Les enquêtes orales en Russie, 1861-1914

Oral sources in Russia, 1861-1914. A. Stanziani. The paper takes into consideration the different steps in the making of statistical and ethnographical inquiries in the economics of peasantry: the questionary, the selection of the "representative cases", the specialists' notion of "scientific truth", and the way they imagine to bypass the cultural and social "otherness" of the peasantry; the mediation of local "cultural" elites (scribes, teachers, landlords, priests, state bureaucrats and zemstva officials) in charge of the questioning of the peasantry in "recurrent inquiries" (monthly, weekly, etc.). On the basis of published and archival sources the author is thus able to show the way different social Russian elites create images of the peasantry. The (Russian) positivistic construction of time and space is also discussed and compared to the peasants' perceptions of those concepts. A general discussion on the impact of those approaches on historiographical constructions is finally provided.Stanziani Alessandro. Les enquêtes orales en Russie, 1861-1914. In: Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales. 55ᵉ année, N. 1, 2000. pp. 219-241