History Of Anthropology Research Articles

Book Review of Yoga in Transformation (Baier, Maas, et al. Eds., 2018).

Yoga in Transformation: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. Edited by Karl Baier, Philipp A. Maas, and Karin Preisendanz. Vienna: Vienna University Press, 2018. 630 pages; 55 figures. The Yoga in Transformation volume pulls together extended research papers from an eponymous conference held at the University of Vienna in 2013. Featuring sixteen peer-reviewed chapters from world-leading scholars, the volume is a valuable resource for academic yoga studies—probably more at graduate than undergraduate level, given its original research content. The collection is divided into two sections. The first, titled “Yoga in South Asia and Tibet,” features mostly studies on texts, while the second, titled “Globalised Yoga,” focuses on developments in the twentieth century and is more interdisciplinary, including textual research, anthropology, sociology, affect theory, and art history.

"American Dreams" of Early Soviet Ethnography: Some Reflections on Bogoras's Legacy

Dmitry Arzyutov discusses a phenomenon that he defines as "American dreams" of Russian ethnography in the early twentieth century based on the example of Waldemar Bogoras, one of the founders of early Soviet ethnography. The essay highlights three specific cases that frame the development of this discipline not through the familiar narrative of gradual isolation but as a story of sometimes problematic contacts and exchanges with American anthropologists. The contacts that were established during the joint Jesup North Pacific Expedition (1897–1902) led by Franz Boas continued into the 1920s. Arzyutov shows that the main concepts of Soviet ethnography, such as "ethnogenesis" and "ethnic history," were products of the debates about the origin of the peoples of Arctica and Siberia between Franz Boas and the Russian expedition participants, Bogoras and, to a lesser degree, Lev Shternberg. The second case addresses Bogoras's unrealized project of establishing nature reserves-cum-reservations for the native peoples of Siberia. These were to combine the prerevolutionary idea of nature reserves (popular among Bogoras's geographer colleagues) with the North American practice of Indian reservations. Finally, the third case compares trajectories of the two students of Bogoras and Boas, Julia Averkieva and Archie Phinney. Their stories show how Marxism might have been differently understood and deployed in the transnational context, and how this difference could have generated intellectual and personal disagreements and conflicting versions of identity politics. The three cases taken together testify to the importance of shifting the optics of the history of anthropology from reconstructing national traditions and local genealogies toward tracing dialogue and mutual borrowings.

ОБЕСПЕЧЕННОСТЬ ЖИТЕЛЕЙ ДАЛЬНЕГО ВОСТОКА СССР ПРОДУКТАМИ ПИТАНИЯ: ИСТОРИКО-АНТРОПОЛОГИЧЕСКИЙ АСПЕКТ ПРОБЛЕМЫ

The author analyzes nutrition as one of the main aspects of material culture from the point of view of a modern integrated multidisciplinary approach. The problem of providing food to the Far East in the late Soviet period is analyzed within the framework of historical anthropology.

The Human Body. Anticipation of Death and Recollection of Birth

Although the human body has now been the central concern of historical anthropology for more than twenty-five years, it remains enigmatic. One important spectrum in which we experience its inscrutability – the body as corpus absconditum – is indicated by the dynamics of the anticipation of death and the recollection of birth. So far, cultural studies, like philosophy, have dealt with the human body’s transience and mortality. Especially death, being the boundary of life, has formed a main area of interest. On the other hand, birth, the other side of physical existence, has hardly received any attention at all until recently. The discussion is now becoming more complex: Birth is the precondition of death. Only what has been born can die. It is the alternation of birth and death which permits the creatio continua, without which neither the human body nor any human life could ever have come into being. Therefore, this article first looks at human evolution from the perspective of the rhythmical repetition of birth and death. I then address the question of how culture deals with human mortality, showing that even for Neanderthal man already, the fear of death occupied the imagination and gave rise to ideas about the hereafter. I show that death is also central to cultural studies with regard to ontogenesis. These considerations require reflections on birth and on the human body’s natality – which is the subject of my third section.

