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Marisa Karyl Franz, "Near and Desired Things: Shamanism in Late Imperial Local Siberian Museums" (Cornell UP, 2026)
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- [00:00]
Dr. Marisa Carol Franz
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Dr. Marisa Carol Franz
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- [00:17]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
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- [00:20]
Dr. Marisa Carol Franz
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- [01:01]
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:05]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I am one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Marisa Carol Franz about her book titled near and Desired Shamanism in Late Imperial Local Siberian Museums, published by Cornell University Press in 2026. Now, as that title suggests, we are going back into the 19th century to Siberia to a bunch of interesting museums that are doing a lot of things like, yes, okay, we're talking about some physical space going on and the objects within them, but also ideas of what objects should go in them and how these sorts of conversations about kind of what is an ethnographic subject being developed, things happening within Siberia, but connections with many other places, some of which maybe we wouldn't be expecting there to be connections with. So this is a book that very much as the subtitle suggests, is about local Siberian museums and things happening around them and a bunch of other things, too. So, Marisa, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Dr. Marisa Carol Franz
Thank you so much for having me.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Could you start us off, please, by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us what you why you decided to write this book? What were your sort of goals for this project?
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Dr. Marisa Carol Franz
Yeah, thank you so much. So, yes, as you generously said, I'm Marisa Carol Franz. I'm a professor at NYU in museum studies. Though the Book itself comes out of my doctoral dissertation, which I did at University of Toronto in religious studies. And I think this book sort of sits at a transitional moment for my own sort of intellectual life, moving from religious studies, where I primarily studied sort of philosophy of religion, into museum studies. And so it's sort of sitting at that nexus. And I think that's partially what sort of motivated me to write this book. Originally, I was sort of interested in the philosophy of religion and this category of religion as a. As a concept, and realizing how much our definition of this category was informed really, through the philosophical and theological perspectives of Christianity. And so I initially became interested in shamanism as a space of sort of philosophical entanglement that challenges certain Christocentric frameworks of what religion is. And museums came in sort of as a. A thought experiment almost. I was initially interested in the idea that once you have a museum collection, things have to go in one place physically. If you have a vase and you're trying to put it in storage, right, it can go with ceramics, it can go with decorative arts. It could go with porcelain and sort of material collections. But you have to make these kind of decisions about what things are. And so I became interested in museums as a space for determining how, in a sort of public intellectual space, religious things were being used to help define these concepts. And so that sort of led me into this muddy space of what's going on? How are we translating intellectual history and these very abstract concepts into really tangible and tactile realities? And so this book, originally, I had sort of planned to go and look at specific collection items and sort of trace how they were acquired, what people were calling them in the archives. Did the cataloging change over time? And then when I arrived in Yakutsk, the first Siberian town I was doing field research in, a librarian at the local museum handed me a copy of this program, what I call sort of desideratas in the book. A program of what the Yakutsk Museum wanted to get at its sort of very iterative moment, as it was first conceptualizing itself as a museum. And I think this sort of struck me, pulling me back into that more sort of conceptual intellectual history and space, rather than that really practical museum history of sort of how do we think about things? How do we order knowledge? Where does the category of religion and specifically shamanism, fit within this sort of broader indexing of culture, place, land? And so that became a sort of pivotal research moment that shifted my project, I think, back to what it had sort of originally been, in some ways. And led to really what this book ended up being.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Very interesting indeed. Thank you for telling us a bit about the kind of development of the project. I think that's so true of so many projects. We sort of expect it to be one thing. And then quite, quite often, I mean, I'm also an archival historian, so similar sort of thing is you come across something and you go, wait a second, right, what happens if I go this way and pursue what's happening? So always interesting to start off, I think, our conversations with sort of a bit of behind the scenes, as it were. But of course, you've already given us a bunch of things to talk about in more detail, the first of which being museums in Siberia. So when and why are these first founded?
