FORUM FOR ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURE

ANTROPOLOGICHESKIJ FORUM
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Antropologicheskij forum, 2016, no. 29

 

“PENELOPE’S CLOTH”: THE BOGORAS PROJECT FROM THE LATE 1920s–1930s

Elena Liarskaya

European University at St Petersburg
3 Gagarinskaya Str., St Petersburg, Russia
rica()eu.spb.ru

Abstract: This paper focuses on the history of the Leningrad ethnographic school in the 1920s–1930s. In Leningrad at that time, there were a number of institutions that had been founded by Vladimir Bogoras or with his active participation, such as the Faculty of Ethnography at the Geographical Institute at Leningrad State University, the Institute of the Peoples of the North and its predecessors, the Academic Research Association of the Institute of the Peoples of the North, the “Northern” Faculty of the Herzen Pedagogical Institute, etc. Based on both archival and published materials, the author argues that all these institutions were not uncoordinated and separate, but were established as parts of a well thought-out and integrated system created in order to merge research with practical tasks of modernization in the Far North. The article brings together and streamlines all the known facts about these institutions by using sources that are disconnected and sometimes hard to find. To some extent, the general picture that emerges from this analysis refutes the stereotype that ethnography in the Soviet Union in general, and in Leningrad in particular, ceased to exist after the infamous “discussion” of 1929.

Keywords: history of anthropology, Leningrad ethnographic school, Institute of the Peoples of the North, Academic Research Association of the Institute of the Peoples of the North, Northern Faculty of the Herzen Pedagogical Institute, Vladimir Bogoras.

To cite: Liarskaya E., 'Tkan Penelopy: proekt Bogoraza vo vtoroy polovine 1920-kh — 1930-kh gg.' [“Penelope’s Cloth”: The Bogoras Project from the Late 1920s–1930s], Antropologicheskij forum, 2016, no. 29, pp. 142–186.

URL: http://anthropologie.kunstkamera.ru/files/pdf/029/liarskaya.pdf