From the General to the Quotient and Backward

Peculiarities of Knowledge Production by the Populists

Abstract

Populism as a social and intellectual movement began to take shape in the 1860–70s among students. Their ideology was formed on the basis of global historical-philosophical and political-economic concepts. However, “going to the people” showed that such broad generalizations were contrary to reality and could not be used as an instrument of cognition. After the defeat of the populism, many of its participants found themselves in exile on the outskirts of the empire, where they were deprived of access to the traditional circle of reading. One of the main forms of activity for them was participation in expeditions that collected specific material (from ethnographic to geological), the comprehension of which required acquaintance with highly specialized literature. In process of accumulation of field material, some populists reached the new level of generalizations. During of the “Sibiryakovsky” expedition quite bold linguistic and anthropological hypotheses were voiced, while discussing the projects of the exposition in the Russian Museum by D.A. Klements, the foundations of the theory of cultural-household types were formulated. Later on, former populists L.Ya. Sternberg and V.G. Bogoraz were able to create new global concepts in ethnography. Thus, the production of knowledge by the people went according to the following principle: at first generalizing theories were used which could not stand the test of practice, then the stage of creation of private scientific knowledge in the field of archaeology, ethnography, geology came, and after that new high-level theories were created on their basis.