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Dr. Marisa Carol Franz
Yeah, firsts are always a troublesome category, especially with museums, which is again, these problems of how do you define what a museum is? Is it a collection, is it a public display? Monasteries in Siberia had all sorts of collections, books, icons, religious artifacts. I sort of pinpoint the Yakutsk, sorry, the Irkutsk Museum as a sort of first. This was founded in the 1780s and it sort of self defines itself as a museum. Of course, it had a history of trying to figure out what that looked like, both in terms of collection, display, bureaucratical organization. But it was an institution founded to represent the local region of Irkutsk. And eventually it sort of expands more broadly to think about Siberia, but to represent that in a public facing way to the local population. It starts off with sort of donations. So local people, you know, people who owned mine mineral mines, donated samples. I believe someone donated a collection of seashells they had. And so it becomes this sort of gathering place for local collectors to also deposit their materials and have them in this sort of public display. So that's sort of, I think, what I would consider the sort of first museum. Though again, there are certainly other institutions that could contend with this, why it was founded. You know, in the book, I really think about this category of modernity as entangled with the museum that we see the development of the social sciences. We see this sort of disciplinary creation around the academy, beyond the social sciences, but also so like anthropology, but also into the natural sciences. And that development of these sort of academic disciplines sought out to build material collections that could speak to their pedagogical goals and educate the public. This was very much tied in with a sort of modernist project of classification of knowledge, circulation. And both of those then are entangled with colonization. I think we can't talk about the history of Museums without talking about the history of colonialism. And that is certainly true in Russia and Siberia as much as it is also true in the United States and Britain and France.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah. I want to talk more about these kind of goals of the museum, the sort of obvious ones on paper and the sort of bigger picture ones too. So can we discuss more the sorts of things that the museums, I guess, were meant to achieve and how they were envisioned to do this?
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Dr. Marisa Carol Franz
Yeah, so a lot of them start off with actually a very wide purview. Some of them offered local seed distribution. Some of them did sort of like weather forecasting. And so I think we forget that these museums, and indeed museums today often are also these sort of broader research hubs that do all sorts of sort of community oriented educational projects. So the museums were certainly doing that as well. And then they were in this sort of goal of documentation. A lot of these museums were stabbed by political exiles. So you have coming into these indigenous and settler colonial towns across Siberia, this influx of young politically radical exiles who had been educated in the kind of Western European models in Moscow and St. Petersburg. And with them, part of their goal then was, I think, both a political one. There was certainly a lot of interest in thinking about sort of political radicalization, anti imperialism, anti tsarism, and using the museums as a space to sort of build up that intellectual curiosity and culture around politics, but also to employ these new intellectual projects that people had been learning about coming out of, you know, these universities where they were thinking suddenly about culture as a category, thinking about ethnography as a methodology, and trying to employ that in their own engagement and in many ways sort of exploration and colonization of these. These local spaces. A lot of these people weren't legally allowed to have various forms of employment. You know, a lot of them had been in exile for their political writings. And so they sort of would arrive in these towns and the museum offered them a space to work that sort of subverted some of the regulations. A lot of them also did time in hard labor camps. So it's a. I think there are ways in which these institutions are serving their local communities, but also serving this new population that was expanding in Siberia. And those goals sometimes align, and I think sometimes those goals also produced friction and certainly continued the process of colonization.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, which is really interesting to see the kind of many different layers of things going on here. Right. We've got, on the one hand, kind of, you're not good enough politically over there, so we're seeing sending you over to Siberia. But then there's different sort of political dynamics going on there in terms of who gets to kind of have power and make decisions. So really interesting to kind of see some of the people involved and sort of what they're coming with and sort of what they're then aiming to do. Of course, though, when we're talking about museums, as you've mentioned a few times, like it is a physical thing and there are some questions around like the physical objects. Right. So we've got an idea of these institutions, we've got a sense of the people, but what kinds of objects were in these museums and what kinds of objects did they want to have in the museums?
