Vladimir Jochelson

Vladimir Ilyich Jochelson (; , Vilnius - November 2, 1937, New York City) was a Russian ethnographer and researcher of the indigenous peoples of the Russian North.

Biography Jochelson came from a wealthy, religious Jewish family. He attended the Vilna Rabbinical Seminary, where he participated in the socialist, revolutionary group Narodnaya Volya. Compelled to leave Russia in 1875, he went first to Berlin and then in 1879 to Switzerland, where he remained four years, studying at Zurich and then teaching at a school on the Lake of Geneva, while keeping in touch with the revolutionary movement as editor of the Vyestnik Narodnoi Voli, which had a clandestine circulation in Russia. On his return to Russia in 1884 he was recognised, arrested and confined for three years in the Petro-Pavlovsk fortress in St. Petersburg, and in 1887 was sentenced by order of the czar to exile for ten years in northern Siberia, in the province of Yakutsk.

In Siberia Jochelson made a special study of the language, manners, and folk-lore of the aboriginal inhabitants, especially that of the Tungus, Yakuts, and the fast-disappearing Yukaghirs. His articles on those subjects began to attract attention, and in 1894 he and a fellow exile, Vladimir Bogoraz ("Tan", also of Jewish descent), were by special permission attached to the first expedition of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society (1894–97), which had been sent to that part of Siberia at the expense of a wealthy Russian promoter of art and science named Sibiryakov. On that expedition Jochelson discovered among the natives in the outlying regions two Yukaghir dialects then considered as extinct. The Imperial Geographical Society published his discoveries in the field of ethnology, while the linguistic reports of his investigation were acquired for publication by the Imperial Academy of Science. The expedition was intended to create a comprehensive record of the peoples being studied, and a very wide range of artefacts and material objects were collected, as well as the final ethnographies and written field-notes of the participants. Jochelson returned with the expedition to the United States, studying there the material which he and his wife, who accompanied him in the last journey, had collected.

Jochelson contributed extensively to scientific journals in Russian, German and English. In English his best-known full works are his volumes The Koryaks (1908) and The Yukaghir and Yukaghirized Tungus (1926) for the Jesup Expedition; his handbook Peoples of Asiatic Russia (1928) for the American Museum of Natural History; and Archeological Investigations in the Aleutian Islands (1925) and Archeological Investigations in Kamchatka (1928), both for the Carnegie Institution. His final work focussed on refining his work on the Aleut language, and preparing a study of the Kamchadal people. Although there are unexplained cultural, linguistic, and ethnological similarities between these groups, Jochelson's theory is now discounted by most scholars. Works Peoples of Asiatic Russia (1928)