2025/2026
"Другой" в социальной истории России и СССР и этнографическом знании
Статус:
Маго-лего
Кто читает:
Департамент истории
Где читается:
Санкт-Петербургская школа гуманитарных наук и искусств
Когда читается:
3 модуль
Охват аудитории:
для своего кампуса
Преподаватели:
Москвина Дарья Алексеевна
Язык:
английский
Кредиты:
3
Контактные часы:
30
Course Syllabus
Abstract
This course aims to critically explore the history of ethnography in Russia, with a special focus on the dynamics of constructing the image of ‘the Other’ and the historiographic patterns used to analyze this process. We begin by discussing why the history of the discipline should be written in the first place and how a history written by someone ‘inside’ the discipline might differ from one written by an ‘outsider.’ With this in mind, we will examine the concept of fieldwork and its genealogy, the transition from bourgeois ethnology to Marxist ethnography, the study of contemporaneity and its representation in museums, and the functioning of ethnographers’ archives and field documents, among other topics. Throughout, our focus will remain on the various forms of ‘Otherness’ within the history of Russian and Soviet ethnography.
Learning Objectives
- To introduce students to the critical historiography of Russian and Soviet ethnography, focusing on the analysis of how the image of ‘the Other’ was constructed throughout the discipline’s history.
Expected Learning Outcomes
- Analyze the key historiographic problems and approaches specific to writing the history of anthropology
- Critically evaluate the major developmental stages and intellectual trajectories of ethnography in Russia and the USSR
- Compare how different methodological and political frameworks within the discipline constructed the image of ‘the Other.’
Course Contents
- Otherness Among Historians of Anthropology
- Imperial and Colonial Otherness
- Otherness and backwardness in the contexts of Imperial modernity and Soviet contemporaneity
- Otherness in Museum Space: Display and Representation
- The American Anthropologist as the Other: Friend or Enemy?
- Otherness in the Field: The Dynamics of Fieldwork Encounters
- Post-Socialism and Shifting Regimes of Access to the 'Other'
Assessment Elements
- Participation in seminar discussions
- Leading of the seminar discussion
- Review essay
Interim Assessment
- 2025/2026 3rd module0.25 * Leading of the seminar discussion + 0.15 * Participation in seminar discussions + 0.6 * Review essay
Bibliography
Recommended Core Bibliography
- D. Ferembach. (1986). Stocking Jr (G.W.) éd. — Objects and others. Essays on Museums and material culture. History of anthropology n° 3. Bulletins et Mémoires de La Société d’anthropologie de Paris, (2), 143. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=edsper&AN=edsper.bmsap.0037.8984.1986.num.3.2.2263
- Francine Hirsch. (2014). Empire of Nations : Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union. Cornell University Press.
- Kuper, A. (2014). Anthropology and Anthropologists : The British School in the Twentieth Century (Vol. Fourth edition). Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=edsebk&AN=850102
- My life as a spy: investigations in a secret police file, Verdery, K., 2018
Recommended Additional Bibliography
- Mogilner, M. (2007). Russian Physical Anthropology in Search of “Imperial Race”: Liberalism and Modern Scientific Imagination in the Imperial Situation. Ab Imperio, (1), 191–223. https://doi.org/10.1353/imp.2007.0088