History of development of foreign ethnopsychology. The history of the development of scientific ethnopsychological ideas in Europe and America The reasons for the emergence of ethnopsychology as a science

Plan

Introduction

1. The concept of ethnopsychology

2. History of ethnopsychology

Conclusion

Bibliography

Introduction

The changes taking place in Russia in recent years make us rethink interethnic relations in all regions of the country. Today it is necessary to admit that for a long time in our country there was no evidence of growing contradictions in one of the most complex areas of human existence - international, which is now reflected in the economic, political, cultural and other spheres of society. It came to open ethnic conflicts, the resolution of which presents great difficulties.

The national policy in the country can and should be carried out on the basis of new approaches to the organization of complex ethno-sociological and ethno-psychological studies of the objective processes of the development of nations and national relations, the use of world experience in solving the national question, the development of scientifically sound recommendations for politicians, leaders who have come to power in national regions.

The correct strategy and tactics in conducting this kind of research and formulating the necessary recommendations for the practice of resolving interethnic conflicts and the corresponding educational work can be built on the basis of clear methodological and theoretical premises, which are the result of studying all socio-psychological phenomena that manifest themselves in interethnic relations.

The purpose of the abstract is to characterize ethnopsychology as a subject.

As a result of the disunity of researchers by the end of the 19th century. formed two ethnopsychologies : ethnological, which today is most often called psychological anthropology , and psychological, for which the term is used cross-cultural(or comparative cultural)psychology. While solving the same problems, ethnologists and psychologists approach them with different conceptual schemes.

The differences in the two research approaches can be grasped using the old philosophical opposition of understanding and explanation or modern concepts. emic And etic.These terms, which are not translated into Russian, were formed by the American linguist K. Pike by analogy with the background ethics studying the sounds that are available in all languages, and the background emic studying sounds specific to one language. In the future, in all the humanities, including ethnopsychology emic came to be called a culture-specific approach that seeks to understand phenomena, and etic- a universalistic approach that explains the phenomena under study.

Main features emic approaches in ethnopsychology are: the study of the psychological characteristics of the bearers of one culture with the desire to understand them; use of culture-specific units of analysis and terms; the gradual disclosure of the phenomenon under study, and, consequently, the impossibility of hypotheses; the need to restructure the way of thinking and everyday habits, since the study of any processes and phenomena, whether it be a personality or ways of socializing children, is carried out from the point of view of the participant (from within the group); installation on the possibility of a collision with a new form of human behavior for the researcher.

The subject of psychological anthropology, based on emic approach is the study of how an individual acts, thinks, feels in a given cultural environment. This does not mean at all that cultures are not compared with each other, but comparisons are made only after their thorough study, usually carried out in the field.

At present, the main achievements of ethnopsychology are associated with this approach. But it also has serious limitations, since there is a danger that the researcher's own culture will become a standard for him to compare. The question always remains: can he immerse himself so deeply in a foreign, often very different from his own, culture in order to understand the peculiarities of the psyche of its bearers and give them an unmistakable or at least adequate description?

Main features etic - approach that is characteristic of cross-cultural psychology can be considered: the study of the psychological life of individuals of two or more ethnic groups with the desire to explain intercultural differences and intercultural similarities; using units of analysis that are considered free from cultural influences; occupation by the researcher of the position of an external observer with the desire to distance himself from the studied ethnic groups; preliminary construction by the psychologist of the structure of the study and categories for its description, hypotheses.

The subject of cross-cultural psychology, based on etic-approach - the study of the similarities and differences of psychological variables in different cultures and ethnic communities. Cross-cultural research is carried out within the framework of various branches of psychology: general psychology studies the characteristics of perception, memory, and thinking; industrial psychology - problems of labor organization and management; developmental psychology - methods of raising children from different nations. A special place is occupied by social psychology, since not only the patterns of people's behavior due to their inclusion in ethnic communities are compared, but also the psychological characteristics of these communities themselves.

The most obvious task facing cross-cultural psychology is to test the universality of existing psychological theories. This task has been given the name "transfer and test" as researchers seek to transfer their hypotheses to new ethnic groups in order to test whether they hold up in many (preferably all) cultural contexts. It is assumed that only by solving this problem, one can arrive at the ultimate goal - to try to collect and integrate the results and generalize them in a truly universal psychology.

It is impossible to list all the points that affect the reliability of the results of cross-cultural studies. It is especially dangerous if ethnocentric tendencies appear in the works of ethnopsychologists, when the standards of one's culture are used as universal ones. As the Canadian psychologist J. Berry notes, quite often ethnocentrism in comparative cultural studies can be detected when choosing a research subject without taking into account the characteristics of one of the studied cultures. For example, in the West, as a rule, the content of communication is studied, while for Eastern cultures, the context in which it takes place is no less important.

The American ethnopsychologist G. Triandis believes that in most cross-cultural studies we are dealing with pseudo- etic approach, since their authors cannot get rid of the stereotypes of thinking of their culture. As a rule, the specificity of Western culture is “imposed” on the phenomena of other cultural systems. To achieve the reliability of cross-cultural studies, it is necessary to first identify universal ( etic)phenomena and processes, then analyze them using culture-specific ( emic) methods and finally compare using etic an approach. Such a combined study requires the joint efforts of psychologists and ethnologists, and, consequently, the creation of an interdisciplinary ethnopsychology. But although there has been a convergence of psychological anthropology and cross-cultural psychology, ethnopsychology is not yet a single whole.

Striving for the development of a unified ethnopsychology, one should not forget about its third branch - psychology of interethnic relations located at the intersection of social psychology and sociology . Today, in the social context of growing inter-ethnic tension and ongoing inter-ethnic conflicts both in the world as a whole and in Russia, it is this branch of ethnopsychology that requires the closest attention. Not only ethnopsychologists, but also teachers, social workers, and representatives of other professions should contribute to the optimization of interethnic relations, at least at the household level. But the help of a psychologist or teacher will be effective if he not only understands the mechanisms of intergroup relations, but also relies on knowledge of the psychological differences between representatives of different ethnic groups and their connections with cultural, social, economic, and environmental variables at the societal level. Only by identifying the psychological characteristics of interacting ethnic groups that may interfere with the establishment of relations between them, a practitioner can fulfill his ultimate task - to offer psychological ways to resolve them.

Conclusion

Completing the work on the abstract, we can conclude that ethnic psychology is an interdisciplinary branch of knowledge that studies and develops: 1) the characteristics of the psyche of people of different peoples and cultures; 2) problems of national peculiarities of world perception; 3) problems of national peculiarities of relationships; 4) problems of a national character; 5) patterns of formation and functions of national identity and ethnic stereotypes; 6) patterns of formation of societies, national communities.

The multiplicity of points of view on the content, originality and role of ethnic determinants of perception and the abundance of recent works devoted to this issue, both in Russia and abroad, once again demonstrate the relevance and importance of studying the characteristics of interethnic perception. The nature of interethnic relations at the present stage, mass migrations, the growth of disintegration processes with the simultaneous desire of mankind to unite and erase state borders, present their own requirements for the choice of topics and methods of social psychology.

Bibliography

1. Andreeva G.M. Social Psychology. - M., 1996.

2. Krysko V.G., Sarakuev E.A. Introduction to ethnopsychology. - M., 1996.

3. Lebedeva N.M. Introduction to ethnic and cross-cultural psychology. - M., 1999.

4. Shpet G.G. Introduction to ethnic psychology. - St. Petersburg, 1996.

CHAPTER I. ETHNOPSYCHOLOGICAL IDEAS IN EUROPEAN SCIENCE

1.1. The origin of ethnopsychology in history and philosophy

Grains of ethnopsychological knowledge are scattered in the works of ancient authors - philosophers and historians: Herodotus, Hippocrates, Tacitus, Pliny, Strabo. Already in ancient Greece, the influence of the environment on the formation of psychological characteristics was noticed. The physician and founder of medical geography Hippocrates (460 BC - 377 or 356 BC) put forward the general position according to which all differences between peoples - including their behavior and customs - are connected with the nature and climate of the country.

Herodotus (born between 490 and 480 - d. c. 425 BC) is the "father" not only of history, but also of ethnography. He himself willingly traveled a lot and talked about the amazing features of the peoples he met during his travels. In the "History" of Herodotus we meet with one of the first attempts etic approach, since the scientist seeks to explain the peculiarities of life and character of different peoples that interested him by their natural environment and at the same time compares them with each other:

“Just as the sky in Egypt is different than anywhere else, and just as their river has different natural properties than other rivers, so the manners and customs of the Egyptians are almost in every respect opposite to the manners and customs of other peoples” (Herodotus, 1972, p. 91).

Rather, this pseudo-etican approach, since Herodotus compares any people with his compatriots - Hellenes. The best example of an ethnographic essay by Herodotus is the description of Scythia, made on the basis of personal observations: he tells about the gods, customs, twinning rites and funeral rites of the Scythians, retells the myths about their origin. He does not forget about character traits, emphasizing their severity, impregnability, cruelty. Herodotus tries to explain the attributed qualities both by the features of the environment (Scythia is a plain rich in grass and well irrigated by full-flowing rivers), and by the nomadic way of life of the Scythians, thanks to which "no one can overtake them, unless they themselves allow it" (Herodotus, 1972, p. 198). In the "History" of Herodotus, we meet with many interesting observations, although he often gives completely fantastic descriptions of supposedly existing peoples. In fairness, it should be noted that the historian himself does not believe in stories about people with goat legs or about people who sleep for six months of the year.

In modern times, the first attempts to make peoples the subject of psychological observations were made in the 18th century. Again, it was the environment and climate that were considered as factors underlying the differences between them. So, discovering differences in intelligence, they explained them by external (temperature) climate conditions. The allegedly temperate climate of the Middle East and Western Europe is more conducive to the development of intelligence, and with it civilization, than the climate of tropical regions, where "heat stifles human efforts."

But not only intelligence was studied. The French Enlighteners of the 18th century introduced the concept of the “spirit of the people” and tried to solve the problem of its dependence on geographical factors. The most prominent representative of geographical determinism among French philosophers is C. Montesquieu (1689-1755), who believed that “many things control people: climate, religion, laws, principles of government, examples of the past, mores, customs; as a result of all this, a common spirit of the people is formed” (Montesquieu, 1955, p. 412). But among the many factors in the first place, he put forward the climate. For example, "the peoples of hot climates", in his opinion, are "timid, like old people", lazy, incapable of exploits, but endowed with a vivid imagination. And the northern peoples are “brave as young men” and are not very sensitive to pleasures. At the same time, the climate affects the spirit of the people not only directly, but also indirectly: depending on climatic conditions and soil, traditions and customs are formed, which in turn affect the life of peoples. Montesquieu believed that in the course of history the direct influence of climate weakens, while the effect of other causes intensifies. If "savages are dominated almost exclusively by nature and climate", then "the Chinese are governed by customs, in Japan the tyrannical power belongs to the laws", etc. (Ibid., p. 412).

The idea of ​​the national spirit also penetrated the German philosophy of history in the 18th century. One of its most prominent representatives, a friend of Schiller and Goethe, J. G. Herder (1744-1803) considered the spirit of the people not as something incorporeal, he practically did not share the concepts of "folk spirit", "soul of the people" and "national character". The soul of the people was not for him something all-encompassing, containing all its originality. "Soul" Herder mentioned among other signs of the people, along with language, prejudices, music, and so on. He emphasized the dependence of mental components on climate and landscape, but also allowed the influence of lifestyle and upbringing, social order and history. Realizing how difficult it is to reveal the mental characteristics of a particular people, the German thinker noted that “... one must live with one feeling with a nation in order to feel at least one of its inclinations” (Herder, 1959, p. 274). In other words, he groped for one of the main characteristics emic approach - the desire to study culture from the inside, merging with it.

