E-mail: spbfolk@mail.ru Tel.: +7 (812) 328-94-87
11, Universitetskaya emb., St. Petersburg, 199034, Russian Federation
DSc in Philology, Professor, Department of History of Russian Literature, Faculty of Philology, Saint Petersburg State University
тел.: +7 (812) 328-94-87; e-mail: spbfolk@mail.ru
This article analyzes the dynamic relations between subject and object in Soviet and post-Soviet folklore studies and ethnography. Pre-revolutionary folklore studies investigated the culture of a particular class — the peasantry. None of the investigators belonged to this social class. Interest in the culture of the peasantry was due to the fact that it was held to preserve know- ledge of bygone eras. After 1917, the entire population of the country was called “the people” (na- rod), but only the rural population was investigated. The customs of this social group were defined in terms of the national heritage, while the peasantry as a social group was subjected to relentless destruction. In the 1960–70s, the structuralist and typological approach in folklore studies made it possible to consider the connections between mythology, folklore and rituals, avoiding evolutionist rhetoric, but this did not break the habit of alienating knowledge from those who practiced it. Consideration of the subjective position of the scholar and the willingness to recognize other types of subjectivity determined T. A. Bernshtam’s search for new methods undertaken in the 1980–1990s. She made the phenomenal world of the peasantry the object of study, represented in the categories by which the participants of this world described it. This phenomenological shift allows folklorists and ethnographers to see the informants they meet in the field as interlocutors who also see them. Recognition of the world of the other allows scholars to recognize their own subjectivity, in relation to which and depending on which the interlocutor is revealed, whether speaking about his or her own experience or interpreting yours to you.
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