Ethno-Eye

During her long-term and quite exhausting field work in 1927, Nadezhda P. Dyrenkova, a Soviet ethnographer who worked in South Siberia, wrote in her field notes, “Several Shors [an indigenous minority in South Siberia] arrived in [illegible] clothes and sat down in front of us. A woman came in a canvas dress with a front closure; ruffles on the skirt, belted with a scarf. Children are in short shirts buttoned in front with one button.”¹ Such ameticulous description of her field subjects—informatory, as she called them—may surprise a contemporary reader.