From Tsarist Russia to the Kolyma Republic: Gender, Colonialism, and the Making of a Female Anthropologist in Dina Brodskaia’s Siberian Travel Accounts

Abstract This article investigates how women scholars reshaped power dynamics in Russia’s Northeast Asia by focusing on the Siberian fieldwork and scientific contributions of Dina Brodskaia, a trained physician, anthropologist, and the wife of the political exile, Vladimir Jochelson. Their 1900 to 1902 trip to the “Kolyma Republic,” as her husband’s fellow political convicts called northeast Siberia, began a transformative stage of her career. Traveling by dog sleds from the Okhotsk port of Gizhiga to Kolyma as part of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, Brodskaia contributed significantly to colonial knowledge on Siberian and Far Eastern Indigenous women through photography and anthropometric studies. This article argues that Brodskaia’s background and identity were crucial to her unique access to Indigenous women’s quarters, informing the direction and authority of her research. Her use of the composite ethnographic approach—a blend of Russian exilic ethnography, Boasian methodology, and German anthropology—illuminates how marginalized women’s gendered participation can expand the methodological scope of colonial science. Ultimately, Brodskaia's experiences reveal how female explorers presented themselves as self‐proclaimed civilizers through the biomedical discourse of imperial modernization, both reproducing and challenging colonial tropes about Europeanness and indigeneity.