OMFG. I just realized that the legitimizing tactics used by historians of esotericism and historians of Ukraine are... Literally the exact same tactic.
Historians of esotericism strove to write works so academic no one could call them pseudo-history. Historians of Ukraine, when faced with Soviet ideology, took place in descriptive archaeography and prided themselves on an impeccable mastery of the sources.
And by "impeccable mastery" I mean... Look, I at KMA I was one of the worst in my cohort for remembering and handling multitudes of texts. Much of it was the memory problems typical to ADHD--I had no idea how to adjust for that back then, and it would take me over a decade to even start approaching "basic competence" in the eyes of Ukrainian academia. Honestly, I'm pretty sure they'll read my book and go "that was... Inadequate".
So by Ukrainian standards I'm barely scratching competence in source mastery. But when I went to Amsterdam, I somehow jumped to being one of the more competent people when it came to knowing and remembering the primary sources. And this was among a field which was using that very same tactic.
The reason for that was simple, as it turns out. Ukrainian history's only refuge from ideology was descriptiveness. You could publish sources. You could be anal-retentive about them context.
The only exam I ever failed was at the ethnography institute in Kyiv. Now, there's a lot of ridiculous things about that institute--some colleagues tried to get me baptized as a safety measure when I said I was interested in magic, for starters--but that one lesson I took away with me forever.
The question I got for my exam was the work Hvedir Vovk, one of the earliest Ukrainian anthropologists. I talked about his main works and concepts for about 5 minutes, and called it a day.
As I finished, an eerie silence fell over the committee. One of them looked at another, then at me, and said quietly: "You realize we had to copy those books by hand in the Soviet Union because it was too dangerous otherwise?"
That's when I knew I was fucked.
The examiner continued: "Just for the benefit of all of you, I want to show you what a proper answer looks like." And proceeded to give a 20-minute lecture off the top of her head, with references and contextualizations and page numbers.
@werekat i don't get it
giving more context is one thing
but what's the point of citing page numbers?
@meena Imagine an environment where it's dangerous to keep certain kinds of written books on hand and you live with the feeling that you might need to remember where you saw something before it gets taken away.
But also keep in mind that it might be just my memory playing tricks on me. I remember that it was extremely detailed, down to "you can find that in this source, this source, and this source, and this part of the chapter is relevant, while that part should be ignored."
@werekat that makes more sense to me. Citing exact page numbers from memory is somewhat believable if it's an often cited passage in the work (assuming some widely published edition), but I have some books I have a pretty good sub-chapter map, at least for some chapters. With thieving government censors...yeah, I could see that.
@meena