The soul of the people, according to Herder, can be known through their feelings, speeches, deeds, i.e. it is necessary to study his whole life. But in the first place he put oral folk art, believing that it is the world of fantasy that reflects the folk spirit in the best way. Being one of the first European folklorists, Herder tried to apply the results of his research in describing the features inherent in the "soul" of some of the peoples of Europe. But when he moved to the psychological level, the characteristics he singled out turned out to be little connected with the features of folklore. So, he described the Germans as a people of courageous morals, noble valor, virtuous, bashful, able to deeply love, honest and truthful. Herder also found a “flaw” among his compatriots: a cautious, conscientious, not to say slow and clumsy character. We are especially interested in the features that Herder attributed to the neighbors of the Germans - the Slavs: generosity, hospitality to the point of extravagance, love "for rural freedom." And at the same time, he considered the Slavs to be easily subordinate and submissive (Ibid., p. 267).

Herder's views are but one example of the close attention of European philosophers to the problem of the national character or the spirit of the people. The English philosopher D. Hume and the great German thinkers I. Kant and G. Hegel also contributed to the development of knowledge about the nature of peoples. All of them not only spoke about the factors influencing the spirit of peoples, but also offered "psychological portraits" of some of them.

1.2. The study of the psychology of peoples in Germany and Russia "

The development of a number of sciences, primarily ethnography, psychology and linguistics, led in the middle of the 19th century to the emergence ethnopsychology as an independent science. It is generally accepted that this happened in Germany, where at that time there was a surge of all-German self-awareness, due to the processes of unification of numerous principalities into a single state. The "founding fathers" of the new discipline are the German scientists M. Lazarus (1824-1903) and G. Steinthal (1823-1893), who in 1859 began publishing the Journal of the Psychology of Peoples and Linguistics. In the program article of the first issue of Thoughts on Folk Psychology, the need to develop psychology of peoples- a new science that is part of psychology - they explained by the need to investigate the laws of mental life not only of individual individuals, but also of entire communities in which people act "as a kind of unity." Among such communities (political, socio-economic, religious), the peoples, those. ethnic communities in our understanding, since it is the people as something historical, always Given, that is absolutely necessary for any individual and the most essential of all the communities to which he belongs. Or rather, to which he refers himself, because according to La Tsarus and Steinthal, people is a collection of people who see themselves as one people, classify themselves as one people. And spiritual kinship between people does not depend on origin or language, since people define themselves as belonging to a certain people subjectively.

All individuals of one people have "similar feelings, inclinations, desires", they all have the same folk spirit, which German thinkers understood as the mental similarity of individuals belonging to a certain people, and at the same time as their self-consciousness, i.e. what we would call ethnic identity. It is the spirit of the people, which * manifests itself first of all in the language, then in the manners and customs, institutions and actions, in traditions and chants" (Steinthal, 1960, p. 115), and is called upon to study the psychology of peoples. The main tasks of the new science Lazarus and Steinthal considered: 1) knowledge of the psychological essence of the national spirit; 2) the discovery of the laws according to which the internal activity of the people is carried out in life, art and science; 3) identification of the main causes of the emergence, development and destruction of the characteristics of any people.

The selection of these tasks indicates that Lazarus and Steinthal considered the psychology of peoples as an explanatory science, reducing the general laws of language, religion, art, science, morals and other elements of spiritual culture to psychological essence. It should only be borne in mind that apart from historical psychology of peoples, explaining the spirit of peoples in general, German scientists singled out the descriptive part of the psychology of peoples - a specific psychological ethnology, designed to give characteristics of the spirit of individual peoples.

The concept of Lazarus and Steinthal cannot be regarded as a socio-psychological theory in the proper sense of the word. The psychology of peoples, from their point of view, is a continuation of individual psychology, since the spirit of the people lives only in individuals and the same processes that are studied by individual psychology take place in it. Nevertheless, the founders of ethnopsychology warned against a complete analogy between individual psychology and the psychology of peoples, emphasizing that a multitude of individuals makes up a people only when the spirit of the people binds them into a single whole. Like individual psychology, the psychology of peoples is called upon to study, first of all, imagination, reason, morality, but not of an individual, but of a whole people, revealing them in its creativity, practical life and religion.

The ideas of Lazarus and Steinthal immediately found a response in the scientific circles of the multinational Russian Empire. Already in 1859, a Russian translation of the presentation of their programmatic article appeared, and in 1864 it was printed in full. In many ways, this interest is due to the fact that in Russia by that time an attempt had already been made to collect essentially ethnopsychological data, although no conceptual model of the new science had been built.

In our country, the birth of ethnopsychology is associated with the activities of the Russian Geographical Society, whose members considered "psychic ethnography" as one of the sections of ethnography. N. I. Nadezhdin (1804-1856), who proposed this term, believed that mental ethnography should study the spiritual side of human nature, mental and moral abilities, willpower and character, a sense of human dignity, etc. As a manifestation of folk psychology, he also considered oral folk art - epics, songs, fairy tales, proverbs.

In 1847, the collection of materials began under the program for studying the ethnographic identity of the population of different provinces of Russia, proposed by Nadezhdin. Seven thousand copies of the program were sent to the branches of the Russian Geographical Society, located throughout the Russian Empire, offering to describe the peoples that inhabited a particular area. For many years, several hundred manuscripts were delivered to St. Petersburg annually from amateur collectors - landowners, priests, teachers, officials ... In accordance with the program, in the descriptions of folk life, they included materials of observations about the "moral life" of the peoples who inhabited Russia, t .e. about all the phenomena of spiritual culture from family relations and the upbringing of children to "mental and moral abilities" and "folk characteristics". Several manuscripts have been published, and reports have been produced containing psychological sections. But the work was not completed, and most of the materials, apparently, are still gathering dust in the archives of the Russian Geographical Society.

Later, in the 70s. of the last century, and in Russia, following Germany, an attempt was made to “embed” ethnopsychology into psychology. These ideas arose from the jurist, historian and philosopher K. D. Kavelin (1818-1885), who in the 40s. participated in the implementation of the program of ethnographic research of the Russian Geographical Society. Not satisfied with the results of collecting subjective descriptions of the "mental and moral properties" of peoples, Kavelin suggested the possibility of an "objective" method of studying folk psychology based on the products of spiritual activity - cultural monuments, customs, folklore, beliefs. In his opinion, the task of the psychology of peoples is to establish the general laws of mental life on the basis of a comparison of homogeneous phenomena and products of spiritual life among different peoples and among the same people in different epochs of its historical life.

Between K. D. Kavelin and I. M. Sechenov (1829-1905), the founder of the natural science direction in Russian psychology, a discussion unfolded on the question of what to consider as an objective method in scientific psychology, for which they both advocated. Recognizing the mental process, Sechenov considered it impossible to study the psyche by the products of spiritual culture. In fact, he denied the possibility of emic research in psychology, believing that "any psychologist, meeting with any monument of human mental activity and setting out to analyze it, must, of necessity, enclose the inventor of the monument with his own measure of observation and his own ideas about the ability to use analogies, draw conclusions, etc." (Sechenov, 1947, p. 208). In other words, correctly noting the great difficulties that researchers face emic directions, he considered these difficulties insurmountable.

In Russia, in a dispute between supporters of the natural science psychology of Sechenov and the humanitarian psychology of Kavelin, the former won. And along with the defeat of Kavelin, the first attempt to create a scientific ethnopsychology within the framework of psychology also ended in failure. But this does not mean that ethnopsychological ideas were not developed at all in our country. Just interest in them, as before, was shown by philosophers, historians, linguists.

And above all, the analysis of the folk - mainly Russian - character continued. Most Russian thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries were more or less concerned with the problem of revealing the identity of the "Russian soul", isolating its main characteristics and explaining their origin. It is impossible even to list the authors who touched on this problem, from P. Ya. Chaadaev to P. Sorokin, including A. S. Khomyakov and other Slavophiles, N. Ya. Danilevsky, N. G. Chernyshevsky, V. O. Klyuchevsky, V. S. Solovyov, N. A. Berdyaev, N. O. Lossky and many others. If some authors only described the features of the Russian national character, then others tried to systematize the descriptions of their predecessors, to determine the significance of each of the studied factors. There are several ways to explain the "Russian soul" as a whole. Thus, the historian Klyuchevsky leaned towards geographical determinism, believing that "the main elements of the nature of the Russian plain" - forest, steppe and river (Klyuchevsky, 1956, p.66). The philosopher Berdyaev emphasized "the correspondence between the immensity, the infinity of the Russian land and the Russian soul, between the geography of the physical and the geography of the soul" (Berdyaev, 1990 a, p. 44). He noted that the Russian people "did not formalize" these vast spaces because of their most dangerous shortcoming - the lack of "courageous character and personality temper" (Berdyaev, 1990 b, p. 28).

Russian linguistics also contributed to the development of ethnopsychological ideas. A. A. Potebnya (1835-1891) developed an original concept of language based on the study of its psychological nature. According to the scientist, it is the language that determines the methods of mental work, and different peoples with different languages ​​form thought in their own way, different from others. It is in the language that Potebnya sees the main factor that unites people into a “nationality”. For him, nationality is more likely not an ethnos, but ethnic identity, a sense of community based on everything that distinguishes one people from another, making up its originality, but primarily on the basis of the unity of the language. Associating nationality with language, Potebnya considers it to be a very ancient phenomenon, the time of origin of which cannot be determined. Therefore, the most ancient traditions of the people should be sought mainly in the language. As soon as the child masters the language, he acquires these traditions, and the loss of the language leads to denationalization.

1.3. W. Wundt: the psychology of peoples as the first form of socio-psychological knowledge

As already noted, in Russia the supporters of natural science and humanitarian psychology waged a struggle among themselves, in which there were winners and losers, but there was no place for ethnopsychology among other psychological disciplines. And in Germany, both orientations intersected in the work of one researcher - W. Wundt (1832-1920), the creator of not only the experimental psychology of consciousness built on the model of physiology, but also psychology of peoples as one of the first forms of socio-psychological knowledge.

Wundt published his first ethnopsychological article in 1886, then revised it into a book, which was translated into Russian and published in 1912 under the title Problems of the Psychology of Peoples. The scientist devoted the last twenty years of his life to the creation of the ten-volume "Psychology of Peoples". Wundt's predecessors in the creation of a new science were Lazarus and Steinthal. At first, his disagreements with the latter were subtle, but then he seriously deviated from the path they proposed.

Firstly, as we remember, for Lazarus and Steinthal, the study of the national spirit is reduced to the study of the same psychological phenomena as the study of the individuals that make up the people. Wundt agrees with them that soul of the people is not at all an incorporeal, abiding entity independent of individuals. Moreover, it is nothing outside the latter. But he consistently pursues the fundamental idea for social psychology that the joint life of individuals and their interaction with each other should give rise to new phenomena with peculiar laws, which, although they do not contradict the laws of individual consciousness, are not reduced to them. And as these new phenomena, in other words, as the content of the soul of the people, he considers the general ideas, feelings and aspirations of many individuals. From this, only one conclusion can be drawn: the psychology of peoples for a German scientist is an independent science. He emphasizes that she not only uses the services of individual psychology, but also helps the latter herself, providing material about the spiritual life of individuals and thus influencing the explanation of individual states of consciousness.

Secondly, Wundt seeks to narrow down the program of study of the psychology of peoples proposed by Lazarus and Steinthal. Although, according to him, in real research it is impossible to completely distinguish between description and explanation, the science of the soul of a people is called upon to explain the general laws of its development. And ethnology, which is an auxiliary discipline for the psychology of peoples, should describe the mental properties of individual peoples. By the way, Steinthal, in his later writings, agreed with Wundt's point of view on this issue and left descriptive psychological ethnology at the mercy of ethnographers.

Bthird, By According to Wundt, the general ideas of many individuals are manifested primarily in language, myths and customs, while the remaining elements of spiritual culture are secondary and come down to them. Thus, art, science and religion have long been associated with mythological thinking in the history of mankind. Therefore, as a subject of study, they should be excluded from the psychology of peoples. True, in his multi-volume work Wundt is not always consistent, for example, quite often he considers religion and art as part of the psychology of peoples.

