Abstract

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.

The paper deals with the problem of establishing ethnography as a scientific discipline with an adequate position within the overall system of scientific knowledge. In Soviet academic practice, ethnography is understood as a branch of social science, having for its principal object ethnoses of peoples, as they vary in time, with their resemblances and specific traits. Though the core zone to be studied by ethnography is the traditional, everyday-life culture, a complex, interdisciplinary approach is invariably required in ethnographic research. Thus, the greater part of the paper analyses the correlation to and possible ways of cooperation with other sciences, natural and social and the humanities (psychology, sociology, geography, demography, folklore and popular art studies etc.), including the rapidly developing intermediary subdisciplines such as ethnopsychology, ethnosociology, ethnodemography, etc. which have sprung up along the interdisciplinary "frontier".