- [13:09]
Dr. Marisa Carol Franz
Right, so what did they have? They had in some ways everything and anything. One of my favorite archival images is of the Minosinsk Museum. And you can see on one of the shelves a sort of row of model cows in a sort of section about agriculture. They also collected a lot of like hunting material, like fishing traps and hunting, like harpoons and bows and arrows. They collected household items, you know, pots and textiles, clothing. They of course, they collected shamanic materials, coats and drums and headpieces. But then they also would collect things we associate with the sciences. Taxidermied animals, pinned insects, rock specimens. So it was really this, this project of trying to document from all these different angles what these local spaces were. And so it really was a, a sort of massive project. I think, as you sort of mentioned in your previous comment that you. The local has all these layers. And I think, you know, growing up when I was a kid, I was often taken to local museums and I did not, I think, sort of appreciate them and sort of was like, oh, well, you know, one small Ontario towns museum felt the same as the other. But then as you dig in and you spend more time and you start noticing that depth of knowledge in these different places is so rooted to local experience. But that local is shifting and growing and it has all these contours. So, you know, the birds in one place aren't going to be the same birds in another place. And that to see that and to know that requires that kind of close looking and embedding in space, which I think from an outsider perspective, you don't have. And so that's, I think when we think about what objects did they want, I think we see this sort of interesting tension between the original documents of these sort of desideratas, imagining and fantasizing about what the local is and then confronting the sort of realities of these different places that don't always conform to the expected and sort of tidy lists. And that was. That tension, I think, plays out in the fact, or maybe not plays out, but is mitigated by the fact that these exiles ended up living in these spaces for a very long time, you know, multiple years. Many of them learned local indigenous languages, and so they had increasing access to that sort of depth and nuance of local space, though I think always at a distance still with their position as. As sort of settler colonialists, non predominantly non indigenous and non generationally rooted to these spaces. And so what did they want? They wanted the whole gambit of things, right? There's a section that I translate in the book from a Desiderado. They list all these different things having to do with smoking, right? So you want the pipe that people use to smoke, but you also want the pouch that stores the tobacco and samples of the tobacco and brushes that are used to clean the pipes. And, you know, any songs that people sing about smoking. And the list sort of goes on and on and on. But then, of course, sometimes maybe you get to a place and they don't smoke pipes and instead they smoke cigarettes. And so that sort of tension of that conceptual space and then the challenges of when you move that into actual collection. One of the things that, again, I think is so interesting about these desiderata is they aren't yet sort of hampered by the material troublesomeness of things. They don't have to confront ideas of scarcity. They don't have to confront ideas of storage space and conservation concerns. When they're conceptualizing what these museums could have, once they start collecting things, those concerns become a real problem. Textiles, for instance, are really hard to control in a museum environment, right? They're very susceptible to light damage. Moths love them, insects love them. And so keeping a textile collection is actually institutionally much harder than perhaps a rock specimen or. Or you want to collect things about farm life. But your museum doesn't actually have space for a plow inside it. And so these differences have to play out in that negotiation between wanting and actually having.
- [18:09]
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- [18:40]
Dr. Marisa Carol Franz
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- [18:45]
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- [18:49]
Dr. Marisa Carol Franz
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- [18:55]
Dr. Marisa Carol Franz
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- [19:08]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, it's definitely one thing to make a list and another thing to kind of then get what you want with it and have it kind of all make sense. And of course, this has lots of ideas embedded in it in terms of, like, what is important, right? Which is a really interesting aspect of this, if we turn to sort of ideas of shamanism and kind of why those sorts of objects were on the list too. So what did these museums kind of mean when they talked about shamanism? Like, what, what, what, how did they conceptualize it? Who did they want to understand what they were talking about?