But in the early works of the German researcher, we find a clear structure of the products of the creative spirit of peoples:

• language contains the general form of ideas living in the soul of the people and the laws of their connection;

• myths, understood by Wundt in a broad sense as the entire primitive worldview and even the beginnings of religion, conceal the original content of these ideas in their conditioning by feelings and inclinations.

• customs include actions that have arisen from these ideas, characterized by general directions of the will and the beginnings of a legal order.

“Language, myths and customs are common spiritual phenomena, so closely fused with each other that one of them is unthinkable without the other ... Customs express in actions the same life views that are hidden in myths and made common property thanks to language. And these actions in turn strengthen and further develop the ideas from which they spring. (Wundt, 1998, p. 226).

Having become acquainted with Wundt's ideas, it is easy to guess that he considers the analysis of the concrete historical products of spiritual life as the main method of the psychology of peoples, i.e. language, myths and customs, which, in his opinion, are not fragments of the creativity of the national spirit, but this spirit itself.

Wundt notes that the products of spiritual culture are also studied by other, in particular historical, sciences. Moreover, psychological and historical research go hand in hand. But the psychology of peoples, as an explanatory science, analyzes them from the point of view of the general laws of spiritual development expressed in them. It strives to psychologically explain the laws that objectively appear in language, myths and customs. If a psychologist studies the cult of tree spirits that exists among the Germanic and Slavic peoples, he needs to answer the question of what psychological reasons underlie this cult and the ideas associated with it, and how changes in ideas with the development of culture are psychologically justified.

1.4. G. G. Shpet on the subject of ethnic psychology

In the 20s. XX century in Russia, taking into account the achievements and miscalculations of the German predecessors, another attempt was made to create ethnic psychology, and under that name. In 1920, the Russian philosopher G. G. Shpet (1879-1940), in a memorandum on the establishment of an office of "ethnic and social psychology" at the Faculty of History and Philology of Moscow University, defined this field of knowledge as a branch of psychology, covering the study of such manifestations of a person's mental life as language, myths, beliefs, customs, art, i.e. the same products of spiritual culture that called for the study of Lazarus and Steinthal, Kavelin and Wundt.

In more detail, he outlined his views in the book "Introduction to Ethnic Psychology", the first part of which was published in 1927. In this work, Shpet conducts a detailed methodological analysis of the concepts of Lazarus - Steinthal and Wundt. From his point of view, ethnic psychology is not at all explanatory, as Wundt insisted, but a descriptive science, the subject of which is typical collective experiences. We are meeting this concept for the first time, so we should dwell on how the Russian scientist interprets it.

Arguing with the Bund, for which the products of spiritual culture are psychological products, Shpet argues that there is nothing psychological in the cultural-historical content of people's life itself. Psychologically different - attitude to the products of culture, to the meaning of cultural phenomena. Shpet believes that all of them - language, myths, mores, religion, science - cause certain feelings among the bearers of culture: “no matter how individually people are different, there is typically something in common in their experiences, as “responses” to what is happening before their eyes, mind and heart" (Shpet,1996, With. 341). Trying to correlate the individual with the world of culture, Shlet understands this general not as an average, not as a set of similarities, but as a “type” that is a “representative” of one or another historical community (the type of Chinese, the type of tradesman). According to the concept of the Russian thinker, analyzing the products of culture, ethnic psychology should identify typical collective experiences, in other words, answer the questions: What do people like? What is he afraid of? What does he worship?

The first part of Shpet's book is a philosophical substantiation of a new science - ethnic psychology, and we will not find in it examples of typical collective experiences of any people. We will never know how G. G. Shpet would concretize his program settings: in the early 30s. he was repressed and in 1940 died in Stalin's camps.

But the ideas of the Russian philosopher, set forth in the first part of his book. "" sound exceptionally modern. Firstly, this refers to the concept he introduced collective experiences, which he does not reduce only to emotions or only to cognitions. Rather, it is what modern science calls mentality, when they understand it not just as social representations, but as an emotionally colored system of worldview inherent in a particular community of people. G. G. Shpet proposes to study not the products of culture as such, but precisely the experiences of people about them, emphasizing that “perhaps nowhere is the psychology of the people so clearly reflected as in its attitude towards the spiritual values ​​“created” by them” (Shpet,1996, With. 341). He talks about the same thing that modern science has come to: about the need to study in psychology subjective culture.

Secondly, his assertion sounds very relevant that a person’s belonging to a people is determined not by biological heredity, but conscious communion to those cultural values ​​and shrines that form the content of the history of the people: “A person, indeed, spiritually determines himself, refers himself to this people, he can even “change” the people, enter into the composition and spirit of another people, but again not “arbitrarily ", but through long and hard work of re-creating the spiritual structure that determines it" (Shpet, 1996, p. 371).

But at the same time, Shpet notes a very important feature of ethnic identity, which many researchers of our days do not pay attention to: the unity of a person with a people is determined by a mutual act of recognition. In other words, in order to be a member of an ethnic community, it is not enough to be aware of one's belonging to it; it is also necessary to recognize the individual as a group.

The ideas of Lazarus and Steinthal, Kavelin, Wundt, Shpet in most cases remained at the level of bare explanatory schemes, and their conceptual models were not implemented in specific psychological studies. But the enduring value of the psychology of the peoples of the 19th - early 20th century lies in the fact that its creators tried to correlate the world of the individual not with the world of nature, but with the world of culture. Social psychology, which in the 20th century developed as an experimental science, rejected the psychology of peoples, along with other first socio-psychological theories, for the "speculative" methods and means of analysis. But the ideas of the first ethnopsychologists, primarily the ideas of W. Wundt, were picked up by another science - cultural anthropology. F. Boas, who was born in Germany and became the founder of cultural anthropology in the United States, transferred ideas about the links between culture and the inner world of a person to American soil.

LITERATURE TO READ

Budilova E. A. Socio-psychological problems in Russian science. M.: Nauka, 1983. S.112-148.

Introduction to ethnic psychology / Ed. Yu. P. Platonov. St. Petersburg: Publishing House of St. Petersburg University, 1995. S. 5-34.

Wundt V. Problems of the psychology of peoples // Criminal crowd. Moscow: Institute of Psychology of the Russian Academy of Sciences; Publishing house "KSP +", 1998. S. 201-231.

Shpet G. G. Introduction to ethnic psychology // Psychology of social life. Moscow: Institute of Practical Psychology; Voronezh: MODEK, 1996. S.261-372.

Let us remember these qualities, we will meet many of them in other "portraits" of the Slavic peoples, in particular the Russian people.

Another concept of linguistic determinism - the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis - we will analyze in the third chapter. There we will also consider studies that have tested this idea empirically.

He uses precisely this concept, and not the term the spirit of the people, as his predecessors, but we will not delve into terminological disagreements.

Let us remember this, since general (or collective, or social) representations are one of the central concepts of modern social psychology in general and social ethnopsychology in particular.

At the same time, he uses the term "type" in a meaning similar to the use of this word to characterize the heroes of literary works and is familiar to everyone from literature lessons.

Topic 1. Ethnopsychology as a subject.

Plan

1. The concept of ethnopsychology.

2. History of ethnopsychology.

The concept of ethnopsychology

Ethnopsychology is a science that arose at the intersection of social psychology, sociology and ethnography, which also to some extent study the national characteristics of the human psyche (Andreeva G.M.).

Ethnic psychology is an interdisciplinary branch of knowledge that studies and develops:

1) features of the psyche of people of different peoples and cultures;

2) problems of national peculiarities of world perception;

3) problems of national peculiarities of relationships;

4) problems of a national character;

5) patterns of formation and functions of national identity and ethnic stereotypes;

6) patterns of formation of societies, national communities.

The term itself ethnopsychology is not generally accepted in world science, many scientists prefer to call themselves researchers in the field of “psychology of peoples”, “psychological anthropology”, “comparative cultural psychology”, etc.

The presence of several terms for designating ethnopsychology is due precisely to the fact that it is an interdisciplinary branch of knowledge. Its “close and distant relatives” include many scientific disciplines: sociology, linguistics, biology, ecology, etc.

As for the “parental disciplines” of ethnopsychology, on the one hand, this is a science that in different countries is called ethnology, social or cultural anthropology, and on the other, psychology.

object studies of ethnopsychology are nations, nationalities, national communities.

Item - features of behavior, emotional reactions, psyche, character, as well as national identity and ethnic stereotypes.

Studying the mental processes of representatives of ethnic groups, ethnopsychology uses certain methods of research.

Widely used comparison and comparison method, in which analytical comparative models are built, ethnic groups, ethnic processes are classified and grouped according to certain principles, criteria and characteristics.

behavioral method is to observe the behavior of an individual and ethnic groups.

Methods of research in ethnopsychology include general psychological methods: observation, experiment, conversation, study of products of activity, test .

Observation - the study of the external manifestations of the psyche of representatives of ethnic groups takes place in natural living conditions (it must be purposeful, systematic, a prerequisite is non-intervention).

Experiment - active method. The experimenter creates the necessary conditions for the activation of processes of interest to him. By repeating studies under the same conditions with representatives of different ethnic groups, the experimenter can establish mental characteristics. Happens laboratory And natural. In ethnopsychology it is better to use natural. When there are two competing hypotheses, the decisive experiment.

The conversation method based on verbal communication and has a private character. It is mainly used in the study of the ethnic picture of the world. Research of products of activity -(drawings, writings, folklore).

Tests - must be a true indicator of the phenomenon or process being studied; give the opportunity to study exactly what is being studied, and not a similar phenomenon; not only the result of the decision is important, but also the process itself; should exclude attempts to establish the limit of the possibilities of representatives of ethnic groups (Minus: the psychologist is subjective)

So, ethnopsychology is the science of facts, patterns and mechanisms of manifestation of mental typology, value orientations and behavior of representatives of a particular ethnic community. It describes and explains the features of behavior and its motives within the community and between ethnic groups living for centuries in the same geohistorical space.

This science is a related discipline with ethnography, ethnopedagogy, philosophy, history, political science and others interested in studying the social nature of man and his essence.

History of ethnopsychology

The first grains of ethnopsychological knowledge contain the works of ancient authors - philosophers and historians: Herodotus, Hippocrates, Tacitus, Pliny the Elder. Thus, the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates noted the influence of the environment on the formation of the psychological characteristics of people and put forward a general position according to which all differences between peoples, including their behavior and customs, are associated with nature and climate.

The first attempts to make peoples the subject of psychological observations were made in the 18th century. Thus, the French Enlightenment introduced the concept of "the spirit of the people" and tried to solve the problem of its dependence on geographical factors. The idea of ​​the national spirit also penetrated the German philosophy of history in the 18th century. One of its most prominent representatives, I.G. Herder, considered the spirit of the people not as something incorporeal, he practically did not share the concepts of "soul of the people" and "people's character" and argued that the soul of the people can be known through their feelings, speech, deeds, i.e. it is necessary to study his whole life. But in the first place he put oral folk art, believing that it is the world of fantasy that reflects the folk character.

The English philosopher D. Hume and the great German thinkers I. Kant and G. Hegel also contributed to the development of knowledge about the nature of peoples. All of them not only spoke about the factors influencing the spirit of peoples, but also offered "psychological portraits" of some of them.

The development of ethnography, psychology and linguistics led in the middle of the 19th century. to the emergence of ethnopsychology as an independent science. Creation of a new discipline - psychology of peoples- was proclaimed in 1859 by the German scientists M. Lazarus and H. Steinthal. They explained the need for the development of this science, which is part of psychology, by the need to investigate the laws of mental life not only of individuals, but also of entire peoples (ethnic communities in the modern sense), in which people act "as a kind of unity." All individuals of one people have "similar feelings, inclinations, desires", they all have the same folk spirit, which German thinkers understood as the mental similarity of individuals belonging to a certain people, and at the same time as their self-consciousness.

