Dmitri Olderogge and His Place in History of Russian African Anthropology
Kochakova, Natalia B. (ed.). 2002. Ethnologica Africana. In memory of
Dmitri Alexeyevich Olderogge (Texts in Russian with English
summaries). Moscow: Muravei. 384pp. ISBN: 5 89737 129 6., no price
given
The appearance of this book to mark the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Dmitri Olderogge
(1903-1987), the ‘Founding Father’ of African anthropology in the USSR (and, to a considerable
degree, African studies in general) in the mid-1930s and its ‘Big Man’ till his death in the late
1980s, provides an opportunity for assessing the role he played in the history of Russian
anthropology as well as for casting a glance at the latter in light of this outstanding personality. In a
sense, practically the whole Soviet period of African studies in Russia was overshadowed and
dominated by the impressive figure of Dmitri Olderogge. Hence the book contributed to and
compiled by Olderogge’s students, friends and colleagues is a ‘virtual monument’ not only to him
but also to the time when almost all of them experienced ‘coming of age’ in the Soviet academy; the
time which none of them was able to choose or change.
The first two parts of the book (pp. 15-194)1 will be of great interest not only to
students of Africa or the history of Russian anthropology but also to all those doing what is now
called ‘microhistory’ – the history of a country or society through a personal biography.
Reminiscences of Olderogge’s students about him and his own reminiscences and letters to them
and other colleagues do shed light on the intellectual atmosphere in the Soviet Union in general and
the academic community in particular. Reading these ‘monuments of the epoch’ may be especially
interesting for those for whom the USSR was not ‘his/her country’, by which we mean not only the
foreign reader but the young Russian reader as well. There is no doubt about the strong desirability
of the publication of such documents today as they give us a chance to look at the passed epoch
‘from within’, with the eyes of its children and thus to avoid both demonising and idealising it.
However, the complicated historical context cannot push into the background Dmitri
Olderogge as one of the most outstanding and contradictory figures in the history of Soviet
anthropology. Being a Holstein nobleman by origin, he happily survived all the Bolshevik purges
and even became the Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (a very high
1
All the references below indicating pages only refer to the reviewed volume.
position in the Soviet academic establishment and the society in general). Living and working in a
‘Marxist country’, Olderogge nevertheless was far from orthodox theoretically and in many respects
was closer to Radcliffe-Brown or Evans-Pritchard than to Morgan and Engels (for example, in his
approach to the institutions of kinship). Indeed, it is a pity that the history of Russian (including
Soviet) anthropology is still too little known to the world anthropological community. 2 In the
meantime, Dmitri Olderogge in particular and his role in the history of African anthropology do
deserve due introduction to it.
Needless to say, like all other disciplines in the fields of science and scholarship,
African studies in the Soviet Union were heavily biased ideologically and politically. In fact, the
goverment’s interest in Africa arose in connection with, and its support of research conducted there
was subsequently determined by, the anti-colonial movement and the struggle between the USSR
and the West for dominance in that part of the world. The government saw Africanists as those
whose main task was to provide ideological support for its policy on the continent. Their practical
advice was very seldom asked, and African studies in the Soviet Union were predominantly of the
armchair kind, as it was unthinkable for Soviet citizens to travel freely. ‘Knowledge of the only true
teaching’, that is, of Marxism-Leninism, as the means of avoiding error was to substitute for firsthand evidence for Russian Africanist anthropologists.3 However, even under such circumstances,
unfavourable for true academic work, there were people in every discipline who had to adapt
themselves to external realities but at the same time managed to remain scientists or scholars and
not become mere servants of the ‘System’. Olderogge was the most outstanding person among such
figures in African studies. It may be argued that thanks first and foremost to him African
anthropology not only appeared in the USSR but also preserved itself as an academically-based
discipline as much as it could be possible under the Soviet regime.
As the Russian Africanist Apollon Davidson, who knew Olderogge in person for many
years, rightly remarks in the reviewed volume (pp. 43–44), the ‘horrible times he [i.e. Olderogge]
survived could not but leave their imprint on him: they taught him not always to demonstrate his
position openly, sometimes made him keep silent, compromise’. Being non-Party and always
consciously avoiding direct political activities, Olderogge nevertheless struggled throughout his life
against the Power and its representatives, in his own specific manner. In Russia such behaviour is
2
The minimal number of entries on Russian anthropologists in foreign anthropological
encyclopaedias testifies to this symptomatically.
