HAR is pleased to announce one of the latest releases from BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology: an article (in English) on the history of Soviet anthropology in the 1960s–1970s.
Alymov, Sergei, 2024. “How Moscow Did Not Become a World Centre of Marxist Anthropology: Liudmila V. Danilova and the Fate of Soviet ‘Revisionism’ in the 1960s‑1970s,” in BEROSE International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.
The article analyzes the trajectory of Liudmila Valerianovna Danilova (1923–2012), a Soviet/Russian historian who specialized in the history of medieval Russia and agrarian history, and a Marxist theoretician of history and social evolution. She worked at the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR/Russia for more than half a century from 1952 onward. Author of two monographs, Essays on the History of Land Ownership and Economy in the Novgorod Land in the 14th-15th Centuries (1955) and Rural Community in Medieval Russia (1994). In the mid-1960s, she was part of the collective group of the department of the methodology of history at the Institute of History, who tried to reinvigorate Soviet Marxism and challenge its Stalinist interpretations. The article analyzes the theoretical and methodological discussions in Russian ethnography and historiography of the 1960s, which were focused on the critique of the Stalinist dogma of the five-stage scheme of world history and gave way to “revisionist” ideas concerning the number and sequence of Marxist socioeconomic formations. As one of the leaders of this collective, Danilova edited the collection of articles Problems of the History of Pre-capitalist Societies (1968), a manifesto of Soviet “revisionist” historical Marxism of the 1960s. This heterodox text received a wide response among historians and anthropologists both in the USSR and worldwide; it attracted a number of commentaries and reviews, including those of British anthropologist Ernest Gellner. Danilova planned to expand this volume into a series which would include authors from Eastern and Western Europe and focus on Marxist interpretation of the whole world history as well as “primitive society.” Danilova’s alternative Marxism negatively affected her academic career. Her main work, Theoretical Problems of Feudalism in Soviet Historiography, remained unpublished during her lifetime, as well as the following volumes of the projected series “Problems of the History of Pre-capitalist Societies.”
This article is part of a series of six papers originally delivered in the panel “Historicizing Anachronistic Motives” held during the First International Conference of the Histories of Anthropologies “Doing Histories, Imagining Futures” (4–7 December 2023, online). The conference was co-organized by the EASA’s History of Anthropology Network and the Università di Pisa with the support of Bérose and ten other history of anthropology stakeholders. The panel was convened by David Shankland (Royal Anthropological Institute; University College London, UK), Christine Laurière (CNRS/UMR9022 Héritages, France) and Frederico Delgado Rosa (Universidade Nova de Lisboa, CRIA Centre for Research in Anthropology, Portugal).
The other articles within the “Historicizing Anachronistic Motives” series are:
“En torno al argumento del anacronismo y la Escuela Histórico‑Cultural en la Argentina: hacia un abordaje discrónico,”by Axel Lazzari
“Anthropology, Photography, and Painting: Jean Gabus and Hans Erni in Mauritania 1951‑1952,” by Serge Reubi
“Frobenius’ Culture History in Australia: Dead Ends and New Insights,” by Richard Kuba
“Fieldwork on the Banks of the Pilcomayo River: The Place of Erland Nordenskiöld in Pre-Malinowskian Traditions of Ethnography,” by Anne Gustavsson
“Through the Speculum of the Psyche: Paul Radin at the Eranos ‘Tagungen’,” by Zsofia Johanna Szoke
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