Orientalism in the Narratives of Russian Travelers and Intelligence Officers on Peoples of the North-West Caucasus in the Second Half of the 19th Century

Abstract

The article focuses on the influence that the orientalist stance of the early nineteenth-century explorers exerted on the way they selected ethnographic material for their descriptions of the peoples that inhabited the North-West Caucasus. Taking the cases of V.B. Bronevsky, a historian of the Don Cossacks who visited the Caucasus during one of his travels, and F.F. Tornau, a Caucasian Corps officer dispatched on an intelligence mission to the Black Sea littoral, I trace the development of two distinct branches of orientalism: “aesthetic” and “official”. These can demonstrate the shift from the romanticized artistic clichés about the Caucasus highlanders to the production of real ethnographic knowledge about the Circassians, Abazins, and Abkhazians. I argue that despite the persistence of clichés and images of pan-European Orientalism, the empirical collection of ethnographic material set the foundation for future scholarly concepts in the description of peoples, as well as their classification based on the ethnolinguistic criteria. The research draws both on published memoirs and on official reports kept in the Russian Military Historical Archive and the State Historical Museum.