Soviet Museum Ethnography at the VII International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnographic Sciences: Restoration and Conservation of Disciplinary Heritage under the “Gaze” of the West

Abstract

Soviet museum ethnography at the VII International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnographic Sciences in Moscow (1964) is considered in the article as a discussion space within which ethnographers and museum workers presented and debated different views on the past and present of their discipline. Archival materials are explored through the concepts of restoration and conservation – rhetorical strategies that involve different forms of interpretation of disciplinary heritage and projects for action. Projects for the “revival” of the Museum of the Peoples of the USSR in Moscow and “Materials on Ethnography’s” edition in Leningrad mostly referred to the ethnography of the 1920s, which was suppressed and criticized during the transition to Marxist methodology in the 1930s. The restoration strategy led to the recognition of the unspoken lag behind Western anthropology and museum affairs. The reconstruction of fragments of the past was proposed as a solution to the problem. The conservation strategy, on the contrary, saw Soviet museum ethnography as ahead of foreign ones. The legacy of the “marxization” of the 1930s, according to this rhetoric, was the key to victories in the past and present, and its criticism and rejection deprived Soviet ethnography of its advantages. Museum practices of research and representation of the culture and life of collective farmers and workers, and the active use of mannequins and life-size dioramas to show social relations were recognized as such a positive legacy.