26. Subject of ethnosociology. Types of ethnic groups - tribe, nationality, nation. Signs of a nation.
Ethnic communities occupy a prominent place in social life. Ethnos ethnonym
consanguineous
Family - the smallest consanguineous group of people related by common origin (grandmother, grandfather, father, mother, children).
Several families entering into an alliance form genus. Clans were united into clans
Clan - a group of blood relatives bearing the name of an alleged ancestor. The clan maintained common ownership of the land, blood feud, and mutual responsibility. As relics of primitive times, they remained in some areas of Scotland, among the American Indians, in Japan and China. Several clans united to form tribe.
Tribe - a higher form of organization, covering a large number of clans and clans. Tribes have their own language or dialect, territory, formal organization (chief, tribal council), and common ceremonies. Their number reached tens of thousands of people.
In the course of further cultural and economic development, the tribes were transformed into nationalities, and those - at higher stages of development - in the nation.
Nationality - an ethnic community that occupies a place on the ladder of social development between tribes and the nation. Nationalities emerge during the era of slavery and represent a linguistic, territorial, economic and cultural community. A nation is larger in number than a tribe; consanguineous ties do not cover the entire nation; their significance is not so great.
Nation - an autonomous political grouping not limited by territorial boundaries, whose members are committed to common values and institutions. Representatives of one nation no longer have a common ancestor and common origin. They do not necessarily have to have a common language or religion.
So, the following ethnic communities have emerged in history: tribe, nationality and nation.
Prerequisite The formation of an ethnic group is a common territory, which creates conditions for close communication and unification of people. However, then diasporas (dispersion) are formed, although the ethnic groups retain their identity. Another important condition for the formation of an ethnic group is a common language. But the greatest importance is the unity of spiritual culture, values, norms, patterns of behavior, traditions and associated socio-psychological characteristics of consciousness.
Ethnic groups self-replicate through internal marriages and through socialization and the creation of national statehood. Thus, society is individuals taken in stable, regular and institutionalized connections and interactions. They are united by a single system of social institutions and communities that ensure the satisfaction of people's vital interests.
27. The concept of ethnicity. Prerequisites, features and stages of the formation of the Russian ethnos.
Ethnos - this is a historically established stable set of people who have common features and characteristics of culture, social psychology, and ethnic identity. The external form of expression of an ethnic group is ethnonym , i.e. self-name (Russians, Germans).
Ethnic communities are also called consanguineous . These include clans, tribes, nationalities, nations, families, and clans.
Russian ethnicity
Russians- an East Slavic people living mainly in Russia, and also making up a significant proportion of the population of Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Latvia, Kyrgyzstan, Estonia, Lithuania, Moldova, Transnistria, Turkmenistan. They speak Russian as an eastern subgroup of the Slavic group of the Indo-European language family. Russians are bound by a common history, culture and ethnic origin.
The number of Russians in the world currently amounts to about 145 million, of which 116 million are in Russia (2002), which is 79.8% of the country's total population. The most widespread religion among Russian believers is Orthodox Christianity.
Seventh lecture by the professor Alexandra Dugina, read at the Faculty of Sociology of Lomonosov Moscow State University as part of the course “Structural Sociology”.
Part 1. Definition of ethnicity and related concepts
The concept of ethnicity
The concept of ethnicity is extremely complex. It is used quite rarely in Western science, and there are no strict classical scientific definitions that would be the subject of unconditional academic consensus. There are such directions in science as ethnology and ethnography. The first describes the various peoples of the world, their characteristics, and the second, according to Lévi-Strauss’s formula, is a subsection of anthropology and studies the structures of primitive ethnic groups and archaic tribes. From this usage it is clear that “ethnicity” in the West is usually understood as peoples whose culture belongs to the category of “primitive”.
The etymology of the word “ethnos” goes back to the Greek language, where there were a number of concepts that described approximately the same as the Russian word “people”. The Greeks distinguished
. το γένος - “people” in the proper sense - that which was “born”, “clan” (in Russian the words “wife”, “woman” go back to this Indo-European root, that is, “a being that gives birth”);
. η φυλή - (people, tribe, in the sense of “tribe”, clan community; “phyles” were the oldest division of Greek clans - the Latin “populus” and the Germanic “Volk” go back to the same root);
. το δήμος - people in the sense of “population” of some administrative-state unit, polis; the people in the political sense, that is, the totality of citizens living in a polis and endowed with political rights, “civil society”;
. ο λαός - people in the meaning of “gathering”, “crowd” gathered for some specific purpose, as well as “army”, “detachment” (in Christianity baptized Christians are called λαός - which can also be translated as “ holy people" and as "holy army"); and finally ours
. το έθνος - “ethnos”, which meant something similar to “genos”, “clan”, but was used much less frequently and in a lower context - often in relation to animals - in the sense of “flock”, “swarm”, “herd” or to foreigners, emphasizing the features (differences) of their customs; the words “το έθνος” (“ethnos”, “people”) and “το έθος” (“ethos”, “morality”, “mores”, “custom”) are close in form and meaning; in the plural “τα έθνη”, “ethnic groups”, this word was used in the same sense as the Hebrew “goyim”, that is, “tongues” (“non-Jews”) and sometimes “pagans”.
There is nothing in the Greek language that would indicate the specific meanings that we attach to this concept today.
Ethnicity - people - nation - race
Based on the uncertainty of the term “ethnicity” and the ambiguity of its interpretation in various scientific schools, we can start not with a definition, but with a distinction between related concepts within the logic of the “Structural Sociology” course.
In ordinary speech, to denote what is meant by “enos”, the following terms are sometimes used, acting as synonyms or at least similar concepts.
We took two of these 5 concepts into brackets, since they have practically no scientific meaning and are the results of numerous layers, convergences and divergences of the meanings of the main 4 terms, which, on the contrary, denote rather specific, but different realities. The differences in meaning among the main members of the chain - ethnicity-people-nation-race - will lead us to a clearer understanding of each term and to an understanding of the instrumental meaning of intermediate concepts taken in brackets.
Scientific definition of ethnos
The term “ethnos” was introduced into scientific circulation in Russia by a scientist who found himself in exile after the October Revolution (1887-1939). The now classic definition of “ethnic group” belongs to him.
"Ethnicity" is a group of people
monolingual
Recognizing their common origin
Possessing a complex of customs and way of life, preserved and sanctified by tradition and distinguished by it from those of other groups.”
This definition emphasizes the linguistic community (it is not by chance that it is put in first place), the community of origin, the presence of customs and traditions (that is, culture), as well as the ability to clearly distinguish these traditions and customs from the customs and traditions of other ethnic groups (differentiation).
A similar definition of “ethnic group” (more precisely, “ethnicity” - Ethnizitat) is given by Max Weber- “ethnicity is membership in an ethnic group united by cultural homogeneity and belief in a common origin.” Shirokogorov's definition is more complete, as it emphasizes the commonality of the language.
The most important thing in the concept of ethnos is the affirmation of its basic reality at the basis of the entire structure of society. Every person has a language, culture, knowledge about origins and customs. And this complex varies significantly from society to society. The fundamental matrix of such a complex (that is, the combination of all elements - sometimes collectively called “culture”) is ethnos.
The people are a community of fate
Shirokogorov proposes not only to separate the Russian term “people” from the concept of “ethnos”, but also not to use it at all in scientific constructions due to its “vagueness” and “ambiguity” (we saw what a complex hierarchy of the word for “people” existed in ancient Greek) . And yet, for a more precise understanding of the term “ethnic group”, you can try to define it. A people is an ethnic group that introduces a higher goal into the structure of its society, strives to surpass the usual framework of ethnic existence, and consciously expand the horizons of culture and the scale of social structures. We can also say that a people is an ethnic group in an upward movement, on the rise, in the dynamics of expansion, growth, takeoff (3).
A people, in contrast to an ethnos, which is focused on a common origin, is focused on a common destiny, that is, not only on the past and the present, but also on the future, on what needs to be accomplished. The people are connected with the mission, project, task. It is organized along the lines of force of realizing the unrealized, discovering the undiscovered, and creating the uncreated.
At its core, a people remains an ethnic group and has all the properties of an ethnic group, but to this set - language, origin, custom, awareness of difference from others - a new component is added - mission, goal, purpose.
Not every ethnic group is a people in this scientific definition, but every people is, at its core, an ethnic group.
Soviet ethnologist Julian Bromley(1921-1990), studying ethnicity, tried to emphasize this same difference. He opposed “ethnos in the narrow sense” (that is, “ethnos” itself as such) to “ethnos in the broad sense,” which he called an “ethnosocial organism” (4). By “ethnosocial organism” Bromley understood approximately the same thing as we by “people”. But, in our opinion, such a definition is extremely unfortunate, since any ethnic group necessarily carries sociality within itself, moreover, it is the matrix of sociality, its original and fundamental form (and in this sense, any sociality is always ethnic in its origins, at least) , and any ethnic group is an organism, that is, it corresponds to an organizational code, is organized according to a certain paradigm, which may change or stagnate, but is certainly present.
