U.S.-USSR Intellectual Dialogues: Sociocultural Anthropology/Ethnography
| Autor: | Demitri B. Shimkin |
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| Rok vydání: | 1982 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Slavic Review. 41:692-697 |
| ISSN: | 2325-7784 0037-6779 |
| Popis: | Constructive intellectual dialogue between the Soviet Union and the United States is basic not only to the lessening of international tensions but also to the optimal development of many fields of learning. This is particularly true of anthropology, a discipline which has followed quite different lines of effort in the two countries. Both lines of development have clearcut contributions to offer. Both have aspects of marked intellectual neglect. In consequence, a genuine dialogue to improve approaches to a recognized common goal the understanding of mankind and its cultures has important promise. Achieving such a dialogue, as opposed to polemical debate, is a very difficult task toward which several Soviet colleagues and I have worked for a number of years. In this review essay I define potential courses of action toward improved dialogue. The core of the essay is an assessment of Academician lulian V. Bromlei's Sovremennye problemy etnografii which he asked me to do as a next step in the process of communication. Prior to this, the distinguished biosocial philosopher Eduard S. Markarian had reviewed incisively the collective work of some seventy American anthropologists, Anthropology for the Future, a volume edited by Sol Tax, John Morrison and me.1 Earlier still there was more than a decade of interchanges,, including those involving my now deceased colleague, Julian H. Steward. A careful consideration of Bromlei's volume is crucial because it is at once a theoretical and substantive contribution by a major Soviet scholar and the report of the director of the Institute of Ethnography of the USSR Academy of Sciences. It is thus both a scientific and an administrative document. Some background on Bromlei's training and prior publications is relevant.2 lulian Bromlei is a Slavicist and social historian whose doctoral dissertation, based on very extensive documentary analysis, defined social institutions and social change in tenthand eleventh-century Croatia. He is a deeply committed |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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