Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2015 number

The article aims to define methods and objectives of the fieldwork carried out among the Siberian Old Believers by Academician of RAS N.N. Pokrovsky - an outstanding Russian historian, expert in source studies and archaeography. For this purpose the author has studied the field journal written in 1967 mostly by the students who had completed their first year at the Division of History of the Departments of Humanities of the Novosibirsk State University. They were members of the Tuvinian Group of the Archaeographic Task Force of the Siberian Branch, USSR Academy of Sciences. Scope of research included the structure of “questionnaire” whose elements were repeated practically in each interview; an attempt was made to determine the impact of methods of related human sciences. Characteristic features of the field work carried out by the research group and its leader are considered through the example of description of symbolic figures of Old Belief. These included Father Palladius, hegumen of all Tuvinian sketes (small monasteries), and I.F. Rukavitsyn who had left Old Believers for the Bolsheviks during the Civil War in Tuva but retained ties with his previous environment. Aims and methods of N.N.Pokrovky’s work have been compared with these of A.F. Emelyanov - a writer who had had anti-religious talks with Tuvinian Old Believers having access to the classified materials from investigative cases of the 1920s-1930s, including cases of self-destruction. Comparison has also been made within the system “ours”- “alien”. The article presents both general scientific methods and those that are appropriate for the historical anthropology. The research findings include establishing the fact that N.N.Pokrovsky used in his fieldwork practices of classical ethnography and intuitively applied methods that were later described in sociology textbooks published in Russia. The author ascertains that there was a strict division between “ours” and “alien” peculiar to the anti-religious literature while the contacts between Old Believers and archaeographers changed the content of these concepts.