Indianism

This was my Ph.D. project at the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology at Stanford University. I called it “Playing and Nothing: European Appropriations of Native American Cultures in the Late 20th Century” (see Table of Contents and References). My readers were Professors Sylvia Yanagisako, Ian Hodder, Richard White, and Matthew Snipp. The theoretical thrust of the dissertation and of this page is the questioning of the metaphysical notion of “culture” as always implying the “boxes” of cultural differences and the reaffirming of the notion of holism in opposition to the underlying theme of Unwrapping the Sacred Bundle: Essays on the Disciplining of Anthropology, edited by Sylvia Yanagisako and Daniel Segal, 2004).

At Stanford, I was working very hard trying to make sense of a phenomenon many people even do not know exists. Virtually each and every country of Europe has a community of young and not so young people who consider traditional cultures of Native North American Indians their lifestyle. They are manual workers, teachers, scholars, artists, petty buisnessmen, and what have you. They are called Indianists or Euro-Indians. Native Americans derogatorily call them “wannabe Indians,” but many American Indians are friends with their overseas aficionados. Some Indianists are rather flaky, others are extremely motivated. Some go for the sheer form, others look into the content. Some travel to Native American reservations in the U.S. and Canada, others have never left their home town and have little interest in seeing a “real” Indian. Still others moved to North America to live near, for or off of Native Americans. Some are adopted into Native American families, others claim to be Indians in flesh and blood.

I was one of Russian Indianists up until 1991. Or maybe I was their captive… Or a primitive anthropologist not yet separated from a native. It is hard to say now. What matters to me more is that this is an unacknowledged phenomenon of European culture, American history, Indian-White relations, and modernity. It has extended its tentacles through many spheres of life since the very discovery of America.

So far, I do not have a clear theory of why people immerse into a distant culture sometimes to a point of developing almost a Ghost-Dance-like frenzy. My Stanford dissertation is an attempt to put theoretical, historical and ethnographic things together and prepare to integrate primitivism into modernism and post-primitivism into post-modernism. I have developed my own set of concepts, for none were available from earlier anthropologists.

I posted some of my publications as well as research papers below. A short version of one of these articles was translated into Russian under the title “Double Identity” and published in an Indianist almanac “First Americans.” Another article entitled “Indians Declared a War Against Indianists” regarding the implications of the Declaration of War Against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality (1997) for European Indianism was also published in Russian by First Americans. In it, I suggested that Indianists should respond with their own declaration, which did not take much time to devise. See Declaration of the Indianists of Russia (2000) in Russian (Link) and in my English translation. The funniest thing is that nobody read my text closely, and the declaration was a fully spontaneous development from within Russian Indianism. An Internet discussion of the Lakota Declaration of War can be found at link.

At Stanford, I taught a class on this topic to a group of mostly Native American undergrads (see Syllabus). Some of the photographs from my field trips to Russia, Bulgaria, Poland, Lithuania, and Belgium are now available. Anyone is welcome to drop a line or two into my blog.

ERNAS-2003.pdf

extessay-1996.pdf