The ideas of Lazarus and Steinthal immediately found a response in the scientific circles of the multinational Russian Empire, and in the 1870s an attempt was made in Russia to "embed" ethnopsychology into psychology. These ideas arose from the jurist, historian and philosopher K.D. Kavelin, who expressed the idea of ​​the possibility of an "objective" method of studying folk psychology based on the products of spiritual activity - cultural monuments, customs, folklore, beliefs.

Turn of the 19th–20th centuries marked by the emergence of a holistic ethnopsychological concept of the German psychologist W. Wundt. He devoted twenty years of his life to writing a ten-volume Psychology of peoples. Wundt pursued the fundamental idea for social psychology that the joint life of individuals and their interaction with each other give rise to new phenomena with peculiar laws, which, although they do not contradict the laws of individual consciousness, are not contained in them. And as these new phenomena, in other words, as the content of the soul of the people, he considered the general ideas, feelings and aspirations of many individuals. According to Wundt, the general ideas of many individuals are manifested in language, myths and customs, which should be studied by the psychology of peoples.

Another attempt to create an ethnic psychology was made by the Russian thinker G.G. Shpet. He discussed with Wundt. According to Wundt, the products of spiritual culture are psychological products. Shpet argued that there is nothing psychological in the cultural-historical content of folk life itself.

He believed that language, myths, mores, religion, science evoke certain experiences in the bearers of culture, “responses” to what is happening.

The ideas of Lazarus and Steinthal, Kavelin, Wundt, Shpet remained at the level of explanatory schemes that were not implemented in specific psychological studies. But the ideas of the first ethnopsychologists about the connections of culture with the inner world of a person were picked up by another science - cultural anthropology.

Control questions

1. Definition of ethnopsychology.

2. What does ethnic psychology study?

3. The object of study of ethnopsychology.

4. Subject of study of ethnopsychology.

5. Methods of research in ethnopsychology.

7. When were the first attempts made to make peoples the subject of psychological observation?

8. The development of what sciences led to the birth of ethnopsychology?

Bibliography

1. Andreeva G.M. Social Psychology. - M., 2011.

2. Krysko V.G., Sarakuev E.A. Introduction to ethnopsychology. - M., 2012.

3. Lebedeva N.M. Introduction to ethnic and cross-cultural psychology - M., 2009.

4. Shpet G.G. Introduction to ethnic psychology. - St. Petersburg, 2010.

4.2. The birth of ethnopsychology

as an independent field of knowledge

The origin of ethnopsychology as an independent field of knowledge, admittedly, took place in Germany. The beginning of research into the nature of national psychology from the position of the theory of the “folk spirit” was laid in the middle of the 19th century, when the German scientists H. Steinthal and M. Lazarus in 1859 began to publish a special “Journal of the Psychology of Peoples and Linguistics”. In their programmatic article “Thoughts on Folk Psychology,” they published their ideas about the essence of ethnopsychology as a new branch of knowledge designed to investigate the laws of mental life not only of individuals, but also of entire communities in which people act as a kind of unity. For the individual, the most essential and most necessary of all groups is the people. A people is a collection of people who look upon themselves as one people, classify themselves as one people. Spiritual kinship between people does not depend on origin or language, since people define themselves as belonging to a certain people subjectively. The main content of their concept is that due to the unity of origin and habitat “all individuals of one people bear the imprint ... of the special nature of the people on their body and soul» , wherein “The impact of bodily influences on the soul causes certain inclinations, tendencies of predisposition, properties of the spirit that are the same for all individuals, as a result of which they all have the same folk spirit” (Steinthal H., 1960).

Steinthal and Lazarus took the “spirit of the people” as a basis, as a kind of mysterious substance that remains unchanged with all changes and ensures the unity of the national character with all individual differences. The folk spirit was understood as the mental similarity of individuals belonging to a particular people, and at the same time as their self-consciousness. It is the spirit of the people, which manifests itself primarily in the language, then in the manners and customs, institutions and actions, in traditions and chants, and is called upon to study the psychology of peoples. (Steinthal H., 1960).

The main tasks of the "Psychology of Peoples" are: a) to psychologically cognize the essence of the national spirit and its actions; b) to discover the laws according to which the internal spiritual or ideal activity of the people is carried out in life, in art and in science, and c) to discover the grounds, causes and reasons for the emergence, development and destruction of the characteristics of any people (Shpet G.G., 1989).

In the "Psychology of Peoples" two aspects can be distinguished. First, the spirit of the people in general, its general conditions of life and activity are analyzed, the general elements and relations of the development of the spirit of the people are established. Secondly, particular forms of the folk spirit and their development are studied more specifically. The first aspect was called ethnohistorical psychology, the second - psychological ethnology. The direct objects of analysis, in the process of studying which the content of the national spirit is revealed, are myths, languages, morality, customs, way of life and other features of cultures.

Summing up the presentation of the ideas put forward by M. Lazarus and H. Steinthal in 1859, we will give a brief definition of the "Psychology of Peoples". They proposed to build ethnic psychology as an explanatory science of the national spirit, as a doctrine of the elements and laws of the spiritual life of peoples and the study of the spiritual nature of the entire human race. (Steinthal G., 1960).

The followers of this school managed to collect significant factual material characterizing the peculiarities of the spiritual life of peoples at different stages of their historical development.

The idea of ​​singling out the psychology of peoples as a special branch of knowledge was also developed by another German social psychologist, Wilhelm Wundt. His serious work "The Psychology of Peoples", published in 1900-1920. in the volume of 10 special volumes, was intended to finally consolidate the right of existence of national-psychological ideas, which were conceived by Wundt as a continuation and addition of individual psychology. Wundt understood the essence of the psychology of peoples differently than his predecessors, Steinthal and Lazarus.

In his concept, he developed the position that the higher mental processes of people, primarily thinking, are a product of the historical and cultural development of human communities. He objected to direct analogy up to the identification of the individual consciousness and the consciousness of the people. In his opinion, people's consciousness is a creative synthesis (integration) of individual consciousnesses, the result of which is a new reality, which is found in the products of super-individual or super-personal activity in language, myths, and morality. It is the joint life of individuals and their interaction with each other that should give rise to new phenomena with peculiar laws, which, although they do not contradict the laws of individual consciousness, are not contained in them. And as new phenomena, that is, as the content of the soul of the people, he considers the general ideas, feelings and aspirations of many individuals.

Although Wundt understood the essence of the psychology of peoples in a slightly different light than Steinthal and Lazarus, he always emphasized that the psychology of peoples is the science of the soul of a people, which manifests itself in language, myths, customs, mores (Wundt V., 1998). The remaining elements of spiritual culture are secondary and are reduced to the previously named ones. Thus, art, science and religion have long been associated with mythological thinking in the history of mankind.

“Language, myths and customs are common spiritual phenomena, so closely fused with each other that one of them is unthinkable without the other. Customs express in actions the same life views that are hidden in myths and made common property through language. And these actions, in turn, make stronger and further develop those ideas from which they arise” (Wundt V., 1998, p. 226).

Thus, the main method of the psychology of peoples, Wundt considers the analysis of concrete historical products of spiritual life, that is, language, myths and customs, which, in his opinion, are not fragments of the creativity of the national spirit, but this spirit itself.

4.3. The birth of ethnopsychology

in the national tradition

The origin of ethnopsychology in our country is associated with the need to study the psychological make-up, traditions and habits of behavior of the numerous peoples of the country. Interest in the psychology of the peoples inhabiting Russia for a long time was shown by such well-known public figures of our state as: Ivan the Terrible, Peter I, Catherine II, P.A. Stolypin; outstanding Russian scientists M.V. Lomonosov, V.N. Tatishchev, N. Ya. Danilevsky; great Russian writers A.S. Pushkin, N.A. Nekrasov, L.N. Tolstoy and many others. All of them paid serious attention in their statements and works to the psychological differences that exist in everyday life, traditions, customs, manifestations of public life of representatives of various ethnic communities that inhabited Russia. They used many of their judgments to analyze the nature of interethnic relations, to predict their development in the future. A.I. Herzen, in particular, wrote: “... Without knowing the people, you can oppress the people, enslave them, conquer them, but you cannot liberate them ...” (Herzen A.I., 1959, Vol. 6, p. 77).

Attempts to collect ethnopsychological data and formulate the basic principles of psychological ethnography were undertaken by the Russian Geographical Society, which had an ethnographic department. V.K. Baer, ​​N.D. Nadezhdin, K.D. Kavelin in the 40-50s of the 19th century formulated the basic principles of ethnographic science, including psychological ethnography, which began to be put into practice. K.D. Kavelin, for example, wrote about the need to strive to determine the nature of the people as a whole by studying its individual mental properties in their relationship. The people, he believed, “represents the same single organic being as an individual person. Start investigating his individual customs, customs, concepts and stop there, you will not learn anything. Know how to look at them in their mutual connection, in their relation to the whole national organism, and you will notice the features that distinguish one people from another ”(Sarakuev E.A., Krysko V.G., p. 38)

N.I. Nadezhdin, who proposed the term psychic ethnography, believed that this branch of science should study the spiritual side of human nature, mental and moral abilities, willpower and character, and a sense of human dignity. As a manifestation of folk psychology, he also considered oral folk art - epics, fairy tales, songs, proverbs.

Since 1847, a program for studying the ethnographic identity of the population of Russia began to be implemented, sent to all provincial branches of the Geographical Society. In 1851, the society received 700 manuscripts, in 1852 - 1290, in 1858 - 612. Based on them, reports were compiled that also contained psychological sections, in which the national psychological characteristics of Little Russians, Great Russians and Belorussians were compared and compared. As a result, by the end of the 19th century, an impressive bank of ethnographic data of the peoples of Russia had been accumulated.

In the 70s of the 19th century, an attempt was made to integrate ethnopsychology into psychological science. These ideas arose from K.D. Kavelin (a participant in the ethnographic research program of the Russian Geographical Society), who, not satisfied with the results of collecting subjective descriptions of the mental and moral properties of peoples, suggested using an objective method of studying folk psychology based on the products of spiritual activity - cultural monuments, customs, folklore , beliefs. Kavelin saw the task of the psychology of peoples in establishing the general laws of mental life based on a comparison of homogeneous phenomena and products of spiritual life among different peoples and among the same people in different eras of its historical life (T.G. Stefanenko, p. 48)

In St. Petersburg, the publishing houses "Leisure and Business", "Nature and People", "Knebel" in 1878-1882, 1909, 1911, 1915 published a number of ethnographic collections and illustrated albums with the works of Russian researchers Grebenkin, Berezin, Ostrogorsky, Eisner , Yanchuk, and others, where, along with ethnographic characteristics, there are many national-psychological ones. As a result, by the end of the 19th century, a significant bank of ethnographic and ethnopsychological characteristics of the peoples of Russia had been accumulated.

A significant contribution to the development of ethnopsychology in Russia was made by A.A. Potebnya was a Ukrainian and Russian Slavic philosopher who worked on the theory of folklore, ethnography and linguistics. He sought to reveal and explain the mechanisms of formation of the ethnopsychological specificity of thinking. His fundamental work "Thought and Language", as well as the articles "Language of Peoples" and "On Nationalism" contained deep and innovative ideas that make it possible to understand the nature and specifics of the manifestation of intellectual and cognitive national psychological characteristics. According to A.A. Potebni, the main not only ethno-differentiating, but also ethno-forming feature of any ethnic group, which determines the existence of a people, is language. All languages ​​that exist in the world have two properties in common - sound "articulateness" and the fact that they are all systems of symbols that serve to express thought. All their other characteristics are ethno-original, and the main one among them is the system of thinking techniques embodied in the language.

A.A. Potebnya believed that language is not a means of designating a ready-made thought. If that were the case, it wouldn't matter which language to use, they would be easily interchangeable. But this does not happen, because the function of language, according to P., is not to designate a ready-made thought, but to create it, transforming the original pre-linguistic elements. At the same time, representatives of different nations through national languages ​​form their thoughts in their own way, different from others. Developing their positions in the future, Potebnya. came to a number of important conclusions: a) the loss by the people of their language is tantamount to its denationalization; b) representatives of different nationalities cannot always establish an adequate mutual understanding, since there are specific features and mechanisms of interethnic communication that should take into account the thinking of all sides of communicating people; c) culture and education develop and consolidate the ethno-specific characteristics of representatives of certain peoples, and do not level them.