Советские партизаны 1941–1945 гг.: пути и возможности научного анализа явления

We propose the first attempt at scientific sociography of the Soviet partisan movement as the most complex phenomenon of the Great Patriotic War social history. At most historic study was possible, first of all, due to the formation of publicly accessible electronic databases with tens of millions of personal records with dozens of information parameters in each. The complex processing of coherent representative information of various electronic databases on long continuous lines allows you to “gather” a collective social portrait of Soviet partisans as a complex of formative signs and compare it with collective portraits of other groups of social activists 1941-1945. Among these features-traits: the general and particular time and place of birth of future activists of the great war period, their social origin and pre-war social status, gender and age structure, national composition, interwar migrations, the status in the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army and the nature of participation in the war. We pay special attention to the social and historical anthropology of activism during the great war. The work is abundantly provided with graphical results of the study.

Leksem świnia i formy pokrewne jako wyrazy motywujące w polskiej onimii

The aim of the article is an attempt to trace the fate of several appellatives grouped in the lexical field around the hyperonym świnia ʽpig, swine’ (wieprz ʽhog’, knur/kiernoz ʽboar’ and prosię ʽpiglet’) as the motivation of many names in Polish onymy, mainly in anthroponymy and toponymy. My research has been conducted along the lines of historical anthropology. Proper names in this approach play an important role in the reconstruction of the past. The field of interest of this article includes mainly names belonging to the old onymic layer. Proper names arise from the lexicon of a given language, which is why my analysis is based on lexical and semantic methodology. My point of departure is the meaning (often reconstructed) of appellative lexical units, including their semantic modifications in the proprial layer. I interpret proper names on the basis of findings regarding their origin and motivation. The first names motivated by the lexeme świnia were associated with the economic organization of the Piast state. In the article I present the history of their creation. I go on to discuss the other lexemes which became the basis of many names belonging to different naming categories. The presence of etymons of interest to us in so many proper names during the Middle Ages allows us to draw the conclusion that pigs played an extremely important role in the lives of our ancestors.

ROMAN BRZESKI’S VIEWS ON POLITICS UKRAINIAN CENTRAL RADA

This article reveals Roman Brzeski’s views on the policy of the Ukrainian Central Rada, the analysis of the factors, that led to the defeat of the Central Rada, was conducted both by key figures of this government and Brzeski himself, their opposition and comparison. The article reveals the historiography of the study of the Central Rada by Ukrainian historians and the evolution of their views. Separately, historical assessments are compared with Roman Brzeski’s assessments, conclusions are made about the relevance of Roman Brzeski’s assessments as a participant in the events of the Ukrainian revolution in the context of modern historical visions. At the same time, an attempt is made to investigate the nature of Roman Brzeski’s views on the Central Rada as a political phenomenon, to explore the reason for Brzeski’s radically negative assessments of the Central Rada and its activists due to Brzeski’s affiliation with the UNP (“samostiynyky”). The UNP was in opposition to the socialist-federalist camp that formed the basis of the UCR. Therefore, it is interesting that Brzeski was in the service of the Central Rada despite his own negative beliefs. It is also important to involve little-known sources of personal origin of Brzeski’s authorship in a wide scientific circulation to study the problems of the Ukrainian Central Rada from the point of view of a witness to the events of that time. The study of personalities such as Brzeski and his visions belongs to the field of historical anthropology, which allows us to reveal local events and look at historical processes not only through thought leaders but also smaller figures who often had no less important influence on historical events. Brzeski is an example of such historical figures and that is why the study of his creative heritage is valuable today.

The collapse of the synodal system (the end of the nineteenth – the beginning of the twentieth century): concepts of modern Orthodox historiography

Purpose of the study. To analyze the works of modern historians, reflecting the intra-church vision of the situation of the Orthodox Church in the Russian Empire from the end of the nineteenth century to 1917. Attention is focused on assessments of the late synodal system, the need to Church renew, Church freedom in the state, the clergy perception of the February Revolution and the new government. The concept of «modern Church / Orthodox historiography» is used in a broad and conditional sense. Itʼs represented by authors of various ideological and canonical directions of the twentieth – early twenty-first century. The research methodology is based on a comparative study of the historiographic concepts mainly of the second half of the 20th century – the beginning of the 21st century. We study the most influential generalizing texts representing the position of various groups in the Russian Orthodox Church, as well as the works of Orthodox historians of emigration, the diaspora, Church dissidents. They have mostly liberal views and assessments of the Church process. The scientific novelty. The novelty of the study is determined by the weakness of the internal Church critical reflection, since the Church history functions within the framework of the apologetic and descriptive paradigm. Modern Church historiography is a specific phenomenon of historical science. Itʼs trying to combine two difficult tasks: religious apologetics and academic research. The article showed the negative aspects of this approach. Findings. The main lack of modern Church historiography is the indifference to non-political aspects of Church history. The potential of historical anthropology, intellectual history, the social history of ideas, and the history of mentality is ignored. As a result, many promising stories fall out of Сhurch historiography. These subjects are successfully investigated by secular historians. Common problem of the Orthodox historiography is thematic limitations, the tendency of the phenomenological «encapsulation» of the Church in the historical process, the conceptual dependence on Orthodox journalism at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries. Also, the weak representativeness of the sources as a result of inattention to local documentary sources.

