Narrative Objects is concerned with the conversations that arise when artists, scholars and museum practitioners come together with historic objects. Its focus is a unique mammoth ivory model of yhyakh – the annual celebration of the Sakha people in the Russian Far East – which has been in the collection of the British Museum since 1867. Almost 150 years later the model was loaned to the National Museum of the Arts of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) for exhibition and public engagement. As Sakha people revisit past histories and reconstitute cultural knowledge following decades of Soviet rule, this book considers narratives generated by the return of the model which speak to wider concerns in anthropology, material culture studies and history about how knowledge is both suppressed and engaged with. The book also explores how art can be a focus for cultural pride, how skilled practices are entwined with oral histories, and how historic objects can contribute to wider processes of cultural revival. The chapters draw on fieldwork, museum and archival research in Sakha (Yakutia), Paris and London.

Narrative Objects is particularly relevant to scholars of anthropology and museum studies as well those with an interest in the subarctic and post-Soviet states.

Tatiana Argounova-Low is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen, UK. As an Indigenous Sakha scholar, she conducts her work in her homeland - Sakha (Yakutia) - and other parts of Siberia. Her academic interests include questions of ethnic identity and nationalism, mobility and transport, and art and creativity in Siberia.

Alison K. Brown holds a personal chair in Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen, UK. As a museum anthropologist her work brings together people with collections separated by time and distance and draws on fieldwork in Canada, the USA, the Russia Federation, and Scotland. She is co-editor of Museum Worlds: Advances in Research.