A student and follower of A.A. Potebny - D. N. Ovsyaniko - Kulikovsky sought to identify and substantiate the mechanisms and means of forming the psychological identity of nations. According to his concept, the main factors in the formation of the national psyche are the elements of intellect and will, and the elements of emotions and feelings are not among them. Therefore, for example, a sense of duty is not ethnospecific for the Germans, as was previously believed. Following his teacher, D.N. Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky believed that national specificity lies in the peculiarities of thinking and it should be sought not in the content side of thinking and not in its effectiveness, but in the unconscious sphere of the human psyche. At the same time, language acts as the core of people's thought and psyche and is a special form of accumulation and conservation of the psychic energy of peoples.

He came to the conclusion that all nations can be conditionally divided into two main types: active and passive, depending on which of the two types of will - "acting" or "delaying" - prevails in a given ethnos. Each of these types, in turn, can be decomposed into a number of varieties, subtypes, differing from each other in certain ethno-specific additional elements. For example, to passive The scientist attributed the Russian and German national characters to the type, which differ with the presence of strong-willed laziness among the Russian elements. TO active type he attributed the English and French national characters, which differ in the presence of excessive impulsiveness among the French. Many ideas of Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky were eclectic and poorly argued, being the result of the unsuccessful application of Freud's ideas, however, later they prompted researchers of ethnopsychology to correctly analyze the intellectual, emotional and volitional national psychological characteristics.

In search of a methodology for ethnopsychological research, it is useful to turn to the works of Russian religious philosophers of the 20th century, whose intense spiritual and moral feat of deep comprehension of the meaning of national belonging in a person’s life, caused by many of them by forced separation from their homeland, is one of the pinnacles of world philosophy on this issue. Most Russian thinkers of the 19th century, as well as philosophers and historians of the Russian Diaspora of the 20th century, thought about the problem of revealing the Russian soul, isolating its main characteristics. P.Ya.Chaadaev, P.Sorokin, A.S.Khomyakov, N.Ya.Danilevsky, N.G. Lossky, I. Ilyin and many others described the features of the Russian character, systematized the factors in the formation of the Russian soul.

One can cite as an example some of the thoughts of the Russian philosopher I. Ilyin regarding the importance of national roots in a person's life for true and deep interethnic communication and mutual comprehension. According to I. Ilyin, there is a law of human nature and culture, according to which everything great can be said by a person or a people only in its own way, and everything ingenious is born precisely in the bosom of national experience, spirit and way of life, therefore the philosopher warns that “national depersonalization is great misfortune and danger in the life of man and people. Motherland (i.e., a conscious ethnic or national identity), according to Ilyin, awakens spirituality in a person, which can and should be framed as national spirituality. And only when she wakes up and gets stronger, she will be able to find access to the creatures of someone else's national spirit. To love the motherland, according to Ilyin, means to love not just the “soul of the people”, i.e., its national character, but the spirituality of his national character.“... He who does not know at all what a spirit is, and does not know how to love it, does not have patriotism either. But the one who senses the spiritual and loves it knows its supra-national, universal essence. He knows that great Russian is great for all peoples; and that the ingenious Greek is ingenious for all ages; and that the heroic among the Serbs deserves admiration from all nationalities; and what is deep and wise in the culture of the Chinese or Hindus is deep and wise in the face of all mankind. But that is precisely why a true patriot is not able to hate and despise other nations, because he sees their spiritual strength and their spiritual achievements ”(Ilyin I., 1993). These thoughts contain the germ of those ideas that received their scientific formulation and development at the end of our century in the form of awareness of the importance of having a positive ethnic identity as a source of ethnic tolerance in the field of interethnic interaction and mutual perception (Lebedeva N.M., p. 13).

Special merit in the development of ethnopsychology in Russia belongs to Professor of Moscow University G.G. Shpet, who was the first in Russia to start teaching a course in ethnopsychology and who in 1920 organized the only ethnopsychology office in the country. In 1927, he published the work "Introduction to Ethnopsychology", where, in the form of a discussion with W. Wundt, M. Lazarus and G. Steinthal, he expressed his views on the subject and main method of ethnopsychology. He also considered the "folk spirit" as the subject of research. However, by the “folk spirit” he understood not some mysterious substance, but the totality of specific subjective experiences of people, the psychology of a “historically formed collective”, i.e. people” (Shpet G.G., 1996, p. 341).

Ethnic psychology, from the point of view of G.G. Shpet should be a descriptive, not an explanatory science. Its subject, in his opinion, is the description of the typical collective experiences of representatives of a particular people, which are the result of the functioning of their language, myths, customs, religions, etc. No matter how individual representatives of one or another ethnic community may be individually distinguishable and no matter how dissimilar their attitude to similar social phenomena may be, one can always find something in common in their reactions. At the same time, the general is not an averaged whole, it is not a collection of similarities. The general was understood by him as a “type”, as a “representative of the psyche of many individuals”, as a characteristic that unites and shows the nuances of all the originality of thoughts, feelings, experiences of actions and actions of people of a particular nationality.

Shpet had no doubt that there was nothing psychological in the cultural-historical content of folk life itself. Psychologically, only the attitude to the products of culture, to the meaning of cultural phenomena. Therefore, ethnic psychology should not study the language, customs, religion, science, but the attitude towards them, since nowhere is the psychology of the people so clearly reflected, as in its relationship to the spiritual values ​​​​created by them (Shpet G.G., 1996, p. 341).

4.4. The development of the "psychology of peoples"

in foreign studies

The main theses of Western ethnopsychologists were repeated and further developed by the representatives of the "Psychology of Peoples" school, well known in sociological science at the end of the 19th century. First, G. Tarde and S. Sigil, and then G. Le Bon came to the conclusion that the behavior of representatives of certain communities is largely determined by imitation, and its most distinctive characteristics are depersonalization, a sharp predominance of the role of feelings over intellect, the loss of personal individual responsibility in the group. The famous English scientist W. McDougall, the founder of the theory of instincts of social behavior, supplemented his ideas about the features of the actions of people of a particular nation with the development of the concept of instincts (innate), which, in his opinion, are internal unconscious motives for their actions.

An important role in the study of intracultural mechanisms of human interaction was played by the work of French scientists - representatives of the socio-psychological direction in the study of cultures G. Lebon and G. de Tarde. The main focus of the works of G.Lebon "Psychological laws of the evolution of peoples" (1894) and "Psychology of the crowd" (1895) is the analysis of the relationship between the masses of the people, the crowd and leaders, the features of the process of mastering their feelings, ideas. For the first time in these works, the problems of mental infection and suggestion were posed, and the question of managing people in different cultures was formulated.

G. Tarde continued the analysis of group psychology and interpersonal interaction. He singled out three types of interactions: mental infection, suggestion, imitation. Tarde's most important works on these aspects of the functioning of cultures are The Laws of Imitation (1890) and The Social Logic (1895). The main task of the author is to show how changes (innovations) appear in cultures and how they are transmitted in society to individuals. According to his views, « a collective intermental psychology... is only possible because an individual intramental psychology includes elements that can be transferred and communicated from one consciousness to another. These elements ... can combine and merge together, forming true social forces and structures, currents of opinion or mass impulses, traditions or national customs "(History of bourgeois sociology, 1979, p.105).

The elementary relation, according to Tarde, is the transmission or attempt to convey a belief or desire. He assigned a certain role to imitation and suggestion. Society is imitation, and imitation is a kind of hypnotism. Any innovation is an act of a creative person, causing a wave of imitations.

G. Tarde analyzed cultural changes on the basis of studying such phenomena as language (its evolution, origin, linguistic ingenuity), religion (its development from animism to world religions, its future), and feelings, especially love and hate, in the history of cultures . The last aspect is quite original for researchers of the cultures of that time. His Tarde explores in the chapter "Heart", in which he finds out the role of attracting and repulsive feelings, reflects on what friends and enemies are. A special place is occupied by the study of such cultural customs as vendetta (blood feud) and the phenomenon of national hatred.

Representatives of "Group psychology" and the theory of imitation discovered and studied the mechanisms of intracultural interaction. Their developments were used in the study of cultures in the 20th century to explain a number of facts and problems that arise in the study of various types of cultures. Concluding the consideration of the socio-psychological aspect in the analysis of cultures, it is necessary to dwell on the content of the phenomena discovered by G. Lebon and G. Tarde.

Imitation, or imitative activity, consists in reproduction, copying of motor and other cultural stereotypes. Its significance in the process of mastering culture in childhood is enormous. It is believed that thanks to this quality, the child masters the language, imitating adults, masters cultural skills. Imitation is the basis of learning and the possibility of passing on cultural traditions from generation to generation.

Psychological infection often consists in the unconscious repetition of actions in a human team or simply in a crowd of people. This quality contributes to the mastering by people of any states of a psychological type (fear, hatred, love, etc.). Often it is used in religious rituals.

Suggestion is a variety of forms of introducing into the minds of people (in a conscious or unconscious form) certain provisions, rules, norms that regulate behavior in culture. It can manifest itself in a variety of cultural forms, very often it contributes to the unification of people within a culture to perform a task. All these three characteristic features of cultural activity really exist and act together, providing regulation between members of an ethnocultural community.

In the studies of European sociologists at the beginning of the 20th century, completely new approaches to the study of ethnic psychology began to emerge. They relied, as a rule, on the young teachings of behaviorism and Freudianism, which were beginning to gain strength, which quickly won great recognition from researchers and were used in describing the national character traits of representatives of different peoples.

For most Western ethnopsychologists of that time, the so-called "psychoanalytic" approach was characteristic. Proposed at the end of the last century by 3. Freud, psychoanalysis from a peculiar way of studying the patient's psyche gradually turned into a "universal" method of studying and evaluating the most complex social phenomena, including the mental makeup of ethnic communities.

Z. Freud developed a "cathartic" method of treating neuroses, which made it possible to establish the phenomenon of the patient's mental resistance to the disclosure of repressed memories and the existence of an intrapsychic factor of censorship. This served as an impetus for Freud in creating a dynamic concept of personality in the unity of conscious and unconscious factors. The significance of the works went far beyond the scope of psychotherapy. The possibility of the impact of mental, emotional states on deep, biological ones was shown. Neuroses were interpreted not as ordinary diseases, having a basis in the defeat of a local organ, but as the product of universal human conflicts, violations of the possibility of self-expression of the individual.

Thus, a hypothesis was put forward about the behavioral cause of neurosis. This meant that its origins could lie in the sphere of interpersonal interaction of people, in the relationship of the individual (I) with the outside world, the loss of the meaning of existence by a person, etc. Thus, the connection between the internal states of the individual and the external socio-cultural world was shown, and psychology about the inner world of a person with the only method of self-observation (introspection) became a discipline that studies external cultural phenomena, features of the real interaction of people. It was this aspect of psychoanalysis that made it possible to make various aspects of ethno-cultural stereotypes in people's behavior the subject of study.

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ABSTRACT

on the course "Psychology"

on the topic: "History of ethnopsychology"

Introduction

1. Ethnopsychological ideas in ancient times and the Middle Ages

2. Foreign ethnopsychology in the twentieth century

3. Domestic ethnic psychology in the twentieth century

Conclusion

Introduction

Among the physical factors influencing the history of society and the general spirit of the nation at the first stages of development, he attributed the geographical location, climate, soil, landscape. At the same time, the climate was called the main among them. He stated, for example, a certain dependence of the spiritual make-up and style of thinking of peoples on their way of life, although the latter, according to his concept, was entirely determined by the conditions of the natural and climatic environment. To the moral factors, he ranked laws, religion, mores, customs and norms of behavior, which become more important in a civilized society. The explanation of social phenomena is not the will of God, but natural causes, i.e. material factors, at that time was of great progressive importance.

