How Siberia is represented in collections found on Europeana
Some parts of the world are imaginary geographic locations to a greater extent compared to others. People rarely go there and, if they do, such visits are presented as unusual, or even heroic, adventures. Representations of such countries are usually prone to biases. They look like closed concepts with a limited number of characteristics, almost like caricatures.
I was born in Siberia in the second half of the 20th century, and I spent many years in this part of the world. My perception of ‘Siberia’ as a concept is usually broader than that of people who rarely think about this place.
This is because I travelled across this area. I met people who lived or travelled in Western and Eastern Siberia, who saw its northern, Polar areas and its southern territories. I listened to their stories, and I read books where different locations in Siberia were mentioned in different contexts and across various time periods. I met hundreds of students who came to Siberian Federal University, where I worked as a teacher. They were from the northern and southern parts of the area, sometimes from larger cities where their parents worked as professionals, and from smaller villages where people earned their living as hunters.
However, imagining how the collections on Europeana cover Siberia in texts, videos and images, it can be hypothesised that ‘Siberia’ as a concept should include a larger number of characteristics.
These could be connected to specific places, such as its natural and human history across modernity, the 20th century and contemporary period. Images and videos could represent people across various professional and demographic characteristics, in larger cities and smaller settlements. Artworks produced by Siberian artists or related to Siberia could be included. Ethnographic evidence related to specific ethnicities across this large geographic area is missing.
After all, this is a territory which covers thousands of square kilometres. In such cases, academics and cultural agencies usually want corpora to either be more representative or make their bias explicit, showing where and how the bias occurs and what its sources are. The collections relating to Siberia on Europeana show that the representation is skewed.
The images which come from European collections represent visual culture as defined by a small number of collections within large institutional collections. When such subcollections were shaped, it happened under the impact of historical, political or social circumstances. They were collected as a result of an expedition funded by an agency with its own strategic priorities, or brought to a museum by a scholar who was driven by a particular research question.
All corpora or collections are inherently biased. If a smaller sub-collection holds more records from a particular expedition, these images will come to the fore. They will shape automatic analysis results and they will impact how AI generated images will be produced.
Sources of Siberia-related images
The largest number of Siberia-related objects - around a fifth of about 5,500 records - come from the Swedish Ethnographic Museum.
The travellers who brought these objects to the museum in the second half of the 19th or early 20th centuries were Swedish explorers, who travelled along the Arctic coasts in the search of the Northeast Passage or a shipping route connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans.
Polar explorers, such as Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld, or geographers, such as Sten Bergman, were interested in Siberia from the perspective of the local peoples who lived along the coasts, hunted reindeer, and provided explorers with the necessary food, clothes or simple equipment.
Sometimes the name Siberia and the connotations of a harsh climate and scarcity of people, probably connected to the previous objects, is attached to geographical areas which lie 6,000 kilometres apart - as the Swedish Ethnographic Museum uses this term for the Arctic coast and for the peoples living in the Western Siberia near the Volga river.
These objects come from the collection of Frederik Martin, a 19th century diplomat and orientalist.
Early 20th century photography
20th century photographs in the collections of the Finnish Heritage Agency, account for an important part of Siberia-related collections.
These photographs show how cities were integrated in Siberian landscapes, featuring the elements of formal architecture, showing the establishment of Russian formal institutions in Siberian provinces, such as the bishop’s house in the second photograph, and demonstrated the number of households in new settlements.
Such photographs, disseminated as postcards, were probably produced with an additional purpose of attracting new settlers to Siberian provinces.
I remember these wooden houses from the time when I was young. They were everywhere: in downtown, featuring beautiful aged carvings on weathered shutters, and in the suburbs, where smoke was seen coming from chimneys and old well pumps with water streams were helpful when children, playing next to buildings, needed a drink.
The majority of these photographs were made by a Russian photographer early in the 20th century. These were probably disseminated across the Russian Empire and reached Finnish heritage institutions through formal imperial channels, such as legal deposit, when a publisher submitted a number of copies to libraries.
They show how Siberian cities were landscaped, what nature looked like in these locations, and how infrastructural projects, such as the Trans-Siberian railway developed. I could spot the railway bridge in the city where I was born. It was built at the end of the 19th century, and it still existed when I was young.
Other photographs of major cities located 1,000 kilometres apart and spanning over 3,000 kilometres feature a diverse set of architecture and colonial ethnography.
This sub-collection includes the photos produced by Finnish photojournalists, such as Jaakko Julkunen.
This photograph shows a bread driver in Eastern Siberia, a place of harsh winters. A contrast between the driver’s face, the everyday routine of delivery, the standardised shape of bread loaves and the figure of the horse bred for survival in the cold makes this photograph especially poignant.
Even with standardised and institutionalised social practices, or probably because of them, this place is difficult to live in. A number of interpretations or questions triggered by this photo make it a long-remembered artwork.
Landscapes and landmarks
Siberian cities and settlements at the end of the 19th century are represented through photography organised by French archaeologist Joseph de Baye during his work and travels in Russia.
This collection includes de Baye’s drawing of an icon from a Siberian church near Omsk.
Another small Siberian collection of Deutsche Fotothek features landscapes near Lake Baikal. These are photos taken in the 1960s and the 1970s with pastoralist scenes mixed with the fashions of the period.
A smaller collection of rural life photography from an Estonian museum requires disambiguation as it seems to erroneously index an agricultural settlement in the south of Russia from the 1920s as a Siberian village. Such large apples could not be grown in a Siberian village early in the 20th century.
Natural history collections
Herbaria from Siberia are found in natural history collections across Europe. In particular, large numbers are found in British collections such as the Natural History Museum, London, the Royal Botanical Garden Edinburgh and the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew.
Precise locations are rarely specified for these collections. However, it is not always possible to know the exact locations of the plants in herbaria as the natural history collections were assembled many years ago. Some of the records index plants from herbaria as located in Southern America. Their relation to Siberia is obviously erroneous.
