Ethnographic documentation of the primitive beliefs of the Slavs in the archives of the 18th-20th centuries: Methodology, representation, problems of interpretation

The relevance of the study was determined by the need to analyse how, throughout the eighteenth-twentieth centuries, approaches to recording, classifying, and interpreting the pre-Christian beliefs of the Slavs changed under the influence of political, confessional, and scientific transformations. The aim of the work was to trace the full sequence of transformations – from field recording to archival classification and public representation – and to determine which methodological and ideological factors determined the final structure of the sources. The methodology was based on a comparative analysis of handwritten corpora, censorship prescriptions, and mass publications using the concepts of the history of knowledge, critical archival studies, textual criticism, and sociolinguistic hermeneutics. It was established that in the eighteenth-nineteenth centuries, field records were created mainly by descriptive intuitive methods, and the criterion of authenticity was defined by the aesthetic and ethnopolitical expectations of collectors, which led to the systematic exclusion of syncretic and everyday forms of ritual practice. The analysis of archival classifications showed that administrative-territorial and genre rubrics separated ritual data from functional context, while standardised questionnaires, editorial reductions, and self-censorship transformed multilayered descriptions into unified statistical units. The comparison of handwritten sources with lubok publications and early cinematographic plots demonstrated that at the turn of the nineteenth-twentieth centuries, religious motifs of demonology and agrarian magic were represented mainly as decorative ethnographic markers consistent with the Enlightenment canons of the era. The generalisation of the results confirmed that multilevel selection, classification, and editorial processing stabilised certain interpretative models, while simultaneously marginalising contextual variations and situational practices of the bearers of tradition. The practical value of the study lay in the creation of a set of criteria for reconstructing the original ritual context from fragmentary and conceptually altered sources, contributing to a deeper understanding of ethnographic materials within archival and scholarly practices