources whenever possible, the narra- tive is thick in detail and rich in analysis, but always a pleasure to read. Slezkine focuses on the “numerically small” peoples of Siberia, who are often subordinated in

accounts that privilege ethnic Russian, Komi, and Sakha (Yakut) peoples in the east. Believing that ideas matter, Slezkine grounds the events and policies of his history in the intellectual fashions current at the time. Thus, we get a cultural and intellectual history of conquest and admini- stration structuring the narrative, which tacks between the Russian and native Siberian points of view.

Cossacks did not establish a “New Russia” because they did not understand Siberia as a discovery. The princes of Russia long knew about “Ostiaks” to the east, and 16th-century empirebuilding consisted of conquering foreign peoples throughout the continuous Eurasian land- mass. There were no breakthroughs across great divides like the Atlantic. At the same time, the conquerors knew they were among foreign peoples, and it was imperative to get the “real” names from the locals. Foreigners were expected to remain foreign; they had only to pay their tribute and express appropriate obsequies to the Tsar, who discouraged the church from converting foreign trib- ute-payers to Orthodox Russians. Not that Russian con- quest was less brutal than Spanish or English conquests elsewhere, but early Russian conquerors’ open-ended worldview did not force new people and territories into closed, Old World categories.

The rules of the relationship changed during the era of Peter the Great. With the coming of the Enlightenment to Russia, “foreigners” (of a different land) became “ali- ens” (of different birth). Peter’s fascination with Western science led to several scientific expeditions into the north and the east to enumerate and classify everything (and everyone) under the dorr~inion of the Tsar. Groups were distinguished by language in a typology of peoples that has persisted to the present day. This second encounter “be- tween the Russian and the native northerners was that between perfection and crudity” (p. 56). German anti- primitivism held sway in Russian thought, and the savages were certainly not noble.

By the close of the 18th century, the increasing cur- rency of the French Encyclopedists in intellectual circles paralleled the rise of Russian sentimentalism, and a differ- ent picture of natives emerged. As disease and warfare decimated the tribute payers, they became ennobled and in need of “protection.” lJnder Alexander I, reformers established the first comprehensive statement of global policy on the natives with the Statute of Alien Administra- tion in Siberia in 1823. Classifying all non-Russian peoples into one of three categories (settled, nomadic, or wander- ers), this statute structured native status for the next 100 years.

Arctic Mirrors presents the story of the rise and fall of Russian anthropology for the first time. This is a signifi- cant contribution to the history of anthropology as an international discipline. More than half of the book deals with the Soviet period. Slezkine offers a lucid analysis of the surreal logic of Stalinist social policy and social sci-

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ence, where bureaucrats and scientists alike were often forced to recant truths they had adamantly defended only months before in order to save their skins. He also traces the current nationalist ideology largely responsible for the breakup of the Soviet Union to the conscious and consis- tent ethnic policies of Lenin and Stalin, another legacy of romantic nationalism of the 19th century.

Slezkine succeeds in presenting the intricacies of a complex encounter. The natives of the north are not passive dupes or innocent victims. Arctic Mirrors has already become required reading for anyone interested in the history or anthropology of Siberia, and it will soon establish itself as an invaluable contribution to the grow- ing field of studies on the newly independent states. It also demonstrates interesting parallels and contrasts with other European empires in the Americas, Africa, and Asia

Labrador Winter. 7ke Ethnographic Journals of William Duncan Strong, 1927-1 928. Eleanor B. Leacock and Nan A. Rothschild, eds. Afterword by Stephen Loring. Wash- ington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994.235 pp.

A D R U N T A N N E R

Memorial University

The Naskapi of Labrador and northern Quebec, today known as the Mushuau Innu, are nomadic subarctic cari- bou hunters who have long fascinated scholars. From their bleak coastal village of Davis Inlet, they have also recently become sadly familiar to international television audiences, with images of slum living conditions and so- cial crises symptomatic of their loss of the interior way of life.

Until now ethnographic information on that life was limited primarily to Henriksen’s Hunters in the Barrens (Institute of Social and Economic Research, 1973), based on eleventh-hour research in 1966-68. However, for 66 years there has existed a kind of ethnographic time cap- sule, containing field notes and the draft of a book, the work of William Duncan Strong. Specialists knew of these manuscripts, but it is only with publication of this extraor- dinary work that the capsule has finally been opened.

What Strong, who died in 1962, had placed there was a very candid account of his experience as a fledgling anthropologist among the Innu. The published book con- sists partly of chapters Strong had written and partly of chapters he had sketched out, written up later using his field notes, a task begun by Eleanor Leacock and com- pleted by Nan Rothschild after Leacock’s own death. The editors did not annotate the text, although the book does have an extensive commentary and bibliographc notes by Stephen Loring.

Before passing on from Algonlaan ethnography to Andean archaeology, Strong published some important articles on his Labrador research, one on prehistory, an-

other on natural history, and a pioneering article on cross- cousin marriage. This book, however, is a very different matter. Part journal, part ethnography, the first chapters are as much about the failures of fieldwork under difficult conditions as they are about results, and many of the results it does offer are given only hesitantly, without analytic focus. Yet for these very reasons it is in some ways more modern (one hesitates to say postmodern) and better grounded than the work of Strong’s teacher Speck, whose book Naskapi (University of Oklahoma Press, 1935) sometimes gives the reader insufficient grounds to judge his conclusions. Despite his limited field research, Strong also shows a more sophticated use of language materials.

Loring’s bibliographic afterword places Strong’s find- ings into current scholarly context admirably. It is testi- mony to Strong that his ethnographic detail resonates beyond bring’s essay, which has its geographic focus on the Labrador side of the peninsula. For instance, we learn that the founder of the Davis Inlet band was the descen- dant of a trader previously at an unknown James Bay post which had been attacked by local Indians; reference is provided to the Hannah Bay “massacre.” Given other linguistic, cultural, and h t o r i c connections across the top of the peninsula, Strong’s material would repay f i r - ther examination from that quarter.

Topics on which the book is particularly detailed include mythology, shamanism, and religious beliefs. Strong’s photographs and maps are especially worth- while. On land tenure, Strong shows there were no fanuly hunting territories but distinct named bands (Strong’s fieldwork involved two of them, which he called the Davis Inlet and the Barren Ground bands), each with its own large territory. Mailhot’s recent book Les Gens de Sheshutshit (Recherches Amerindienne ail Quebec, 1993), not referred to by br ing, shows that this type of land tenure system also extends south of where Strong worked. Like Mailhot, Strong documents a flow of person- nel between these bands. From the Innu names provided by Strong, these seem to be “tradmg post bands,” whch only raises new questions, given the short and unstable relationshp of the Mushuau Innu to the fur trade. H

Boundaries and Passages: Ride and Ritual in Yup’ik Eskimo Oral Tradition. Ann F’lenup-Riordan. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994.389 pp.

EDITH TLJRNEK University of Virginia, Charlottesvik

Ann Fienup-Riordan has been researchng the social and cultural anthropology of the Yup’ik Eslamo people of western Alaska for 20 years and is becoming known as the most talked about scholar in Arctic studies. She has now published a definitive work based on the human and