75 Russian Ethnographers and Caucasus MountaineersThe teachers were responding to the initiatives of their colleagues
in Tbilisi, who specifically requested this sort of material in the re-
ports. The question of the religious beliefs and practices of the
mountaineers was only one among many questions or issues. The
first issue at hand, according to the guide for the teachers composed
by Inspector N. Likhachev, was a “description of the village, locality,
or city” and the “history and archaeology of the area.” The reports
were to resemble the standard ethnographic accounts published by
the numerous scholarly societies and to include descriptions of geog-
raphy, climate, livestock, domestic implements, the “physical and
moral characteristics of the inhabitants,” their “way of life,” and their
“hygenic and sanitary conditions.”^108 For these missionaries and edu-
cators, the question of faith and religious practices would be under-
stood and encouraged through the creation of this sort of composite
picture of “custom” or culture.
The evolution of imperial cartography illustrates the interests of
these travellers, military officials, and missionaries. Over time,
Russian maps of the North Caucasus became populated by peoples
and thus served, as J.B. Harley suggests, as “communicators of an im-
perial message.”^109 Eighteenth-century maps showed the provinces
of the empire. New Russia, Azov, Taurida, and Astrakhan stretched
close to the North Caucasus.^110 A 1744 map of the region lacked any
notion of ethnicity whatsoever; Kabard was marked by the princely
households (dvor) and the forty-eight villages that belonged to
them.^111 Early military maps, such as the one composed for General
A.P. Ermolov (1816–27), referred to the North Caucasus as the “Land
of the Mountain Peoples” and lacked a conception of ethnicity as ter-
ritorially and culturally distinct.^112 Cartographers marked the rugged
territory that served as an obstacle to the Russian army. Fortresses,
bridges, and Cossack settlements competed with mountain villages
and the different “tribes” known to the cartographers.^113 Military
maps of 1806 and 1807 offered a prominent place to the Kabards,
Chechens, and Karabulaks, an Ingush tribe subsequently exiled to
Ottoman Turkey in 1865.^114 The random character of the early maps
reflected the experiences and encounters of Russian military officials.
“A village of the Kazelbekovsk people,” explained the key to one
such map.^115 This “people” was presumably an Abaza tribe called the
Kyzylbekovs, who either were killed in the war, left in the emigra-
tion, or were, as a contemporary scholar writes, “assimilated” by the
Abkhaz.^116
Later maps offered a more coherent vision of ethnic identity. In an
184 2 map, narody such as the Abkhaz, the Dagestanis, or the Cherkes
were not represented as a whole, but the table to the left of the map