The reference of the supporters of the geographical school to the decisive role of climate and other natural conditions was erroneous and entailed ideas about the immutability of the national psychology of the people. In the same geographical area, as a rule, different peoples live. If their spiritual image, including the traits of the national psyche, were formed under the influence of only one geographical environment, then these peoples would somehow resemble each other like two peas in a pod.

In reality, however, this is far from the case. For many millennia, significant changes have taken place in the life of mankind: socio-economic systems have changed, new social classes and social systems have appeared, various tribes and nationalities have merged, and new forms of ethnic relations have been formed. These transformations, in turn, brought about enormous changes in the spiritual image of peoples, in their psychology, customs and traditions. As a result, not only their ideas and concepts about life, about the world around them were radically updated, but habits and mores, tastes and needs changed, the content changed: also the forms of expression of their national self-consciousness and feelings. Meanwhile, the natural and climatic conditions on the planet did not undergo any noticeable changes during the indicated period.

The absolutization of the role of the geographical environment in the formation and development of the features of the national psychology of peoples, thus, inevitably led to the assertion of the immutability and eternity of these features, to the complete denial of the fact that ethnopsychological differences are historically transient phenomena.

1. Ethnopsychological representationsin ancient times and the Middle Ages

Representatives of different peoples have always distinguished each other by ethnic and racial characteristics, sought to understand and correctly interpret these features in relation to the conditions of their life and work, relationships and interaction. However, it took a very long time for a coherent concept of ideas about the essence of ethnopsychological phenomena and processes to emerge on the basis of practical experience and its theoretical understanding in the West. A purposeful study of the national psychological characteristics of other peoples began in the 30s of the twentieth century.

Starting from Herodotus (490-425 BC), ancient scholars and ordinary writers, while narrating about distant lands and the peoples living there, paid much attention to describing their manners, customs and habits. This knowledge broadened the horizons, helped to establish trade relations, mutually enriched peoples. It should be noted that there was a lot of fantastic, far-fetched, subjective writings of this kind, although sometimes they contained useful and interesting information gleaned from direct observations of the life of other peoples. Many centuries later, a tradition developed of using such descriptions for political purposes, which is well shown in the work of the Byzantine emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus "On the management of the empire" (9th century). Byzantium had borders with many other countries, its statesmen wanted to know as much as possible about their external environment. “The Byzantines carefully collected and recorded information about the barbarian tribes. They wanted to have accurate information about the morals of the "barbarians", about their military forces, about trade relations, about relations, about civil strife, about influential people and the possibility of bribing them. On the basis of this carefully collected information, Byzantine diplomacy was built.

Ascertaining the differences in culture and traditions, the external appearance of tribes and nationalities, first the ancient Greek thinkers, and then the scientists of other states, made attempts to determine the nature of these differences. Hippocrates (460-370 BC), for example, explained the physical and psychological originality of different peoples by the specifics of their geographical location and climatic conditions. "The forms of people's behavior and their customs," he believed, "reflect the nature of the country." Democritus (460-350 BC) also allowed the assumption that the southern and northern climates unequally affect the body, and, consequently, the human psyche.

More mature thoughts were expressed much later on this subject.

K. Helvetius (1715-1771) is a French philosopher who first gave a dialectical analysis of sensations and thinking, showing the role of the environment in their formation. In one of his main works "On Man" (1773), K. Helvetius devoted a large section to identifying the changes taking place in the character of peoples and the factors that give rise to them. In his opinion, each nation is endowed with its own way of seeing and feeling, which determines the essence of its character. In all peoples, this character can change either suddenly or gradually depending on imperceptible transformations taking place in the form of government and social education. Character, Helvetius believed, is a way of worldview and perception of the surrounding reality, this is something that is characteristic of only one people and depends on the socio-political history of the people, forms of government. Changing the latter, i.e. change in socio-political relations, affects the content of the national character. K. Helvetius confirmed this point of view with examples from history.

Of the most prominent representatives of this trend, C. Montesquieu (1689-1755), an outstanding French thinker, philosopher, jurist, and historian, approached the problems of ethnic psychology more deeply than others. Supporting the theory that appeared at that time about the universal nature of the movement of matter and the variability of the material world, he considered society as a social organism that has its own laws, which are concentrated in the general spirit of the nation.

According to C. Montesquieu, in order to understand the essence of society and the peculiarities of its political and legal institutions, it is necessary to identify the spirit of the people, by which he understood the characteristic psychological features of the people. He believed that the national spirit is formed objectively, under the influence of physical and moral causes. Recognizing the decisive role of the environment in the emergence and development of a particular society, C. Montesquieu developed a theory of the factors of social development, which he most fully outlined in "Etudes on the Causes that Determine Spirit and Character" (1736).

That is why other points of view appeared. In particular, the English philosopher, historian and economist D. Hume (1711-1776), who wrote the great work "On National Characters" (1769), in which he expressed his views on national psychology in a general form. Among the sources that form it, he considered social (moral) factors to be decisive, to which he attributed mainly the circumstances of the socio-political development of society: forms of government, social upheavals, abundance or need of the population, the position of an ethnic community, relations with neighbors, etc.

According to D. Hume, the general features of the national character of people (general inclinations, customs; habits, affects) are formed on the basis of communication in professional activities. Similar interests of people contribute to the formation of national features of their spiritual appearance, a common language and other elements of ethnic life. Economic interests unite not only socio-professional groups, but also individual parts of the people, so Hume, on this basis, sought to derive a dialectic of the relationship between the specifics of professional groups and the characteristics of the national character of people. The role of social (moral) relations recognized by him in shaping the morals and habits of the people ultimately led the scientist to ascertain the historicity of the national character.

G. Hegel (1770-1831), a German philosopher, the creator of objective-idealistic dialectics, played an important role in the development of stable scientific ethno-psychological ideas.

The study of national psychology gave him the opportunity to comprehensively comprehend the history of the development of the ethnos. However, the ideas of G. Hegel, although they contained many fruitful ideas, were largely contradictory. On the one hand, G. Hegel approached the understanding of the national character as a social phenomenon, often determined by socio-cultural, natural and geographical factors. On the other hand, the national character appeared to him as a manifestation of the absolute spirit, which is torn off from the objective basis of the life of each community. The spirit of the people, according to G. Hegel, firstly, had some certainty, which was the result of a specific development of the world spirit, and secondly, it performed certain functions, giving rise to each ethnic group its own world, its own culture, religion, customs, thereby determining peculiar state structure, laws and behavior of people, their fate and history.

At the same time, G. Hegel opposed the identification of the concepts of national character and temperament, arguing that they are different in their content. If the national character, in his opinion, has a universal manifestation, then temperament should be considered a phenomenon correlated only with a separate individual.

G. Hegel, in addition, studied the characters of European peoples, noting not only their diversity, but also a certain similarity. Revealing the features of the national character of the British, he emphasized their ability to intellectually perceive the world, their propensity for conservatism, adherence to traditions.

Significant interest in the problem of national psychology manifested itself in the era of capitalism, the emergence and development of which is associated with the discovery of previously unknown countries, new sea routes, the policy of colonial wars, robbery and enslavement of the peoples of entire continents, the formation of a world market, the breaking of former national partitions, when the old national isolation came multilateral ties and the well-known dependence of some states on others.

At a time when a new social formation was rapidly developing, European scientists put forward a number of ideas that were progressive for their time, reflecting specific moments and trends in the social life of society. Some of them, correctly noting that peoples differ from each other in certain spiritual traits, peculiar shades in mores and customs, in artistic and other perceptions of the surrounding reality, in everyday life, traditions, etc., tried to find the roots of these phenomena in material factors. .

In the second half of the XIX century. in European sociology, a number of scientific trends arose that considered human society by analogy with the life of the animal world. These currents were called differently:

Anthropological school in sociology,

organic school,

Social Darwinism, etc.

However, the results of these studies had one common specificity - they underestimated the special objective tendencies inherent in social life, mechanically transferred the biological laws discovered by Charles Darwin to the phenomena of social life. The supporters of these trends tried to prove the existence of a direct impact of such laws on the social, economic and spiritual life of peoples, sought to substantiate the "theory" about the direct influence of the anatomical and physiological characteristics of people on the psyche and, on this basis, to derive the features of their internal, moral and spiritual appearance. In reality, however, the psychological traits inherent in every ethnic community are, in the main, exclusively the product of social development. Statements of foreign researchers of the middle of the XIX century. that the traits of the national psyche are transmitted from parents to children by inheritance, through germ cells, do not stand up to scrutiny. The social psyche, including the national one, owes its origin only to the social environment. M. Lazarus and H. Steinthal. M. Lazarus (1824-1903), a Swiss philosopher, student and follower of the founder of German empirical psychology, I. Herbart, initially studied such phenomena as humor, language in its relation to thinking, etc. He gained great fame in scientific circles as one of the founders of the theory of "psychology of peoples".

H. Steinthal (1823-1889), by the time interest in the "psychology of peoples" appeared, was already known for his works in the field of linguistics, studies of the relationship between grammar, logic and the psychological essence of language, and was also considered one of the founders of the psychological direction in linguistics, the author of the theory onomatopoeia in explaining the origin of language. He, like Lazarus, supported the idea of ​​creating a special science, which can be called "the psychology of peoples." This science should combine historical and philological studies with psychological ones.

M. Lazarus and H. Steinthal saw the tasks of the "psychology of peoples" as an independent branch in knowing the psychological essence of the national spirit; discover the laws of the inner spiritual or ideal activity of the people in life, art and science; identify the grounds, causes and reasons for the emergence, development and destruction of the characteristics of any people. "Psychology of peoples", in their opinion, should study the same phenomena as general psychology. Moreover, the former was perceived by them as a continuation of the latter. At the same time, they believed that the “spirit of the people” is present only in individuals and cannot exist outside of a person.

2) "Psychology of peoples", which studies the representatives of certain ethnic communities by analyzing the results of their historical activities (religion, myths, traditions, monuments of culture and art, national literature).

And although W. Wundt represented the "psychology of peoples" in a slightly different light than Steinthal and Lazarus, he always emphasized that this is the science of the "spirit of the people", which is a mysterious substance that is difficult to know. And only later, at the beginning of the twentieth century. Russian ethnopsychologist G. Shpet proved that the “spirit of the people” should in fact be understood as the totality of subjective experiences of representatives of specific ethnic communities, the psychology of a “historically formed collective”, i.e. people.

At the end of the XIX century. the outstanding French scientist G. Lebon (1842-1931), who in the West is considered the founder of social psychology, supplemented the "psychology of peoples" with his personal views. He believed that each race has its own stable psychological mentality, which has been formed over many centuries. “The fate of the people is controlled to a much greater extent by the dead generations than by the living ones,” he wrote. “They alone laid the foundation of the race. Century after century, they created ideas and feelings, and therefore all the motives of our behavior. The dead pass on to us not only their physical organization. They also inspire us with their thoughts. The dead are the only indisputable masters of the living. We bear the weight of their mistakes, we receive rewards for their virtues.

Taking such positions, Western researchers for a long time ignored the process of rapprochement of nations that was already in its infancy, and in the modern era has become a reality. That is why their attention, as noted by E. A. Bagramov, was focused on finding the dissimilarity and even “the opposite of peoples, and not on the study of the uniqueness inherent in each nation in expressing thoughts, feelings, experiences common to people, which could contribute to the growth of mutual understanding of peoples ".

2 . foreign ethnopsychoologistAndme in the 20th century

At the beginning of the twentieth century. in the studies of Western scientists, approaches to the study of ethnic psychology that are completely new in form are emerging. They relied, as a rule, on the young teachings of behaviorism and psychoanalysis, which were gaining strength, which rather quickly won great recognition from researchers and found application in describing the national character traits of representatives of different peoples. The observations contained in them, with a strict critical approach, were of much greater interest.

