The W.L. Seroshevsky collection (MAE No. 831) as the first targeted acquisition of visual and thematic materials on Japanese traditional phallic cults in Russian ethnography
The purpose of this article is to consider the subject composition of the collection by V.L. Seroshevsky in Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (“MAE No. 831”) as the first in the Russian ethnographic Japanese studies thematic set of materials enabling visual representation of the cultural and ethnic functioning of traditional phallic and fertility cults, as well as some aspects of the gender culture of the mid. 19th c. Japan. The acquisition was the result of the collecting activity of V.L. Seroshevsky during his expedition to Japan in 1903, sponsored by Emperor’s Geographical Society and the Emperor’s Academy of Sciences. The acquisition reflects the research interests of L.Y. Sternberg, one of the founders of the Soviet ethnographic school. The collection was acquired in the period when phallic cults, once an integral part of the “primordial” paradigm of Japanese ethnicity, suffered suppression from the part of the Meiji authorities and stayed at the very verge of extinction. However, this reason allowed V.L. Seroshevsky to collect a number of very rare items, which in subsequent periods would be much more difficult to acquire. V.L. Seroshevsky’s comments proper on the pieces he collected are valuable ethnographic evidences, too. The article also touches upon the problem of transformation of the approaches (both in Russia and Japan) to the relevant limits for the visualization of phallic cult objects in public space and museum exposition; the fate of this collection presents a vivid example of such transformation.