Waldemar Bogoras was born in Russia in 1865, and he died in 1936. During his youth he was exiled into Siberia. This is where his ethnological research started, with the tribes he lived among and this is where he would return to, on more than one occasion. In Siberia he studied the Chukchee people, also the Koryak, and Yup'ik people. He collected items from people he called “Russified Natives,” who had been exiled. He used these to show how cultures were being borrowed and assimilated, because they were being introduced to each other for the first time when exiled. The Russian Geographical Society was so impressed with his power of observation that he was given a scientific mission. The Petersburg Academy of Sciences recommended he and his friend, Waldemar Jochelson to the American Museum of Natural History. They were invited to join the Jesup Expedition and to study the North Pacific coast tribes. Leo Steinberg, another exile, later joined them on the expedition. This was the beginning of a close contact between American anthropologists and Bogoras, which continued until he died.
Jointly published by the Jesup Expedition and the Petersburg Academy of Sciences, Bogoras's work on the Chukchee proved his deep insight into the life of the people he lived among while in exile. Bogoras not only possessed scientific insight but he also possessed artistic gifts that gave clarity to his descriptions. He also used his remarkable powers of observation and psychological analysis as a novelist, writing under the name of Tan. Bogoras was famous in Russia as a novelist, “one story he wrote is about a prehistoric man trying to interpret the strange drawings of mammoths done ages ago on the walls of caves and still found all over Europe and Asia, infusing the breath of life into the lore of the scholar's study and the dust of the museum.”
Bogoras stayed in the United States for several years after the Jesup Expedition ended, before returning to work in the Museum of the Academy of Sciences in Russia. After the Russian Revolution, he became the director of the Institute of the Peoples of the North, an agency concerned with education and developmental work among the northern tribes of Siberia. He worked to help the tribes in their unavoidable assimilation and organized educational work to give them greater economic security.
During the time that he spent in Siberia he was able to witness and record a ritual by a Chukchee shaman. He recorded on a phonograph the noises that where coming from the room. It started with the shaman beating a drum and entering a trance like state. He then heard voices coming from all around the room, and that they spoke both Russian and English. On the recording one can hear both the voices of the Shaman and the spirits in the room. The recording that he made is not only studied by anthropologists but also by physicists.
Bogoras was a well respected friend of fellow anthropologist Franz Boas. The obituary of Bogoras that appeared in American Anthropologist was written by Boas. Boas said that Bogoras's interest was more centered in what Bogoras liked to call the grand generalization of anthropology, in which he gave freer reign to his imagination than was possible in the careful analysis of observed facts and the necessary faithful presentation. Boas believed it was Bogoras' artistic side, rather than his scientific side that was evident when he dwelled on those problems. In 1928, Bogoras was at the Congress of Americanists in New York as a Delegate of the Academy of Science in Leningrad. Waldmar Bogoras died May 11, 1936.
Some of the publications by Bogoras are:
The Chukchee (1909)
Chukchee Mythology (1910)
The Eskimo of Siberia: Folk-tales and Songs (1913)
Koryak Texts (1917)
Tales of Yukaghir, Lamut,, and Russionized Natives of Eastern Siberia (1918)
Handbook of American Indian Languages: Part 2. With Franz Boas, LJ Frachtenberg, and E Sapir. (1922)
Ideas of Space and Time in the Conception of Primitive Religion (1925)
References
Biography, http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/Jesup/fieldletters/Bios.html, (Feb, 2003)
Northeast Asians, http://www.koryaks.net/biblio-kam.html, (Feb, 2003)
Physic Journal, 1999
Biography, http://www.trussel.com/prehist/bogoras.htm (March, 2003)
Written By: Alex Swenson
Edited By: Lillian Dolentz, 2008