Sergei Alexandrovich Tokarev

Sergei Alexandrowitsch Tokarew ( Russian Сергей Александрович Токарев ; born December 29, 1899 in Tula , † April 19, 1985 in Moscow ) was a Soviet ethnologist and religious scholar with a Marxist-Leninist orientation. In his home country he held high positions in science, including at the Academy of Sciences of the USSR , and achieved great international importance. He received numerous honors.
Tokarev's main works (he is always cited in the literature as SA Tokarew or Tokarev) deal with social structure, ethnogenesis , the history of the world's religions, forms of religious customs and historiography . His main field of research was the ethnography of the peoples of Siberia, Oceania and Western Europe.

Life and career

Sergei Alexandrowitsch Tokarew was born in 1899 in Tula , a city about 200 km south of Moscow, to a family of teachers. His family, the close of the estate Yasnaya Polyana of Leo Tolstoy lived there survived the October Revolution . He studied anthropology at Lomonossow University in Moscow and graduated there in 1925. Various teaching activities followed, for example at the "Communist Workers Institute of China Sun Yat-Sen". From 1928 he became a member of the Central Ethnological Museum, and in 1932 he took over the “North” department. He also worked at the “National Academy for the History of Material Culture” in the central “Museum for Anti-Religion”. In 1935 he received his doctorate in history, in 1939 he became a professor and in 1940 he defended his dissertation on "The Yakutian social system in the 17th to 18th centuries" and received a doctorate in ethnology. At the beginning of the Second World War after Nazi Germany's attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, Tokarev was evacuated to Abakan , where he worked at the Department of History at the Pedagogical Institute. In 1943 he returned to Moscow and became head of the “Department for the Ethnology of the American, Australian and Oceanic Peoples” in the newly established Moscow “Institute for the Ethnology of the USSR”. In 1961 he took over the management of the "Sector for the Ethnology of the Non-Soviet Peoples of Europe". At the same time he headed the "Ethnological Department at the Faculty of History" of Lomonosov University between 1956 and 1973 and gave various lectures on general ethnology, ethnic religions and the ethnology of the USSR, the peoples of Australia and Oceania, the Slavic, Mongolian and Turkic peoples Siberia and about the peoples of America. Under his leadership, the department's activities expanded in terms of both personnel and organization. The main focus was on researching the Slavic, Siberian, Central Asian and African peoples, the history of these peoples and the history of ethnic religions and shamanism .

meaning

Despite the difficult times in the first phase of his life, ideological and political campaigns and despite all obstacles Tokarev managed to remain true to his scientific ideas and principles. He was a great ethnographer and ethnologist and left over 250 works on various subjects. The enormous scope of his research interests began to show at the beginning of his scientific career: he developed the literature on Oceania, dealt with the ethnology of Siberia, worked in archives and took part in expeditions. This almost encyclopedic focus on two different directions, that of museum work and that of field research on expeditions, enabled him to work with a wide variety of different data. In his scientific work, he constantly expanded his activities and interests, but also permanently questioned previous results. He was also involved as a co-author on numerous publications by international researchers; his contributions have been translated into many European languages, so that his name remains known in science to this day. Tokarev was basically not a historiographically oriented researcher, rather he wanted to acquaint his readers with different foreign concepts of ethnography, new discoveries in the field of anthropology and archeology. His atheistic attitude contributes to his neutrality. At most, the class struggle concepts and gentile societies , to which he repeatedly refers, relativize some of his analyzes, even if not decisively.

plant

• In 1928, Tokarev began a series of publications on Australia and Oceania, which were later incorporated into the 1956 series "The Peoples of Australia and Oceania".
• In the early 1930s he dealt with the ethnology and history of the Siberian peoples, especially the Yakuts , using an enormous number of different sources. In 1940 he published the "Essay on the History of the People of the Yakuts" in this context, and in 1945 "The Yakut social system in the 17th and 18th centuries".
• In the mid-1940s he began to take an active interest in the other peoples of Europe. In 1946, for example, his article on “The Ethnographic Study of the Balkan Countries” appeared. In Belgrade he began to publish a work on the Serbo-Croatian language.
• The next step was the comprehensive presentation of ethnology in the work “Ethnology of the USSR. Historical Foundations of Life and Culture ”, which was conceived primarily as a textbook for students, but at the same time also represents an encyclopedic representation of the peoples of the USSR with their historical dynamics of their development and treats all aspects of traditional culture, whereby the territorial principle as an ethnogenetic characteristic and every people is examined against this systematic background.
• In 1956 he published an article on "The Origin and Early Forms of Religion" in the journal Questions der Philosophie . He attempted to solve the problem of the scientific classification of religious phenomena. On the basis of a Marxist understanding of religion and with the help of extensive material, he critically examined existing concepts. In the following years he dealt extensively with this topic. In his opinion, classifications should not only have a purely formal justification, but should also approach religion historically as a social phenomenon.
• In 1957 Tokarev published his first book on religion, namely "The Religious Beliefs of the Eastern Peoples in the 19th and Early 20th Century". The publication of this book was not a coincidence, because religious topics had always interested the researcher. Tokarev constantly criticized the foreign literature on the subject and had already written seven essays on the subject of the traditional beliefs of the Siberian peoples as part of the work "Religion in the USSR" published in 1931, where he wrote the chapter on the Siberian peoples. The ethnology and ethnography were always the basis of his historiographical presentations. In 1964 he finally published a general presentation on this topic with: “Early forms of religion and their development” and “Religion in the history of the peoples”, a work that went through four editions and whose scientific significance continues to this day. (German: Dietz Verlag, Berlin, GDR 1968). In 1990, a collection of Tokarev's works was also published posthumously under the title "Early Forms of Religion". In "Early Forms of Religion and Their Development" he also dealt with the problem of animism and totemism , whereby he also evaluated prehistoric archeological findings.
• From the 1960s he took part in numerous international conferences.
• At the age of 70 he finally published large articles in compilations, and in 1978 he published his book "Sources of Ethnography" (until the middle of the 19th century) and "History of Foreign Ethnography", after having studied intensively since the early 1970s had dealt with their research results, among others with Sigmund Freud and André Leroi-Gourhan . But he was particularly interested in the history of domestic ethnography, and in 1966 he published a monograph on the “History of Ethnography Before the October Revolution”, a work that is still unique today.
• In the 1980s he published a four-volume, irreplaceable compilation on “Calendar Customs and Rituals in European Countries” (1973–1983).
• His scientific life's work was enormous and varied. He was responsible for the publication of the collected works of NN Miklukho-Maclay and was the author of numerous articles in a wide variety of publications, he was also the main editor of the encyclopedia "The Myths of the Countries of the World".

Publications (selection)

• Obshchestvennyi stroi iakutov v XVII – XVIII vv. Yakutsk 1945.
• Etnografiia narodov SSSR. Moscow 1958.
• Религия в истории народов мира. Moscow 1964; 3rd edition 1976.
  • German: The religion in the history of the peoples. Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1968, and Pahl-Rugenstein, Cologne 1968.
• Rannie formy religii i ikh razvitie. Moscow 1964.
• Istoriia russkoi etnografii. Moscow 1966.

swell

1. [1] (SA Tokarev. Sovetskaia etnografiia, 1969, no. 6.)
2. [2]
3. [3]

supporting documents

1. ↑ ZBSP Dunn, pp. 238-241