Photo: Maria Plotnikova
Modern Russia quickly decided on the list of its enemies and now took on the most difficult part of the confrontation with the outside world — self-identification. Every day, specially authorized people are looking for the cultural and moral code of the Russian people so that the authorities can approve it and make it obligatory for memorization and execution in the Fatherland. But what if the code has long been found, stored in a museum under the supervision of specialists, and you just have to be not too lazy to go there. You can check this hypothesis in St. Petersburg, the cultural capital, by the way, with the head of the department of ethnography of the Russian people of the Russian Ethnographic Museum Dmitry Baranov. Judging by what he says, the code has long been known and consists mostly of goblin, incantations, songs and dances. In this interview, we tried to figure out if it still works and how to use it in the future.
Dmitry Baranov, Head of the Department of Ethnography of the Russian People at the Russian Museum of Ethnography. Photo: Sergey Mostovshchikov/Novaya Gazeta
— Let's start with understanding the phenomenon of Russian ethnography as such. Why did you start studying not just a person, but a Russian person?
— You know, in Soviet times, all the boys were fond of films about Indians. Produced by the DEFA film studio of the German Democratic Republic. Goiko Mitic as Chingachgook, that's all. And then I was still thinking as a child: wow, what cool guys the Indians are! And I asked my dad: listen, who are they? He said: Native Americans. I asked: when did they live? He said: yes, they still live, there is even a science that studies them, called American studies, and it has a section of ethnography.
As a Leningrader, I was lucky with ethnography later. At the university, we had a department of ethnography, and plus there is a research institute of the Kunstkamera in the city. This is a lot, because after the twenties the Bolsheviks did not favor ethnography, it was considered such a suspicious science.
So everything was really good with studies, but not with the Indians. They immediately told me: no, no, no. What are the Indians in the USSR?
The main thing in the work of an ethnographer is the field, field work, direct contact with the object of interest. Well, where do we have Indians in the field? Of course, you can study them, but then you will not find work for yourself with the Indians. So I eventually switched to Russian.
Aleksey Tikhonovich and Varvara Vasilievna Lepsky, 1990 photo. Author: Sayapin Vladimir/TASS
After I graduated, I worked for a year at school, and then moved to the Russian Ethnographic Museum. He worked first as a keeper in the basement. Very, you know, a good experience — a tactile study of the material culture of the people. When you take some thing for safekeeping, you touch it with your hands, your intuition and imagination sharpen. True, it is not very clear how to convert them later into scientific discourse, but, say, I can still tell with my eyes closed where the spinning wheel comes from. As a result, I wrote a dissertation that was completely non-museum — “The image of a child in ideas about conception and birth among the Eastern Slavs.”
— That is, in essence, why and where do Russian children come from?
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— Well, you could say that. At first, this topic seemed unpromising to everyone, because many works had been written about the maternity rite even before me. At first I even slowed down, just studied the materials, read dictionaries. And after six or seven years there was such a qualitative leap. I suddenly realized that a breakthrough in ethnography does not happen when you discover some new phenomena or facts, but when you suddenly look at completely familiar things from a different angle.
I decided to look at the birth ceremony among the Slavs not from the traditional point of view of the socialization of the newborn or from the understanding of the rituals that should, as it were, make a person out of a child. It suddenly fascinated me as a dialogue of equal partners. That is, the child is not as an object, but as a subject. You know, in modern European culture, the model of the dialogue «I» — «it» is usually implemented. That is, there is always something that needs to be conquered, changed or redone. Nature, for example. This is where human effort comes into play. And in traditional culture, the “I” – “you” model is implemented. It is important not to alter it, but to agree. Hence all these ancient signs or belief in the goblin and brownie. They personify the subjectivity of the outside world.
By the way, all these codes are still activated in a crisis situation. On weekdays, we do not pay attention to signs. But if you suddenly need to pass some kind of exam, you get up in the morning, do not wash and put a patch under your left heel.
Or left home and returned. Badly. You have to show your tongue in the mirror. The archaic model of behavior suddenly turns on itself. That is, it turns out that signs are not superstitions, but in fact — a text, a message, a message of the world,
which we are still reading. This is the subjectivity of the world.
So here are the kids. It is now very fashionable to talk about the so-called perspectivism or ontological turn in contemporary anthropology. This is when you try to look at the world not with your own eyes, but, say, with the eyes of an aborigine. And if you do it right, you get not a mythological picture, but a completely scientific one, but simply an alternative to modern knowledge. If you are interested, look at this topic in the books Beyond Culture and Nature, How Forests Think, or Cannibal Metaphysics. It's super interesting. Let's say the story of the sacrifice. Here cannibals, bounty hunters, take some high-status person prisoner in a neighboring tribe. They give him the best women, the best food. He lives like this for a year, and then they kill him and eat him. And they sing songs about it, but not from the point of view of the winners, namely from the point of view of the victim. This is an example of self-identification through the subjectivity of reality.
