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[INDIGENOUS PEOPLE OF AMERICA] Indeitsy Severnoi Ameriki: Ot rodovogo obshchestva k klassovomu [i.e. North American Indians: From Tribal to Class Society]

Petrova-Averkieva, J.

Item #2501

Moscow: Nauka, 1974. 348 pp.: ill. 22×15 cm. In original full cloth with colored lettering and illustration. Fine.

First and only edition. One of 4500 copies. Cover design by A. Kovrizhkin.
The monograph is written by Julia Petrova-Averkieva (1907–1980), the leading Soviet anthropologist of North American Indians and a woman of tough life. She was born into a family of
Onega Pomor peasants in the Russian North and spoke Karelian fluently. In 1925, Julia Averkieva was enrolled in the ethnographic department of the Leningrad State University, where she studied with Vladimir Tan-Bogoraz and Lev Sternberg. In 1929, she graduated from the university specializing in Finno-Ugric peoples, and was sent for a two-year internship at Columbia University.
There she studied with Franz Boas and took part in a six-month trip to Vancouver Island to study the Kwakiutl people and lived among them. Upon returning to the USSR, she entered the graduate school of the Academy of Sciences and was attached to the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography. She worked on a candidate dissertation under the leadership of Nikolai Matorin and Vladimir Tan-Bogoraz. In early 1932, Averkieva published her first scientific article dedicated to ethnology and physical anthropology in the magazine ‘Soviet Ethnography’. In late 1935, she married Apollon Petrov, researcher of the USSR Academy of Sciences specializing in ancient Chinese philosophy. In 1935, Julia Petrova-Averkieva published her thesis ‘Slavery among the Tribes of the Northwestern Coast of North America’. In 1936, she was expelled from the Komsomol for political reasons and fired from work. For two years she worked as a librarian at the State Public Library (now Russian National Library). In 1937, she returned to scientific work. During World War II, she first was evacuated from Leningrad to Moscow, then to Povolzhye. From May 1942 to September 1943 and from 1945 to July 1947 she lived in Chongqing along with her husband sent as a diplomatic worker in China. In 1947, Julia Petrova-Averkieva was arrested. Imprisoned, she gave birth and lost a child who was sent to the orphanage. In 1949, she was sentenced to 5 years in a GULAG camp in the Mordovian ASSR and then in Siberia. She returned to Moscow in 1954 and was fully rehabilitated two years later, getting access to scientific work. In 1962, she submitted a doctoral dissertation ‘Decomposition of the Family Community and the Formation of Class Relations among the Indians of the Northwestern Coast of North America”.
Later she headed North American Studies at the Institute of Ethnography in Moscow. She took part in many international congresses on anthropology and ethnography, was a member of the Permanent Council of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences and was the editor-in-chief of the magazine ‘Soviet Ethnography’ in 1966–1980. Despite years of repression, Petrova-Averkieva remained a Marxist influenced by Lewis H. Morgan. This book contains her analysis of various Native American tribes, including ethnogenesis, occupations, social systems, unions and conflicts, etc. As a Marxist scientist, she elaborates on the four main options for the collapse of the primitive societies and the formation of class relations. Lists of 5 maps and 17 illustrations are published at the end of the book.

Copies are located in LoC, Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Alaska Fairbanks, Cornell, Michigan, Wisconsin, Duke, North Carolina, Illinois, Chicago, Maryland, Missouri, Kansas Universities.

Price: $750.00