Аннотация:By the summer of the year 2000 a hundred years had passed since an expedition set out for north-eastern Siberia.Organized by the American Museum of Natural History, and subsidized by the president of the Museum, the banker Morris Jesup, the Jesup North Pacific Expedition took its name from him.Two Russian scholars, V. I. Iokhel'son and V. G. Bogoraz, received invitations to join the expedition.Both were well prepared for such an undertaking by their years in Kolyma, where they had been exiled in the 1890s for participating in the radical political movement, "The People's Will."Both had acquired field work experience during the Iakutsk expedition led by Sibiriakov (1895-97), and they were already known to the Western scholarly world as researchers into the life, folklore and languages of the ancient northern tribes.Both were ready to devote themselves completely to the study of these "primitive, half-exterminated, and almost completely unknown" peoples, regarding this activity as one of the "social tasks of the epoch.
