Before Kluckhohn: The Interdisciplinary Principle of the Functioning of the Tungusic Expedition of 1927-1928

The article explores the activities of the Tungusic expedition of 1927-1928. Its participants conducted interdisciplinary researches in Eastern Siberia and the Far East of Russia in the sphere of history, geography, archeology, physical and visual anthropology, geography, botany, sociology, local lore, history of science. The precedence of the approbation of the interdisciplinary approach in comparison with the similar methodology of the American anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn, who was the head of the field research in 1936-1937, is proved. In foreign anthropological science, Kluckhohn is considered to be the founder of the new -interdisciplinary - expedition type and of the correspondent comprehension of anthropology as an integrating science. This paradigm still exists, although the domestic scientist Lev Sternberg put forward a thesis that ethnography was the quintessence of all the humanitarian (social) disciplines and that without it the science about the humanity in general could not exist. The members of the Tungusic expedition belonged to one scientific school and were working in the framework of the several disciplines, which were formalized as ethnosociology, ethnoarcheology, ethnopsychology, judicial anthropology, economic and gender anthropology only decades later. The biennial large-scale versatile activity of the participants of the expedition, who collected unique anthropological and ethnographic materials, data about different issues of the economy, mode of life, beliefs, mythology and shamanism, the Tungusic family system, problems of children's upbringing and gender stereotypes of behavior, photo-illustrative collections, is highly appreciated. The whole complex of the materials is stored in archives and museums of Moscow and Saint Petersburg, and still has not been fully introduced into scientific discourse. The conclusion is made that the scientific heritage of the Tungusic expedition should be studied in the collective and interdisciplinary work - to show the ethnic history of the Tungusic and Manchu peoples of Eastern Siberia and the Far East integrally: from the Middle Ages and up to the modern times. stages of the origin of the new direction of the Siberian and Far Eastern historical science, the development of the national science in the first third of the 19th century, with its world-level quality.

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