Waldemar Jochelson

Waldemar Jochelson

Waldemar Jochelson ( Russian Владимир Ильич Иохельсон , Wladimir Iljitsch Jochelson ; scientific transliteration Vladimir Il'ič Iochelʹson ); (Born January 14 ^{. Jul} / 26. January  1855 ^greg. In Vilnius , Russian Empire ; † 2. November 1937 in New York City ) was a Russian anthropologist , ethnographer and linguist . As a researcher of the indigenous peoples of the Russian north , he mainly studied the language and culture of the Jukagirs , Korjaks and Aleutians and is also considered a pioneer of archeology in the North Pacific region. He took part in three large expeditions to Eastern Siberia.

Life

Political activity

At the age of 13, Jochelson came into contact with socially critical and revolutionary ideas as a student at the Rabbi Seminary in Vilnius. He became a member of a student group led by Aaron Sundelevich . Under the influence of the writings of Nikolai Gavrilowitsch Tschernyschewski , Pyotr Lavrowitsch Lavrov and Alexander Ivanovich Herzen , the Narodniki movement was formed , which Jochelson joined. He learned the craft of a shoemaker to put himself in the shoes of the workers. When the secret police became aware of him, he evaded their access in 1875 by fleeing to Berlin. Here he worked as a lathe operator in a machine factory and attended public lectures and events organized by social democratic organizations. He met leading social democrats like Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein personally. He also began to work as a journalist, writing articles about the situation in Russia for the newspaper Vorwärts . From 1876 he stayed illegally in the Russian Empire and continued his revolutionary activity as a member of the Narodnaja Wolja (People's Will), initially in Kiev . He later commuted between Moscow and Saint Petersburg, helped with the forgery of passports and other documents, and smuggled illegal magazines. In the summer of 1880 he went to Switzerland to work as an editor for magazines such as Westnik Narodnoi Woli . Jochelsen taught children of wealthy Russian families on Lake Geneva and began studying humanities at the University of Bern . After the successful assassination attempt on Tsar Alexander II , he reported on the trials against his organizers in the newspaper Der Sozialdemokrat . While trying to re-enter Russia, Jochelson was arrested at the border in 1885. As forbidden writings were found on him, he was taken to the Peter and Paul Fortress in Saint Petersburg. He was convicted and after two years imprisonment in the fortress, he was exiled to Siberia for a period of ten years .

exile

Jochelson's first place of exile was Olyokminsk on the upper reaches of the Lena . Because of suspicious passages in his correspondence - he had expressed the opinion in a letter that the exiles should study the local population - the authorities sent him to remote villages in the Kolyma area . The living conditions here were much tougher than in the places where there were smaller communities of exiles. With the help of the indigenous population, he had to learn to make a living from hunting and fishing. He developed a pronounced ethnographic interest, learned Yakut and was able to publish his first works in 1894 and 1895 in which he discussed the possibilities of agriculture in Yakutia. In 1895 he was awarded the silver medal of the Ethnographic Department of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society .

Scientific work

Jochelson navigates the Korkodon during the Jesup North Pacific Expedition (around 1900).

While in exile, Jochelson met Waldemar Bogoras , who developed an interest in ethnography right away. With the permission of the authorities, both took part in an ethnographic expedition of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society from 1894 to 1897. This venture, financed by Innokenti Michailowitsch Sibirjakow (1860–1901) and therefore known as the Siberyakov Expedition, was organized by the East Siberian Department of the Society in Irkutsk and used the regional intellectual potential of the often well-trained exiles. One of the two leaders of the expedition was Dmitri Alexandrowitsch Klementz , a political companion of Jochelson's, with whom he had worked in the revolutionary movement from 1875. At first, Jochelson's main interest was the Yakuts in the Kolymsk region. Only on later of his eight journeys between 1894 and 1897 did he deal intensively with the way of life and language of the Jukagirs . The expedition suffered from organizational difficulties, especially after Sibiryakov withdrew to the monastery in 1896. The results were not published uniformly because no funds were available. Jochelson published the first results in various Russian journals as early as 1898.