It is much more constructive to use the term “people,” each time emphasizing and keeping in mind its scientific definition. When translating the pair “ethnos” - “people” into European languages, you can use the Greek form “ethnos” (in French - l "ethnie) and the most accurately corresponding term “people” - the people, das Volk, le peuple, el pueblo and etc. As a last resort, if this is not enough, it is possible to introduce the Russian word “narod” into scientific circulation - at least because this concept lies in the center of attention of Russian philosophy, which, starting from the era of the Slavophiles and up to the populists, paid it has the most important place in philosophical, historical and social theories and systems.
People, state, religion, civilization
The desire of the “people” to realize a mission that surpasses the norms and rhythms of ethnic existence is, in practice, translated into a limited range of possibilities. The “people”, realizing themselves as such and accepting responsibility for organizing the future, for fulfilling the mission, most often embodies this in the creation of three structures
Religions
. civilization
. states.
These three concepts are usually interconnected: the state is often based on a religious idea, civilization is made up of states and religions, etc. But theoretically, one can imagine peoples - and they exist in history - which are created only by the state, only by religion and only by civilization. State, power, empire are the most natural forms of historical creativity of the people and there is no need to give examples here. The states that previously existed and exist today are the product of the activity of ethnic groups that have become peoples.
The Jewish people, although historically they had statehood and it was restored in the 20th century, nevertheless, for two millennia they remained a people (and not just an ethnic group) mobilized by religious faith, that is, they lived by religion as a goal and destiny, without having a state.
The example of Ancient India shows that the Vedic Aryans, who came from Northern Eurasia to Hindustan, created the greatest civilization of the world, in which the statehood was weak and blurred, and the religion was syncretic and included many not only Indo-European elements proper, but also autochthonous cults.
The ancient Greeks also created a civilization that existed without a state for many centuries before Alexander the Great built an empire.
Nation as Nation-State
In contrast to the organic and always factually given, original “ethnic group” and from the “people” that create religions, civilizations or states, a nation is an exclusively political concept and associated with the New Age.
In Latin, “natio” means strictly the same as “people”, that is, “birth”, “kind”, as well as “Motherland”, the place where a person was “born”. The Latin word has a place reference, but this is not expressed semantically, but rather associatively - based on the typical use of this term in Latin texts. This “natio” differs from “populus”, which is more associated with “genus”, “origin”.
In political and scientific language, the term “nation” has acquired a stable meaning in connection with the concept of the state. There is an important French phrase - Etat-Nation, literally “State-Nation”. It emphasizes that we are not talking about an empire, where a single political system could include various ethnic groups, but about a formation where the state-forming ethnic group is completely transformed into a people, and the people, in turn, embodies themselves in the state, turns into it, becomes him. A nation is a people that ceases to be an ethnic group and becomes a state.
The state is an administrative apparatus, a machine, a formalized body of legal norms and institutions, a rigidly structured system of power and management. A nation is what this mechanism consists of - a set of parts, atoms, elements that allow this mechanism to function.
Nations appear only in modern times, in the era of modernity, together with modern states - moreover, these are not two separate phenomena; one brings into existence the other: the modern state entails the emergence of a modern nation. One is unthinkable without the other.
A nation is, in a logical sense, the product of the completed implementation by the people of the task of building a state, and the reverse gesture of the state to establish a nation in the place of the people and instead of the people. The people create the state (in the modern sense), and this is where its function ends. Further, the state begins to act according to its own autonomous logic, depending on what idea, paradigm or ideology is embedded in it. If at the first stage the people create a state, then later, having taken place, the state itself artificially gives birth to a certain analogue of the “people” - this analogue is called a “nation”.
In a Nation State, by definition, there can only be one nation. This nation is determined primarily by a formal criterion - citizenship. At the heart of a nation is the principle of citizenship: nationality and citizenship are identical.
In the Nation-State there is
One (less often several) state language,
. obligatory historical episteme (narration about the stages of formation of a nation),
. ruling ideology or its equivalent,
. legal legislation, compliance with which is an indisputable duty.
We see in the “nation” certain elements of both “ethnicity” and “people”, but they are transferred to another level, they do not represent an organic whole, but an artificially constructed rationalistic mechanism.
The nation is based on the transformation of the main people and the suppression (sometimes destruction) of small ethnic groups that fall within the zone of state control. In essence, everything ethnic, original, basic, traditional (which was also preserved among the people) disappears in the nation. The people who build the state and become the core of the “nation” lose their own ethnicity, since living connections, the processes of evolution of language, customs, and traditions acquire a fixed form in the state once and for all; social structures are transformed into legal codes; only one of the possible ethnic dialects is taken as a normative language, fixed as universally binding, and the rest are eradicated as “illiteracy”; and even the implementation of the goal, mission, the state rationalizes and takes responsibility for its achievement.
Race and racial theories
The term "race" has several meanings and varies significantly from language to language. One of the meanings - especially in German die Rasse, but also in French (la race) and English (the race) - strictly coincides with the meaning of the concept of “ethnicity”, but puts forward an additional criterion - biological and genetic relatedness. In this sense, “race” should be understood as “ethnicity” (as Shirokogorov or Weber defines it), but with the addition of biological genetic relatedness.
This meaning is sometimes transferred to the concept of “ethnic group”, since linguistic community and cultural unity imply a certain biological relationship and physical similarity among their speakers. i.e. For this reason, in certain cases, race is understood as an “ethnic group” or “ethnic group”. In this sense, the expressions “Germanic race” or “Slavic race” are used, that is, “related groups of Germanic or Slavic ethnic groups.”
The biological nature of the concept race is also expressed in the fact that in European languages it refers to the classification of animal species, where it serves as a form of taxonomic identifier - something that is conveyed in Russian by the word “breed”. Hence, a “purebred shepherd dog” is a dog belonging to the shepherd breed without mixing with other “breeds” - it will be a shepherd dog of “pure race”, “purebred shepherd dog”, “purebred shepherd dog”.
The mongrel is a “mixed race” dog.
In this sense, the concept of “race” was used by many authors of the 19th century - in particular, Ludwig Gumplowicz, the author of the concept of “Race Struggle”, where “race” refers to ethnic groups.
The second meaning of the concept “race” is an attempt to generalize a relatively large number of ethnic groups into several macro-families, differing in skin and eye color, skull shape, hair types and anatomical features (as well as the commonality of what was once a common language). In Antiquity and the Middle Ages, there was an idea of four races (white, black, yellow and red) or three (descendants of Shem, Ham and Japheth).
“In modern times, the naturalist (1707-1778) divided all types of people into three types:
1) wild man - homo ferus, which included mainly cases of feralization and transformation into an animal state of children left without human upbringing;
2) an ugly person - homo monstruosus, to which microcephaly and other pathological phenomena were classified and
3) homo diurnus, which includes four races, namely: American, European, Asian and African, distinguished by a number of physical characteristics. Linnaeus also points to ethnographic features. In his opinion: Americans are governed by customs, Europeans by laws, Asians by opinions, and Africans by arbitrariness." (5) The naivety of such a gradation is striking.
"At the end of the 18th century Blumenbach(1752 - 1840) - built a completely independent classification, basing it on hair color, skin color and skull shape. Blumenbach counts
five races, namely:
1) The Caucasian race, white with a round head, lives in North America, Europe and Asia up to the Gobi Desert,
2) Mongolian race - has a square head shape, black hair, yellow complexion, slanting eyes and lives in Asia, except the Malay Archipelago,
3) The Ethiopian race, - black, with a flattened head, - lives in Africa,
4) The American race, - with copper-colored skin and a deformed head - and, finally,
5) Malay race - has brown hair and a moderately round head. This classification should be considered as purely anthropological, somatic.
Fr. Miller introduced language into his classification as a sign. He believes that hair color and language are the most stable characteristics that can serve as the basis for dividing people into races and establishes that there are:
1) Bunch-haired - Hottentots, Bushmen, Papuans;
2) Fleece-haired - Africans, blacks, kaffirs;
3) Straight-haired - Australians, Americans, Mongols and
4) Curly-haired people are Mediterranean. These races make a total of 12 more groups.” (6)
Today, science has established the idea that there are three races: 1) Caucasoid, 2) Mongoloid and 3) Negroid, although debate about the justification and relevance of such a classification continues.
Racism biological and cultural
In parallel with these primary systematizations of ethnic diversity, the idea arose to build a certain hierarchy of innate properties between races (which was already noticeable in Linnaeus). Arthur de Gobineau, Yours de Lapouge(1854-1936) and Gustav Le Bon develop theories about “inequality of races,” which indirectly justifies Europeans for their colonial conquests and leads directly to Nazism. The assertion of racial inequality and the resulting ideas of preserving racial purity and justifying the persecution of people on racial grounds are called “racism.”
Racism was the official ideology of the white population of the American continent, who imported slaves from Africa, exterminated (in the North) or enslaved (in the South) the local Indian population and established “racial superiority” over the “savages.” The United States was fundamentally a racist state, which shaped the specifics of the American attitude to anthropology. Later, the idea of the racial superiority of whites over “people of color” took the form of cultural racism, expressed in the conviction of Americans that their culture and civilization is the best and universal, their values - freedom, market democracy - are optimal, and those who challenge this are at the “inferior” degree of development."
