Dmitry Nosov
(St. Petersburg, Russia)

Reconstructing a Folklore Act: On Some New Challenges for Mongolists

(57th Annual Meeting of the PIAC Vladivostok, 2014)

Discoveries in folklore theory, made during last decades, require new methods from field-researches. At the same time it gives new challenge to the historians of different research disciplines.

Understanding of folklore as specific type of social communication makes mongolists not only to rebuilt their methods of fieldwork, but to reconsider materials, written down by previous researches. This reconsideration includes full-scale reconstructions of folklore acts, that took place in the past.

Reconstruction of folklore act requires analysis of all sources (diaries, letters and biographies of travelers and researchers, different types of local histories and folklore texts themselves). The article makes an attempt to reconstruct some folklore acts, that took place among Mongols at the beginning of 1920-es. This attempt includes methods of textology, cultural anthropology and editorial criticism.