A Legacy across Two Continents: The Poniatowski‐Arseniev Collection at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History

Abstract

This article explores the history of two ethnological collections from the Russian Far East at the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH), Smithsonian Institution, as a part of an ongoing multistep assessment process. Both collections, currently known under the names of their respective donors/collectors, Stanisław Poniatowski and Vladimir Arseniev, were shipped to the then‐U.S. National Museum in Washington in 1918, following the 1914 field trip by Dr. Stanisław Poniatowski to the Amur River area. Poniatowski’s fieldwork was cut short by World War I; only a portion of his collections arrived in Washington, with the rest taken to Warsaw. The two Smithsonian collections are very close to each other, particularly when compared to acquisitions from the Amur River area at other museums. The NMNH collections constitute a fraction of 500+ photographic, ethnographic, and documentary materials related to Poniatowski’s trip of 1914, with the rest now held at the Polish Ethnological Society in Wroclaw, Poland, and, perhaps, in Khabarovsk, Russia. This dispersed legacy may be “reunited” via today’s digital means, which is to pave the way for the next phase, namely, to engage Indigenous and local cultural experts from the Amur River region in knowledge coproduction and to make the collections accessible to the home communities surveyed by Poniatowski 110 years ago. Regretfully, prospects for such an effort remain distant in 2024 as Russia’s war against Ukraine continues.