1743: Ethnography - The book of science

Ethnography
Disciplines
Saved for eternity
Commentary

Ethnography

Russian Emperor Peter I the Great
and the Empresses Anna and Elizabeth
sent Gerhard Friedrich Müller
on the Second Kamchatka expedition
along with the Danish Captain Vitus Bering
who is credited with the discovery
of Alaska and the Aleutian Islands.
Müller’s plan was to compile
histories of the towns they would visit,
and to describe the languages, clothing,
and religions of the ethnic Siberians.
On this expedition Müller realized
the value of a study of a culture
written from the point of view
of the people being studied. He taught
the value of using primary sources
and looking at a culture holistically.

Disciplines

Sociology
cultural anthropology
social anthropology
economics
history
historical economics
education
psychology
ethnomusicology
folklore
religious studies
and linguistics.
Many disciplines
use the
ethnographic method.

Saved for eternity

Someone thought it was worth documenting
before the language was lost
before the way of life disappeared
leaving us with an emotional attachment
to a few facts and images
of a landscape we will never live in.
It’s so far away, so long ago,
that if we’ve forgotten, we need to be reminded
they were almost entirely the same as us.

Primitive notions of how other people differ from us continue to persist in many ways, nurtured by ignorance, religion, and nationalism. Johann Georg Gmelin, who went with Müller on the second expedition, was charged with learning “whether the peoples of Siberia could move their ears, whether their uvulas were simple, or split into two or three parts, whether Siberian males had milk in their breasts, etc.”