One of the main theorists of racism in the twentieth century was H.F. Gunther(1891-1968), who identified the following taxonomy of races in Europe -
1) Nordic race,
2) Dinaric race,
3) Alpine race,
4) Mediterranean race,
5) Western race,
6) East Baltic race (sometimes he added the Thalic race to them).
Gunther considered the creators of civilization to be representatives of the Nordic race - tall, blue-eyed dolichocephals. He considered Africans and Asians inferior. Most of all fell to the lot of the Jews, whom Gunther classified as “representatives of Asia in Europe” and, accordingly, the main “racial enemy.” Racism became an integral part of the National Socialist ideology, and the implementation of racial principles led to the death of millions of innocent people.
The unfoundedness of such generalizations was proven in a purely scientific (and not humanitarian-moral) manner by modern anthropologists and, first of all, representatives of structural anthropology (especially Lévi-Straussom). It is significant that it was his justification for the failure of racial theory that was included in the textbook for French schools as a classic definition of the equality of all human races and ethnic communities.
Since racism and racist theories, and especially the inhumane practices based on them, left a terrible mark on the history of the twentieth century, the very term “race” and any form of “racial studies” in our time have become rare and obviously arouse suspicion.
In a purely scientific and neutral sense, this concept means an attempt to classify ethnic groups according to physiological, phenotypic - sometimes linguistic - characteristics.
Terminological problems of Soviet ethnology
In Soviet times, the question of the definitions of ethnicity, nation, people, etc. was complicated by the need to combine the theories of ethnicity, nation, and state with Marxist theory. This particular case revealed all the difficulties that initially lay in the desire to give the Bolshevik revolution the character of a natural implementation of the predictions of Marxist theory - despite those factors that blatantly contradicted this. Marx believed that socialist revolutions would occur in industrial countries, which are full-fledged Nation-States with a predominance of capitalist relations, developed classes - the industrial bourgeoisie, the urban proletariat, etc. That is, socialist society, according to Marx, replaces the nation and replaces it with itself, reorganizing the economy and culture on a new class (proletarian) basis. In Russia there were not the slightest prerequisites for such a turn of affairs - there was neither a developed bourgeoisie, nor sufficient industrialization, nor a predominant urban proletariat, and, moreover, there was no nation in Russia. Russia was an empire, that is, numerous ethnic groups and one power-forming Russian people lived within it. The Nation-State would assume that there should be no ethnic groups or people (in the full sense of the word).
But after the revolution, having gained control of the empire, the Bolsheviks were forced to urgently adjust their conceptual apparatus to the current situation. From this arose a confusion of concepts and “nation” began to be understood partly as an “ethnic group”, partly as a “people”; under “people” - a semblance of “civil society”, and in addition, additional terms were introduced - “nationality” and “nationality”.
“Nationalism” meant a small ethnic group that had preserved the remnants of a traditional (pre-capitalist) society, and “nationality” meant belonging to an ethnic group that had signs of social self-organization according to the criteria of the New Age. These completely conventional categories, which have no correspondence in European languages and scientific concepts, were also described with the help of numerous omissions, equivocations and implication, which makes them completely non-operative in our time and deprives them of any instrumental value.
The French “la nationalite” or the English “tha nationality” means strictly “citizenship”, belonging to a very specific Nation-State. Therefore, “nationality” is understood everywhere as a synonym for “nation” (in the sense of the Nation-State). The term “nationality” is simply untranslatable, and in the Russian language and the modern scientific field is meaningless.
For this reason, we put these definitions in the chain ethnos-people-nation-race in brackets.
At this stage, you can simply cross them out and not mention them again.
Ethnicity - people - (nationality) - nation - (nationality) - race
Ethnicity and race
Now it’s worth making one more amendment. The term race in our chain of concepts should be transferred to the cell of ethnicity, since, from a sociological point of view, grouping ethnic groups into races does not give us any meaningful additions - except for the sociology of racial theories, which, for obvious reasons, is out of the question. In addition, the diversity of racial systematizations and the uncertainty of taxonomy do not allow race to be considered a reliable matrix for the relationship between ethnic groups and the analysis of these relationships. Some positive conclusions can, of course, be drawn based on the rapprochement between ethnic groups and their grouping into more general categories - sociologist Georges Dumézil, who studied primarily the family of Indo-European ethnic groups, came to extremely important sociological conclusions. But any generalizations here should be made with very great caution - including taking into account the sad experience of Nazism.
And finally, the close connection of race with biology does not carry relevant sociological information that would not be contained in the concept of ethnicity.
Thus, we can remove race as an independent concept, either by identifying it with one of the generalizations in a systematized taxonomy of ethnic groups, or by setting it aside altogether as something irrelevant for sociological research.
In this case, we received the following picture of the original chain of basic concepts -
ethnicity - people - nation (race)
In what follows we will consider only this triad.
Part 2. Ethnicity and mythos
Ethnicity and mythos
Let us correlate the triad ethnos-people-nation with the dual (two-story) topic within which we are conducting our research.
In this case, the following fraction will correspond to the ethnic group:
Ethnicity is an organic unity, which is held together by the community of myth. If we take a closer look at Shirokogorov's definition, we will see that the main characteristics of an ethnos - language, community of origin, ritual, traditions, distinctions - collectively determine the myth and are its constituent parts. Ethnicity is a myth. A myth does not exist without an ethnos, but an ethnos does not exist without a myth; they are strictly identical. There are no two ethnic groups with the same myths - each ethnic group necessarily has its own myth.
This ethnic myth may contain elements common to the myths of other ethnic groups, but the combination is always original and applies only to this ethnic group and not to any other.
At the same time, at the level of the ethnos and ethnic social structure, myth is simultaneously in the denominator (where it is always found in all social models) and in the numerator, which creates complete homology between the structure of the unconscious and the structure of consciousness. Such homology is the main feature of an ethnos as a phenomenon - strictly identical processes occur in the mind and heart of an ethnic community.
Such homology gives rise to the phenomenon that Lévy-Bruhl called “pre-logic”, that is, a special form of thinking where rationality is not autonomous from the work of the unconscious, and all generalizations, taxonomies and rationalizations are carried out in terms of living organic impulses and symbols, which are indivisible units with multiple meanings (polysemy). The pre-logic of the “savages” is akin to the world of feelings, art and poetry: in it, each element carries many meanings and at any moment can change the trajectory of development and change the meaning.
The fraction mythos/mythos expresses the stability inherent in an ethnos in its normative state. The myth is told again and again, and remains the same all the time, although its internal elements may change places or the bearers of certain symbolic functions may act instead of each other.
Myth and mytheme in the structure of an ethnos
Here it is important to say a few words about how Lévi-Strauss understood myth. Lévi-Strauss proposed to consider myth not as a story or notes describing the sequential development of a melody, but as a poem or notes of accompaniment, where the structure of harmony, repetitions, and changes in keys are clearly visible, against the background of which the story-melody unfolds. In poetry, this is marked by rhyme (that is, rhythm), which implies a line break.
An acrostic poem is an example of this vertical reading.
Levi-Strauss came to the discovery of such a structure of myth under the direct influence Roman Yakobson And Nikolai Trubetskoy, the largest representatives of structural linguistics, creators of phonology and convinced Eurasians (Trubetskoy was the founder of the “Eurasian movement”).
Levi-Strauss gives the now classic example of the myth of Oedipus, where each episode from the history of the unfortunate king corresponds to a certain mythological quantum, which includes a whole system of meanings, associations, symbolic meanings, and although the story moves forward and forward, acquiring more and more new plot twists, mythological quanta, being limited (as the number of chords and notes is limited - but not their combinations!), are periodically repeated, which makes it possible to fold the myth of Oedipus like a tape and read it from top to bottom. Levi-Strauss called these mythological quanta mythemes - by analogy with semes in structural linguistics, which denote the smallest particles of meaning.
This explanation is extremely important for understanding the ethnic group. Being a myth, an ethnos always has in its structure a certain set of fundamental elements - a mythem. This determines that in different ethnic groups and cultures, even those that are extremely distant from each other and have no connections, we encounter very similar plots, symbols, and concepts. This similarity is a consequence of the limited number of basic mythemes. But at the same time, each ethnic group builds its own special myths from these basic mythemes, common to all, combining them in a special order and in a special sequence. This creates the differences between ethnic groups and underlies their identity - each of which is original, special and different from the others.
The identity of mythemes and the difference between diverse myths (as combinations of mythemes) explains the multiplicity of ethnic groups and the presence of certain similarities between them.
Taking into account this amendment by Lévi-Strauss and the introduction of the concept of “mytheme,” the model of the structure of ethnic processes that occur even when the ethnic group is in a state of maximum stability becomes clear.
