Archaeology, Ethnology & Anthropology of Eurasia 47 (1) 2019   DOI: 10.17746/1563-0110.2019.47.1.127-136

Annotation:  The Loess-Paleosol Sequence at the Krasnogorskoye Section, the Low-Hill Zone of the Northeastern Alt The Early Neolithic Complex on the Tartas-1 Site: Results of the AMS Radiocarbon Dating Water and Cosmology in the Stone Age of Northeastern Europe Turning Points in Horse Breeding in the Eurasian Steppes and the Near East The Study of Middle Bronze Age Interments at Khanghah Gilavan: Tentative Results The Petrovka Bronze Age Sites: Issues in Taxonomy and Chronology A Comparative Study of the Layout of Bronze Age Fortifi ed Settlements in the Southern Urals (3rd to Early Iron Age Pyramidal Kurgans in Western Siberia The Xiongnu Gold from Noin-Ula (Mongolia) Geophysical Studies at the Horogoru Fortifi ed Settlement in South Korea Medieval Sites of Tara Region, the Irtysh Basin: Origin, Chronology, Cultural and Ethnic Attribution A Central Asian Helmet from the Northern Kazakhstan Regional Museum The 18th-Century Udmurt Women’s Outfi ts Depicted in J.P. Falk’s Book: Interpretation and Attributio Wearing Folk Costumes as a Mimetic Practice in Russian Ethnographic Field Studies Types of Winter Clothing Worn by Descendants of the Russian Pioneers in Siberia (Late 19th to Early Long-Bone Growth in the Bronze Age Skeletal Population of Gonur-Depe, Turkmenistan   

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

M.A. Kucherskaya

National Research University Higher School of Economics,Staraya Basmannaya 21/4, Moscow, 105066, Russia

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 field 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 first 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 confidence pragmatically irrelevant; however, wearing traditional folk costumes as a political gesture is meaningful even today.

Keywords: History, ethnography, Pavel Yakushkin, disguise, Russian costume, mimicry, Russian Populists