Вышелейские эпифании: концептуальная пересборка случайной этнографии

Журнал социологии и социальной антропологии. 2026. Т. 29. № 3. С. 244–274.

Rozhdestvenskaya E., Abramov R.

The article presents an experimental study at the intersection of social anthropology and qualitative sociology. The empirical basis is a corpus of 18 short biographical sketches of collective farm peasant women from the village of Vysheley, Penza Region, created at the end of the Soviet period by school local historians and discovered by one of the authors during a local Mordovian culture festival. The authors develop the approaches of “accidental ethnography” and “second-order ethnography”, considering ego-texts as a source for the social history of women’s labour in the 20th century and as a local performance of memory. The methodology combines retrospective reflection on unintentional field experience, work with material collected by another researcher, and controlled use of neural networks (ChatGPT) for primary structuring of the corpus. The theoretical foundation of the article is F. Fuchs’ concept of short civic storytelling and the notion of epiphany. The analysis shows that despite the formal lapidarity of the narratives (peasant origin, lack of education, total labour during the war, help to the front), they form a stable emotional regime of patience, duty and silent heroism. The collection itself acts as a narrative agent constructing local identity. In the conclusion, the authors reflect on the epistemological and ethical boundaries of using AI in qualitative research, discussing the potential and risks for “live” fieldwork. The polyphony of voices (ethnographers, neural network, school authors and heroines) problematizes genre and authorial modes of writing in contemporary social anthropology.

Keywords: социальная история, neural networks, краеведение, local history, peasantry, крестьянство, social history, эго-документы, нейросети, ego-documents, accidental ethnography, epiphanies, случайная этнография, эпифании