You can imagine the situation this way. In an ethnos, the myth in the denominator is not a myth in the full sense of the word - but a set of mythemes that tend to a certain structuralization. We saw earlier how the structuring of archetypes occurs in the example of the modes of the unconscious. Gilbert Durand in his later works he introduces into his theory the concept of “chreod” - a hypothetical process in biology (discovered by the biologist Conrad Waddington(1905-1975)), predetermining the development of the cell along a predetermined path in order to ultimately become a part of a strictly defined organ. Also, the mythemes that are in the denominator of an ethnos do not represent a neutral set of possibilities, but groups that tend to manifest themselves in a strictly defined context and in strictly defined combinations - according to the logic of “chreod”.
Mythemes “chreodically” creeping towards the clutch into the mode
And in the numerator of the ethnic group, myth is a real myth, a diachronic story, presented as a sequential unfolding of events. Between the mythemes (chreods of the myth) in the denominator and the myth in the numerator, a dynamic interaction unfolds, which generates semantic tension. This tension is the life of an ethnos.
If upon superficial observation the stable and balanced existence of an ethnos may seem to be pure statics, this dialogue between the denominator and numerator freely interacting with each other forms the true dynamics of a full-fledged, developed, rich and every time “new” (in the initiatory sense), but at the same time eternal existence .
Dual structure of an ethnic group: phratries
The largest Russian linguist and philologist Viach.Sun. Ivanov, speaking at one of the lectures (7) about his expedition to the Kets, emphasized the “most important thing” that the interviewed representative of this ancient ethnic group of Eurasia told the members of the expedition. “Never marry a woman of your own kind.” This law is the fundamental axis of ethnic organization.
Lévi-Strauss (8) and Huizinga (9) .
The prohibition against incest is the most important social rule, found in all types of societies - even the most “savage”. This prohibition itself requires the division of society into two parts, phratries. These two parts are thought of as not connected to each other by ancestral ties. Roughly speaking, we can say that in its purest form, the organization of a tribe, as the basic form of an ethnos (as a cell of an ethnos), necessarily presupposes two clans. These clans or phratries are conceived as exogenous to each other - that is, not connected with other ties of direct kinship.
The tribe is always dual, and marriages take place only between these opposing motries. The entire social morphology of the tribe is based on this dualism of phratries. A genus is a thesis, and another genus, the opposite phratry, is an antithesis. Contradictions are emphasized through many rituals, rites, symbols, and totemic associations. Phratries constantly and in many ways emphasize their differences, emphasizing antitheticality and dualism. Sun.Vyach. Ivanov believes that twin myths, common among all peoples of the world, have a direct connection with this basic social duality of the tribe.
But this enmity, constant attacks and competition between the two phratries take place in the space of the game. Huizinga in his book “Homo Ludens” (10) shows that play is the basis of human culture, and it is born from the original social structure of the tribe, divided into two opposing phratries. Phratries compete in everything, but in relation to what lies outside the tribe’s space (enemies, natural disasters, predatory animals), they become solidary and united. Huizinga sees the main quality of culture in the ability to include disagreement, competition, differences and even enmity in the context of unity.
But it is not only the external threat that relieves tension between the two moieties. The institution of marriage and its associated property (that is, the relationship between the relatives of the parties to the marriage) is another fundamental point in the social organization of the tribe. This is what the Keta says about “taking a wife from someone else’s family.” This rule is the basis of the ethnos, the main law of social organization.
An ethnos is nothing more than a tribe, only sometimes expanded into several tribes, while maintaining the relationships that prevail within the tribe. No matter how the size of the tribe increases, through demographic growth or merger with other tribes, within the ethnic group the general structure remains the same. Hence the dual organization often found among ethnic groups. Thus, among the Mordvins there is a division into Erzei and Moksha. The Mari are divided into mountain, meadow, etc.
The boundaries of an ethnic group are not in its numbers, but in its qualitative structure. As long as the formula remains
And the basic structure of society reproduces the dual structure of kinship/property of the tribe (or as they sometimes say “hordes” - this term, in particular, was used by Freud), we are dealing with an ethnos as an organic integrity.
Ethnicity, community, family
If we apply the sociological classification to the ethnic group F.Tennis, - “community” (Gemeinschaft)/“society” (Geselschaft), - one can quite unambiguously identify an ethnos with a “community”. According to Tennis, “community” is characterized by trusting, family relationships, and the perception of the collective as a single whole organism. This “community” is characteristic of the ethnos, and the most important thing here is that the basic model of the family as a clan in the ethnos is complemented by the integrating institution of property. The “community” includes the family as a clan and others (not family, not clan), who become “insiders” while remaining outsiders. This is an extremely important feature of the ethnic group. Ethnicity operates with the subtlest dialectic of relations between native and other (but its own!), which constitutes a significant part of myths and underlies fundamental ethnosocial processes. This family-community dialectic is not simply an extension of the principle of the clan to another clan. We see that the prohibition against incest states quite the opposite. Strangers remain strangers, do not become part of their family, their kind, and this alienation of the other serves as the basis for exogenous marriages. Ethnicity manages to build a balance of such integration, which, starting from the genus, would create a “community” not as a continuation of the genus, or not only as a continuation of the genus, but also as something third, which would include the thesis (genus) and antithesis (another genus ).
Connections remain organic when they are based on consanguinity and when they are based on alienated, heterogeneous properties.
Initiation in the ethnic structure
From this subtle dialectic of ethnicity, society is born. The dynamics of the exchange of tribal women between the two phratries and the complex complexes of patrilineal and matrilineal kinship, as well as matrilocal and patrilocal placements of newlyweds and their offspring, create the social fabric of the ethnic group, in the space of which social institutions are formed. This space is between genera and expresses the synthetic nature of their constant interaction.
The most important tool here is initiation (which we have already talked about in another context earlier). Initiation is the introduction of a teenager into a structure that is parallel to his clan and which places him to some extent “above” the clan. But at the same time, it is initiation that makes the initiate a full-fledged member of the clan, possessing all its social powers. But this post-initiatory participation in the life of the clan is qualitatively different from the natural and pre-initiatory. The initiated youth symbolically returns to the clan as a bearer of additional status, which he receives not in the clan, but in the initiatory male union, in the brotherhood. And thus, each time he re-establishes the connection of the genus with the world of “forces”, “deities”, “spirits” - with the living presence of myth.
Initiation reveals to the initiate how the clan and tribe are structured, that is, it endows him with sociological knowledge and, accordingly, power, since he now sees the structure of the life around him not just as a given, but as an expression of order, to the source of which he becomes involved in the course of initiation .
Thus, the “community” becomes an ethnic group through the initiation procedure, and through initiation the main social institutions are constituted. The Ket formula “always take a wife from someone else’s clan” is an initiatory formula, with the help of which an ethnos becomes an ethnos and at the same time a society, since an ethnos is the original, basic, most fundamental form of society.
Ethnic boundaries and the scaling of marriages
Establishing the “correct” boundaries of an ethnic group, that is, determining what to include and what to exclude, and what the proportions of inclusion are, is the theme of countless mythological stories. Since the construction of an ethnos presupposes the establishment of a delicate balance between kinship and property (inclusion in the community of one’s native and non-native, but one’s own), this topic is described through well-known stories about marriage that is too close (incest) and marriage that is too distant.
Mythological stories directly or allegorically describing incest (usually brother-sister) are constructed in such a way as to draw catastrophic consequences from this fact. This is the meaning of the myth: incest = disaster. But the myth can unfold in another way - a catastrophe can cause the appearance of a brother and sister, the separation of a brother and sister can serve as an antiphrase for incest, or vice versa, a prevention of incest, etc. Examples abound in both the systematized myths of the Indians by Lévi-Strauss and the Russian fairy tales collected Afanasyev (11) .
Another topic is marriages that are too distant. This is an even more exciting part of mythology, which describes numerous versions of marriage with a creature of a non-human species - an animal (Masha and the Bear, the Frog Princess), an evil spirit (Kashchei the Immortal, Dragon, Wolf Fiery Snake), a fairy-tale creature (Snow Maiden, Fairy, Morozko).
Marriage myths stretch between marriages that are too close and too far away, as if they are taking aim to hit the exact target - and this target is “the other as one’s own,” that is, a member of the opposite phratry. This is a real art, since determining the distance is the key to creating and recreating an ethnic group. At the heart of the ethnic group is a precisely executed marriage - getting too close or too far is fraught with fundamental disaster. Therefore, marriage themes are closely intertwined with initiation. Marriage crowns initiation, which is a deepening into myth in order to carry out this most important ethnic-creative action in the most optimal way.
Bears are like people
Determining the boundaries of an ethnic group, as we have seen, is not an easy matter. You can make a mistake by going beyond its limits. Added to this complexity is the fact that ethnic groups operate with “pre-logic,” that is, a taxonomy of a mythological nature, which in practice is most often expressed in the use of totems and totemic animals to systematize not only natural, but also cultural and social phenomena. The animal world, as well as the world of plants and elements in the mythological consciousness, participates in the structuring of culture and organization of society.