I didn’t know about all this in the nineties, but in the ethnographic literature about Russian children, I suddenly also saw a lot of texts where the pronoun “I” is used and adults are described as if from the perspective of a child. That is, to a newborn being, which, as it were, does not yet have consciousness, traditional culture delegates the subjectivity of the adult world. And then all the rituals turn into rituals, the purpose of which is recognition, identification of a new creature, which is still a mystery.
1990. Photo: Grigory Kalachyan/TASS
For example, the rite of naming can then be described as a rite of name recognition. Its essence is directly opposite to the task of socialization or education. The point is just to make the child not like everyone else, but on the contrary — unlike anyone else. Because impersonality is a classification feature of the dead. Or evil spirits. In folklore, if you meet characters with the same face, then they will be nonhumans. Hence, by the way, a special wary attitude towards twins or twins. But a child is born, as it were, with one face, similar to other children, his facial features are smoothed. Therefore, it was important to understand who he was.
In Russian tradition, it was believed that until the age of seven, children are not who they say they are. So all the practices were aimed at identifying the child. Let's say there was a ritual called «throwing from under the table», it was especially common among the Cossacks. On the third day of life, the child was hidden under the table, all the relatives gathered and they took him out three times, put him on the table, unfolded the diapers and examined his body. They looked for marks, because there was a sign — if the child does not have special marks, he will die. And scars, birthmarks, they acted as insignia, they were read like a text. When a mother saw a fire during pregnancy, she grabbed her stomach — a birthmark appeared.
I stepped on a frog — a spot appeared in the form of a frog. Stole — there will be a stain on the body in the form of a stolen item. So the child could be identified and understood that he was his own, and not from evil spirits.
— Sorry, since we have already started talking about «our» — ”, I’m curious: this is the identification system, when a person is either his own, native, or from evil spirits — is this some kind of special idea of u200bu200bthe Russian ethnic group about the world around him?
— I would not single out Russians here as some kind of special people. Rather, it is not the features that fascinate me in the study, but just the usual things. In general, this definition of anthropology is very close to me: it is a science that teaches you to make a problem out of everything that surrounds you. In this sense, in Russian culture there is an endless scope for the activity of a scientist. For example, see: a regular table. We are used to the fact that we always have it on four legs. Why? After all, three points of support are the most stable position. No matter how uneven the floor, a table with three legs will never rock. Nevertheless, development in our culture has taken the path of instability. Dealing with this kind of paradox is a terribly interesting task for an ethnographer.
When you solve it, you understand, for example, that Russian culture as such does not exist, it does not add up analytically to any one big picture. There are local knowledge, orders and traditions that can be completely different. I have an interesting example. We once went on an expedition to the Kola Peninsula and I took an employee of the conservatory with me. She is a specialist in the Old Believers, a musicologist and she has a beautiful voice. And so we recorded some grandmothers in the center of the Kola Peninsula, on the Ponoi River, they sang, and then they say: we are old grandmothers, but you have a girl with a good voice, let her sing to us. And she sang a traditional Smolensk folk song for them. They listened and said: a beautiful voice, a beautiful song, it's a pity that it's not in Russian.
Photo: Maria Plotnikova
— That is, it turns out that we are talking about an amazing thing — the so-called Russian culture does not exist at all so that Russians understand and recognize each other well, but quite the opposite: they had a happy opportunity to each other not to know and not to understand?
— I would say this: we have a happy opportunity to immerse ourselves in the culture of an essentially unknown people. Not in such a way as to round up grandmothers, make them sing, torture them and squeeze their whole life out of them. I always liked to travel and work with one grandmother for several years. And there are many subtleties. First of all, establishing contact. You always run into a psychological barrier. It took me a long time to learn how to overcome it.
Well, how to enter the first house that comes across? Not just come in, but come in to talk. You immediately become an uninvited guest.
I had a whole complex about this, especially when we went on an expedition to study metaphysical anthropology as students. By appearance, we learned to identify races. And in this case, in scientific terms, young individuals are always needed, especially men, because they have all the characteristic features most pronounced. Well, you can imagine — some young tractor drivers come and they need to explain that we came to study them — measure their heads there, take prints, and sometimes also make casts of teeth. How are you?