Reconsidering Centers and Peripheries: I. M. Pul’ner and the Jewish Section of the State Museum of Ethnography in Leningrad

This paper explores the scholarly legacy of I.M. Pul`ner, the director of the Jewish Section of the State Museum of Ethnography in Leningrad in the later 1930’s. As director, Pul’ner curated the 1939 exhibit “The Jews in Tsarist Russia and the USSR,” and hoped to create a traveling ethnographic exhibit that would reach Jewish provincial audiences far outside of Leningrad. Although Pul’ner consistently echoed the party line in his curatorial work, archival records suggest that he was strongly influenced by the disgraced “bourgeois” ethnographer S. An-sky. In surveying Pul’ner’s professional trajectory, this paper seeks to identify intellectual continuities between the pre- and post-revolutionary periods and to reflect on the significance of the Jewish Section relative to the Jewish ethnographic activities carried out in Soviet locales far from the former Imperial-era center.