Ethnopsychology at that time, acting as an interdisciplinary field of knowledge, included elements of such sciences as psychology, biology, psychiatry, sociology, anthropology and ethnography, which left its mark on the methods of analysis and interpretation of empirical data. Various approaches to the study of ethnic processes were accompanied by discussions about the content and form of ethnopsychological concepts and terms. The “sociologization” of the conceptual apparatus was most widespread, which was also characteristic of all Western science of that time as a whole.

For most Western ethnopsychologists of that time, the so-called "psychoanalytic" approach was characteristic. Proposed at the end of the last century by 3. Freud, psychoanalysis from a peculiar way of studying the subconscious sphere of the human psyche gradually turned into a “universal” method for studying and evaluating the most complex social phenomena, including the mental makeup of ethnic communities.

Psychoanalysis, whose founder was Z. Freud, arose simultaneously as a psychotherapeutic practice and as a concept of personality. According to Freud, the formation of the human personality occurs in early childhood, when the social environment suppresses as undesirable, unacceptable in society, first of all, sexual desires. Thus, injuries are inflicted on the human psyche, which then in various forms (in the form of changes in character traits, mental illness, obsessive dreams, etc.) make themselves felt throughout life.

Borrowing the methodology of psychoanalysis, many foreign ethnopsychologists could not but reckon with criticism that pointed to the failure of Freud's attempts to explain human behavior only by innate instinctive drives. Rejecting some of his most ambiguous provisions, they nevertheless failed to break with the main thrust of his methodology, but operated with more modernized concepts and categories.

One of them - the so-called social interaction - was reduced to the fact that representatives of the same ethnic community influence each other through their ideas, moods and feelings, correlated with their "culture" in some vague and abstract way that has nothing in common. with their awareness and comprehension, as well as their practical activities. It is obvious that some ethnopsychologists considered the social environment not as historically determined relations of people in the system of social production, but as the result of the manifestation of psychological drives, feelings, emotions, completely divorced from the basis that gave rise to them.

At that time, the development of ethnopsychological views and their methodological foundations in the West was greatly influenced by the work of the French philosopher and ethnographer L. Levy-Bruhl (1857-1939), who believed that people of various ethnic communities have a specific type of thinking. He argued that collectivist ideas dominate the thinking of individuals, reflected in customs, rituals, language, culture, social institutions, etc. The logic of primitive people differed from the thinking of modern man, which, in his opinion, determined the duration of the evolution of the national psyche.

Under the influence of these views, stable ideas were eventually formed about socio-psychological (ethnic) archetypes, which are sets of specifically directed value orientations and expectations of representatives of specific ethnic communities, causing their usual range of feelings and behaviors, manifested in response to the impact of objects and phenomena of the surrounding world.

The socio-psychological (ethnic) archetype is inherited from previous generations, exists in his mind at a non-verbal, most often non-reflexive, (unchanging, subconscious) level. Actions, deeds, manifestations of feelings, excited by a socio-psychological (ethnic) archetype, are much stronger than impulses initiated in the human psyche by simple influences of his environment.

The development of ethnopsychological views was also influenced by the ideas of C. Levi-Strauss (1908-1987), a French ethnographer and sociologist. The main direction of Levi-Strauss's work was the analysis of the structures of life and thinking that do not depend on individual consciousness, using the study of primitive societies in South and North America as an example. In his opinion, culture, as the most important component of the way of life of people, has approximately the same set of features in various national communities.

The purpose of the study of social, cultural and national structures, as Levi-Strauss believed, should be to discover the laws that govern communities. Analyzing the rules of marriage, the terminology of kinship, the principles of building primitive societies, social and national myths, the language as a whole, he saw behind the variety of social forms of behavior the general mechanisms and factors that initiate it. The ratio between coexisting modern societies - industrialized and "primitive" - ​​he called the ratio of "hot" and "cold" societies: the former strive to produce and consume as much energy and information as possible, and the latter are limited to the sustainable reproduction of simple and similar conditions. existence. However, in his opinion, a new and ancient, developed and “primitive” person is united by the universal laws of culture, the laws of the functioning of the human mind.

K. Levi-Strauss put forward the concept of "new humanism", which does not know class and racial differences. His theory is largely ethnopsychological in content, but it is not aimed at identifying differences between representatives of various ethnic communities, but at finding what can unite them.

In the 30s of the last century, the development of Western scientific ideas began to be carried out under the predominant influence of the American "ethnopsychological school", which emerged from ethnography. Its ancestor was F. Boas, and A. Kardiner headed and led it for a long time. The most famous representatives were R. Benedict, R. Linton, M. Mead and others.

F. Boas (1858-1942) - a German physicist who fled from fascism in the United States and became an outstanding American ethnographer and anthropologist, became interested in questions of national culture in his declining years and actually created a new direction in American ethnography. He believed that it was impossible to study the behavior, traditions and culture of people without knowledge of their psychology and considered its analysis as an integral part of ethnographic methodology. He also insisted on the need to study the "psychological changes" and "psychological dynamics" of culture, considering them the result of acculturation.

Acculturation is the process of mutual influence of people with a certain culture on each other, as well as the result of this influence, which consists in the perception of one of the cultures, usually less developed (although opposite influences are possible), elements of another culture or the emergence of new cultural phenomena. Acculturation often leads to partial or complete assimilation.

In ethnopsychology, the concept of acculturation is used to denote the process of socio-psychological adaptation of representatives of one ethnic community to the traditions, habits, lifestyle and culture of another; the results of the influence of culture, national psychological characteristics of representatives of one community on another. As a result of acculturation, some traditions, habits, norms-values ​​and patterns of behavior are borrowed and fixed in the mental warehouse of representatives of another nation or ethnic group.

F. Boas considered each culture in its own historical and psychological context as an integral system consisting of many interconnected parts. He did not look for answers to the question why this or that culture has a given structure, considering this the result of historical development, and emphasized the plasticity of a person, his susceptibility to cultural influences. The development of this approach resulted in the phenomenon of cultural relativism, according to which the concepts in each culture are unique, and their borrowings are always accompanied by careful and lengthy rethinking.

In the last years of his life, F. Boas advised politicians on the conflict-free acculturation of the socially backward peoples of the United States and colonial peoples. His legacy has left a marked mark on American science. He had many followers who embodied his ideas in many concepts now known throughout the world. After the death of F. Boas, the American psychological school was headed by A. Kardiner (1898-1962), a psychiatrist and culturologist, author of the well-known works "The Individual and Society" (1945), "The Psychological Limits of Society" (1946), who developed a concept recognized in the West, according to which national culture has a strong influence on the development of ethnic groups and their individual representatives, the hierarchy of their values, forms of communication and behavior.

He emphasized that the mechanisms that he called "projective systems" play a decisive role in the formation of personality. The latter arise as a result of the reflection in the consciousness of the primary life drives associated with the need for housing, food, clothing, etc. A. Kardiner saw the difference between cultures and communities from each other in the degree of dominance of “projective systems”, in their relationship with the so-called systems of “external reality”. Investigating, in particular, the influence of European culture on the development of the individual, he came to the conclusion that the long-term emotional care of the mother, the strict sexual discipline of Europeans form in a person passivity, indifference, introversion, inability to adapt in the natural and social environment and other qualities. In certain of his theoretical generalizations, A. Kardiner finally came to the idea of ​​cultural relativism, cultural psychological incompatibility.

The outstanding American cultural anthropologist R. Benedict (1887-1948), the author of the works “Models of Culture” (1934), “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword” (1946), “Race: Science and Politics” (1948), widely known abroad, lived for several years in Indian tribes North America, organized a study of "transcultural" prerequisites leading to a decrease in national hostility and ethnocentrism. In her writings, she substantiated the thesis about the strengthening of the role of consciousness in the development of ethnic groups, about the need to study their historical and cultural past. She considered culture as a set of general prescriptions, norms-requirements for representatives of a certain ethnic community, manifested in its national character and the possibilities of individual self-disclosure in the process of behavior and activity.

R. Benedict believed that each culture has its own unique configuration, and its constituent parts are combined into a single, but unique whole. “Every human society once made a certain selection of its cultural institutions,” she wrote. - Each culture, from the point of view of others, ignores the fundamental and develops the non-essential. One culture has difficulty understanding the value of money, for another it is the basis of everyday behavior.

During World War II, R. Benedict studied the culture and national psychological characteristics of the Japanese from the point of view of analyzing their place and role in conditions of universal peace and cooperation.

M. Mead came to the conclusion that the nature of social consciousness in a particular culture is determined by a set of key typical norms for this culture and their interpretation, embodied in traditions, habits and ways of nationally unique behavior. The ethnopsychological school differed significantly from other branches of American ethnography, such as the historical school. The difference was in the understanding of the categories "culture" and "personality". For historians, "culture" was the main subject of study. Supporters of the ethnopsychological school considered "culture" a generalized concept and did not attribute it to the main object of their scientific research. The real and primary reality for them was the individual, the personality, and therefore, in their opinion, it was necessary to begin the study of the culture of each people with the study of the personality, the individual.

That is why, firstly, American ethnopsychologists paid the most important attention to the development of the concept of "personality" as the main component of the initial unit that determines the structure of the whole. Secondly, they showed great interest in the process of personality formation, i.e. to its development from childhood. Thirdly, under the direct influence of the Freudian teachings, special attention was paid to the sexual sphere, and in many cases its significance was unnecessarily absolutized. Fourthly, some ethnopsychologists exaggerated the role of the psychological factor in comparison with the socio-economic ones.

All this led to the fact that by the beginning of the 1940s, the scientific views of foreign ethnopsychologists crystallized into a coherent concept, the main provisions of which were as follows. From the first days of its existence, the child is affected by the environment, the influence of which begins primarily with specific methods of caring for an infant adopted by representatives of a particular ethnic group: ways of feeding, wearing, laying down, and later - learning to walk, speak, and hygiene skills.

etc. These early childhood lessons leave their mark on a person's personality and influence his whole life. That is why the concept of the “basic personality” was born, which became the cornerstone for the entire ethnopsychology of the West. Here is this “basic personality”, i.e. a certain average psychological type that prevails in each particular society, and constitutes the basis of this society.

The hierarchical structure of the content of the "basic personality" was presented to Western scientists as follows:

1. Projective systems of the ethnic picture of the world and the psychological defense of the ethnos, presented mainly at the unconscious level.

2. Learned norms of behavior adopted by the people.

3. The learned system of models of the activity of the ethnos.

4. Taboo system perceived as part of the real world.

5. Reality, perceived empirically.

Let us highlight the most common problems that Western ethnopsychologists solved during this period:

Study of the specifics of the formation of national psychological phenomena;

Identification of the correlation of norms and pathology in different cultures;

Study of specific national-psychological characteristics of representatives of various peoples of the world in the course of field ethnographic research;

Determination of the significance of early childhood experiences for the formation of the personality of a representative of a particular national community.

Later, ethnopsychological science gradually began to move away from the concept of the "basic personality", since it gave a largely idealized idea of ​​the national psychological characteristics of people and did not take into account the possibility of variations in their traits among different representatives of the same ethnic community. It was replaced by the theory of "modal personality", i.e. such that only in an abstract general form expresses the main features of the psychology of a particular people, in real life, there can always be different spectra of manifestations of the general properties of the mental make-up of a people.

At the same time, the main drawback of ethnopsychology in the West was the methodological underdevelopment of the theory, since its representatives themselves believed that neither "classical" psychology (W. Wundt and others), nor the "behaviorist" direction (A. Watson and others), nor "reflexology" (I. Sechenov, I. Pavlov, V. Bekhterev), nor German "Gestalt psychology" (D. Wertheimer and others) could not be used in the interests of their research.

At present, ethnopsychology is taught and researched at many universities in the USA (Harvard, California, Chicago) and Europe (Cambridge, Vienna, Berlin). She is gradually coming out of the crisis that she experienced in the 80s.