3
Nevertheless, in the 1960s-early 1990s there was a handful of Soviet expeditions to Africa which
were not purely anthropological but complex, having an anthropological part among others. On the
2
called ‘life with a fig in a pocket’ – a lifestyle by no means unusual for a quite significant part of
Soviet intellectuals.
Among other reasons for such an attitude to the Power (including social origin),
Olderogge’s deep devotion to repressed teachers, colleagues and friends was not the least important
one. He tried his best to help those of them who were lucky to survive and return from gulag or
exile but still bore the stigma of ‘people’s enemies’ and hence could not expect equal treatment with
‘trustworthy citizens’, for example when applying for a job. Another of Olderogge’s features worth
mentioning at this point is his disaffection with ideological pressure in scholarship, to which his
critique of some concepts recognised as ‘truly Marxist’ (like that of matriarchy) and support of
younger non-orthodoxically-minded colleagues testify.
At the same time, in inter-personal relations Olderogge was not an easy man at all. His
professional authority was indisputable, he was highly respected for his unique erudition and
academic intuition, but not everyone found him a pleasant person; some were even afraid of him.
As it is often characteristic of outstanding personalities, he did not bear brilliant, intellectually
independent people nearby. Olderogge purposefully created the situation of his own exceptionality
and indispensability. In the 1960s-1980s much was determined by his unique status as the only
Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR among Africanists and as ‘living
classic’. The latter title was informal but nevertheless not at all less visible than the former. It is
even difficult to say which was primary: the official recognition of professional merit which
provided opportunities (both in the academy and everyday life) of which ‘common’ colleagues
could not even dream, or elevation to the ‘living classic’ status as a natural sequence of actually
declaring the person as belonging to this narrow category by the government-controlled election to
the Academy of Sciences. The Soviet system demanded that in every sphere there was to be one and
only one ‘Big Man’ or ‘general’. Olderogge eagerly played this role in African Studies.
For more than sixty (!) years Olderogge worked for the Museum of Anthropology and
Ethnography – the famous Kunstkammer founded in St. Petersburg by Peter the Great and later
named after him. Before that he had been trained at the Petrograd (then Leningrad) University by
many outstanding teachers and scholars of the ‘old school’ soon labelled as ‘bourgeois’, including
the most prominent Russian anthropologists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Vladimir
Bogoraz and Lev Shternberg. It was the latter who advised Olderogge to devote himself to ‘African
problems’ (pp. 177–178). Also on Shternberg’s initiative, Olderogge spent half a year in Western
specifically Soviet way of conducting anthropological fieldwork and its political and ideological
premises, see Bondarenko and Korotayev 2003: 235.
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Europe in 1927-28 attending Westermann’s lectures and practical lessons, consulting Ankermann,
Baumann and other leading European Africanists of the time, getting acquainted with methods of
teaching African languages and exhibiting African museum collections in Germany, the
Netherlands and Belgium.
For the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (which also was and is a research unit)
Olderogge served in different years as the Director and, from 1944 till 1986, as the first Chair of the
African Ethnography Department. He received many prestigious academic and government
awards crowned by election as the Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences of the
USSR in 1960. In the Soviet Union any important sign of academic recognition was also a sign of
the government’s favour. The Academy of Sciences was naturally completely controlled by the
Soviet State and Communist Party. So it seems not incidental that Olderogge was elected to the
Academy only in 1960 – the year called throughout the world ‘the year of Africa’. 1960 saw the
crucial point in the process of Africa’s decolonisation (seventeen independent states appeared on
the continent that year), and the Soviet government might well have wanted to demonstrate the
significance of Africa for the struggle between socialism and capitalism and the importance of
Soviet African studies for the future success of socialism there.4
However, it would be completely wrong to separate Olderogge’s official recognition from
his true academic achievements. These achievements are vividly testified to by the fact that
Olderogge was recognised internationally: he was a member or honorary member of many top
Western and international academies and academic societies including the British Academy, the
Royal Anthropological Society, the French Academy of Overseas Territories, the French African
Society, and the Permanent Committee of the International Congress of Anthropological and
Ethnographic Sciences. Among his foreign awards was the prize of Haile Selassie I, Emperor of
Ethiopia.
