6. Order out of Chaos: Anthropology and Politics of Sergei M. Shirokogoroff

This chapter analyses the political pamphlets of Sergei Shirokogoroff, published and distributed during the turbulent time of the Russian Civil War when Shirokogoroff was an officer of the White-led Far Eastern Republic. The portrait of the ethnographer which emerges from these recently discovered writings sits at odds with all other biographies of his life. His political writings were in a sense concealed by the scholar himself since many did not appear in bibliographies of his academic production. The texts points to an unresolved paradox in his writing and thinking wherein he vacillated between libertarian and authoritarian accounts of social life. Set with the war-ridden epoch in which he lived; the political pamphlets help situate an ethnography of identity at the start of the 20th Century. The paper is illustrated with two diagrams, a sketch and five photographs.