Therefore, it is often placed not outside the boundaries of the ethnic group, but within them. In practice, this is expressed in the domestication of wild animals, the development of agriculture and the cultivation of garden and vegetable crops, when the natural world outside the ethnic group is included in the inner circle of the ethnic group. This is also a kind of zeroing in on what is the correct distance.
We can clearly see totemism in modern Russian surnames. Where do the Volkovs, Shcheglovs, Karasevs, Shchukins, Solovievs and, finally, the Medvedevs come from? These are the consequences of the targeting of the Russian ethnic group when determining its correct boundaries within the framework of totemic consciousness.
Today, few people remember that the Russian people in ancient times classified the bear as a member of the human race. It was explained this way: the bear walks on two legs, has no tail, and drinks vodka. Until the 19th century, men and women in the Russian outback were completely confident in this, and therefore they went to fight a bear with a spear, just like going to fist fights in a neighboring village. The bears had a typical middle name - Ivanovich - hence the full name Mikhail Ivanovich.
The bear was associated with marriage and fertility. During the “bear wedding”, an immaculate maiden was taken to the forest and left there to become the bear’s wife (12). In wedding rituals, the bride and groom were called “bear” and “bear,” and the groom was called “bear bear.” In pre-wedding lamentations, the bride sometimes called her father-in-law and mother-in-law “bears.” Matchmakers were often called “shaggy.” In Russian folklore, the image of a bear - a matchmaker - is popular.
This inclusion of the bear within the boundaries of the ethnic group has become such a common cliche that the expression “Russian bear” has entered everyday speech as a phraseological phrase. This Russification of the bear reflects not just an ironic metaphor, but also deeper ethnosocial patterns.
The inclusion of the bear (and in this case also the tiger) into the ethnic system of other peoples - this time the Tungus - is described by Shirokogorov, who participated in a number of ethnographic expeditions in Manchuria. Here's his story in full:
“In Northern Manchuria there are two types of bears, the large dark brown bear and the small brown bear, - there is also a tiger and, finally, people. Depending on the time of year, both the bear and the tiger, and man change their places, to which they are forced by the movement of the game on which they feed. The big bear goes ahead and occupies the best places, the tiger follows, sometimes challenging its territory, the small brown bear settles in the worst places in terms of game, but is quite good in other respects, and, finally, the Tungus hunters. This movement from one place to another and in the same constant order occurs annually. But sometimes clashes occur between young tigers and bears over territory (each of them occupies a small river for itself). Then the matter is decided by a duel, as a result of which the weakest gives way to the strongest. These duels sometimes last for three years, and for the competition, the bear gnaws one tree, and the tiger scratches it, and if he manages to scratch above the place gnawed by the bear, then either the bear leaves, or the issue is resolved the next year in the same manner. If neither one nor the other yields, then a fierce battle ensues. Local Tungus hunters, having studied well this order of dividing territory between young individuals, willingly take part in battles, knowing their date (this happens annually at the end of April) and place (a tree that was gnawed and scratched in the previous year). The hunter usually kills both fighters. There are cases when a person has to give up his occupied place if it is taken away from a tiger or a bear, as a result of the violent and systematic attacks of these animals on domestic animals and even on a person’s home. It is therefore understandable that many Tungus consider some rivers inaccessible for themselves (for hunting), since they are occupied by tigers or large bears.
Thus, due to the fact that a bear cannot help but wander, since it is adapted to existence in precisely this way, but another type of bear, a tiger, and a human are adapted in the same way, competition is created between them all and, finally, they enter into certain relationships, become dependent on each other and create a kind of organization - “taiga society”, governed by its own norms, customs, etc., allowing a person to live next to a bear, when the bear does not touch a person if he does not see him signs of an attack, and when people and a bear pick berries at the same time without harming each other.” (13)
The “taiga society” of the Tungus, whose full members are two species of bears and a tiger, who share hunting grounds, rivers and thickets, is a model of an ethnic group that integrates vital elements of the surrounding world.
In mythology, the bear plays a very important role. The ancient Greeks, autochthons of Siberia and the Slavs associated the bear with the feminine principle. The Greek goddess-hunter Artemis (goddess of the Moon) was considered the patroness of bears. The bear is a chthonic creature associated with the earth, the moon and the feminine principle. Hence its role in marriage ceremonies and rituals. We can say that the bear is a feminoid.
Ethnicity and regimes of the unconscious
The structure of the sociocultural topic of the ethnos that we have elucidated - myth/myth - leads us to the conclusion that the ethnos includes two regimes and three groups of archetypes. Moreover, we can expect to meet them not only in the sphere of the unconscious (denominator), but also in the sphere of the numerator. This is so, since each ethnic group has a mythological system, which reveals how it constitutes itself through a set of mythemes.
The same patterns that we saw when analyzing regimes appear here. The diurn mode tends to rise to the numerator, and the nocturne modes are ready to remain in the denominator. Thus, in parallel with the refined topic of myth/mytheme, we can propose the ethnosocial topic of diurn/nocturne. However, here we encounter a certain problem: this theoretical assumption, based on the axiomatic statement that social structures, society unfolds in all societies around the vertical axis of the diurn, is not confirmed by observations. Even more precisely, if society as a phenomenon is always and in all circumstances the construct of a diurnic myth (it does not matter whether the diurn has passed into the mode of logos or remained at the level of myth), then ethnic groups can put various myths in the numerator, that is, not necessarily diurnic. In this we capture the main difference between society and ethnicity. Society always and without any exceptions unfolds the myth of diurna parallel to the suppression of the nocturne regime or, at least, through its exorcism. But ethnic groups can be structured differently.
This means that we were able to see the difference between an ethnos and a society, which is especially clear in cases where the myth of the nocturne is in the numerator of the ethnos.
At first glance, we have arrived at a contradiction - the numerator is the area of society, and the ethnos is society. This is true, but the myth that is in the numerator of an ethnos may represent an expression of the nocturne regime, but at the same time sociality - as in any case - will bear the imprints of the diurn regime. That is, the ethnic, while coinciding with the social as a whole, may diverge from it in the nuances of mythological regimes.
This circumstance is extremely important, since it shows us the importance that ethnicity plays in sociology. If it were not for this seemingly small difference, ethnos as a phenomenon would be redundant, and a sociologist could be completely satisfied with the study of societies without introducing the additional and cumbersome concept of “ethnos.” Ethnicity - in contrast to society - represents the ability of society to exist in the mode of an unstructured dream, that is, if the structures of society are violated, the ethnic group is able to survive.
The reason for this should be sought in those institutions that are socially formative in the ethnos - that is, in initiation. And the first hypothesis, which suggests itself, is the exogenous nature of society in those ethnic groups where the myth in the numerator is configured according to the nocturne model. That is, in this case we are dealing with societies where sociality was introduced from outside the ethnic circle (including bears, tigers, etc.). We previously encountered a somewhat similar scenario in the form of archeomodernity (pseudomorphosis), but there we were talking about modern societies, and logos appeared. Now we are faced with a similar situation even in the very depths of primitive society.
This hypothesis of a gap between ethnos and society assumes the following: the structure of a society in which the myth in the numerator is not diurnic, bears the imprint of the influence of another ethnos, which either mixed with the given one at some stage, or conquered it, and then dissolved in it , or conveyed social structures in some other way.
Thus, we gradually approached the theory of cultural circles or diffusionism.
Cultural circles
The most prominent representative of the theory of cultural circles (also called “diffusionism”) was a German ethnologist and sociologist (1873-1938). Other scientists following this trend were the founder of political geography Friedrich Ratzel And Fritz Graebner(1877 - 1934). Archaeologist Graebner put forward a tough thesis: in the history of mankind, every object - material or spiritual - was invented only once. It was then transmitted along complex historical and geographical trajectories.
Many structuralist features can be found in Frobenius. So, in particular, he believed that each culture has its own “code” or “soul”, which he called “paideuma” (in Greek, literally “what is taught to a child”, “skills”, “knowledge”, “ability” "). And culture itself is primary in relation to its bearers, that is, to people. According to Frobenius, it is not people who make culture, but culture that makes people (a completely structural-sociological thesis, however). The entire cultural and historical process is a translation of the “paideum”. The meaning of this concept is that a culture can be transferred from one soil, where it arose and developed, to another alien one - and there it will develop according to a completely different logic.
The theory of diffusionism proceeds from the fact that at the basis of each cultural type there is a very specific center, from where this type further spreads - just as a stone thrown into water produces circles that diverge strictly around the place where it fell. This can be traced in the remains of the material culture of antiquity or in the fate of the spread of religions, rituals, ideas, etc.
This principle tells us how to solve the problem of the presence of society in those ethnic groups where the nocturnal myth dominates the numerator. Within the framework of diffusionism, this is explained simply - the “paideuma” of diurnic culture, due to some circumstances, was transferred to the soil of an ethnos with the dominance of the nocturnic myth and became the basis of society there and predetermined the structure of initiation.
Frobenius divided all cultures into two types: chthonic and telluric. Chthonic (from the Greek “chthonos”, “earth”) type is a type in which images of caves, pits, holes, and concavity dominate. It has matriarchal traits; carriers of this type are prone to balance, balance, harmony with nature, and peacefulness.
