| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Francine Hirsch. Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union. (Culture and Society after Socialism.) Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 2005. Pp. xviii, 367. Cloth $59.95, paper $27.95.
Having written extensively on the topic of the book under review, and having read a spate of recent works that cover the same ground while offering few new insights, I must admit that I began Francine Hirsch's study with just a bit of skepticism. Was there anything more to say on the topic? This concern quickly dissipated. Hirsch has produced a first-rate piece of scholarship that not only breaks new ground but does so in a highly compelling and readable fashion. It is a most welcome addition to the literature, and one that I highly recommend both to those who have long studied ethno-national identity construction in the USSR, as well as to newcomers to the field.	1
Using the "census, map, museum" framing found in Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities (1983), as well as a Foucauldian approach to biopolitics and the art of governing (i.e. governmentality) in the production of knowledge, Hirsch investigates the construction and institutionalization of ethno-national identity categories in the USSR. Rather than study political elites and their pronouncements on the "national question," Hirsch focuses her attention on the anthropologists, geographers, and ethnographers involved in the discussions regarding the boundary formations around these identity categories as they were debated and reconfigured in censuses, on maps, and in museum exhibits from 1905 to 1941.	. . .

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