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 6047 Silsby Hall
Hanover, NH 03755
Phone: 603-646-2550
Fax: 603-646-1140
sergei.a.kan@dartmouth.edu
Much of my ethnographic and archival research and writing in the 1980s-1990s
focused on the culture and history (and especially religion, both indigenous
and Christian) of the Tlingit of Southeastern Alaska and resulted in numerous
articles and two monographs. While I continue to work on these subjects and
maintain close ties with a number of Tlingit families, my most recent
publications deal with a somewhat different set of issues, such as the
relationship between Tlingit and anthropologists as well as American attitudes
toward images of and relations with the Tlingit in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries (as exemplified by the maritime tourism). Eventually I hope to write
a book on the cultural history of tourism in a multiethnic Alaskan town of
Sitka. A long-standing interest in the peoples and cultures of the entire
Pacific Northwest Coast has led me to co-editing (with an American and a French
colleague) a volume of essays representing some of the major recent work in the
field, this book, Coming to Shore: Northwest Coast Ethnology, Traditions and
Visions, was published in 2004.
My graduate training at the University of Chicago under Raymond Fogelson and
many years of teaching courses on Native North American ethnology and
ethnohistory, have inspired me to co-edit (with Pauline Turner Strong) a series
of papers by several generations of North Americanists who have also been
trained by the same mentor. This volume, which honors Fogelson and is entitled
Perspectives on Native North America: Cultures, Histories, and Representations,
was published in 2006.
Finally, having always had a strong interest in the history of anthropology,
I have been for the last few years working on an intellectual biography of Lev
Shternberg, one of the leading Russian anthropologists of the late imperial and
early Soviet period. He attracted me as both a scholar who played a major role
in modernizing Russia's famous Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (in St.
Petersburg) and training the first generation of Soviet ethnographers, but also
as someone who became an ethnographer under rather unusual circumstances, i.e.,
while serving an exile sentence on a remote island in the Russian Far East in
the 1890s. A book manuscript, which draws on Shternberg's published works of
various genres as well as the manuscripts and papers I found in his archive
located in St. Petersburg, has recently been completed and will be published in
2008. In addition I have recently published several articles (in English
and Russian journals) on the history of Russian/Soviet anthropology
In the fall of 2007 and 2008 I conducted ethnographic and archival research
in southeastern Alaska on a new topic: a collection of photographs taken by
Vincent Soboleff (a Russian-American photographer) in a Tlingit community of
Killisnoo/Angoon in the 1890s-1920s. This project will result in a book
entitled Vincent Soboleff: A Russian-American Photographer in Tlingit
Country.
Selected Recent Publications
Selected Recent Publications
- Nineteenth-Century Russian Orthodox Missionaries at Home and Abroad: the
Case of Siberian and Alaskan Indigenous Peoples. 2001. Pp. 173-200 In Of
Religion and Identity: Missions, Conversion, and Tolerance in the Russian
Empire. Robert Geraci and Michael Khodarkovsky, eds. Ithaca: Cornell University
Press.
- Strangers to Relatives: The Adoption and Naming of Anthropologists in
Native North America. 2001. Ed. by Sergei Kan. Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press.
- Friendship, Family, and Fieldwork: One Anthropologist's Adoption by Two
Tlingit Families. 2001. Pp. 185-217 In Strangers to Relatives: The Adoption and
Naming of Anthropologists in Native North America. Sergei Kan, ed.. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press.
- The "Russian Bastian" and Boas: or Why Shternberg's "The Social
Organization of the Gilyak" Never Appeared Among the Jesup Expedition
Publications. 2001. Pp. 217-248 In Gateways:Exploring the Legacy of the Jesup
North Pacific Expedition, 1897-1902. William K. Fitzhugh and Igor Krupnik, eds.
Contributions to Circumpolar Anthropology 1. Arctic Studies Center, Smithsonian
Institution.
- Coming to Shore: Northwest Coast Ethnology, Traditios and Visions. Marie
Mauzé, Michael Harkin, and Sergei Kan, eds. Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press. 2004.
- It's Only Half a Mile from Savagery to Civilization: American Tourists and
Southeastern Alaska Natives in the Late Nineteenth Century. In Coming to Shore:
Northwest Coast Ethnology, Traditions and Visions. Marie Mauzé, Michael Harkin,
and Sergei Kan, eds. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2004.
- "Potlatch." Encyclopedia of American Indian Religious Traditions. Suzanne
J. Crawford and Dennis F. Kelley, eds. ABC CLIO. Pp. 728-734. 2005
- Perspectives on Native North America: Cultures, Histories, and
Representations. Sergei Kan and Pauline Turner Strong, eds.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2006.
- Perspectives on Native North America: Cultures, Histories, and
Representations. Sergei Kan and Pauline Turner Strong, eds. Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press. 2006.
- “My Old Friend in a Dead-end of Skepticism and Empiricism”: Boas, Bogoras,
and the Politics of Soviet Anthropology of the late 1920s-early 1930s.
Pp. 32-68 In History of Anthropology Annual. Vol. 2. Ed.
by Regna Darnell and Frederick Gleach. 2006. Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press.
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