In the telluric type (also from the word “earth”, only in Latin - tellus) hills, mounds, and convexity predominate. It has patriarchal features and is associated with belligerence, aggressiveness, expansion, cruelty, and the will to power.
We absolutely clearly recognize the nocturne mode in the chthonic type, and the diurne mode in the telluric type. If we accept Frobenius’s version of the dual type of cultures and the cultural circles and translation of the “paideum,” then we get the following picture.
There are two huge families of ethnic groups, each of which includes many groups, regardless of their racial, linguistic, religious or political affiliation, as well as the level of cultural development and geographical location. One family - chthonic - is guided by the formula nocturne/myth (elements of diurn may be present in the unconscious, but they do not dominate and cannot break out into the numerator).
The second family - telluric - is based on the formula diurn/myth (elements of nocturne may also be present in the denominator, but they are restrained by the energies of diurn in the numerator). These two families cover the entirety of the ethnic groups of humanity, and any representative of humanity necessarily belongs to either one or the other ethnic family. Moreover, almost all - perhaps with the rare exception of some archaic tribes (like the Pirahã tribe, which was already discussed earlier) - ethnic groups have social structures within themselves as their organic part. In the case of telluric societies, the identity ethnos = society is complete and perfect. And in the case of chthonic ones, we are forced to recognize the exogenous nature of the social structure and initiation brought - according to the logic of the translation of the “paideums” - by the bearers of the telluric cultural code, that is, by the Diurna ethnic groups.
This hypothesis is completely consistent with the theory Ludwig Gumplowicz about the “racial struggle” if we take into account, as we said earlier, that by “race” in his case we should understand ethnicity. In this case, Gumplowicz's theory in our terms will look like this. Telluric cultures are created by the Diurna ethnic groups, which, in accordance with their “heroic” orientation, are extremely active and aggressive, and therefore, dynamically spreading throughout the world, subjugate the chthonic ethnic groups, inclined towards peace. Since the duirna myth is the axis of the initiatory deployment of the vertical and individuation, these ethnic groups carry in their cultural code (paideum) the foundations of society - with its stratification, the main sociological axes, relationships, roles and structures. Seizing power over chthonic ethnic groups, they assert in them their social models (diurna models), which represent a kind of pseudomorphosis (according to Spengler). Under certain circumstances, they dissolve into chthonic ethnic groups, which gradually return to the nocturne/myth model that is natural for them (so in place of a stone thrown into water, at some point a smooth surface appears again), but the formal remnants of their presence are preserved in the form society, social structure and, most importantly, initiation.
Germanic mythology vividly describes to us the warlike telluric aesir (Odin, Thor, etc.) and the chthonic peace-loving Vanir. According to Dumézil, Indo-European ethnic groups and, most importantly, the Indo-European cultural type, the Indo-European paideuma, represent a classic diurn.
The vast majority of ethnic groups - both archaic and modern - that we can study today show us exactly this model: either these ethnic groups themselves carry society within themselves, or they are guardians and relays of society, which was entrusted to them by “aliens”, “others”, carriers of telluric culture, which gradually either transformed or remained in its original form.
The Pirahã Indian tribe in the Amazon basin, who did not have numerals, even such simple ones as one and two, who did not have any prohibitions (including the prohibition of incest) and structured myths (but who at the same time saw spirits and communicated with them in everyday life mode) is an exceptionally pure example of a chthonic culture, that is, a nocturnal ethnos. The lack of structured myths and the presence of abilities for direct spiritual vision should not confuse us: the point is that the Pirahans operate with mythemes, from the basic elements of a myth that has not yet unfolded into a structured narrative - these are individual notes or chords taken at random. The spirits that the Pirahã Indians see, hear and interact with outside of religion, rituals and myths are nocturnal mythemes. Their case represents a unique phenomenon of the ethnos with the following formula mitheme/mytheme. This is a pure form of the chthonic type.
Ethnic differences and the collective unconscious
Being organic unities that completely predetermine the structure of society (directly or through the complex operation of the exogenous introduction of the bad myth into the nocturne myth), ethnic groups are different from each other. And these differences represent the differences of myths. Each ethnic group has its own edition of the myth/myth formula. This is manifested in language, culture, rituals, beliefs, and images of origin.
Ethnicity can be likened to Do Camo, which was discussed in the chapter on social anthropology. Or more precisely, two Do Kamo, since Do Kamo, as an individuating (initiatory) exponent of the power of the clan, necessarily deals with the exponent of the power of another kind, opposite to the phratry. Here we can recall the twin myth and the dual organization of society, about which Vs.Vyach wrote a lot. Ivanov (17) . Do Kamo are twins, hence the frequent occurrence of an ethnic group having two leaders or two elders in a tribe. They are one and different at the same time, symmetrical and asymmetrical. There is no hierarchy between them, but there is also no equality. It cannot be ruled out that the division of power functions between the priest (flamen) and the king (rex) was one of the consequences of the reinterpretation of the twin nature of the ethnic organization.
Each ethnic group has its own version of the twin code, its own balance of myths, archetypes, its own combination of denominator and numerator, its own trajectories of “chreod” combinations, its own combinations of mythemes. This statement is tantamount to the statement that cultural circles also exist in the space of the collective unconscious. The general structure of this collective unconscious is the same. But for each ethnic group, in the case of each myth/myth formula, we are dealing with different parts or holograms of a single whole. The unity of humanity and man is due to the single most fundamental bottom structure of myth. And at the other end - at the level of striving for logos - the goal is also general, individuation. But the paths and strategies of this individuation are different. They are different in the case of each person, but a person, according to Frobenius, is nothing more than a neutral “carrier” of “paideum” in itself, that is, in other terms, a person is an expression of an ethnos. There is no person outside the ethnos and the society largely determined by this ethnos. He cannot individuate the collective unconscious by starting directly from himself. By definition, it deals with how this unconscious is structured in an ethnic group, that is, what its structure is - and, among other things, what is the structure of the balance of the denominator and numerator in each specific case. A person is completely and completely predetermined by an ethnic group, but not as a biological fate, but as an element of myth, a cultural code. He is not able to complete individuation bypassing the ethnic group. Individuation occurs only within an ethnos and, in fact, by the ethnos themselves. Man is only an instrument of this ethnic individuation, its moment, its interval.
Ethnicity is a person in his maximum understanding. And just as people are different from each other, so are ethnic groups. The only difference is that people are not self-sufficient - they do not have half to produce offspring, there is no dialectical balance between native and alien, there is no initiation as an institution of death and rebirth, it does not have its own myth, but the ethnos has all this there are couples for marriage, and space for communication, and opportunities for procreation, and myth, and initiation. Therefore, the differences between ethnic groups and their relationships with each other are a truly meaningful and important process, and a person acquires meaning and weight only if he realizes himself in an ethnic group, and through the ethnic group, its myths and its structures comes into contact with the rest of the world, which is an ethnic world, ethnically predetermined, ethnically conditioned, ethnically structured.
Interethnic interactions according to Shirokogorov
We examined the main type of interethnic interaction using the example of the Diurna and Nocturne ethnic groups. From the point of view of the structural sociology of an ethnos, they represent the most important paradigm, since it is precisely this moment of grafting tellurism into chthonic ethnic groups (and these graftings can be carried out many times) that constitutes the most important moment of the birth of society - with its institutions, statuses, roles, etc. .
At a more down-to-earth level, Shirokogorov proposed considering three types of interaction between ethnic groups -
Commensalism (from the French commensal - “companion” - a form of symbiosis (cohabitation) of two ethnic groups that interact with each other, but this interaction and exchange is not fundamental for either one, and in case of absence will not cause serious damage to any of them );
Cooperation (when each of two ethnic groups is vitally interested in the other, and if ties are broken, both will suffer seriously)
Shirokogorov describes commensalism this way. “The weakest connection between the two ethnic groups is the form of commensalism, i.e. when one and the other ethnic group can live on the same territory, without interfering with each other and being useful to each other in one way or another, and when the absence of one does not in any way interfere with the prosperous life of the other. For example, the existence of a farmer occupying a limited area uninhabited by wild animals, with a hunter eating the products of the hunt, is quite possible. Although each of the commensalists may be independent of one another, they can also see mutual benefit - the hunter can be provided with agricultural products in the event of a temporary hunger strike, and the farmer can have some hunting products - meat, furs, leather, etc. An example of such relations can be the Russian settlers of Siberia and local aborigines, as well as the ethnic groups of South America living on the same territory - the farmers and hunters of Brazil.” (14)
Cooperation is “a form of relationship between two ethnic groups, which assumes that one ethnic group cannot live without the other and both are equally interested in each other’s existence. Such relationships exist, for example, between Indian castes, between conquerors who were distinguished into a class (for example, the Germans) of nobility or knighthood and the local population (Gauls, Slavs). In the case of such cooperation between ethnic groups, they choose a form of social organization that turns out to be equally convenient for both parties. Depending on ethnic stability, a biological or cultural absorption of one ethnic group by another may then occur, and the social organization continues to exist, as can be observed, for example, in some castes in India, etc., but with the transition to another form of social organization through merger or absorption it may there will be a complete loss of ethnic characteristics. (...)
