Narrative Objects: The Sakha Summer Festival and Cultural Revitalization: Work in progress presentation

This presentation will focus on the AHRC-funded Narrative Objects: The Sakha Summer Festival and Cultural Revitalization project, which formally begins in January 2015. This project is led by the Department of Anthropology at University of Aberdeen and involves a partnership with the Department of Asia, British Museum, and the National Museum of the Arts, Yakutsk, Sakha Republic (Yakutiia), Russian Federation. The project’s focus is a unique mammoth ivory model of ysyakh, the summer festival of the Sakha (Yakut) people. Acquired at the Paris Exhibition of 1867, and now in the collection of the British Museum, this model is the earliest known depiction of ysyakh. During the Soviet era, many Sakha cultural expressions, including ysyakh, were suppressed, but recent cultural revitalization efforts and attempts to establish political autonomy have generated considerable interest in these expressions and in the intersection of their historic and contemporary forms.

This project involves the loan of the model for exhibition in Yakutsk and associated archival and ethnographic research to explore its historical and contemporary relevance. The wider objectives are:
- to explore the silencing of cultural memory during times of ideological oppression;
- to investigate the capacity of artefacts to support cultural revitalization;
- to examine the articulation of artefacts, cultural memory, narratives and silence and to ask how it might inform museum practice;

On 17 April 2015 the opening of Century Long Journey: The Ysyakh Model in the British Museum will take place at the National Museum of the Arts, Yakutsk. This work in progress presentation will report on the exhibition opening and initial responses to the model’s return to the Sakha Republic (Yakutiia).