"Long Night at the Vepsian Museum is an ethnography that documents the history and current cultural struggles of the Veps people, a Finno-Ugric speaking minority community that lives in Russia’s Karelia region, on the border with Finland."
Samantha Lomb, EuropeNow
"Long Night at the Vepsian Museum, is a well-written and engaging contribution to the literature on Post-Soviet Russia and indigenous cultural production. Moreover, the book’s accessibility and clean prose will make it of interest to not only scholars of these fields, but also undergraduate educators looking for a snappy and thought-provoking syllabus addition."
A. Lorraine Kaljund, EuropeNow
"By juxtaposing relations between Veps craftspeople and the czarist and soviet states with traditions of reciprocity with master spirits that ensured Karelia’s natural bounty, Davidov offers an altogether new paradigm for understanding Indegeneity in the modern world."
E. J. Vajda, Choice Connect, June 2018 vol. 55 # 10
"One of Davidov’s strengths lies in the place that she chose as a base for fieldwork: the local museum. Despite the idea that such institutions present only rigid, official discourses about real and lively cultures, what Davidov successfully reveals is that behind the facade of public exhibitions, there is an important vein of hidden and non-official cultural knowledge transfer and production taking place."
Tatiana Safonova, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
"Long Night at the Vepsian Museum represents a solid analysis of Veps ‘resource biography’ which connects landscape, industry, and practices of remembering as intertwined local resources. This book would be particularly relevant for anthropology students due to the author’s valuable self-reflections on the nature of fieldwork and ‘collaborative ethnography.’"
Anna Varfolomeeva, Tyumen State University, Anthropology of East Europe Review
"Davidov uses a small Vepsian museum on a northern Russian lake as a compelling site for reflections on indigeneity, statecraft, and history. Highly recommended!"
Bruce Grant, New York University
"In clear and compelling prose, Davidov weaves together experiences of past and present, cosmology and politics, and nature and culture among 'the forest folk' of northern Russia. The result is at once a magnificent account of cultural survival in and after the Soviet Union, and a highly innovative contribution to scholarship about global indigeneity in the twenty-first century."
Douglas Rogers, Yale University
"This important contribution to anthropology, indigenous studies, and museology offers a rich ethnographic and historical account of a twenty-first century Vepsy community. Beginning and ending in the 'living history museum' in which Veps and visitors engage with this community's complex past, it tells a compelling story of a people contending with the legacy of others' imaginings alongside the remembered and lived realities of who they are."
Andrew Walsh, Western University
