76 Orientalism and Empirecontained an early attempt to list the various “Abkhaz tribes,”
“Cherkes [Adygei] tribes,” “Tatar tribes,” and so on.^117 The 1870 map
of the Caucasus Military District’s Topographic Department repre-
sented with a single colour groups such as the Cherkes, Ossetians,
Chechens, Dagestani mountaineers, and Abkhaz, and provided a key
that listed the many tribal distinctions among these groups.^118 Tribes,
Russians believed and hoped, were soon to be peoples. There were
deviations from this trend, of course. A 1790 map was strangely mod-
ern, almost similar to a Soviet map of the autonomous regions in the
192 0s. “Dagestanis” was even used by the makers of this map
(“Dagestani mountaineers” was the norm in the nineteenth century),
although the “Lezgin” (one of the primary languages of Dagestan)
were also identified.^119 Some cartographers had a greater interest in
ethnicity than others. The general trend, however, was toward the
more prominent and precisely defined presentation of “peoples.”
This interest in ethnicity was probably unique to the colonizers. After
Khalat Efendi killed the murid of Shamil who had robbed his home
and injured his wives, a series of events that forced him to flee
Chechnia in 185 2, he arrived before the Russians with maps of
Vedeno and the lands of Shamil’s imamate. “Although these draw-
ings are very crude and done without any rules,” noted an official in
the viceroy’s office, Russians will be “curious to see these examples of
the geographic conceptions of the mountaineers.”^120 Ethnic distinc-
tions were irrelevant to the concerns of the mountaineer cartogra-
phers. The makers of the Russian Empire, ironically, were sometimes
more interested in the representation of what we have come to call
ethnicity than the non-Russian peoples themselves.^121
In direct response to the rich tradition of literary writing about the
region, ethnographers imagined themselves as producers of realistic
accounts of mountain culture, which in their view amounted to a
clarification of the imperial mission. The concerns of ethnography
were matters of great “practical interest” to the administration of the
empire, noted Voronov, and the statistical committees reminded their
research helpers that only “truthful, actual, and genuine figures have
meaning for statistics.”^122 The search for “facts” was an effort to clar-
ify the imperial mission. By the later nineteenth century, journals,
scholarly societies, and even university departments accompanied
and fostered a more precise sense of purpose among ethnographers.
The Society for the Amateurs (Liubiteli) of Nature at Moscow Univer-
sity became in 1867 the Imperial Society for the Amateurs of Nature,
Anthropology, and Ethnography. Etnograficheskoe Obozrenie (Ethno-
graphic review) was founded in 1889. The scientific classification of
peoples was the primary issue for the contributors to these new