Sounding Memory in the Tradition of the Caucasian Jews. Part I. The Contexts of Argumentation

Abstract

This article is an introduction to the problem of systematizing the traditional music of Jews in relation to the historical waves of their migration to the Caucasus. The author analyzes two contrasting rhetorics in Russian pre-revolutionary and contemporary ethnography related to the question of the collective memory of Caucasian (Mountain) Jews. It is established that the historical change of argumentation contexts is conditioned not only by the problem field of the humanities but also by the universalist approach, the basic tools of which are the categories of ‘the general’ and ‘the specific’. It is obvious that the way to understand the ‘other’ culture of Caucasian and, more broadly, ‘Eastern’ Jews lies through the acceptance of the variability of meaning-making, which implies the researcher’s going beyond the intuitions of European Jewish communities. The methodological and practical advantages of the logical and semantic approach (the principle of ‘same but different’) are shown. The article appeals to the rare Russian and foreign ethnographic publications and maps of the 18th-20th centuries.

Keywords

• caucasian jews
• traditional music
• collective memory
• systematization
• logical and semantic approach
• universalism
• ethnography
• history