E-mail: n.v.drannikova@gmail.com
6/1, A, Gagarinskaya str., St. Petersburg, 191187, Russian Federation
PhD in Philology, Professor, Associated Researcher, the European University in St. Petersburg
This article begins a series of articles devoted to the construction of Pomor identity, a process that began in the Arkhangelsk region in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Pomor identity has not been solidified for a long time. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the cities of the Arkhangelsk urban agglomeration, attempts to create a new Pomor urban identity began, but it only had an imaginary connection with the past. Those active in forming the new identity were academic and artistic intellectuals and regional politicians. This article examines one attempt to construct modern Pomor identity, through the publication of expedition materials. This is exemplified by V. N. Matonin and S. V. Rapenkova’s Mezen’s Living Water: The History of the Region in the Fates of its Residents (2017). This book contains interviews recorded during expeditions by the Northern Shipping Partnership and the Solovetsky Sea Museum to the Mezensky and Leshukonsky Districts of the Arkhangelsk Region in 2011-2016. The scholarly content and authors’ presentation of the expeditionary materials raise many problems. The authors rely on L. N. Gumilev’s theory of ethnogenesis, according to which the peculiarities of an ethnic group are conditioned by the peculiarities of the landscape where it lives, and they try to depict the mythologized image of the Pomors as formed in local artistic and media discourse. However, without knowledge of proper ethnographic and anthropological research methods, the authors use representations of expedition materials to describe an imaginary, rather than real, community and to introduce unverified information into scholarship.
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