Narrative Objects Museums, the Sakha Summer Festival, and Cultural Revival in Siberia

List of figures; Language and transliteration; Glossary; Acknowledgements; Foreword by Tim Ingold; Introduction : Encountering a Model; Part 1: Places and history -- 1.1 Introduction; 1.2 Narrative and voice; 1.3 Silence and yhyakh; 1.4 Yhyakh returns; Part 2: Exhibition narratives -- 2.1 Introduction; 2.2 A model made for display; 2.3 Puteshestvie Dlinoiu v Vek / Century Long Journey: connecting people with collections; 2.4 Narrating the model in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia); Part 3: Craftsmanship and creativity -- 3.1 Introduction; 3.2 Mammoth ivory as material; 3.3 Carving as art and craft; 3.4 Artistic futures: the model and the aspiring artists; Conclusion: model of yhyakh as a narrative object; Index.

Biography

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.

“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).