THE MANUSCRIPT BY S. A. AVIZHANSKAYA ON THE BASHKIR WEDDING

Abstract

Sofia Aleksandrovna Avizhanskaya is known for her research in the field of decorative and applied art of the Bashkirs and the Bashkir collections she collected for the State Museum of Ethnography of the Peoples of the USSR. However, her contribution to ethnographic science is not limited to this. The proposed publication introduces into scientific circulation Avizhanskaya’s manuscript about the Bashkir wedding, discovered in the Scientific Archives of the Ufa Federal Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences in the 1956 field diary of Rail Gumerovich Kuzeev. The author supplements these materials with the information contained in Avizhanskaya’s expeditionary report, and highlights their novelty and uniqueness using our own field records of recent years. Archival sources indicate that during joint field research, Kuzeev often served as Avizhanskaya’s translator from Bashkir into Russian, including the story of a wedding, and shared his knowledge of the history and life of the Bashkirs. This helped Avizhanskaya to study the territorial features of the national costume, economic activities, food systems and other areas of the ethnography of the Bashkirs. For her part, she passed on the experience of expeditionary work. A record of the Bashkir “red wedding” made jointly by Avizhanskaya and Kuzeev fills in the source gap in the study of the Bashkir ritual of the mid-20th century. The manuscript presents the local features of the northeastern Bashkirs, preserved traditions, including the institution of “planted parents”, as well as other ethnic and Soviet customs that have penetrated into ritualism.