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This paper sets out to discuss the objects/areas/models/notions of Europe and Eurasia from the standpoint of a critical historical anthropology, in order to assess their intellectual usefulness, heuristic validity, and correspondence to actual social and historical realties. This will be done through reviewing and assessing the concept of Eurasia as it is developed in the recent works of Chris Hann. By confronting his arguments, I will articulate why the notion of Eurasia and its ontological status in this form is not entirely conceptually and historically convincing, even if it is thought-provoking (or even politically desirable). I will explain why considering Europe as a part of a macro-region--instead of as a macro-region itself--is not convincing, and thereby reaffirm the specificities which make Europe a discernible object/area/model/notion of historical-anthropological study; specificities that for the time being prove it heuristically unsuitable and unsustainable to substitute the notion of Europe with that of Eurasia (or "Western Eurasia"), as Chris Hann seems to advocate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the eighteenth century, Western European travelers enjoyed unprecedented access to Siberia and many of those who visited believed themselves to have observed a clear boundary between Europe and Asia. This article examines the books of eight such travelers and explores how they categorized those living in Siberia into one of two categories, European or Asian. These travelers interpreted their observations in ways that led them to conclude that a clear binary division existed in the region, separating the European Russian settlers and government from the Asiatic indigenous peoples. Presenting their work as new information, they reproduced older categorizations, repackaged within the scientific language of the Enlightenment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]