Vintage Portraits of the Indigenous Peoples of the Far East From the Late 19th Century

Lev Yakovlevich Sternberg (1861–1927) was a Russian ethnographer and anthropologist best known for his fieldwork among the indigenous peoples of the Far East, particularly the Nivkh (Gilyak), Orok, and Ainu peoples of Sakhalin Island.

Sternberg was originally trained in law and became involved in revolutionary socialist activities in the 1880s. Because of his political activism, he was arrested by Tsarist authorities and exiled to Sakhalin Island in 1889 — a penal colony in Russia’s Far East. What began as a punishment became a formative ethnographic expedition.

During his years in exile, Sternberg turned his attention to studying the indigenous peoples of Sakhalin and nearby regions. This period effectively became an ethnographic expedition, though it was self-initiated and conducted under exile conditions rather than as an official mission.

The Nivkh (Gilyak) were his primary focus, but he also gathered material on the Orok, Evenk, and Ainu peoples. Sternberg lived closely with local communities, learned their languages, and documented their myths, rituals, kinship systems, and spiritual beliefs. His work was among the first to emphasize participant observation, a method that later became central to modern anthropology.

Sternberg’s expedition established him as one of the founders of Russian ethnography. His data provided invaluable insight into pre-industrial Far Eastern Siberian cultures before their traditional ways were disrupted by colonization. He was later a professor at Petrograd University (now Saint Petersburg State University) and a founder of the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera)’s modern ethnographic collections.