After serving his sentence, Jochelson returned to Bern to complete his studies. With the mediation of Friedrich Wilhelm Radloff , he joined the Jesup North Pacific Expedition organized by Franz Boas in 1900 with his wife Dina Jochelson-Brodskaja (1862–1941) as well as Bogoras and Lew Sternberg . Until 1902 they worked with the Koryaks on the north coast of the Sea of Okhotsk and briefly again with the Yukagirs in Verkhnekolymsk. In order to process his research material, Jochelson was employed at the American Museum of Natural History in New York until 1907 . After a brief activity at the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography in St. Petersburg, he headed the ethnographic department of the Ryabushinsky expedition (1908–1911), which dealt with the archeology , culture and language of the Aleutians and Itelmens in Kamchatka .

From 1912 to 1917 he was a curator at the Petersburg Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography. After the revolution he did not succeed in becoming a professor at the Petrograd University like Bogoras and Sternberg . In 1918 he became a curator at the Asian Museum in Petrograd. He emigrated to the USA in 1922, where he received a scholarship from the American Museum of Natural History, which owes him extensive collections. He died in New York in 1937.

Works (selection)

• Preliminary report on ethnographic research among the peoples of the Kolymsk and Verkhoyansk districts of the Yakutsk province , 1898
• On Asian and American elements in the myths of the Koryaks , 1904
• The Koryak (= Publications of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition . Volume 6), two volumes, New York 1905, ( digitized version )
• The Yukaghir and the Yukagirized Tungus (= Publications of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition . Volume 9), three volumes, New York 1910–1926 ( digitized version )
• Archaeological Investigations in the Aleutian islands , Washington 1925, Reprint Salt Lake City 2002
• Peoples of Asiatic Russia , New York 1928. ( digitized version )
• Archaeological Investigations in Kamchatka , Washington 1928 ( digitized version )
• History, ethnology and anthropology of the Aleut , Washington, Inst. 1933
• The Yakut , New York 1933 ( digitized version )

literature

• Erich Kasten : From Politically Exiled To Eminent Ethnologist. Waldemar Jochelson and the Sibirjakov Expedition (1894–1897) . In: Erich Kasten (Ed.): From the Far East of Russia German-language writings (1881–1908) , Verlag der Kulturstiftung Sibirien, Fürstenberg / Havel 2017, ISBN 978-3-942883-91-7 ( PDF ; 305 kB).
• Donatas Brandišauskas: Waldemar Jochelson - a prominent ethnographer of north-eastern Siberia . In: Acta Orientalia Vilnensia . Volume 10, No. 1–2, 2009, pp. 165–179 ( PDF ; 2.5 MB, English)
• Michael Knüppel: Paraphernalia on a biography of the Siberian, anthropologist and archaeologist Vladimir Il'ič Iochel'son (1855–1937) (= Michael Weiers [ed.]: Tunguso Sibirica . Volume 35 ). Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 2013, ISBN 978-3-447-10097-7 .
• Petra Rethmann: Iokhel'son (Jochelson), Vladimir Il'yich . In: Mark Nuttall (Ed.): Encyclopedia of the Arctic . tape 2 . Routledge, New York and London 2003, ISBN 1-57958-438-1 , pp. 1021-1023 (English, limited preview in Google Book Search).

Remarks

1. ↑ Michael Knüppel: Paraphernalia on a biography of the Siberian, anthropologist and archaeologist Vladimir Il'ič Iochel'son (1855–1937) , 2013, p. 7
2. ↑ Donatas Brandišauskas: Waldemar Jochelson - a prominent ethnographer of north-eastern Siberia . 2009, p. 166
3. ↑ Erich Kasten: From politically exiled to important ethnologist. Waldemar Jochelson and the Sibirjakov Expedition (1894–1897) , 2017, p. 10.
4. ↑ Erich Kasten: From politically exiled to important ethnologist. Waldemar Jochelson and the Sibirjakov Expedition (1894–1897) , 2017, p. 14 f.

Web links

• Literature by and about Waldemar Jochelson in the catalog of the German National Library