| Sergei Mikhailovich Shirokogoroff | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
Photo of Shirokogoroff in 1929 |
||||
| Russian name | ||||
|
||||
| Chinese name | ||||
|
Sergei Mikhailovich Shirokogoroff (1887-1939) was a Russian anthropologist. A White émigré, he lived in China from 1922 until his death.[1][2]
Contents |
Shirokogoroff was born in Suzdal. He went to France in 1906 to study at the University of Paris (Sorbonne) and then the École d'anthropologie.[3][4] He returned to Russia in 1910 to enter the Natural Sciences Department of the Saint Petersburg University, but pursued other interests including archaeology and then anthropology.[5][6] Under the direction of Vasily Radlov he began studying the ethnography of the Tungusic peoples, participating in expeditions in northeast China and eastern Siberia.[7]
With the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, Shirokogoroff first stayed in Vladivostok at the Far Eastern University. In 1922 he went to Shanghai on a busienss trip to get some of his works printed, but due to the fall of Vladivostok to the communists in 1922, remained in Shanghai as part of the city's Russian community.[8]
Shirokogoroff joined the Academia Sinica's Ethnology section in 1928 under Cai Yuanpei, and along with his wife and Yang Qingkun did fieldwork among the Yi people of Yunnan.[9][10] He also taught at Fu Jen Catholic University (which later moved to Taipei).[11] Afterwards, he was the first (and for quite some time, only) anthropology professor at Tsinghua University. Administratively, the status of anthropology was in flux for the first few years; the department began as "Sociology and Anthropology", then changed to "Sociology"; however, it was an "integral part of the department". He was the master's thesis advisor for Fei Xiaotong, who arrived at the university in 1933. Fei is best known for his association with Bronisław Malinowski, but Fei himself says that Shirokogoroff was more influential in his academic development.[12] Another student of Shirokogoroff's at Tsinghua was Francis Hsu, who had a less favourable view of him, complaining years later of his "authoritarian" and "intimidating" personal style.[13] Shirokogoroff also had rather poor relations with fellow expatriates Wilhelm Schmidt and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown.[14]
Major works of Shirokogoroff's include «Опыт исследования основ шаманства у тунгусов», "Social organisation of the Manchu" («Социальная организация маньчжур»), and «Этнос. Исследование основных принципов изменения этнических и этнографических явлений».[15] He left behind a manuscript of an Evenki dictionary, which his wife conveyed to Yasumoto Tokunaga (later of Kansai Gaidai University) in 1943. However this and other papers of Shirokogoroff's were lost during the Occupation of Japan when the United States Army, Japan took over the building of the Minzoku Kenkyūsho.[16][17]
Later writers described Shirokogoroff as one of the greatest scholars of Tungusic studies. In 1991, Koichi Inoue discovered an unprinted manuscript of his about the Evenki language among the papers of Władysław Kotwicz (Inoue had been looking for information from Bronisław Piłsudski); it harshly derided the Soviet-developed literary language for Evenki, and Inoue speculated that the paper, intended for publication by the Polish Oriental Society, had been rejected due to political fears of the Soviet reaction.[18]