Chursin’s Manuscript “The Karachais” as a Source on the Ethnography and History of Karachai

The manuscript of G. F. Chursin’s article “The Karachais” is preserved in the Archive of Oriental Studies at the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences. It can be called the result of many years of work of the author on the study of ethnography and history of the Karachai people. During the scientific and technical processing of the file, the article was dated 1927. The manuscript was preserved almost intact, as a typewritten work, with a few handwritten corrections and notes, previously not published in its entirety. It consists of an introduction and more than twenty chapters on various topics. There is also an “appendix” to the article, which includes numerous notes, inserts and drafts of significant scholarly interest. The materials of the “appendix” are handwritten, partly in the pre-revolutionary and partly in the modern orthography. In his work Chursin focuses on issues relating to the spiritual culture of the Karachais: rituals, superstitions and various relics of pre-Muslim beliefs are described and analyzed with particular care. Studying questions of material culture, he describes in general terms the cattle breeding and agriculture of the Karachais, and elaborates on the hunting. G. F. Chursin also collected rich folklore material. Much of the information is unique and has not been given by other researchers. In some cases, we were able to verify the data collected by Chursin from independent sources, which were not available to him. Thus, the main method in our work is the comparative textual method

Ethnography · Folklore · Folkloristics · Eurasian Exchange Networks · Linguistics and Cultural Studies · Rangeland Management and Livestock Ecology