Wearing Folk Costumes as a Mimetic Practice in Russian Ethnographic Field Studies

Abstract

Wearing folk costumes was a mimicry practiced by certain mid-19th-century Russian ethnographers and folklorists. The most consistent of these was Pavel Yakushkin, who posed as a peddler when doing fi eld work in villages. In this he followed the instructions written by the famous writer, historian, and antiquary Mikhail Pogodin. The sources of Pogodin’s ideas on how a folklorist and ethnographer should look were the Slavophiles’ perception of the Russian costume, Alexander Pushkin’s habit of wearing a red shirt, as well as court jokes and folk legends about top-ranking persons wearing folk costumes. While the changing of clothes fi rst used by Yakushkin was later adopted by other ethnographers, such as Sergey Maksimov and Pavel Rybnikov, political reasons prevented it from spreading. Nevertheless, in the 1870s, at the peak of the movement of the Narodniki (Populists), using folk costumes re-emerged as a way of bringing the intelligentsia closer to the peasants and workers. The erosion and eventual disappearance of class boundaries in Soviet Russia made such ways of winning confi dence pragmatically irrelevant; however, wearing traditional folk costumes as a political gesture is meaningful even today.