Sergei Aleksandrovich Tokarev

Sergei Alexandrovich Tokarev (Russian: Сергей Александрович Токарев; born December 29, 1899 in Tula, † April 19, 1985 in Moscow) was a Soviet ethnologist and scholar of religion with Marxist- Leninist orientation. In his home he took high positions in science, including at the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, and also gained international importance. He has received numerous honors. Tokarews major works ( he is in the literature always cited as SA Tokarev Tokarev or ) deal with social structure, ethnogenesis, the history of religions in the world, forms of religious customs and historiography. His main field of research was the Ethnography of the Peoples of Siberia, Oceania and Western Europe.

Life and career

Sergei Alexandrovich Tokarev was born in 1899 in Tula, a city about 200 km south of Moscow, the son of a family of teachers. His family, who lived very close to the estate of Yasnaya Polyana, Leo Tolstoy, standing there on the October Revolution. At the Lomonosov University in Moscow, he studied anthropology and graduated in 1925 from there. Various teaching activities followed, about the " Communist Workers Institute of China Sun Yat- Sen". From 1928 he became a member of the Ethnological Central Museum, and in 1932 he took over the department "North". He also worked on the " National Academy for the History of Material Culture " in the central " Museum for anti religion." In 1935, he received a doctorate in history, 1939, he was professor and 1940 he defended his thesis on " The Yakut society system in the 17th to 18th centuries " and received a doctorate in ethnology. At the beginning of World War II after the attack of Nazi Germany on the Soviet Union in June 1941 Tokarev was evacuated to Abakan, where he worked at the Department of History at the Pedagogical Institute. In 1943 he returned to Moscow and became head of the " Department of Anthropology of the American, Australian and Oceanic peoples " in the newly established Moscow's " Institute for Ethnology of the USSR". In 1961 he took over the management of the " sector for the ethnology of non- Soviet nations of Europe." At the same time, he headed 1956-1973 the " Ethnological Department at the Faculty of History " of the Moscow State University and held several lectures on general anthropology, primitive religion, and about the ethnology of the USSR, the people of Australia and Oceania, Slavic, Mongol and Turkic people Siberia and the peoples of the Americas. Under his leadership, the activities of the department expanded staffing and organization. Above all, the study of Slavic, Siberian, Central Asian and African peoples, the history of these peoples, and the history of primitive religions or of shamanism were doing priorities.

Importance

Despite the difficult in the first period of his life Zeitläufte, ideological and political campaigns, and in spite of all obstacles succeeded Tokarev, his scientific ideas and principles to remain faithful. He was a great ethnographer and ethnologist and left more than 250 works on various topics. The enormous size of its researchers' interest began early in his scientific career to emerge: he developed literature on Oceania, dealt with the ethnology of Siberia, worked in archives and participated in expeditions. This almost encyclopedic concentration in two different directions of museum work and the field research expeditions, enabled him to work with a variety of data. In his scientific work he constantly expanded his activities and interests, but also presented earlier results permanently in question. He has also been involved as a co-author of numerous publications of international researchers; his contributions have been translated into many European languages ​​, so that his name remains to this day known in the art. Tokarev was basically no historiographical oriented researchers, rather it was due to make his reader with different foreign concepts of ethnography, new discoveries in the field of anthropology and archeology. His atheist attitude contributes to its neutrality. At most, the class struggle concepts and gentile societies to which he refers again and again, into perspective some of his analyzes, though not essential.

Work

Main works

• Obshchestvennyi STROI iakutov v XVII- XVIII vv. Yakutsk, 1945.
• Религия в истории народов мира. Moscow 1964; 3rd edition 1976. German: Religion in the history of nations. Pahl - Rugenstein, Cologne 1968.

Swell

Documents

• Ethnologist
• Religious scholars ( 20th century)
• Historians of religion
• Sociology of Religion
• Marxism -Leninism
• Russian
• Born in 1899
• Died in 1985
• Man