The Development of Academic Strategies of Expedition Studies of Yakutia in the 20th Century

On the example of the expedition of the Commission for the Study of the Yakut ASSR (1925-1930), the R&D potential of the Soviet Union and the importance of the USSR's contribution to the academic study and development of the northern territories of the country are described. In the first half of the twentieth century, the Academy of Sciences of the USSR implemented the method of an integrated innovative study on the basis of the Commission for the Study of the Yakut ASSR, which determined the continuity of the academic expeditionary studies of subsequent years in Northern Asia. The close scientific communications of Yakut regional historians and representatives of St. Petersburg scientific elite, who took part in the expeditions of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR allowed testing the methodological tools of various intellectual communities and scientific schools. The transformation of the scientific research strategy and the initial stage of the Soviet ethnographic school's formation in the specified chronological period are considered in line with the problem field of intellectual culture. The existing researchers' programs on the visual fixation of the traditional daily life of the Yakut population helped to collect a huge array of anthropological evidence in a relatively short period of time. Analysis of these materials as special phenomena of the visual culture of their time in terms of different conceptions will give them a broader interpretation, including an assessment of their relationship with social reality and the history of their further existence. The author showed that visual methods of research in the work of expeditions of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR was the main field tool for ethnographic and historical-anthropological studies, which reflected in detail the existence of the collected exhibits in the culture of everyday life. It seems that the implementation of complex interdisciplinary studies, following the example of academic expeditions of the Soviet period, at the present stage of science development would allow us to update the scientific data on the present state of peoples, to assess the quality of the environment in areas that are in the zone of active industrial development, to organize demographic, sociological, statistical, economic and ethnographic studies, including the research of natural landscape complexes. In conclusion, it is summarized that the use of visual methods of research by scientists contributed to solving the methodological problems of anthropology in the study of the cultural experience of peoples and its representation.

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