Authors

Anna Smelova¹;  ¹ Georgetown University, United States

Discussion

The proposed paper investigates how women scholars reshaped power dynamics in Russia’s Northeast Asia, focusing on Siberian fieldwork and the scientific contributions of Dina Brodskaia (1864-1943), a trained physician, anthropologist, and wife of a political exile Vladimir Jochelson. Their 1900-1902 trip to the “Kolyma Republic,” as her husband’s fellow political convicts called northeast Siberia, began a transformative period in her career. Traveling by dog sleds from the Okhotsk port of Gizhiga to Kolyma as part of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition organized by the New York Museum of Natural History, Brodskaia significantly contributed to accumulating colonial knowledge on Siberian and Far Eastern Indigenous women through photography and anthropometric studies. As the paper shows, Brodskaia's experiences reveal how female explorers navigated their roles as self-proclaimed civilizers using the biomedical discourse of imperial modernization, both reproducing and challenging colonial tropes about Europeanness and indigeneity.