Blog Post Title One

Fig. 7.1b “Petr Ivanovich’s daughter and daughter-in-law riding reindeer to look for lost deer. Holding long sticks = Tiawun used for mounting the deer”. Photo by Ethel Lindgren, Ulugit River, 24 June 1932 (MAA P.78208.LIN). © Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge

The river rises near the watershed between the Yenisey River basin and that of the Lena River and flows north and then west across the Central Siberian Plateau. In its upper course, the river has a broad valley with numerous sandbanks, but after turning west its valley narrows, and there are numerous gorges and rapids.

Ethel Lindgren, a Cambridge social psychology graduate, and Oscar Mamen, the Norwegian explorer and trader (and later, her husband), conducted social anthropological research from their base in Hǎilāěr, Hūlúnbèiěr province, between 1929 and 1932. Lindgren’s most well-known work is from her and Mamen’s three short expeditions northwards to stay with Reindeer Ewenkis in summer 1929, winter 1931, and spring 1932. On each of these trips they also spent a number of weeks with the Russian Cossack communities along the Argun [É’ěrgǔnà] River. The routes of these expeditions often overlapped with the earlier paths of the Shirokogoroffs (Fig. 7.12). During their time in Hūlúnbèiěr, Lindgren and Mamen amassed a staggering visual archive of 8,813 photographs covering all minorities in the area including Reindeer Ewenkis.10 The collection is not only notable for the high quality and pleasing artistic composition of its images, but that it provides some of the earliest known photographs of the diverse peoples and landscapes of the region now known as Hūlúnbèiěr, Inner Mongolia. As with the Shirokogoroffs, Lindgren and Mamen also made a large number of field reports and Lindgren collected over 200 material artefacts.

https://books.openbookpublishers.com/10.11647/obp.0150/ch7.xhtml

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/oct/03/the-evenki-people-custodians-of-the-resources-of-yakutia-photo-essay