Towards a historical anthropology of Upland Laos

When travelling across Houaphan province in upland north-eastern Laos in 2010, I took with me a copy of James Scott’s (2009) Art of Not Being Governed. This thought-provoking book offered fresh perspectives to exploring this ‘Zomian’ landscape and its ethnolinguistically diverse population. Indeed a historical frontier zone of refuge and opportunity, Houaphan’s forested mountains always constituted an escape option for people facing (Siamese, Vietnamese, lowland Lao, or French colonial) imperial interventions (Boutin 1937; Tappe 2015). Even today, the different ethnic groups of Houaphan demonstrate a wide range of flexible livelihoods such as swidden cultivation that carried them through times of crisis and war at the margins of lowland state formations, often seeking creative ways to keep state authorities at bay.

World Anthropology and its Institutional Challenges: A History of the Transformative Impact of Democratic Internationalisation on the Discipline of Anthropology

Anthropology reveals a rich diversity of human cultures, while also highlighting our commonalities. The discipline is a distorted mirror of this unity in diversity, however, so long as anthropologists from only a few, privileged cultures dominate the process of global knowledge construction. The World Council of Anthropological Associations (WCAA) was founded to address this. The WCAA provides a global platform for democratic participation in the spirit of a new ‘world anthropologies’ paradigm, which recognises that our understanding of other cultures is perspectivistic, and hence, to be fully understood, every culture needs to be contemplated from the multiple perspectives of all ‘anthropologies’. Key words: world anthropologies, World Council of Anthropological Associations, history of anthropology, internationalisation in anthropology, equity in anthropology.

The housewives' periodicals in the modernization of the Bulgarian village: a case study from the 1930s-1940s

The article examines social modernization in the Bulgarian village in the first half of the 20th century and particularly the place of the periodicals as a factor for cultural influences. The focus of the study is put on young women’s generation, who improved their educational status and became agents of the social change from towns to villages. The individual perception of the housewives’ (women) press in the 1930s-1970s is based on private archives and interviews, and is done by means of historical reconstruction and social anthropology.

Antropologia feministyczna i historia kobiet a onomastyka – miejsca wspólne (na przykładzie chrześcijańskich imion żeńskich obecnych w nazwach miejscowych)

The article is a fragment of the research project Names as the basis of Polish toponyms, conducted in the Department of Onomastics in the Institute of Polish Language in Kraków. It is also a continuation of the discussion on the opportunities of using the category of gender in onomastics. The aim of the text is to highlight the presence of several Christian female names in structures of Polish toponyms, to describe their frequency, chronology and popularity. The author indicates various cultural and social factors facilitating (or not) the use of such toponyms in Poland. She interprets the creation of such toponyms (especially later) as a sign of increasing presence of women in the public and institutional sphere. The interpretation framework of this anthroponymic and toponymic material includes feminist anthropology and historical anthropology (especially the history of women).

Positive Foundations of the Axiological Aspect of Historical-Philosophical Research

The paper examines the axiological aspect of historical-philosophical research. It is important to demonstrate that this issue was widely discussed at the turn of 19th and 20th centuries, and, therefore, a certain axiological aspect in historical-philosophical investigations was elaborated and interpreted. To solve this issue, we turn to the question of what are the scientific premises of historical-philosophical work and whether they form the necessary foundation to acknowledge the scientific status of the history of thought. In our opinion, it is history of philosophy that provides the scholars with factual set of notions, and so it forms this field of research as a definite (or strict) science. We consider fruitful to analyze historical responds to the challenge of scientific status of philosophy and its history as well as to compare the history of philosophy and anthropology. In our opinion, many peculiarities of anthropological investigations are also quite typical for the historical-philosophical work, and such comparison enlarges the scientific perspective of philosophy as a human cognitive practice. A historian of philosophy cannot ignore ontological foundations of different cultures in his research since it is the source of his ability to adequately interpret the subject-matter of his research. Like ethnographers, the historians of philosophy reveal the meanings and distinguish the attitudes that various thinkers, being the representatives of their own culture and epoch, had taken into consideration.

