EtnoAntropologia (Jan 2021)
From Ethnography to Ethnology to Anthropology. The “quiet revolutions” within the Ukrainian Folk Studies during the 20th and 21st centuries
Abstract
Tracing the history of folk studies in Ukraine during the20th and 21st centuries, one can notice multiple changes in the naming of scientific disciplines: ethnography, ethnology, anthropology. It was neither a mechanical nor an aesthetic step: it was due to deep crises in the humanities and, consequently, to academic transformation processes. The transition from the self-name “ethnographer” to “ethnologist” took place in Ukraine in the 1990s and marked a break with the Soviet scientific methodology. The crisis in the Ukrainian ethnology in 2010s led to the emergence of a new scientific discipline: anthropology. Both events took the form of a “quiet revolution”. This can be explained by the lack of appropriate professional education: in Soviet times, neither ethnographers nor ethnologists were trained in Ukraine, and today there is no specialization as anthropologist in Ukrainian education. That is why new specialists appeared as a result of self-education and retraining from other scientific fields. This, in turn, led to a certain eclecticism of the research methodology in Ukraine.
