Anthro Notes / From an Email to Advisor
“I want to bring into the manuscript of my dissertation a Russian anthropologist, like you did in Agitating Images. The name I heard in the field most often was Lyudmila Saburova - not the Irkutsk contemporary scientist but the one who was studying the Russians in Priangarie in the 1960s, before and after the flood. I began researching her. The anthropology she did, correct me if I am wrong, was in a lot of ways descriptive, like, I think, much of the Russians ethnography at the time. I do not know if she has any grand theory in any of her works (for me, that would be a gift, but I don't think that this should be the case here).
In her obituary, written by a colleague, I read that she lived in a passage room (if this is the correct English expression; проходная комната) with her adult son because "she did not think she was deserving" of improving her living conditions all the while being a party official who could afford to demand a better apartment. I wonder if this is a female or a Soviet-intelligentsia modesty, or both (or neither). The obituary also states that she believed till the end in the high ideals and in humanity. The obituary begins with the statement though that she did not communicate with any one of her former colleagues on any regular basis in the last ten years of her life. So there is a little bit of contradiction between the statement that she believed in ideals until the end and the information that she had not, apparently, disclose her beliefs to anyone in the last years of her life. Fascinating. Even if she will not make a path into this rendition of my work (I still hope that I can at least mention her), I found myself wanting to know more about Saburova.”
(Keeping the excerpt here to find easily what little I have written about Saburova.)
