ისტორიული მეთოდოლოგია და ეთნოლოგიური კვლევები. HISTORICAL METHODOLOGY AND ETHNOLOGICAL RESEARCH

Abstract

The question of the intersection or relation of the research interests of history and ethnology is an accompanying topic to the process of establishing ethnology as a scientific field. The development of scientific methodology in the twentieth century, the expansion of areas of interest, and empirical innovations were accompanied by a revision of methodological and theoretical approaches. Differences in ethnological (anthropological) schools and traditions have led to the emergence of different approaches in the English, German and French speaking spaces. The theoretical development of the field in the English-speaking world was influenced, on the one hand, by the historical particularism of Franz Boas and, on the other, by the approaches of Bronislaw Malinowski and Alfred Radcliff e-Brown, who drew a sharp line between ethnology and history. They considered the socio-cultural phenomena from a functional point of view, and were perveiving the historical descriptions only as a bearer of the function of historical legacy of the present. Historical anthropology was developed in Germany. The main research question was the reconstruction of history, criticizing the connection of history only with the written sources. The ethnohisory as a specal field was etablished from the 60s of the twentieth century in Vienna, under the leadership of Hirschberg. This filed is on the edge of the historical and ethnographic studies. Ethnohistorical studies are based on both historical and ethnographic data and approaches. Ethnohistorical research is based on the analysis of written sources and documents. The French-speaking space was influenced by the historical school of the Annals, which focused on the everyday life and ordinary people. Attention was drawn to the microhistory. Such traditions have determined the urgency of historical methodology. The historical dimension has become more important to modern anthropology since the 1980s because it allows the analysis of similarities and differences of social life in historical or genealogical contexts and makes possible the accumulation of the comparative knowledge about human existence. Using a historical methodology in historical ethnology means retrospecting the past from modern cultures, thanks to the cultural memory of the people living today, their oral histories, historical sources and documents. The goal of the historical reconstruction should be to restore the whole context and not its fragments. Contexts change over the time. Consequently, historical continuity must not sought in the continuum of the same categories, values, or motives, but in the logic of transformational processes. Therefore the reconciliation of synchronic and diachronic approaches is the most effective for holistic analysis of the past or the present. Based on the above metioned, it can be said that the issue of strict definition of research areas is not relevant today and the shift of attention to this issue indicates the existence of the other types of problems within the specific scientific circles.