The work deals with studies of Russia’s peripheral territories that advanced within social discourse during the post-reform era. Those were a reaction of Russian society to the rapid disappearance of so called ‘internal peripheries’ — regions of the Russian Orient that had retained a certain level of autonomy and characteristic economic lifestyles since their annexation by the Russian state. The paper contains an excerpt from Kalmyk Steppe of Astrakhan Governorate: a Statistical and Economic Description (St. Petersburg, 1868) by K. I. Kostenkov that has become a classic of Kalmyk studies. The published fragment of Chapter Four characterizes livestock breeding practices — a major economic sector of traditional Kalmyk society. The fragment is actually a key one since it provides an overview of approaches and methods that took shape in national science — including history, ethnology, and sociology that touched upon domestic agriculture as a basis of traditional cultures in general — during the period under consideration.