Describing Ethnography of a Borderland Province: Mary Holderness in the Crimea

Abstract

This paper addresses travelogues by English author Mary Holderness who spent the years 1816–1820 in the settlement of Karagoz in the Crimean Peninsula. Scholarship has used this source but rarely, mostly for cultural-anthropological facts. This paper provides an integral analysis of these travel writings as the most detailed account of Crimean ethno-confessional communes from the period. The works by Holderness are studied in the context of contemporary Western knowledge of the Crimea and specific ethnographic ideas in early Romanticism. The “involved observer’s” experience allowed Holderness to collect unique information about the economy and ethnography of the country. The source provides various accounts on the economic activities and taxation specificities, traditional costumes and cuisine, matrimonial relations and funeral rituals, entertainment and superstitions, religion, and other features of Crimean Russians and Tatars, Greeks and Germans, Bulgarians and Armenians, Karaites, and other ethnocultural communities. These materials allow one to disclose the features of the British perception of other peoples. Thus, foreigners tended to generalisation and typisation, making conclusions about the general trends of the national character relying on a few cases known to them from their own experience. The traveller put her fellow countrymen at the top of the “stairs of peoples” going from “barbarism” to “civilization,” while Crimean ethno-confessional communes occupied the stairs below them. She “supplied” them with various combinations of such features as primitive religiosity and superstitions, bad morals and disinclination to work according to Protestant ethics, laziness and stealing combined with a good heart, hospitality, empathy, etc.

Keywords

• крым
• записки путешественников
• этнографические описания
• российская империя
• крымские татары
• историческая имагология
• образ другого