85 YEARS OF THE DEPARTMENT OF ETHNOLOGY OF MOSCOW UNIVERSITY: THE ERA OF CHANGE, THE SEARCH FOR A NEW IDENTITY AND THE EXPERIENCE OF PROFESSIONAL CONTINUITY (1986–2024)

The article covers the history of the University Department of Ethnology over the last four decades. It has been a time of radical transformations in both the socio-political and academic life of the country. The stability and healthy conservatism of the university science allowed the Department of Ethnology not only to successfully pass the period of sociopolitical, cultural, and ideological turbulence but also to significantly expand and update the concept of ethnological education, turning it towards modernity. At the turn of the first and second decades of the 21st century, the Department faced new challenges related to the “anthropologization” of ethnology, the blurring of its subject definition, and the transformation of professional identity. The current situation at the department gives grounds for professional optimism. The department’s imperatives are not to oppose, but to combine traditional ethnographic (ethnological) approaches with the conceptualizations and tools of sociocultural anthropology, interdisciplinarity, the preservation of intergenerational continuity, and the successful transmission of tradition. The traditions of the department include maintaining interest in the history of the discipline, careful preservation of the memory of teachers and predecessors, and openness to the new. Collective memory, collective experience, and collective ethos — these are the components of the 85-year collective academic biography of the University Department of Ethnography (Ethnology) and, at the same time, the source of social and intellectual optimism for its members.