14 Eight Ways to Catch a Seal: Fieldwork in Siberia in the Age of Enlightenment
In: Naturalists in the FieldSearch for other papers by Han F. Vermeulen in
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Abstract
In the course of the eighteenth century many state-sponsored research expeditions were dispatched to Siberia and other regions of the expanding Russian Empire. Starting in the 1710s, the participants and sometimes the sole executors of such expeditions were employed either by the Apothecary Chancellery or the Academy of Sciences. Their mission was to describe, catalogue, and collect everything of interest in the regions visited, primarily in the field of natural history but also in that of history, geography, antiquities, linguistics, and the emerging field of ethnography. Almost all naturalists conducting research in Siberia and environs produced ethnographic descriptions, which was unusal internationally but characteristic for the situation in Russia.