Near and Desired Things: Shamanism in Late Imperial Local Siberian Museums

Near and Desired Things reveals nineteenth-century Siberian museums, built on Indigenous land and increasingly populated by political exiles, as active sites of ethnographic knowledge-making and centers of scientific research, regional identity, and colonial authority.Rather than collecting from distant colonies, these institutions concentrated on surrounding communities, their tools, beliefs, and everyday lives, to configure ideas about what counted as legitimate knowledge. Marisa Karyl Franz traces how Siberian museums helped construct shamanism as an ethnographic category.Shamans, while familiar and embedded in local space, were recast as icons of cultural otherness or representatives of an imagined primitive past.Through the evolving languages of science, anthropology, and empire, the local was abstracted and exported, feeding global museum networks and shaping modern anthropology.Yet, the museums held onto the intimacy of place, preserving tensions between familiarity and spectacl