Regarding the Transcript of a Lecture Course by G. F. Debets at the Department of Anthropology of the Moscow State University in 1954

Abstract

The subject of this study was a poorly readable 66 years old typewritten text. This is a transcript of twenty lectures by the outstanding Russian anthropologist Georgy Debets (1905–1969), a record of his training course “Anthropology of the Peoples of USSR”. In 1954, he taught it at the Department of Anthropology at Moscow State University. Initially G. F. Debets had intended to write a textbook based on this lectures, but he did not fulfill this idea. The characteristics of the training course are given in general terms. The main attention is paid to how G. F. Debets saw the history of anthropological study of the peoples of Russia. At the same time, certain changes were taken into account both in the theory and practice of anthropological studies that have taken place since the early 1950s. The 1st lecture was delivered on September 6th, 1954, the last lecture was dated to the end of December of the same year. The lecture transcripts are mainly 30–40 pages long, with the exception of lectures on the peoples of Kazakhstan and Central Asia, which fit in 50 pages. The first two lectures were devoted to the study of the history of the peoples of the USSR from ancient antiquity to the present, the 3–5th lectures dealt with the methodology of studying the modern and fossil population, meaning racial somatology and craniology. The 6th lecture outlined the principles of the classification of modern human races and described the various existing classifications. Five lectures (7–11th) were devoted to the review of the country's population paleoanthropology from the Paleolithic era until the Middle Ages, inclusive. The next nine lectures covered the anthropology of peoples living in separate geographical areas. G. F. Debets pointed that the course he taught was not about the history of Russian anthropology, so he would not touch on many works of the 19th century. The first lectures outline the stages of development of anthropological research of the peoples of the USSR and state the results of isolated stages, which are reflected unevenly. Both this periodization and the characteristics of the stages do not always coincide with the periodization that was presented in the university textbooks of anthropology that appeared later. For this reason, the transcript of lectures of 1954 is a valuable source both for the history of physical anthropology as a whole and for understanding the scientific views of one of the founders of modern anthropology.