Ethnicities and war
Another form of interethnic interactions, according to Shirokogorov, is war. This is an extreme, but permanent format of interethnic relations. An ethnos on the rise crushes an ethnos in a state of stability or in decline. Since ethnic groups as a whole are constantly dynamically pulsating, moving in space, changing, transmitting and adapting cultural codes, mastering various types of economic activity, acquiring new technological skills and losing old ones, then between them - in addition to the three forms of peaceful coexistence - flare-ups often occur. wars are the same “racial struggle” of Gumplowicz.
In the war of ethnic groups, many levels and forms can be distinguished - competition for resources (in the spirit of the example of the fight between bears, tigers and Tungus hunters, which we gave), battles for territory, the desire to conquer another and force them to work for themselves or pay tribute, the desire to impose on others your cultural code, etc. We are interested in highlighting here only one factor related to the structure of archetypes.
The fact is that the heroic archetype of Diurna has an arrow and a sword as one of its main symbols. These are not just metaphorical images, they are a plastic embodiment of the diurna movement itself, which represents the impulse for war. The Diurn archetype carries within itself a call to war, since in its very depths it is a war with death and time. But something else becomes an expression of death, a monster for the heroic impulse.
Since the other within the ethnic group is included as one’s own, heroism must be projected beyond the boundaries of the tribe. This is where the call for war begins. The other outside the ethnic group is another ethnic group. His demonization, his transformation into an enemy, the projection onto him of images that oppose the diurnic impulse, this is the most natural operation that the code of telluric culture carries within itself. In other words, the basis of society itself is the spirit of war, society is generated by war, since it is generated by a warrior who fights against death in initiation and defeats death in a “new birth”.
Probably here we should look for the source of war - not in material limitations or objective factors, war is born in an ethnos, in a person, in his depths and rises from there to reorganize everything around, to adjust the world around him to his scenarios. Ethnic groups howl because the ethnoses are based on the spirit of war - at least those ethnic groups that belong to the telluric type. But even those who have perceived diurnic moments in an exogenous way are not free from this - even with the most peaceful mood, they often, by inertia, honor warlike spirits and gods, since in them lies the axis of the social structure revolving around the sword, arrow, scepter (in the softened form of the staff - where does the staff have a bent or forked handle).
Part 3. The people and their logos
Now let's look at what happens when an ethnic group becomes a people. In our sociocultural topic, the formula of the people is as follows:
The most important difference between an ethnic group and a people is in the numerator. There, instead of mythos, there is logos. This logos represents the introduction of a fundamentally new dimension into ethnic life - a dimension that is now formulated in rational terms and operates with a category of purpose that is fundamentally absent from mythos. The myth explains how it is now, how it was before, and why we must continue to do one thing and not do another. There are no questions in the mythos - why? Where? for what? It lacks a telos. The introduction of telos transforms mythos into logos, gives it a completely new structuring, reorganizes the internal resources of the ethnos, directing them in a new direction. These are no longer chreods of mythemes, which are vaguely pushed to link up with other elements in order to come to an organization (although the chreod implies some semblance of teleology), it is a rigidly drawn and strictly formalized path, practically a railroad track, along which the energies of the ethnos will henceforth run.
The logos that separates the people from the ethnos is the folk logos, deeply rooted in the ethnos and its myths, but rising above them in order to establish itself in a new dimension and, at the same time, to constitute and create this dimension.
The transition from an ethnic group to a people is not a quantitative, economic or political process. This is a deep philosophical phenomenon when a shift occurs in the structure of a myth, and it turns into something qualitatively different - into logos.
Heidegger pointed out that initially two basic concepts were introduced in the philosophy of Ancient Greece - physis and logos. Both of them represent a rationalization of agrarian metaphors - physis originally meant shoots, and the verb legein, from which logos is etymologically derived, is the process of harvesting, cutting ears, gathering fruits. Fusis is an ethnos in which myth freely (or chreodically) grows.
As long as there is only fusion, myth spreads freely throughout the entire space of society, constituting this space, being it. When logos is introduced, a new phase begins, fundamentally different from the previous one - the harvest phase, the logos phase. This is the moment of the birth of a people: an ethnos turns into a people when it begins to think rationally, i.e. reap your own content.
Greeks as a people
The Greeks begin to fully comprehend themselves as a people just during the period of the emergence of philosophy, and this philosophy itself, isolating the Greek logos from the Greek myth, serves as the axis of Greek self-awareness as an ecumene, a civilization. The Greeks become a people from many Mediterranean ethnic groups precisely through the unity of culture. In the city-states, various political regimes develop (as polar as the ascetic militaristic Sparta and the democratic hedonistic Athens), local cults and customs differ significantly from each other, many ethnic groups included in the ancient Greek area sometimes speak different languages, but all this diversity is decentralized and the original - united by the commonality of civilization, the acceptance of the ecumenical Hellenic paideum. Thus, a common language, a common written language, and a common mythology gradually takes shape, but this language, this writing, and this mythology already have a significantly different character - super-ethnic, rationalized, schematized, oriented towards a specific telos. Therefore, we are talking specifically about the people. And at a certain stage, the emergence of pre-Socratic philosophy becomes the crystallization of this process. IN Plato and Aristotle, the Greek logos, the logos of the Greeks as a people, reaches its culmination and clearly realizes itself and its nature, and the student Aristotle, descendant of the Diurnic Macedonians who took Athens, Alexander the Great, guided by this logos and embodying this telos, builds a gigantic world empire.
In this case, we see that the Greeks became a people from the constellation of Mediterranean ethnic groups without a state, but at some stage they created a world empire. When this empire fell, giving way to new empires and kingdoms, primarily Rome, new ethnic groups and peoples began to form on its ruins, and some ethnic groups returned to their previous state, but in any case retaining a colossal trace of belonging to Greek culture.
We meet the next stage of Greek identity as a people in Byzantium, after the Western Provinces fell away from it, captured by the barbarians. Then the “people of the Romans” (that is, literally “Romans” - since the Byzantine Empire was the Roman Empire), as the Greeks of this period called themselves, once again formulated their logos, this time as the core of the Byzantine Empire and the priority bearer of the Orthodox religion.
People of India
The Vedic Aryans turn into a people when, from a warlike diurnic ethnos (one of many that roamed the steppes of Eurasia), the keeper of the “telluric”, according to Frobenius, solar myths, they invade Hindustan, where they realize their myth as the structure of a universal logos and create a majestic civilization, based on a unique process, lasting thousands of years, of rationalization of the Vedas - through the Brahmanas, Puranas, Upanishads, Samhitas and countless philosophical systems.
If, from an ethnic point of view, this process can be described in terms of interethnic relations between the Aryan elite, who created the social system of India, and the autochthonous population of Hindustan, mainly the Dravidians, then from another point of view, this is an example of the deployment of the people as the logos/mythos formula.
Formation of the Islamic "Ummah"
The Arab people were formed through the religious idea. Having previously been disparate ethnic groups, the Arabian Arabs of the era Muhammad(571-632) gradually rallied around a new religious preacher, who was recognized as a prophet. In this case, the “Koran” acted as the logos, which contained rational instructions for behavior, social organization, economic and ethical laws, the foundations of law, and listed the responsibilities of each member of the community (ummah). In Islamic philosophy there is an exact equivalent to the Greek concept of logos - this is “kalam”, in Arabic the pen with which God writes the contents of the world.
The new religion, the carriers of which were the Arabian tribes, gives a gigantic impetus to the integration of the Arabian Peninsula at first, and then provokes a wave of Arab conquests that swept through Eurasia, reaching Europe (where the Arabs were stopped only by Charles Martell(686-741) during the famous Battle of Poitiers) in the West and to India and Indonesia in the East.
The Arabs became a people who received a logo in the form of the “Koran”, and began to spread this religiously understood model of the people (“ummah”) to the whole world. At the same time, three parallel processes took place -
Arabization (assimilation into the Arab people - with language, customs, type of behavior) of many ethnic groups of North Africa and the Middle East;
Islamization (conversion of all conquered peoples and ethnic groups to Islam);
Creation of the caliphate (establishment of the political power of the Arab nobility over the conquered territories within the framework of a single Islamic empire).
Here we see that several Arabian tribes, in particular the Quraish, under the leadership of a religious figure, are rapidly turning into a people, who, in turn, creates a civilization and a gigantic state. Religion and the holy book of Muslims, the Koran, play the main role here - the role of logos.
At the same time, as in the case of the Greeks, who, starting from civilization and partly philosophy, approached the creation of an empire, the Arabs, this time, starting from religion, developed an entire civilization on its basis and built a powerful world state.
This shows that the forms of transformation of an ethnos into a people that we identified earlier - religion, state, civilization - can unfold in different orders and flow into one another at different stages. The most important thing is precisely that deep moment when a change of register occurs, and the myth in the numerator is replaced by logos.