- [19:38]
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- [19:39]
Dr. Marisa Carol Franz
I mean, shamanism has a long history in the sort of Russian conceptualization and imaginary of Siberia. You know, Catherine the Great writes this poem, the Siberian, or, sorry, this play, the Siberian Shaman, in which a sort of very racialized figure from Irkutsk travels to St. Petersburg and sort of hoodwinks everyone. And that's deeply entangled in the sort of enlightenment frameworks of shamanism, really as a kind of carnival esque and underhanded practice. And so that logic, right, it comes in, in Diderot's encyclopedia that is lingering here, that the shaman is really a performer. I think Diderot calls the shaman like a juggler. At some point, as we move forward in time, closer to the end of the 19th century, close to the 20th century, with the emergence of anthropology as a discipline and really religious studies as a discipline, shamanism becomes more entangled in this category of magic, which also has that kind of theatrical stage, carnival element to it, right? Magicians can be both sort of sorcerers and stage performers. And so that tension remains, though it's sort of contoured differently as we move forward in time. So the shaman throughout this history and this sort of changing conceptualization of it was kind of an iconic figure of Siberia. And if you look at the, the shamanic coats, I mean, they're beautiful, they're incredibly complex garments with these, I mean, depending on the area, layers of silk, layers of metal, layers of leather and decorative pieces and beadwork and embroidery. And so the, the, the desire to look at them and to fantasize about them is entangled in their stunning and provocative materiality. And so they became this kind of archetype because I think both of that colonial gaze, but also the material reality of these pieces in the local space. I think there was a assumption that shamanism would be a category of collection, even if it may not have been sort of understood locally as shamanism. Right. I think this category of shamanism is itself a sort of colonial taxonomy. Siberia is geographically huge. It is culturally diverse. We have, you know, a ton of different nations that all have their own distinctive religious traditions. And all of these get kind of collapsed into this category of shamanism. And because of that, what the collections. What these collectors were imagining for their collections is also kind of homogenized. So we really see this anchoring of shamanism materially, really, to these ideas of, like, the coat, the drum, a beater for the drum, a headpiece that that could be worn as part of the regalia. And that becomes really the material representation across local Siberian museums and then spreading into primarily sort of other Western colonial institutions in Germany, France, Scandinavia, the Americas. What I again find, again, getting back to this sort of these tensions, that's the material record. But as we see in these collection programs, as people develop more familiarity with their own local spaces, we see these collection programs produced for ethnographic research as opposed to sort of material collection. And this is that museum as research institute side, coming through in conjunction and in conversation with the museum as site of display and material collection. And these ethnographic programs start defining or imagining maybe shamanism much more broadly. So we get these questions about bats, right? What are the stories about bats? Right. Bats are a funny animal because they don't look like birds, Right. They're very menalian, but they fly. And so one of the questions is, you know, they don't quite fit into the. The kingdom of the animals. I think they say, like, you know, the lion is king of the animals, and the, you know, the hawk, let's say, is the king or the eagle is the king of the birds? And where do bats fit into this. This hierarchy, these. These sort of domains? What about constellations? What about the traditions around birth? There's these sort of beautiful questions about the moving of fire. And, like, how do you sweep out a hearth? Can you move fire across buildings? Do. I think there's a.
- [25:12]
New Books Network Host
And.
- [25:13]
Dr. Marisa Carol Franz
And so in these kinds of ethnographic programs, we see a framework of shamanism that is tied broadly to people's everyday lives, to the natural world, to the scientific investigations of medicine and astronomy that these different indigenous nations were developing. Right. It's not just shamanism as this kind of isolated Individualized, quote, unquote, like magician figure. But rather it's sort of shamanism as this entangled cultural, religious, medicinal, scientific framework that orients people to the land, to the animals, to their ancestors and to their communities. And. And so I think we see these two different versions of shamanism emerging in this context. And I don't really see, or maybe I haven't really seen, that broader conceptualization of shamanism pulled into the material record, though I think one of the nice things about these hyperlocal institutions is that you do inevitably get these kind of cross conversations between objects, even if you aren't necessarily curating that, because you do have a taxidermied animal across the room from a shamanic coat made of animal hide. And so there's a relationship established there. And so one of the things I was really interested in in this book is trying to think through, you know, why do we have this insistence on shamanism as atomized to the shaman themselves? But then how can we sort of tease that apart and embed that within this broader shamanism while recognizing that there are these sort of disciplinary boundaries that are being maintained in the period and I would say, indeed today.
- [27:16]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, it's very interesting to think about these questions of kind of, where do lines get drawn?
- [27:20]
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- [27:20]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
It goes right back to what you're saying at the very beginning in terms of this being very much an intellectual history, not just kind of, where is this object from? Right. Like, yes, there's a museum's aspect of it, but there's also a sort of, like, what did they think they were doing? And how were they making those sorts of decisions? That's a really interesting piece.
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Dr. Marisa Carol Franz
Thank you. Yeah. And I. You know, we think about museums often through this sort of institutional framework. You know, the museum Collected X, but it's, It's. It's people. And, you know, one of the things I find so interesting with this conceptualization and why I sort of frame it through desire is that, you know, on the one hand, we have this narrative of institutions and the scientific process and, you know, the 19th century and classification, but we also have individual people who were interested in certain things and liked certain things and knew certain people. And so it becomes a lot less tidy when we start moving into this space of individuals and their thoughts and wants and imaginations.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, the point you mentioned there, in terms of who knew who. I want to go into that more because, of course, it's one thing to sort of say we want these objects and even then in some cases to get them, but like, how to get them. How does one say, in exile in Siberia, with all these ideas about what shamans are and their role in society? Making a list of all the objects you want and why. How do you actually get these objects?
