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[AMERICANA] Doma i domashniaia zhizn’ amerikanskikh tuzemtsev [i.e. Houses and Domestic Life of the American Aborigines]

Morgan, L.

Item #2604

Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Instituta Narodov Severa TsIK SSSR, 1934. VIII, 199 pp.: ill., 1 ill. 26,5 × 18 cm. In original printed wrappers. Spine and cover corners restored.

First Russian edition of the last work by Lewis H. Morgan. One of 4000 copies.
The book was published as the second issue in the series ‘Proceedings of Ethnography’ (1933–1936) released by the Research Association of the Institute of the Peoples of the North. The editorial reads “‘Houses and House Life of the American Aborigines’ is an extremely little-known book. In bourgeois academia, a veritable conspiracy of silence exists regarding this book. And this is hardly
surprising. There is no other work in the realm of global ethnological and archaeological literature that so consistently and unequivocally demonstrates the communist character of primitive life.”
The work was edited by Ia. Al’kor, the pseudonym of Latvian ethnographer and linguist Jan (Jacov) Koshkin (1900–1938). In the late 1920s, he taught at the Northern Faculty of the Leningrad Oriental Institute and at the Ethnographic Department of the Faculty of Geography of the Leningrad State University. In 1930–1936, he held the position of professor (since 1931, director) of the Institute of the Peoples of the North. He founded the Research Association and was engaged in the production of its “Proceedings” (a series on ethnography, linguistics, folklore, history, economics). At the same period, Koshkin became Head of the Departments of Northern Languages of the Leningrad Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History and the Pedagogical Institute named after A. And. Herzen. In the mid-1930s, he headed the ethnographic section of the Institute of Anthropology, Archaeology and Ethnography of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Among his scientific interests was the study of the language and ethnography of the Evenks; he was one of the developers of the Evenki alphabet.

In the late 1930s, he was blamed for “the loss of class vigilance”, expelled from the party, arrested for the participation in a spy-terrorist organization and then murdered. The book with his foreword had no chance to distribute across the country after the repression.

Worldcat shows the only copy located in Rochester University.

Price: $950.00