The Sanguszkos in the history of Pidhirtsi castle (1865–1939): sources for the study (based on the archival materials from Kraków and Tarnów)

The article outlines a list of archival sources upon the history of the Sanguszko family and their activity in the Pidhirtsi castle (1865–1939). The main goal is to introduce some archival sources from the archive of the Sanguszkos in Kraków and Tarnów such as «Guestbooks», «Castle chronicle», and also private correspondence, various documents about property, and photo materials. The further research can be realized via the anthropological approach to the history of this castle, with focus on the owners, workers, and guests. This article offers some perspectives and views upon the functions of the Pidhirtsi castle: a house, a public museum, and a residence. The archival materials allow us to analyze the private history of the castle owners – Eustahy Sanguszko, Konstancja Sanguszkowa, and Roman Sanguszko. In addition, they outline their significance at the local level – in Pidhirtsi and Galicia (through correspondence upon employment, receptions of the state officials and clergymen). Moreover, available primary sources contain information potential for historical anthropology, the cultural history of architecture, and memory history. The archival data indicates that the Sanguszkos properly assessed the value of this castle and its assemblies. Therefore, they carried out the extensive restoration work though the constant increase of expenses, provided access to researchers (i.e. financing of professional photographers and scholars in the preparation of the research), and maintained contacts with artistic, social and public institutions (openness of collections to the public; artistic and public events in the 1920s and the 1930s). Many warm recollections upon the visits to the castle, mentioned by Konstancja Sanguszko, give grounds for treating it as a home and a place of rest, whose remoteness from big cities was rather an advantage. Article received 23.02.2019

Sources for the history of the Church in postwar Ukraine: a case of historical anthropology study

The article examines major groups of sources for the study of the Church “under communism” from the perspective of historical anthropology. The characteristic is based on the author’s own research into the history of the Russian Orthodox Church and a Greek-Catholic community, forcefully “reunited” with it, in postwar Soviet Ukraine from the mid-1940s – early 1970s. The author also briefly characterizes major archival holdings for these sources. The author defines methodological framework for such a study and also considers recent discussions on the source value and reliability of various texts from the Soviet epoque. The application of historical anthropology approach to Soviet studies in general and study in the life and survival of the Church in particular has the broadening of the spectrum of research questions as its outcome. Logically, the number and diversity of sources for their study also expand. The author lists and characterizes all the groups of sources she uses in her study. These are the so-called “archive of repression” (namely, official Soviet documents and secret documents of Soviet security organs), both official and church periodic, various church documents (from Patriarchal messages and Synodal decisions to church correspondence), and a variety of sources from below. The latter consists of the so-called “letters to power” coming from the Church (both clergy and lay activists), “hidden texts” (according to James C. Scott) of church members, and oral interviews taken after the fall of the USSR. Ethnographic materials, sociological studies, and numerous visual materials similarly constitute source base for such a study. This variety of sources becomes a powerful challenge for researchers because requires an understanding of the character of each group from them as well as skillful application of appropriate methodological instruments for their analysis. Article received 24.02.2019

Revisions and Revisionisms in H.O. Meisner’s Modern Diplomatics of Files: An Essay in the Historical Anthropology of Bureaucratic Mediocracy

Abstract In this essay I lay out an argument about the scholarship on the emergent rationality of files. Looking at the case of Heinrich Otto Meisner’s groundbreaking modern diplomatics of files and the conditions and possibilities that shaped the argument of his work both practically and politically, I suggest a model for the analysis of bureaucratic mediocracy in historical perspective. I argue for an historical anthropology that acknowledges the epistemic violence and politics of inclusion and exclusion in bureaucracy in order to arrive at an historical anthropology of reason that does not deny, but instead attempts to think through its unequal terms.