- [28:53]
Dr. Marisa Carol Franz
Great question. You know, unfortunately, a lot of times that the answer is through any means necessary. When we're talking about the history of museums more broadly. And I think that's also true in the Siberian context. I think the colonial project isn't immune to using the resources at its disposal to acquire what it wants. We certainly see records of close friendships between people that led to donations or that, you know, people as they. They have retired from certain phases of their life or as relatives passed on and they inherited materials, would donate things, you know, even shamanic things, these very sacred and very powerful objects to museums. And those kinds of relationships, I think, to me, are a model to be thinking with. I talk about in the book the very complicated relationship between Bogaras and Scratching Woman, where we see these sort of ambiguities between a friendship and a professional relationship that invited and, I think, consented to certain forms of access and sharing. But we also see moments where Bogueras really is coercing and pressuring Scratching Women into moving beyond what perhaps had been sort of consensually agreed to. We see a lot of purchasing a lot of these exiles. Russia is such a complicated. Imperial Russia is just such a complicated thing. The Imperial Geographical Society often was funding ethnographic and research expeditions in Siberia, including funding political exiles, which often required complicated negotiations with the government because, of course, they were supposed to be in exile. But the Geographical Society also wanted them to be doing research. A lot of those objects that were collected on these paths ended up being diverted to the imperial museums at the center, right? And so, again, we're just left in this messy network of colonial relationships and politics. But so on these expeditions, we certainly see ethnographers purchasing things from people, commissioning things. We also know that, for instance, in Yakutsk, there were confiscations in some periods by the police of shamanic objects. And so some of those things were taken through force. While I haven't seen any specific records in the Siberian context, though, the Jessup Expedition, which operated in Siberia. I've seen records specifically talking about theft occurring in the North American Pacific Northwest. And so it would, to me, it would be impossible to imagine that certain forms of theft, whether that's grave robbing or sort of illicit, illicit practices. I mean, there are stories of people, you know, quote unquote, finding abandoned houses and going in and taking stuff. But you hear in the records that it's abandoned, but there's like a still warm fire. So abandoned becomes a very sort of temporary category. It's sort of. The house may have been vacated for a moment, but was not necessarily abandoned. And yet that was taken sometimes as an invitation to. Or an opportunity to take things, to steal things. And to me, it would be unimaginable. That wasn't also happening in Siberia, though. I think some of this is always tempered by the fact that these are locals. And so you do have to still live, in many cases, within and around the places you're doing this work. You know, in the Jessup North Pacific, North. The Jessup North Pacific expedition, in the American context, there was a lot of collection of human remains. I'm sure there were collections of that in Siberia as well, but I haven't seen specific references to them. I haven't seen collections of human remains in these local museums. There are certainly photographs of local burials, but again, I think some of those collection practices on the more violent side may have been slightly tempered, though. Of course, still, I believe we're going on. So it's a whole range of things that lead to collections. The desiderata themselves. Oh, sorry. No, I was just gonna say the desiderata themselves are also really trying to solicit donations. Again, I think this is something that seems so alien to us, perhaps with our conceptualization of museums often as these very elite and sort of foreign institutions that are collecting things on a scale that are outside of our everyday lives. Right. You know, I don't imagine that the Metropolitan Museum is going to be messaging me any day soon, be asking for, you know, objects I might have to donate. But in these. These museum contexts that I'm talking about in Siberia, these desiderata were circulated publicly. You know, they were. They were circulated to people in the town. They were circulated to explorers and traders and clergy and military folks as they were moving through space, saying, like, you know, if you happen to shoot a really nice, I don't know, deer, would you consider donating it so we can have it taxidermied for the museum? You know, does your. Does anyone in your house have examples of embroidery? Like, would you consider donating them? And so they. These were simultaneously this kind of conceptualization of what the museum imagined for themselves and sort of wish lists that were given out to the public as a mode of collection. So, yeah, there's both these sort of practical documents and these sort of theoretical documents.