It must be noted at this point that as the quasi-official ‘general’ of Soviet African Studies,
Olderogge was for a long time among those very few Soviet Africanists who had the opportunity to
travel abroad, including to African countries (he visited Egypt, Mali, Senegal and Ethiopia). As a
result, he knew personally and stayed in correspondence with many prominent anthropologists of
Europe and America and became the first Soviet Africanist to do fieldwork on the continent (in
Egypt and Mali in the early 1960s).
4
It is also characteristic in this respect that the Institute for African Studies of the Academy of
Sciences of the USSR was founded in Moscow at practically the same time – in December 1959.
4
From the late 1920s Olderogge combined research with teaching, from the mid-1930s until
the end of his life at the Leningrad State University. For over half a century he taught a variety of
courses on African ethnography, social anthropology and linguistics. He also taught African
languages: Swahili and Zulu. In 1946 he was appointed the Chair of the University’s African
Studies Department and held that position until his death. Under him the Department became the
country’s leading centre in training future African anthropologists and linguists. As a lecturer
Olderogge was unique: his lectures, always simple for comprehension, formulated problems and
charted ways to their solution, set African cultural and historical phenomena into a universal
context, awoke students’ thought and provoked discussions.
The majority of Africanist anthropologists and linguists working in St. Petersburg (and
some of those working in other Russian cities and abroad) even today, were once Olderogge’s
students – undergraduate, graduate or both. On their mentor’s initiative, under his supervision and
with his active participation, former students realised many of Olderogge’s publication projects: the
biannual collection of articles ‘Africana’, the first Swahili-Russian and Hausa-Russian dictionaries,
translations of ancient and medieval sources on Sub-Saharan African ethnography and history, and
many others.
The commemorative volume is further testimony to Olderogge students’ professional
success, the first step to which was made under his supervision. Its last (third) part is simply titled
‘Africa’ (pp. 195–366). It is a collection of eleven papers on very different aspects of African
anthropology. What nevertheless gave the editor good reason to include them all in the book is that
each of the aspects was among those studied by Olderogge. His academic thinking was
characterised by a complex and multidisciplinary approach to the subject, his knowledge of cultures
across the continent was unique as well as that of academic literature published world-wide, and all
this made Olderogge qualified to contribute to the study of almost all aspects of Africanist
anthropology. During the sixty years of his academic career Olderogge authored about 150
publications5 and the majority of them, especially those written in the 1950s and 1960s, were
pioneering and groundbreaking; sometimes not only for Soviet but also for world Africanist
anthropology and Prehistory. Olderogge’s works determined in great measure the main trends in the
development Soviet Africanist studies (note that until the late 1950s, when the Institute for African
Studies was founded in Moscow, Olderogge chaired at one time both of the only two Africanist
5
One can find the complete list of Olderogge’s publications in the reviewed volume (pp. 112–132).
5
centres in the country – at the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography and at the Leningrad
State University). Nowadays the themes first studied by Olderogge are regarded as traditional and
even ‘classical’ within Russian African Studies. The most important of them are: the historical
sociology of Tropical Africa; kinship systems and terminologies; the early ethnic history of African
peoples; ancient and medieval sources on the history and ethnography of sub-Saharan Africa; the
origins of social stratification and the early state; the specific characteristics of colonial society and
different models of colonial rule; traditional social and political institutions in post-colonial states;
social and applied linguistics; autochthonous systems of information preservation… Olderogge also
was among the initiators of the teaching African languages in the Soviet Union.
In fact, the first paper in the volume’s closing part is by Olderogge himself; it is a
previously unpublished piece of a manuscript in which the ideas of Leo Frobenius, one of the
greatest explorers of the Black Continent, whom Olderogge knew in person, are discussed. The
other ten contributions deal with a diverse range of Africanist problems such as the pre-colonial
state, common law, ethnic processes, intra-generation relations, traditional art and its representation
in museums, religion, and languages.