3 . Patriotic etechnical psychology inXXcentury

In the 30-50s of the twentieth century. the development of ethnic psychology, as well as some other sciences, was suspended due to the birth of the personality cult of I. V. Stalin in the country. And although he himself considered himself the only true interpreter of the theory of national relations in the country, he wrote many works on this issue, however, all of them today cause a certain skepticism and should be correctly assessed from modern scientific positions. Moreover, it is quite obvious that some areas of Stalin's national policy did not stand the test of time. For example, the orientation towards the formation in our state of a new historical community, the Soviet people, taken on his instructions, ultimately did not justify the hopes placed on it. Moreover, it harmed the process of forming the national self-consciousness of representatives of many ethnic communities in our country, since bureaucrats from politics in the state too zealously and straightforwardly implemented an important, but too early proclaimed task. The same can be said about the results of the denationalization of university and school education. And all this because the ethnic identity of the representatives of the majority of the peoples of our country was ignored, which, of course, could not disappear by magic. The absence of specific applied ethnopsychological research in these years, the repressions against those scientists who carried them out in the previous period, had a negative impact on the state of science itself. A lot of time and opportunities were wasted. Only in the 60s did the first publications on ethnopsychology appear.

The rapid development of the social sciences during this period, the continuous increase in the number of theoretical and applied research, halts for a comprehensive study of first the social and then the political life of the country, the essence and content of human relationships, the activities of people united in numerous groups and collectives, among which the majority were multinational . Special attention of scientists was attracted by the public consciousness of people, in which national psychology also plays an important role.

At the end of the 1950s, the Soviet social psychologist and historian B.F. Porshnev (1908-1979), author of the works “Principles of Social and Ethnic Psychology”, “Social Psychology and Stories. He considered the main methodological problem of ethnopsychology to be the identification of the reasons that determine the existence of national psychological characteristics of people. He criticized those scientists who sought to derive the originality of psychological characteristics from physical, bodily, anthropological and other similar features, believing that it is necessary to seek an explanation for the specific characteristics of the mental make-up of a nation in the historically established specific economic, social and cultural conditions of life of each people.

In addition, B.F. Porshnev urged the study of traditional forms of labor that form the features of the national character. He especially emphasized the need to identify the connections of language with deep mental processes, pointed out that hieroglyphic writing and phonetic writing involve different areas of the cerebral cortex in the work. He also advised to study the mechanisms of communication, in particular, facial expressions and pantomime, believed that even without the use of precise special methods it is easy to notice how in similar situations representatives of one community smile many times more often than another. B.F. Porshnev emphasized that the essence of the matter is not in quantitative indicators, but in the sensory-semantic meaning of the movements of the face and body. He warned that one should not be carried away by compiling a socio-psychological passport for each ethnic community - a list of mental traits that are characteristic of it and distinguish it from other mental traits. It is necessary to confine ourselves to only a narrow circle of existing signs of the mental make-up of a particular nation, which constitute its real specificity. In addition, the scientist studied the mechanisms of manifestation of "suggestion" and "counter-suggestion", manifested in interethnic relations.

Many sciences began to study ethnopsychological phenomena: philosophy, sociology, ethnography, history, and some branches of psychology.

So, for example, military psychologists N.I. Lugansky and N.F. Fedenko initially studied the national-psychological specifics of the activities and behavior of the personnel of the armies of some Western states, and then moved on to certain theoretical and methodological generalizations, which eventually formed a clear system of ideas about national-psychological phenomena. Ethnographers Yu.V. Bromley, L.M. Drobizheva, S.I. Korolev.

The value of the functional-research approach was that its edge was aimed at identifying the specifics of the manifestation of the national psychological characteristics of people in their practical activities. This made it possible to take a fresh look at many theoretical and methodological problems of this extremely complex social phenomenon.

Chronologically in the 60-90 years of the twentieth century. Ethnic psychology in our country developed in the following way.

In the early 60s, discussions on the problems of national psychology took place on the pages of the journals Questions of History and Questions of Philosophy, after which Russian philosophers and historians in the 70s began to actively develop the theory of nations and national relations, giving priority to methodological and theoretical substantiation of the essence and content of national psychology as a phenomenon of social consciousness (E.A. Bagramov, A.Kh. Gadzhiev, P.I. Gnatenko, A.F. Dashdamirov, N.D. Dzhandildin, S.T. Kaltakhchiai, K. M. Malinauskas, G.P. Nikolaychuk and others)

From the standpoint of their branch of knowledge, at the same time, ethnographers joined the study of ethnopsychology, who generalized at the theoretical level the results of their field research and more actively began to study the ethnographic characteristics of the peoples of the world and our country (Yu.V. Arutyunyan, Y.V. Bromley, L. M. Drobizheva, V. I. Kozlov, N. M. Lebedeva, A. M. Reshetov, G. U. Soldatova, etc.).

From the beginning of the 1970s, ethnopsychological problems began to be developed very productively by military psychologists, who focused on studying the national psychological characteristics of representatives of foreign states. (V.G. Krysko, I.D. Kulikov, I.D. Ladanov, N.I. Lugansky, N.F. Fedenko, I.V. Fetisov).

In the 1980s and 1990s, scientific teams and schools dealing with the problems of ethnic psychology and ethnosociology proper began to take shape in our country. The sector of sociological problems of national relations headed by L.M. Drobizheva. At the Institute of Psychology of the Russian Academy of Sciences in the laboratory of social psychology, a group was created that studied the problems of the psychology of interethnic relations, headed by P.N. Shikhirev. At the Academy of Pedagogical and Social Sciences in the Department of Psychology V.G. Krysko created a section of ethnic psychology. At St. Petersburg State University under the leadership of A.O. Boronoev, a team of sociologists is fruitfully working on the problems of ethnic psychology. Questions of ethnopsychological characteristics of a person are being developed at the Department of Pedagogy and Psychology of the Peoples' Friendship University, headed by A.I. Krupnov. The faculty of the Department of Psychology of the North Ossetian State University, headed by Kh.Kh. Khadikov. Under the leadership of V.F. Petrenko conducted ethnopsychosemantic research at Moscow State University. M.V. Lomonosov. DI. Feldstein heads the International Association for the Promotion of the Development and Correction of Interethnic Relations.

Currently, experimental research in the field of ethnic psychology includes three main directions. Serious theoretical and analytical generalizations in the field of cross-cultural psychology are carried out by B.A. Dushkov.

The first direction is engaged in a specific psychological and sociological study of various peoples and nationalities. Within its framework, work is being carried out to comprehend ethnic stereotypes, traditions and specifics of the behavior of Russians and representatives of numerous ethnographic groups of the North Caucasus, national psychological characteristics, indigenous peoples of the Volga North, Siberia and the Far East, representatives of some foreign states.

Scientists belonging to the second direction are engaged in sociological and socio-psychological studies of interethnic relations in Russia and the CIS. Representatives of the third direction in Russian ethnic psychology pay the main attention in their work to the study of the socio-cultural specifics of verbal and non-verbal behavior, ethnopsycholinguistic issues.

A special role among the researchers of the origins of the national identity of the peoples of our state was played by L.N. Gumilyov (1914-1992) is a Soviet historian and ethnographer who developed a peculiar concept of the origin of ethnic groups and the psychology of people belonging to them, reflected in a number of his works. He believed that ethnos is a geographical phenomenon, always associated with the landscape, which feeds people who have adapted to it and whose development at the same time depends on a special combination of natural phenomena with social and artificially created conditions. At the same time, he always emphasized the psychological originality of the ethnos, defining the latter as a stable, naturally formed group of people that opposes itself to all other similar groups and is distinguished by peculiar stereotypes of behavior that naturally change in historical time.

For L.N. Gumilyov, ethnogenesis and ethnic history were not identical concepts. In his opinion, ethnogenesis is not only the initial period of ethnic history, but also a four-phase process, including the emergence, rise, decline and death of an ethnos. The life of an ethnos, he believed, is similar to the life of a person, just like a person, an ethnos is mortal. These ideas of the outstanding Russian scientist still cause controversy and criticism from his opponents, however, if the subsequent development of ethnic groups and his research confirm the cyclical nature of their existence, this will allow a fresh look at the formation and transmission of national psychological characteristics of representatives of specific national communities.

Ethnic history, according to L.N. Gumilyov, discrete (discontinuous). The impulse that sets the ethnic groups in motion, he believed, is passionarity. Passionarity is a concept that he used to explain the features of the process of ethnogenesis. Passionarity can be possessed both by individuals belonging to a particular ethnic group, and by the ethnic group as a whole. Passionate personalities are characterized by exceptional vigor, ambition, pride, extraordinary determination, and the ability to suggest.

According to L.N. Gumilyov, passionarity is not an attribute of consciousness, but of the subconscious, is a specific manifestation of nervous activity, which is recorded in the history of an ethnos by especially important events that qualitatively change its life. Such transformations are possible in the presence of passionarity as a special quality and distinctive characteristic not only for an individual, but also for groups of people. Thus, the passionary sign acquires a population and natural character. For passionaries, the scientist considered, devotion of oneself to one goal, a long-term energy tension, correlated with the passionary tension of the entire ethnic group, is characteristic. Curves of growth and fall of passionary tension are general patterns of ethnogenesis.

The concept of L.N. Gumilev as a whole is quite specific, but psychologists find a lot of new things in it due to the fact that the passionarity and specificity of the ethnogenesis of an ethnic community help to understand many of the phenomena that they study, to derive and quite accurately comprehend the patterns of formation, development and functioning of the national psychological characteristics of people.

Consideration of the history of the development of national ethnic psychology would be incomplete without an analysis of the place and role of peculiar schools (sociological, ethnological, on the one hand, and psychological, on the other) that have developed and function today in our state.

Conclusion

The idea of ​​singling out the "psychology of peoples" as a special branch of knowledge was developed and systematized by Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920). W. Wundt is an outstanding German psychologist, physiologist and philosopher, who in 1879 created the world's first psychological laboratory, later transformed into the Institute of Experimental Psychology. In 1881, he founded the world's first psychological journal "Psychological Research" (originally "Philosophical Research"). direct experience of the life of the individual, i.e. phenomena of consciousness accessible to self-observation. According to him, only the simplest mental processes are amenable to experimental study. As for the higher mental processes (speech, thinking, will), then, in his opinion, they should be studied by the cultural-historical method.

His fundamental ten-volume work "Psychology of Peoples" was intended to finally consolidate the right of existence of ethnopsychological ideas, which were conceived by Wundt as a continuation and supplement of individual psychology. At the same time, he believed that psychological science should consist of two parts:

1) general psychology, which studies a person using experimental methods and

2) “psychology of peoples”, which studies the representatives of certain ethnic communities by analyzing the results of their historical activities (religion, myths, traditions, monuments of culture and art, national literature.

And although W. Wundt represented the "psychology of peoples" in a slightly different light than Steinthal and Lazarus, he always emphasized that this is the science of the "spirit of the people", which is a mysterious substance that is difficult to know. And only later, at the beginning of the twentieth century. the outstanding Russian ethnopsychologist G. Shpet, proved that the “spirit of the people” should in fact be understood as the totality of subjective experiences of representatives of specific ethnic communities, the psychology of a “historically formed collective”, i.e. people.

In the twentieth century under the pressure of irrefutable scientific facts, which were the result of numerous applied studies, foreign sociologists and psychologists were forced to move away from recognizing any significant role of the racial principle in the formation of the national psyche of people.

Bibliography

1. Krysko V.G. Ethnopsychology and international relations. M., 2006.

2. Krysko V.G. Ethnic psychology. M., 2007.

3. Stefanenko T.G. Ethnopsychology. M., 2006.

4. Bondyreva S.K. Kolesov D.V. Traditions: stability and continuity in the life of society. Moscow-Voronezh., 2004.

5. Olshansky D.V. Fundamentals of political psychology. Business book., 2006.

6. Olshansky D.V. Political psychology. SPb., 2006.

7. Pirogov A.I. Political psychology. M.. 2005.

8. Platonov Yu.P. ethnic factor. Geopolitics and psychology. SPb., 2008.

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