- [35:27]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that is interesting to kind of see what sorts of things are there and how they're being used. And of course, a number of the practices you there mentioned in terms of collection, as you said, really are quite embedded in settler colonialism. Either things we have kind of very clear evidence for there, or as you mentioned, comparatively, looking at other places going well, probably similar things were happening as well. Are there any other ways we want to talk about these museums being part of settler colonialism beyond just collection practices?
- [35:55]
Dr. Marisa Carol Franz
So colonialism in the sort of space of Russian history has been a, I think, a slow. A slow growing topic. Russian. Russian historians, I think, are increasingly and have been increasingly addressing colonialism explicitly. But I think Russia often had a kind of asterisk experience of colonization partially because I think historically our imagination of what colonization was really involved this kind of overseas framework. Right. You think about the British colonization of India, whereas Russia had this contiguous territory that they expanded into and very early on. Right. I mean, Russia, you know, the czars had been pushing out to the Pacific Ocean for a very long time. And so I really wanted to be thinking about colonization in the Russian context, both as part of. To contribute to the growing sort of field of coming to terms with Russia as a colonial empire, for emphasizing that this is a form of settler colonization, just like other forms of settler colonization. Other parts of the world where we have a European, though Russia's always sort of in and out of that category of Europe, but expanding into indigenous territory and then using that land for the benefit of the metropole. Colonization, I think, is often thought of as a. As this sort of uniform, monolithic hegemonic process, this sort of infrastructure of the center controlling and dominating these vast expanses of territory. And it definitely is that. Right. And I'm thinking here about, you know, Tuck and Yang's work on decolonization is not a metaphor, right? Saying if we're thinking about colonization, we are talking about the taking of land, and therefore decolonization has to be that return of land, not this sort of. I think they use the example of, like, decolonize your bookshelf. And I think this is a really strong point they are making. But I think colonization, when we think of it, and in that way, in that sort of monolithic way, in that uniform way of this is about controlling land. We also sort of, I think, buy into some of the sort of propaganda, these sort of ideologies of colonization that imagined itself as this machine that could do that work of dominating, controlling, documenting, owning these vast expanses of land. And when we move into the local Space, I think we see how lumpy and textured and uneven the experiences of, and the sort of practices of colonization are. We see the way in which colonization is not just this economic, racial, institutional, military control, but is also embedded in these practices of relationships of knowledge production, of the ways in which places are changed and what's imagined in them is changed and the experiences of everyone involved are shaped and reformed and altered. And this is where I think, you know, if we think about postcolonial theory, you know, in this moment where countries were gaining independence from their colonial, from the, the colonial state. So in a fantasy where we simplify things, land has been given back, right? India gained independence. Of course, it's much more complicated than that and much more messy. But then post colonial theorists come forward and say, but wait a second, there's all this other colonial stuff that we still have, right? Intellectually, philosophically, locally, and how do we address that? How do we identify it? How do we even know at a certain point the layers that we need to peel back to see what it, what colonization actually looks like, feels like. And I think like Pollutionist Colonialism, a recent book that was published by Max Liberal, they do a really good job of sort of teasing out this balance between colonization as this top down state institutional infrastructure, but also then this very sort of messy, bottom up, land based, relationally based, generationally based process. And so I really wanted to think about these local institutions as in this really messy space of negotiation between that ideology of colonialism and the ways in which that shapes what modernity looked like, what these museums imagined themselves as certainly part of that kind of quote unquote, like civilizing mission and sort of educational mission that these institutions had, right? What that education looked like was a colonial education, right? This, this was coming out of and educating the populations in a European model of epistemology. And at the same time, it's not that easy, right? It's not that. Or maybe not easy. It's not that that simple or uniform. It's these constant and messy relationships between people and the local, I think forces us to think about that in a way which when we pull back into sort of larger histories, it can be hard to see.
- [42:11]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's definitely an interesting way into all of these things that are entangled and of course, things that are not just specific to the late imperial period either. So what sorts of continuities do you see between kind of what we've been discussing in that particular time and place and sort of what happens in the Soviet period? I mean, do the Soviets come in and go, all these museums must close or do they go? Actually, you know what, let's keep them.
