Sergey Alexandrovich Tokarev and the Intellectual Landscape of Soviet Yakutia

This article is devoted to the Yakut period in the biography of the famous scientist S. A. Tokarev. The Archive of the Yakut Scientific Center of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences contains a corpus of a few ego-documents related to the period of collaboration between Professor Sergei A. Tokarev and the Yakut Institute (1935-1959), the personal fund of the repressed ethnographer and orientalist Gavriil V. Ksenofontov and the historian Vasilii N. Chemezov. The study employs the methodology of “new biographical history” (social personal history), through which the formation of S. A. Tokarev’s individual scientific strategy during the period of early Soviet society’s construction is traced. The intellectual biography is reconstructed in the historical and hermeneutic space of the studied era, which allows the authors to reveal the social context of the historical narrative in which S. A. Tokarev’s scientific worldview was formed. The new interpretation of the scientists’ biography highlights the moment when the academic northern studies commenced in Moscow and the development of regional ethnography in Siberia, while S. A. Tokarev was actively involved in the scientific discourse between the «center» and the «periphery» on both sides of the complex integration process

Epistemology · Geography · Linguistics and language evolution · Religious, Philosophical, and Educational Studies · History · Philosophy