The Bridegrooms of Ethnography: Projects for a New Ethnographic Paradigm in the Late 1920s

Abstract

The first period of Soviet ethnography’s existence, the 1920s, proved to be extremely fruitful and pluralistic in terms of theories. Four centres of scientific and ideological discourse-generation were active in forming ethnographic paradigms: the Leningrad schools of Volkov and Sternberg-Bogoras, the Moscow school of Anuchin, and the authoritative Moscow ethnographer and administrator Petr Preobrazhensky. By the end of the period, outside pressure forced the schools to crystallise their paradigm projects in texts and public speeches. The most vocal were Bogoras’s project, which essentially identified ethnography with field research, the project of the Anuchin school, where the aim of ethnography was stated to be broad historical and cultural comparisons, the data for which would be collected in large, complex expeditions, short but with as broad a coverage as possible, and Preobrazhensky’s project, which raised the “comparative” method to the universal level, practically absorbing historical science. With their projects, the leaders of the schools drew boundaries between the future ethnography and related disciplines, but were unable to protect it from Marxist ideology, and this ultimately predetermined the failure of the proposed claims. An attempt at mimetic resistance by presenting ethnographic methods (“field” in Bogoras, “technical-statistical” in the followers of Anuchin, or “comparative ethnological” in Preobrazhensky) as an expression of Marxist materialist methodology (in the spirit of the philosophical movement of the mechanists) was a failure. This gave ethnography the reputation of a “non-Marxist” science, and contributed to the further defeat both of the schools of the 1920s and the institutions associated with them.