Imperial Russia in Australia & the Pacific
How did scholars in the Russian Empire understand and communicate the physical and cultural diversity of Pacific peoples? This was the subject of the 2022 Greg Dening Memorial Lecture, delivered by Dr Hilary Howes (Australian National University).
Russian scholarly interest in the varieties of humankind developed during the reign of Peter the Great (1672–1725), Tsar (from 1721, Emperor) and focused initially on the variety of peoples inhabiting the territory of the expanding Russian Empire. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, this interest expanded to include the peoples of Australia and the Pacific. Russian expeditions traversed the ‘South Sea’, bearing naturalists, surgeons, artists, and educated officers. Russian museums, universities and scientific societies cultivated international networks through which they could obtain scholarly literature and artistic representations of the Indigenous inhabitants of ‘the fifth part of the world’, as well as their artefacts and even their skeletal remains. World’s fairs, exhibitions, public lectures and ‘human zoos’ offered platforms for Russian scholars to convince the public of the importance of anthropology. This lecture examines the reasons for Russian scholarly interest in human physical and cultural diversity in Australia and the Pacific during the long nineteenth century, as well as the methods used by Russian scholars seeking to understand this diversity and to communicate their findings to the wider public.
You can watch Dr Howes’s lecture on the YouTube player below.
Dr Hilary Howes is an ARC DECRA Fellow based in the Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies at The Australian National University. Her current project, Skulls for the Tsar: Indigenous Human Remains in the Collections of Imperial Russia, aims to produce the first detailed investigation of the acquisition of Indigenous human remains from Australia, New Zealand and the broader Pacific by the Russian Empire during the long nineteenth century. Her research to date addresses the German-speaking tradition within anthropology and archaeology in Australia and the Pacific region.
Previous Greg Dening Memorial Lectures
2021 Jenny Bulstrode, ‘Performances on the World Stage: Interpreting Innovation in Iron “In the Light of What is Old”‘
2020 Bronwen Douglas, ‘Encounters, Agency, and Race in Oceania‘
2019 Nat Cutter, Fallon Mody, and Henry Reese, ‘Listening Across Boundaries’
2018 Gillian Triggs, ‘Australia’s Protection of Human Rights: Is a Charter of Rights a Solution?’
2017 Joy Damousi, ‘Out of Common Humanity’
2015 Ron Adams, ‘Talking to the Dead’
2014 Ross Gibson, ‘”Who Knows the Weather?”: The Memory of Greg Dening’
2013 Shino Konishi, Maria Nugent and Tiffany Shellam, ‘Aboriginal Australians and Boundary Crossings’ (preceded by postgraduate presentations by Jayson Cooper, Lucy Eyre, Annika Lems, Damir Mitric, and Zoe Robertson)
2012 Alexandra Walsham, ‘Landscape, Ancient Monuments and Memory in Early Modern Britain’
2011 Shane Carmody, ‘On Finding Oneself in a Library’
2010 Katerina Teaiwa, ‘Challenges to Dance! Choreographing History in Oceania’
2009 Tom Griffiths, ‘History and the Creative Imagination’
