Some Questions of Agro-Ethnographic Research

Abstract

At the Agrarian Symposium of the Seventh International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnographic Sciences, there was a discussion of methods of study of agrarian ethnography. A majority of the participants in the symposium concentrated their attention on the development of general principles for ethnographers and other specialists in the history of agriculture with respect to the description of the fundamental agricultural processes and of implements, terminology, bibliography, etc. Soviet ethnographers directed the attention of the symposium to the fact that questions relating to technique of study of agrarian ethnography must be considered not in themselves, but as derivatives of the principles on the basis of which this field of folk culture is studied, and that before developing unified methodological rules, a general approach to understanding the basic processes in the history of agriculture must be established. Agrarian ethnographers thus far have no such general approach or general principles. By using a large quantity of formal-typological data on plowing implements and other features of agriculture, they draw up maps showing the prevalence of these phenomena, and models of historical development, or genealogies, on the basis of which conclusions, sometimes highly significant, are derived in the realm of ethnic culture and ethnogenesis, as well as on the development of the level of agriculture.