Olderogge argued that many pre-colonial African societies, even rightly ranked among the
most complex on the continent, did not fit the Marxist criteria of the state. He also (again, contrary
to the Marxist dogma) wrote that in Africa political processes (state formation) could outstrip social
ones (the appearance of class stratification) and insisted on the priority of internal factors in the
socio-political transformations occurring in pre-colonial African cultures. Confirming these
arguments, in the commemorative volume H. J. M. Claessen discusses problems of control and
communication in early states with the help of the examples of the African polities of Dahomey and
Buganda (as well as of some early states of South-East Asia, medieval Europe and pre-Columbian
America). He demonstrates that a stable early state government is based on a fair degree of
communication, organisation and legitimacy.
Olderogge saw the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial periods as distinctive and
specific stages in the ethnic history of Africa. In his contribution to the volume I. G. Kopytoff traces
how political changes from pre- to post-colonial times have crucially determined the process of
Suku ethnicity formation and shaping in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
In the Soviet Union Olderogge was regarded as the most authoritative specialist in using
kinship terminology as a source for socio-historical and socio-anthropological research. His works
were crucially important for the elaboration of a proper method in the use of this kind of source.
Olderogge’s contribution to the study of the phenomenon of kinship, of African modes of marriage
and family life was significant, for theoretical no less than for Africanist anthropology. The article
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by I. Ye. Sinitsina in the reviewed volume is devoted to the legal consequences of death. It is shown
how differences in burial rituals are determined by the age, social and proprietary status, and sex of
the deceased and it is argued that the most significant distinction is made between married and
single persons as Africans consider the creation of a family as the most important social act. The
specific features of traditional African cultures in terms of generation and gender divisions and
interactions are also studied by I. L. Andreyev.
Olderogge contributed numerous publications on African peoples’ material culture and
arts. From all his travels in Africa Olderogge brought ethnographic collections which are now in the
possession of the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography. Under his supervision many
permanent and temporary exhibitions were organised; a number of albums and books on African art
were published under his editorship. The block of contributions to the reviewed volume on African
art includes articles by V. B. Mirimanov on the approach to its periodisation, and S. Ya. Berzina
and V. R. Arseniev on the principles of collecting and representing Ethiopian and the Niger Valley
Savanna art respectively in museums. African spirituality as it is reflected in the religious system is
also considered by N. B. Kochakova in her paper on the famous Ifá divination of the Yoruba from
whom it was borrowed by the neighbouring peoples. The author reveals the way the most
fundamental values of traditional African (specifically, Yoruba) culture are expressed through
divination ‘philosophy’ and practice.
Olderogge proposed an original version of African peoples’ ethno-linguistic classification.
He also elaborated a method of using linguistic evidence for historical reconstructions (especially
with respect to illiterate peoples) based on the idea that lexical subsystems (of kinship terminology,
numerals, weight measures, etc.) are determined not by a language structure only but by the level of
social development and specific nature of ethno-cultural interactions as well. In the commemorative
volume African linguistics is represented by two papers. S. Brauner analyses processes of
grammaticalisation within locative classes of the Bantu (particularly Shona and Swahili) languages
and argues that the locative classes were formed in these languages later than other noun classes.
For his part, A A. Zhukov contributes to the discussion initiated by Olderogge of the system of
numerals in the Congo language as it is represented in Brusciotto’s mid-17th century Regulae
quaedam pro difficillimi Congensium idiomatis faciliori…, and insists that this system is unusual
for the Bantu languages.
To conclude, the reviewed book does serve both as a collection of papers which may be
important to, and helpful for, many students of African cultures and as an intellectual homage to
Dmitri Olderogge.
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DMITRI M. BONDARENKO
Institute for African Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow (Russia)
VLADIMIR A. POPOV
Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, Russian Academy of Sciences, St.
Petersburg
Reference
Bondarenko, D. M. and A. V. Korotayev. 2003. ‘In Search of a New Academic Profile: Teaching
Anthropology in Contemporary Russia’, in D. Dracklé, I. R. Edgar and T. K. Schippers (eds.),
Learning Fields. Vol. 1. Educational Histories of European Social Anthropology. New York
and Oxford: Berghahn.
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