- [42:34]
Dr. Marisa Carol Franz
Them much more. The, let's keep them model. You know, again, a lot of these, A lot of these exiles who were working in these museums, who were founding these museums, who were collecting for these museums were revolutionaries. And after the revolution and the sort of installment of the Soviet government, many of them returned to Moscow and Petersburg and became the kind of leading figures in universities and museums. They became experts for the, the state, advising on the sort of Soviet practice of again, colonization and Sovietization. And so the museums continued on. I think there was a real, both personal connection to them from many people who, who gained positions in the Soviet Union, but it was also, I think, part of a Soviet imaginary of these sort of cultural landscapes and towns. You know, the Soviet Union wanted there to be these cultural public spaces across the Siberia and other regions of the, of the Union. You know, the cultural halls, symphony halls, there's an opera house in Yakut. The imaginary or of the Soviet Union as this space of public collective access. Of course, that didn't necessarily always work out. The Soviet regime certainly had extremely repressive practices. And the Stalinist period was brutal, particularly on shamans. There was a lot of anti shamanic propaganda, there was killings of shamans, there was arrests. So it wasn't this sort of, it didn't maybe live up to its sort of utopian imaginaries. Utopian imaginaries that were also, of course, embedded in Western colonization and sort of colonial ideology. But the Soviet Union saw these institutions, I think, as really valuable as part of that kind of public space of socialism. And you know, the early Soviet Union was very active in literacy campaigns and museums were useful for that. Right. I mean, it's, it's the same reason we take children to museums today. Right. You go and you can look at things, you can talk about things, you can read labels to them. And there's this kind of interactive element that brings us into that sort of intellectual educational project. And so the Soviets, I think, continued to see that in these institutions. And then there's the added piece of the sort of nationalities project. Right. Part of the early Soviet framework was thinking that, you know, we could accelerate people through the stages of economic development to lead to socialism and communism. And one of that was sort of going through the moment of nationhood. And so there were these projects to kind of define different groups of people across Siberia as a kind of collective nation. And so this in some places took the form of developing and teaching alphabets for indigenous languages, primarily at the sort of direction of state linguists. But these museums, I think, also served a purpose in that sort of nationalities project, of defining the cultural and geographic boundaries of place that had to be tied in with these sort of definition of nationhood. So I think they were incredibly useful for the Soviets. You know, there's a reason, I think, why these museums today often are on streets called, you know, Lenin street or Red Square. You know, these were these institutions at the center of towns and really, I think, valued for what they could provide. There was, of course, governmental involvement in museums. You know, I don't work specifically, or I didn't work specifically on the Soviet period, but there are some other scholars who have. Julia Fine's dissertation is a sort of excellent example of this. You know, the centralization of the Soviet state also sort of started to try to define more more specifically what museums should be doing, what sort of ideological practices should be represented in them. Though, again, easier said than done, right? We can make a list and tell everyone what to do, but it may not happen. Francine Harris has a great article called, like, Virtual Tourism, Visiting the Peoples of the ussr. I may have the title wrong, but it looks at some of the changes in a museum in St. Petersburg during part of the Soviet Union. And, you know, we see the state saying, like, this is what we want you to do, but it takes a while to change all the labels in a museum. And maybe you can't actually move one of the objects you have from where it is to this other place. And so there's this constant sort of back and forth between a sort of imagined homogenization and sort of control of the material and intellectual work of museums by the Soviet state. And then the practical realities of, like, who's going to do that work?
- [48:40]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, how is this actually going to happen?
- [48:42]
Facebook Advertiser
Right.
- [48:43]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And I think that comes up kind of all throughout the book. There's so much of this that is looking at, like, just the ideas and the sort of discussions people are having and then also sort of what that means and doesn't in practice. And that's a really. I noticed a really strong continuity in that between the late imperial and the Soviet period of kind of even if the politics are a little bit different, like a lot of the underlying ideas, and the disconnect between the ideas and the reality definitely seemed to continue, which was very interesting indeed. And to be honest, not something I was necessarily expecting that much. I kind of thought there would be more change or the politic the political change would make more of a difference in those sorts of things. So I was intrigued to read that aspect. But perhaps as we wrap up our discussion on the book, was there anything that you were surprised by in sort of following all these threads and pushing them together?
