ed note: as part of a new initiative examining how theory gets made, we are featuring interviews with recent Anthropological Theory authors, inquiring into their writing and thinking process. This interview, with Vida Savoniakaitė (Lithuanian Institute of History)  about her article “Challenges in empire: Eduards Volters’ ethnography on Lithuania, 1882–1918″ (2023), is the fifth of these interviews. See here for others.

1. (Background) Could you say a bit about your own trajectory, and research interests?

My studies of fine arts at the Vilnius Academy of Arts raised the question of how individuals and nations interpret the meanings of culture, especially by exploring ornaments as emblems of distinctive cultural patterns. Doing my Phd at Lithuanian Institute of History and Vytautas Magnus University, I turned in an anthropological approach on the issues of local communities’ patterns and cultures in space and time. Later, I researched in the libraries of Oxford University (2008) and Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale (2017, 2019) and explored Jack Goody’s idea of how writing helps a community to achieve political goals. Tim Ingold’s discussions about innovations in ethnography have always intrigued me. Through the historical texts of the Latvian ethnographer and archaeologist Eduards Volters this intrigue increased. Volters was the first to not only study Lithuanian and Latvian ethnicity, but also institutionalise Lithuanian anthropology – he gave lectures in ethnography at St Petersburg University, the University of Lithuania, and Vytautas Magnus University. My research trajectory is primarily focused on the perspectives of theoretical connections in anthropological works, as well as the origins and epistemology of Lithuanian anthropology and ethnology. These issues are intertwined with my broader research interests: history and theory of ethnology, ethnicity and nationalism, cultural history and heritage, economic anthropology, and art anthropology.

2. (Backstage) What drove you to write this specific article?

At the 2018 conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists in Stockholm, the renowned Austrian anthropologist Andre Gingrich noted the similarity between the Latvian ethnographer and archaeologist Eduards Volters’ concept of the soul of the nation and the anthropological and philosophical perspectives of Johannes Gottfried von Herder. He provided this observation as part of a commentary on my presentation on the ethnographic, anthropological, and ethnological research of the Lithuanian Scientific Society. I was talking about how, in the development of Lithuanian science, ethnography, anthropology, ethnology, folklore and statistics were, of course, linked to the discourses of world anthropology and had their own distinctive features. I have often been asked in international discussions why little is written about how Lithuanian research fits into the history of anthropological research from theoretical perspectives. The discussion of Volters’ legacy and my new research have opened up unexplored problems in anthropology with regard to the historical theoretical perspectives of ethnography. I thought that maybe Volters’ approach to social relations in ethnography would be of interest to a broader audience than just those interested in Lithuania.

3. (Contribution) In brief, in which set of theoretical discussions the article engages and what is the article’s contribution to those debates?

Eduards Volters’ critique of ethnography reminded me of Tim Ingold’s contemporary position that observation in ethnography brings both objective and subjective data. Volters theoretical discussions argue that anthropologists retain a particular ability to manipulate social relations and observations in ethnographic research. Volters’ approach is a bit similar to Ingold’s much later suggestion ‘we really need a new word, something like anthropo-ontogenetic’ (Ingold 2015: 122).

In particular, first of all, Volters openly criticized the positivists of the Russian Empire, who rejected observation in ethnography in favour of writing down as many facts as possible, in the sense that this would make research objective rather than subjective. Volters was interested in the ethnography of European academic schools. Volters encouraged the study of Lithuanians and Latvians, as did the famous Polish ethnographer Oscar Kolberg, who kept a diary and observed people in his ethnographic research.

Secondly, Volters interpreted the statistics of the researchers of the Russian Imperial Geographical Society in his own way and manipulated social relations: he designed questionnaires to take into account the specific space of each province. The focus of his research on the economic issues of the peasantry had links not only with the political interests of the Russian Empire, but also with the patriotic discourses of the statisticians known in Germany. Most importantly, Volters included Lithuanian place names in his statistical summaries in the Lithuanian language, recording that Lithuanians were living there when the censorship of the Russian Empire forbade the printing of Latin scripts, claiming that these studies would serve for future academy and generations. These pieces provide answers, according to Ingold, that as human beings we can aspire to truth about the world only by way of an emancipation that takes us from it and leaves us strangers to ourselves (Ingold 2014: 387). Volters was condemned by the Russian Empire for his participation in the Lithuanian national movement, including themes of emancipation in ethnographic theory, and printing Lithuanian texts in his books.

4. (Expansion) Why does theory matter (to you and/or in a broad sense)?

Theory, in a broad sense, helps me to understand how unexpected and peculiar phenomena emerge in society. This particular study of Eduards Volters’ legacy has revealed how and to what extent ideas that are familiar in anthropological theory have found resonance in the centres and peripheries. Our discussions on the interpretations of ethnographic and statistical theory opened up not only anthropological theory, but also the social relations, ethnicity, culture, expectations, and nationalism of Lithuanians and Latvians, and the politics of Russian empire. The study of the intellectual biography of Volters, an anthropologist activist, highlighted the issues of decolonisation. The analysis of Volters’ theoretical approach reveals the little-studied origins of anthropological theory and history in Lithuania and beyond.