Orientalism and Empire. North Caucasus Mountain Peoples and the Georgian Frontier, 1845-1917

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77 Russian Ethnographers and Caucasus Mountaineers

journals. “People of science gather and classify [gruppiruyt] ethno-
graphic facts according to the central manifestations of a people’s
world outlook, morals, and way of life [byt],” stated the editors of
Etnograficheskoe Obozrenie in an early issue.^123 “[I needed] to orient
myself amidst this mass of tradition,” wrote P.S. Nazarov of his work
with Bashkir legends and folk tales.^124 The search for folk culture on
the frontier resulted in a new conceptualization of the empire.
In the Caucasus, ethnographers were armed with more “scientific”
methods, and scholars such as Gustav Radde criticized Zisserman’s
early essays on the Khevsur, which were far too personal and self-
absorbed for his taste. Zisserman wrote too much about himself, com-
plained Radde.^125 Zisserman’s experience was central to the telling of
the story, such as when he accompanied a group of nomadic Tushin
and helped hold off an attack from a band of Dido (Dagestani Avar).
“This was a day not to be effaced from my memory,” he proudly told
his Tbilisi readers.^126 For Zisserman, inspired by the traditions of Rus-
sian Romanticism, the strange clothes, turbans, and long stockings of
the Khevsur were reminiscent of “the middle ages, and the time of
knights, fighting for their faith.”^127 His early work might have been
intriguing, but for Radde much more was at stake. Scholarly objectiv-
ity, he stressed in 1880 , was required for a truthful picture of the
Khevsur, and ethnographic description had advanced since
Zisserman’s time. Radde’s ethnographic essay was devoted to the
“main moments in the lives of the Khevsur: birth, marriage, and
death,” and also covered religious beliefs and church buildings, cus-
tomary law, and Khevsur clothes, decorations, and domestic imple-
ments and utensils.^128 Late-nineteenth-century ethnographers such as
Radde believed that the administration of the multi-ethnic empire de-
manded a form of ethnographic knowledge that could facilitate pro-
gressive cultural change. Ethnographers attempted to understand
and thereby transform the practices of the blood feud (krovomshche-
nie), and they frequently compiled and studied examples of crimes
committed by mountaineers.^129 Their effort to codify mountaineer
customary law (adat) was an example of the interest of the regime and
educated society in the identity of the mountaineers as “peoples.”
“Peoples,” ethnographers and administrators believed, possessed le-
gal traditions, a history of laws, and a court system. As in Siberia and
on the Kazakh steppe, the Russian regime established special courts
(narodnyi gorskie sudy) that were primarily based on customary law.^130
Russian ethnographers served as the compilers and interpreters of
this tradition.
The process of collecting initiated by the Caucasus Department in
Tbilisi became the basis for the Caucasus Museum, a site for the

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