Abstract
Examining the early development of ethnographic concerns regarding plague in Imperial Russia, this chapter proceeds by providing a detailed account of plague outbreaks and corresponding research that gave rise to the ‘native knowledge hypothesis’: the idea that Mongols and Buryats inhabiting the NE Chinese-Russian frontier possessed a traditional knowledge of plague, as a zoonotic disease, and the means to prevent its spread to and amongst humans. After illustrating its international impact on studies of plague, it is argued that the native knowledge hypothesis was based on a process of ethnomethodological mystification. This obscured the sources of ethnographic data and generated an opaque ethnomedical narrative on which all future ethnographically led reasoning on plague relied.
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Lynteris, C. (2016). The Native Knowledge Hypothesis. In: Ethnographic Plague. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59685-7_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59685-7_2
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