Overview

Narrative Objects is concerned with the conversations that arise when artists, scholars, and museum practitioners come together with historic objects. Its focus is a unique mammoth ivory model of yhyakh – the annual celebration of the Sakha people in the Russian Far East – which has been in the collection of the British Museum since 1867. Almost 150 years later, the model was loaned to the National Arts Museum of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) for exhibition and public engagement. As Sakha people revisit past histories and reconstitute cultural knowledge following decades of Soviet rule, this book considers narratives generated by the return of the model which speak to wider concerns in anthropology, material culture studies, and history about how knowledge is both suppressed and engaged with. The book also explores how art can be a focus for cultural pride, how skilled practices are entwined with oral histories, and how historic objects can contribute to wider processes of cultural revival. The chapters draw on fieldwork and museum and archival research in Sakha Sire, Paris and London. Narrative Objects is particularly relevant to scholars of anthropology and museum studies as well as those with an interest in the subarctic and post-Soviet states.

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9781138315334

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“Narrative Objects focuses on a mammoth ivory composition made in the 1860s and depicting yhyakh, the Sakha summer festival, within the broad contexts of the art and culture of the Sakha people (Yakutia, Russia). Thanks to the efforts of these authors, this composition, which is now part of the British Museum collection, was exhibited in 2015 at the National Art Museum in Yakutsk. Its accurately executed scenes of the festival in the second half of the nineteenth century provoked wide interest in the Republic, among the general public and scholars alike, as important ethnographic evidence of the celebrations at that time. The ancient festival of yhyakh, which rose from the ashes in the 1990s, brings together the spiritual and material culture of the Sakha people, to which the authors draw attention in their book, connecting the silence of the past Soviet era with the modern-day celebration. This is an original study of the yhyakh celebration which is supported by Indigenous insights into the process of the revival of the old Sakha traditions.” ~ Professor Zinaida Ivanova-Unarova, Arctic State Institute of Culture and Arts, Yakutsk, Republic of Sakha (Yakutia).

Author Information

Tatiana Argounova-Low is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen, UK. As an Indigenous Sakha scholar, she conducts her work in her homeland – Sakha Sire – and other parts of Siberia. Her academic interests include questions of ethnic identity and nationalism, mobility and transport, and art and creativity in Siberia. Alison K. Brown holds a personal chair in Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen, UK. As a museum anthropologist, her work brings together people with collections separated by time and distance and draws on fieldwork in Canada, the USA, the Russian Federation, and Scotland. She is co-editor of the journal Museum Worlds: Advances in Research.

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