An Expedition to the Primitive: On an Unfulfilled Dream of Soviet Ethnography

Abstract

The article is a publication of a 1931 archival document (“A Memo Report on the Issue of Organization of the All-Union Ethnographic Expedition”) with a commentary. The report is a project plan of Soviet ethnographers’ expedition to the “primitive” tribes of New Guinea and Tierra del Fuego meant to prove the Marxist view of the primitive society. The author discusses the history of the project and the reasons of its failure.