Foundational principles of the activity of the article of the Ethnology and Local Lore Section of the Kharkiv Research Department of the History of Ukrainian Culture (1924–1929)

Abstract

The article analyzes the circumstances surrounding the formation of the fundamental principles of scholarly and public activity of the etnological and local-history section of the Kharkiv Research Department of the History of Ukrainian Culture in the context of the socio-political transformations of the Ukrainian SSR in the 1920s. It demonstrates that the section`s institutional development took place amid, on the one hand, the ideologization of the humanities and, on the other, the expansion of the mass local-history movement. During 1924 – 1929, section meetings resulted in the elaboration of a new approach to ethnological research. In an effort to more from the accumulation of ethnological materials and data toward the analytical study of ethnographic issues, scholars distinguished between the terms ethnography (data collection) and ethnology (analysis).  The study of ethnological material was structured around three thematic areas: local history, material culture, and spiritual culture. The theoretical and methodological foundations of the ethnological unit corresponded to all-Ukrainian and Western European trends in the development of ethnological scholarship. At the same time, the section`s members developed their own distinctive approach to research in this field. Professors Petro Kovalivskyi and Oleksii Vetukhov provisionally referred to it as the «local-history method». Nevertheless, the research relied on generally accepted historical methodology, while the local-history emphasis consisted in integrating ethnological data into the comprehensive study of the industrial potential of regions. The combination of ethnological and local-history topics within a single unit enabled the continued development of Ukrainian studies under conditions of adapting scholarship to the needs of the republic`s economic development. However, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the curtailment of the local-history movement and a systematic offensive against Ukrainian-studies fields in the humanities led to the termination of the section`s activities.