ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses the major activity in the realm of ethnography in Soviet Estonia and reviews that the same subject is offered by Aleksei Peterson. It reviews that published ethnographic works is given by specialized bibliographies compiled by Ants Viires and Juri Linnus and Ellen Karu. In 1922 the museum employed its first director with a specialized ethnographic education, the Finnish scholar Dr. Ilmari Manninen, who was simultaneously appointed docent of ethnography at the University of Tartu Riiklik Ulikool. The new professorial chair was filled by this writer, the first native Estonian to head ethnographic instruction in the country. Cultural collections, archives, and libraries containing a large share of the ethnographic museum's holdings had been evacuated from the cities and sheltered in a multitude of locations. The expeditious establishment of an outdoor ethnographic museum, an idea predating the war, may be similarly taken as reflecting the desire to preserve aspects of traditional peasant culture before modernization destroyed that culture fully.