The «Esoteric Community» and anthropological knowledge in the Late Soviet society

Abstract

In the 1960s and 1980s, in the USSR emerged a peculiar communicative community. Various anthropological ideas and practices were discussed and developed in there. In the article, this environment is described as an «esoteric community». It was comprised of people who would develop their own anthropological interests and projects in way, alternative to official philosophy and science. To denote the communicative aspect of this informal community, the concept of «esoteric scene» is introduced. The key feature of anthropological knowledge was its actual or potential connection with bodily practices and other possibilities of experimentation with everyday life and one’s own life in general. With the help of these 2 criteria: anthropological interest and the possibility of its application to oneself, «esoteric knowledge» in distinguished from «occult». The article describes the infrastructure of this «esoteric community», comprised of spatial and information infrastructures. The complexity of his Relations of the community with the Soviet state were ambitious, though, as the state sought to limit and control the consumption of such knowledge, while simultaneously disseminating it through educational propaganda. In the article, biographies of two prominent representatives of the Moscow «esoteric community», Eugeny Shiffers and Valentin Kuklev, are taken for case study and briefly analyzed. The study of the «esoteric community» is essential for proper reconstruction of the entire process of development and dissemination of anthropological ideas in late Soviet and post-­Soviet society.