Ethnography of the western and southern slavs at the reception of professor Adam Fischer
Authors: TARNAVSKYI Roman 
Published: April 2023

Background: In 1924, the Department of Ethnology under the leadership of the Polish ethnologist, Professor Adam Fischer was established at Lviv University. The department was to specialize in Slavic issues. Thus, since the founding of the unit, Slav-ic ethnography has been one of the main topics in A. Fischer’s courses. However, until the early 1930s, these disciplines were concluded in areas of culture. A. Fischer began to implement another concept of lecture courses (by peoples or their groups) in the 1930s, after traveling to Central and Eastern Europe(travel geography included ethno-graphic centers of cities such as Prague, Brno, Martin, Bratislava, Vienna, Ljubljana, Zagreb, Belgrade, Budapest). It was then that the Lviv professor started the series “Slavic Ethnography”. It was to consist of a synthesis of “General Characteristics of Slavic Ethnography” and 11 parts of the complex characteristics of individual Slavic peoples (coverage of such issues as the boundaries of ethnic territory and ethnographic zoning, stages of ethnic history, dialectal and anthropological features, the history of ethnographic research, areas of folk culture). Purpose: The work is aimed to analyze the views of the Polish ethnologist of the interwar period Adam Fischer on the Western and Southern Slavs, in particular on the basis of the manuscripts of a professor from the Archives of the Polish Ethnological Society (Wrocław, Poland). Results: Among the West Slavic peoples, A. Fischer singled out the Polabians (German-assimilated Polabian tribes living in the area between the Elbe, the Oder and the Baltic Sea), Lusatians, Poles (the professor emphasized the population of Pomera-nia, in particular, the Kashubians, whose features against the background of the Polish people explained primarily by the Baltic influences), Czechs and Slovaks (in the series “Slavic Ethnography” two separate notebooks dedicated to these peoples were planned. Instead, in the Archives of the Polish Ethnological Society there is one manuscript of two parts – “Czechs” and “Slovaks”, respectively, which was obviously influenced by their stay in the interwar period within one state). In developing the general scheme of the series“Slavic Ethnography”, A. Fischer often used the principle of the existence of the state among the people (which is ethnologically incorrect).This can be seen primarily in the materials about the South Slavs: separate notebooks of the series were to be devoted only to such South Slavic peoples as Serbs and Croats (A. Fischer characterized them as separate peoples with one language), Slovenes, Bulgarians.In the manuscript “Ethnography of Bulgaria” the scholar paid special attention to the Macedonians, emphasizing that part of the then Bul-garian state was not Bulgarian ethnic territory.Instead, Montenegrins and Bosnians (A. Fisher used the term “Muslim Serbo-Croats”) were mentioned occasionally by the pro-fessor in the context of the characterization of the peoples of Yugoslavia.The lecture course “Balkan Peninsula” prepared by A. Fischer deserves special attention. Here, the scientist used the geographical factor to the grouping of the material. 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