| Summary: | The purpose of this paper is to examine two concepts, which were put forward by M. G. Levin and N. N. Cheboksarov in 1950s, in the case of the peoples of the Lower Amur and Sakhalin. One is the concept of " economic-cultural types" and the other is that of "historicalethnographic regions". These concepts were born in Soviet ethnology in the studies of economic and cultural diversity among the peoples of the same level of socio-economic development. Definition of the concepts by Levin and Cheboksarov is as follows: the economic-cultural type is to be understood as historically formed complexes characteristic of a given economy and culture, typical for the peoples living under certain natural geographic conditions, at a certain level of socio-economic development; the historicalethnographic regions are the territories where a definite cultural entity was formed as a result of continued relations among the people inhabiting them, of their influences on one another, and of a similarity in their historical destiny [LEVIN 1972: 3, 5]. Levin and Cheboksarov grouped the peoples of northern Siberia into five by the concept of economic-cultural types: 1. hunter-fishermen in taiga (Siberian forest), 2. sea mammal hunters in the arctic shore and Bering sea, 3. fishermen on large rivers, 4. hunter-reindeer-breeders in taiga, and 5. reindeer nomads in tundra. According to them, an examination of the major economic-cultural types of northern Siberia and the [Soviet] far East reveals that: 1) the same economic-cultural type may develop among different peoples, in different, even remote, regions but only under conditions of the same level of development of productive forces and of a similar geographic environment; 2) different types in a particular territory have definite historical continuity [succession]— under certain historical conditions one type develops into another, for instance some hunter-fishermen of the forest zone changed their economic-cultual type to "hunter-reindeer-breeders" by introducing renideer-breeding; 3) ...
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