- [49:35]
Dr. Marisa Carol Franz
I think I was. I mean, you said you were an archivist, and I mean, archival work is always a surprise. You know, I tell my students that it's chaos. You know, you think you have a plan and you've done your research and you've looked at, you know, the. The records online and, you know, what boxes you're going to request, and then you go and it's completely different. And the things you are interested in are different. And, you know, one of the things that I found myself gravitating towards were some of the natural history specimens, some of the collections of animals, particularly, you know, Yakutsk, for instance, is one of the centers of the world for finding preserved mammoths. And so, you know, there are these archival documents of what do we do with this mammoth? Like, can we get it into the museum? There's a photograph of a museum in Sakhlin where there's this mounted whale skeleton outside the museum, just on the street. And for me, these questions of, you know, how do we entangle the natural world in the cultural world. In the late 19th, early 20th century, we see increasingly a sort of division in museums where these collections that had been multidisciplinary begin separating. And so you have, you know, the Zoological Museum, and you have the Ethnographic Museum, and you have the Decorative Arts Museum, and they're all kind of separated out. And seeing these, you know, taxidermy animals or these skeleton mounts in these local institutions really, I think, changed something for me about how I thought about our project of trying to understand place. And this isn't necessarily a great. It's not a sort of revelation for many people, perhaps, but for me, looking at these images and the sort of challenges of presenting these animals and the, you know, taxidermy. And I. I read some document. I. I didn't quote this in the book, but there was a document I read that was talking in Yakutsk about giving advice to hunters. You know, if you want to donate a skin and it's in the winter, like, don't worry, you can just put it by the door because it's so cold that the cold will preserve it and the museum will get to it when they get to it. But they remind people, like, in the summer, you can't do this because it'll start to rot. And so these real sort of relationships that had to be formed in the museum on the sort of preservation side, on the display side, that networked together the sort of natural world and the cultural world in a time when the sort of European colonial, modern project was trying to divide those. It was something I found really interesting.
- [52:57]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, thank you for sharing that kind of bit about your process, I suppose, with us. I think it's a nice way to wrap up our discussion on the book. But I do have one question to ask you before I let you go, which is what you might be working on now that the book is done. Anything you want to give us a sneak preview of? Sure.
- [53:13]
Dr. Marisa Carol Franz
So I'm sticking with this idea of the local. That's something that I've really been interested in, but I'm moving in a very different direction. The next project or the project I'm working on now is actually looking at Chernobyl. So we've jumped forward in time and we've jumped to the other side of the former Soviet Union geographically. I became sort of interested in the Chernobyl exclusion zone again, as it operates as this definition of a kind of locally bound space. Right. You, like, literally have borders set up to contain it. But as with, I think the local in this book, the containing of, in this case, radiation is impossible. And it's sort of. It's leaky. So that sort of bounded space spreads outward. And so I'm interested in sort of looking at how in different visual materials, people are imagining what Chernobyl is materially and visually to think about. Again, this kind of fantasy of bounded space and the sort of fantasy of documentation. Radiation is generally invisible. You can't smell it, you can't taste it. And so how do we render that knowable in or encounterable in a kind of physical, phenomenological sense? And so it's sort of taking themes, I think, from this, this book and my sort of research on Siberia and these local museums and trying to pull it a really different space, but continuing on with some of those questions about what does it mean to document and to try to know something. Something as space.
- [55:23]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, that certainly seems like you're going to have some intriguing things to think about and figure out. So best of luck with that. And of course, listeners can read the book we've been talking about. It's titled near and Desired Things, Shamanism in Late Imperial Local Siberian Museums, published by Cornell University Press in 2026. Marisa, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [55:43]
Dr. Marisa Carol Franz
Thank you. So much.
- [55:44]
New Books Network Host
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- [56:26]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello.
- [56:27]
Dr. Marisa Carol Franz
Look what TJ Maxx dragged in.
- [56:29]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
The Devil Wears Prada 2 is more now streaming on Disney plus and Hulu.
- [56:33]
Dr. Marisa Carol Franz
We are digital. We are downloadable. We are streamable.
- [56:37]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
The fashion event of the year is certified fresh. Pull yourself together. We have work to do. Critics say it's smart and witty and the perfect sequel. That's all. Get Runway ready for The Devil Wears Prada 2 on Disney and Hulu. Rated PG 13.