Ethnographic aspects in «Essays on North-Western Mongolia». Actual and contemporary presentation.

The article is devoted to Essays on North-Western Mongolia, G.N. Potanins fundamental workwhich - especially its second and fourth issues - is a compendium of ethnographic materials and has an important place in the Russiantradition of Turkic and Mongolian Studies. Essays… have a complicated structure. It is clearly subdivided into three parts: ethnographicmaterials, tales and legends and extensive comments which are unfinished pieces of academic research. Potanins research interests focusedon the Turkic tribes of the Russian Altai, such as the Altai, the Telenget, the Toyoles, the diverse ethnic and territorial groups of theUryankhai (mostly the future Tuvins), the Mongol peoples, such as the Durbur (Derbets), the Darkhats, the Buryats, the Khalkha, and theKirghiz (Kazakhs), the subordinates of both Russia and China. The inclusion of Buryats, Altai peoples, Kazakhs in the geographicframework of North-Western Mongolia was hardly accidental, as it reflected Potanins profound idea of Central Asia as of an integralorganism including Mongolia, Altai (the whole of South Siberia), the Kazakh lands. Defining the geography of the territories he studied, theauthor approached this problem primarily as an ethnographer, not as a geographer. It was the cultural and linguistic continuity of MongoliasNorthern parts and the South of West Siberia as well as the ethnogenetic affinities that allowed positing this region as some cultural andlinguistic unity, irrespective of the political, orographic and landscape systems. As a matter of fact, Potanin used the ethnographic materialsto delineate the Northern borders of Central Asia (in the traditional Russian understanding of the term) which encompassed the Turkic- andMongol-speaking Southern Siberia. No less important was the problem of the ethnic affiliation of the pre-Mongol population of the landsbetween the Altai and the Tian Shan that Potanin raised. In his opinion, the fact that Kazakhs lived there in the 19th century did not testify totheir autochthony. Thus, two problems have been raised: of the nature of the pre-Mongol population and of the territory of the Kazakhsethnogenesis. On the basis of his brilliant knowledge of Mongol ethnography and the cultures of various Turkic peoples of the Sayan and theAltai, Potanin carried out comparative ethnographic research. He did not compare the whole cultural complexes of Mongols and Turks of theSayan and the Altai, on the one hand, and of the Kazakhs, on the other hand. He tried to find out the commonalities and the specifics in thedetails of these cattle-breeding cultures. It is the details that are the most illustrative ethnographic markers when isomorphic cultures arecompared, as the details, in particular, retain the ethnic and cultural traces of the long-forgotten, extinct peoples. The studies of folk-lore ofthe peoples of North-Western Mongolia allowed Potanin to trace the subjects common for both Asian and Western cultures. From herefollowed a no less important Potanins thesis about the deep influence of the Orient on the cultures of the European peoples. The acceptanceof this vision was incompatible with the Euro-centric view of the development of the human civilization shared not only by many of thecontemporaries, but also by the posterity. The stereotype of a European as a Kulturtraeger became firmly entrenched in the evolutionaryand Marxist concepts of the human development. Potanins scope of research interests, deep knowledge of the culture of the peoples ofCentral Asia, respectful attitude to them, new vision of the established scientific truths, academic courage allowed him to not only raisenew academic problems, but also to suggest a way of their resolution.

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