The Etnos Archipelago

The concept of etnos—one of the more controversial anthropological concepts of the Cold War period—is contextualized by looking at its “life history” through the biography of one of its proponents. Sergei Mikhailovich Shirokogoroff was a Russian/Chinese anthropologist whose career transected Eurasia from Paris to Beijing via Saint Petersburg and the Siberian borderlands of the Russian Empire. His transnational biography and active correspondence shaped the unique spatial and intellectual configuration of a concept that became a cornerstone of both Soviet and Chinese ethnography. The theory of etnos turned out to be surprisingly stable, while circulating through various political and intellectual environments ranging from England, Germany, and China to Imperial, Soviet, and modern Russia. This case study presents a history of anthropology wherein networks and conversations originating in the Far East of Eurasia have had unexpected influences on the heartlands of anthropology.

Acting historians: Historicism, memory, and performance among Lebanese former detainees from Syria

ABSTRACTThe nascent subfield of the anthropology of history criticizes the historicist bent of Western historiography and calls for attention to alternative historicizing practices, especially non-Western ones. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Beirut, I argue that former Lebanese and Palestinian detainees held in Syria have developed a range of such practices in order to have their testimonies about their detention taken seriously in Lebanon. Against a background of institutionalized amnesia and deep political and sectarian divisions, the state refuses to treat them as political detainees. Other publics are more sympathetic, but the ability of ex-detainees to persuade them is limited by these audiences’ historicist presuppositions, particularly their expectations that detainees’ accounts rely on a linear chronology with a clear progression from past to present and that detention narratives provide evidence that can be critically compared and corroborated. In this regard they also implicitly reject the model, bequeathed by the Holocaust, of the inarticulate victim as guarantor of a testimony’s authenticity. Consequently, the anthropology of history should resist the temptation to map historicist and non-historicist forms of history onto a West/non-West split.

Sprachalltag II: Sprachatlas – Digitalisierung – Nachhaltigkeit und das Arno-Ruoff-Archiv am Ludwig-Uhland-Institut für Empirische Kulturwissenschaft der Universität Tübingen.

Since 2015, the project Sprachalltag II has been running at the Institute of Historical and Cultural Anthropology in Tübingen. In addition to the final processing of the Sprachatlas von Nord Baden-Württemberg (SNBW), begun in 2009, and the creation of a popular, online Sprechender Sprachatlas von Baden-Württemberg, the goal is to research and digitize the extensive material of the Arno-Ruoff archive for further linguistic and ethnologic studies.
 This project in particular includes the transcription and alignment of the dialect recordings collected by Ruoff and Bausinger since 1955 for the so called Zwirner corpus as well as the publication of the edited texts in a database in cooperation with the IDS Mannheim. After researching mainly on the morphological and syntactic level of the corpus, the project now also enables phonological examinations of the spoken language throughout the federal state of Baden-Württemberg and the area of Bavarian Swabia via the database.
 This report will introduce the nature and extent of the hitherto edited recordings in more detail and show how, in the sense of a cross-disciplinary collaboration, Empirical Cultural Studies can benefit from the content development of the Tübingen corpus. In the course of editing, the transcripted dialect recordings are assigned to thematic categories by using keywords such as leisure or modernization. This includes the means of enquiry of the corpus to a content-related level that can serve the research fields of Historical and Cultural Anthropology.

Arkhangelsk Commercial Club (Marfa’s House) as a center of European culture of the port city of Arkhangelsk of the late XIX – early XX centuries

This article is dedicated to the Arkhangelsk Commercial Club (Marfa’s House) – a cultural center of the port city during the late XIX – early XX centuries. The author traces the fates of the representatives of Western European dynasties of merchants and tradesmen who dwelled in the port city for several centuries and were subjected to repressions during the World War I and Soviet time. Currently, one of the paramount tasks of scientific community consists in the preservation of memory on the activity of the prominent people of the past, as not only the region, but also the country as a whole owes them for development of economy, culture, science, systems of state administration, education, and a number of other spheres of life. The theoretical-methodological framework for the research became the set of methods of new anthropologically-oriented branches of historical science, generalized by the concept of “historical anthropology”, which allowed shifting the point of attention from history of government structures towards life of households and separate individuals. The experience of working with cognate disciplines – such as historical sociology and sociology of everyday life became useful, especially when working sources of personal origin. The article employs modern methodology and introduces into the scientific discourse documents discovered by the author in the State Archive of Arkhangelsk Oblast, Archive of the Arkhangelsk Regional Museum of Local Lore, as well as biographical records on the representatives of the prominent Arkhangelsk merchant dynasties – families Leuzinger and Petz from the personal archives of the descendants.