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<nikolai@ND1506.spb.edu>
Obituary: Vyacheslav Misyugin (1924-1988)
Most Russian Africanists of his generation were hardly known outside the
former "socialist world". Vyacheslav Misyugin who passed away a few days
ago had been a leading figure in Russian African Studies since the 1950s.
He was particularly active in the fields of East African history, traditional
ideology and age-related social structures.
Vyacheslav Misyugin generated a large amount of original ideas and shared them
with his students (from Russia, China, Eastern European and African countries).
Some of these (e.g. concerning Swahili history and seafaring) were first
proposed ten and even twenty years before they appeared in Africanist
publications in Western Europe and the USA. He was also famous for his
successful technological experiments such as African-type iron working or
boat construction, used to verify some of his hypotheses.
His articles (plus only one book, as he was more interested in oral
transmission of his ideas) were published in Russian, with a few English
translations, mostly by St. Petersburg University Press and the "Nauka"
publishing house of the Academy of Sciences, as well as the "St. Petersburg
Journal of African Studies."
RIP
 Humanities & Social Sciences Online 
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