Andrey Savvin’s work “Yakut food before the development of agriculture” is a descriptive work, which contains unique information about the food culture of the Sakha people. The author collected data for the book during his many years of field research.
The Yakut historian Olga Ionova noted that in terms of the quality of the material and the study of literary sources, as well as completeness and accuracy of the selected facts, Savvin’s manuscript is one-of-a-kind among the existing literature on the subject of Yakut food culture.
The study of food traditions in different ethnic cultures of Russia has always been one of the most important areas of Russian ethnography. As the editors of the book “Traditional Food as an Expression of Ethnic Identity”, Sergey Arutyunov and Tatiana Voronina, point out, “… the long ethnic and social history of peoples is reflected in the sets of foodstuffs characteristic of different peoples, in the cooking methods, in the traditions of food preferences or, on the contrary, in food restrictions and prohibitions, in the forms of table arrangements, in the etiquette and rituals associated with them, and in many other aspects of material and spiritual culture, in one way or another related to food.“
In this respect, Savvin’s monographic study, which is devoted to the traditional nutritional system of the Yakuts, is of great historical, scientific and cultural interest. The researcher was unable to complete the work he started. The manuscript lacks a summary and general conclusions. The notes and comments in pencil on the pages show that the researcher continued to work on the draft version of the text.
Andrey Savvin prepared his manuscript for publishing and actively discussed the future monograph in the scientific community. Thus, the National Archive of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) contains a notebook with extracts from Andrey Savvin’s work among the materials of the archaeologist, ethnographer and local historian Ivan Novgorodov. Later, some pencil editing made by Novgorodov’s hand was found on the manuscript itself.
Using the Yakut material, Savvin was the first to
create a scheme of the food system, where the main criterion is the natural and
environmental factor. On the basis of broad historical and ethnographic
material, the researcher analyzed practically all types of economic activities
of the Yakuts: cattle breeding, hunting, fishing, gathering and farming. Andrey
Savvin suggested that the traditional food system is determined by the
environmental conditions and economic activities of the people themselves.
