The Basmanny district in perception and everyday practices of the residents: A study commissioned by a museum

Abstract

The article dwells on applied anthropological research conducted in Moscow in 2018. The research, titled “Basmanny district in perception and everyday practices of the residents”, was carried out as a part of the socio-cultural project “Museum of the Basmanny district of Moscow”, and was aimed at identifying, describing and analyzing the views of the area’s residents concerning this space: its structure and borders, as well as social, architectural, historical, cultural and other features. The article describes the tasks, methods and principles of the research, lists out the most significant results, and provides some notes on certain technical and methodological limitations and difficulties caused by various circumstances and the applied nature of the work. In the conclusion, the author specifically dwells on the scientific significance of the results obtained and notes the partial and selective customer demand for them: those results that had a quantitative expression or were more or less definite and unambiguous were in demand much more than qualitative ones, the most valuable from a scientific point of view. According to the author, the reason for this disparity lies in the excessive complexity of the “picture” revealed in the course of the study: observations describing the complex and contradictory nature of a person’s relationship with a space are difficult to convert into a simple and visual scheme that is in demand in the format of a socio-cultural project.