88 Orientalism and Empirework. Ethnographic description conformed more closely to the needs
of the empire, as newly understood by ethnographers. While ethnog-
raphers offered a new means of conceptualizing cultural difference,
they did not challenge its contemporary hierarchies. Their work, for
example, was far from the radical perspectivism of twentieth-century
modernism or the cultural relativism of much of contemporary an-
thropology. By the standards of our day, their ideas were chauvinistic
and Russocentric. Mountain languages were to be transcribed and
young mountaineers were to be educated in order for mountaineers
to gain exposure to the cultural world of Russia and Europe. Uslar in-
sisted on the use of Cyrillic rather than Georgian for the transcription
of mountaineer languages, since the purpose of mountaineer literacy
was, in his view, to facilitate their access to the literature of Russia.
In spite of their frequently profound criticism of the history of con-
quest, ethnographers still accorded to Russian culture and even to the
Russian state a prominent educative and tutelary position.^199 In their
vision of empire, Russia still remained a “great people,” as
Dostoevsky’s Shatov put it, the benevolent caretaker of a diverse em-
pire.^200 At the same time, however, the ethnographers’ interests and
assumptions about identity looked toward the twentieth century and
illustrate the contradictions and tensions of Russian imperial society,
simultaneously autocratic and reformist, in the last half of the nine-
teenth century. These interests and assumptions also illustrate the
contradictions associated with the rethinking of the empire on its
southern frontier. While the proliferation of “peoples” was still quite
compatible with empire – indeed, the process of cultural discovery
was fostered by the imperial experience – this compatibility could not
be taken for granted in a nationalistic age when an ethnically defined
“people” was understood as the foundation for political sovereignty.
The incorporation of the frontier left the new empire with numerous
“peoples” who might someday ask to be “nations.”