G.P. Snesarev and the Field Study of "Religious-and-Everyday Survivals"

Abstract

The article discusses the life and career of the ethnographer and religious studies scholar G.P. Snesarev. The author examines the issues of fieldwork methods and ethical and epistemological problems in research on religion as they stood in the Soviet time. He pinpoints the mix of elements pertaining to the functionalist research program and the method of tracing survivals in Snesarev’s work. Snesarev’s scholarship is further taken as a case for showing both the attitude of Soviet religious studies scholars toward classifying religion as a “survival” and their notions of where the traditional and the modern meet.