Empire of Genghis Khan
There are a great many examples of how an ethnic group becomes a people through the creation of a state. The history of any state necessarily has a phase of an internal leap from mythos to logos, after which a people is discovered in the place of the ethnos.
An impressive example of the construction of the greatest state and, accordingly, the creation of a people practically from scratch - without civilization and without a specific religion - is given to us by the Mongol Empire. The petty prince of the Mongolian tribe Kiyat-Borjigin, who is in a stable ethnic state and does not show any signs of becoming a people, on the contrary, weakening and losing positions among other Mongolian ethnic groups, Temujin(1167-1227) suddenly and almost single-handedly switches the mode of ethnic existence and begins a series of endless conquests. In lightning speed, a gigantic Mongol Empire is created, surpassing in scale the greatest empires of antiquity.
The creator of the empire is the Mongolian people, which is formed from various ethnic groups by the will of the supreme ruler Genghis Khan. In the shortest period of time, not only various Mongolian tribes, but also hundreds of other Eurasian ethnic groups are fused into a single structure, becoming accomplices in an undertaking on a global scale.
The logos in this case is the “Yasy” code constructed by Genghis Khan, the legislative principles of the organization of the World State. This code, poorly studied in the scientific literature, is a rationalization and absolutization of the basic principles of the duirn regime - friend-enemy dualism, the highest values - loyalty, valor and honor, normative contempt for comfort and material well-being, equating life with an endless war, a ban on alcohol etc. This style of society was characteristic of most of the nomadic tribes of Eurasia and before the Mongols (Scythians, Sarmatians, Huns, Turks, Goths, etc.), but Genghis Khan elevates myth into logos, custom into law, following the traditions of the past into a project achieving the highest goal - the creation of a world Mongolian power and the conquest of the world.
It is significant that from the very beginning Genghis Khan was building an empire, a state-world, in which the rights of conquered ethnic groups and the religious issue were clearly stipulated. The Mongol Empire undertakes to respect a certain autonomy for those ethnic groups that submitted to the authority of the “Great Khan”; representatives of all religions are considered inviolable, get rid of tribute and receive guaranteed state support.
The Mongolian logos is expressed in a unified tax collection system, the organization of a professional army, and the establishment of Yam communication systems throughout the empire. But at the same time it preserves myth, ethnicity and religion intact, coordinating only the most general administrative and legal positions with the universal model.
Genghis Khan creates a state, but this state does not abolish ethnic groups and myths. The logos and the (Mongolian) people come to the fore, but the myth is not erased or driven underground. Such a model can be called the imperial logos, a logos that does not conflict with mythos. The people (in this case the Mongols), who become the bearer of such an imperial logos, are constituted according to the formula
The relationship between logos in the people building an empire and ethnic groups (with their myths - including the main empire-building ethnic group) differs significantly from how the balance develops between logos and mythos in the case of the creation of other types of statehood.
It can be noted that in the era, collectively defined as the era of Premodernity, all forms of state created by the people are empires in their type. This is not an indication of the extent of their territorial conquests, the universal scale of their ideas, or the presence of an emperor, but describes the specific relationship of logos to mythos in them. Logos in Premodern states - large or small - never becomes in direct opposition to mythos (that is, ethnos), and the poet is always imperial.
We see this fully in the formation of the Russian State: Rurik Slavic and Finno-Ugric tribes belonging to various ethnic groups are invited to rule. And in the new statehood, their ethnicity is not erased or suppressed, but is preserved and continues to exist in a natural rhythm for many centuries. This means that from its first steps Kievan Rus was a state of the imperial type - the logos in this case was Varangian, and the mythos was Slavic and Finno-Ugric.
According to the same model, the state of the Franks was created, which gave birth to modern France, as well as almost all states of the pre-modern era known in history - they were all empires (either universal, or medium-sized, or tiny).
Balance of logos and mythos among the people
However, the people who create the state in the process of developing their logos, in any case, change the structure of their ethnicity. The myth goes under the fraction line, the direct homology between the numerator and the denominator (as in the ethnic formula mythos/mythos) is violated. More complex relationships are built between the structure of the unconscious and the structure of consciousness than in myth. Some things pass from myth into the logos of the people, but some do not.
In theory, space is created for potential conflict, at least some friction.
This is clearly seen in the development of Greek philosophy: as it develops, a rationalization of myth occurs with a parallel division of what lends itself to it and is included in the structure of philosophical systems, and what is discarded as “fables,” “fairy tales,” and “superstitions.”
A people leaving an ethnic group sends some part of its “former” (in a logical, not chronological sense) state to the periphery.
The same is true with the advent of Islam. Mohammed partially accepts the ethnic traditions of the pre-Islamic period - in particular, the black stone of the Kaaba in Mecca, many religious and everyday prescriptions of the ancient Arabs, and partially rejects them and declares religious war on them - as a battle with unbelief and “giving partners to God” (shirk).
It’s the same with Genghis Khan’s Yasa, where certain ethnic codes of the Mongol nomadic code are elevated to the status of law, and some traditions - in particular, ritual Mongol drunkenness, as well as much else - are harshly rejected.
The imperial logos does not come into conflict with myth, but still strictly and clearly distinguishes itself from myth. At the next stage, this difference can lead to serious contradictions.
Passionary push
The event described by Gumilev - the passionary push as the start of the process of ethnogenesis - exactly corresponds to what we designate as the transition from an ethnos to a people. Gumilyov described this in terms of “energy,” an active force that suddenly opens up in an ethnos and brings it to a new scale of historical existence. He associated this with the increase in the number of “passionaries” - that is, people of the heroic, sometimes somewhat adventurous type, driven by an excess of internal strength.
Regarding the cause of passionary impulses, Gumilyov gave a very original explanation, linking them with the pulsations of solar cycles, the connection of which with the biological cycles of life on earth was studied by the Russian scientist A.L. Chizhevsky(1897-1964)(18). For all the wit of such a hypothesis, it has nothing to do with sociology and structural sociology. But the following is extremely important: Gumilev described in detail and correctly identified in the history of ethnic groups those moments when the transition from an ethnic group to a people specifically took place, that is, he compiled a systematic table of ethnic groups in geographical and chronological order, including all cases of such a switching of regimes, whenever they neither occurred - both in antiquity and in recent centuries.
And if Gumilyov’s answer to ethnological problems: why the transition from ethnos to people occurs can be found controversial or irrelevant, the very attraction of fixed attention to this topic can hardly be overestimated. In that part of structural sociology that studies ethnicity - that is, in the field of structural ethnosociology - Gumilev's theory is an important component.
Mechanics of ethnogenesis according to Gumilev
In its most general form, Gumilyov’s theory of ethnogenesis is as follows. Within the framework of existing ethnic groups, Gumilev identifies “convixia” (“community life”) as the basic cell. Numerous “convictions” form “consortia”. Groups of “consortia” form a “subethnos”. The next step is “ethnos”, and finally “superethnos”.
The process of movement from conviction to ethnos and superethnos is a route that in the overwhelming majority of cases remains in a potential state - and every existing social system is in equilibrium. But in the rarest cases, under the influence of an inexplicable (or heliobiological) impulse - a passionary impulse - a single “conviction” (for example, a community, a group of like-minded people, a bandit gang, a tiny religious sect, etc.) begins to behave actively, aggressively, violently, taking over with its energy everything around itself - that is, other convixions. If this process continues, then the convictia will form a new consortium, then a sub-ethnos - and so on up to a super-ethnos. The full path in history was traveled in isolated cases - two of which we mentioned: the Empire of Genghis Khan and the Arab Caliphate. This also includes the spread of early Christianity - from a small group of apostles to a world empire and world civilization. For the most part, passionary impulses fade away at intermediate stages. Thus, the structure of convisxia-consortium-subethnos-ethnos-superethnos can be perceived as a chreod, that is, a probable path for the development of passionarity processes, which will be completed in reality only with the combination of many additional conditions.
Passionarity and diurn
In Gumilyov's theory, the similarity between the phenomenon of passionarity and the regime of imagination, which Gilbert Durand describes as the regime of diurn, is immediately striking. In its pure mythological form, the diurn carries within itself something similar to passionarity. The complex of myths and symbols of Diurn unfolds in the mode of a tough and heightened dramatic confrontation between the imaginer of death and time. Heroic diairizis rejects the euphemism of nocturnal regimes and defies time. The balance on which the habitual life of an ethnos is based is based on a compromise between the diurn (the basis of initiation and social institutions, the structure of individual practices) and the exorcism of the nocturne (as discussed earlier). An excess of diurn may well consider such a compromise as the transition of the entire system to the side of the “enemy” - time-death, and the delicate ethnic balance of kinship and property, in which twin opposites are resolved dialectically, in this case may be disrupted - which will lead to the destabilization of the tribe (ethnic group) ) and the beginning of unpredictable (catastrophic) events.
Something similar can occur when the male union as an initiatory structure is separated from the rest of the tribe - up to complete isolation, migration, separation, resettlement. The male union as an institution for the cultivation of the heroic principle - warriors, hunters, young aggressive men - in isolation from the restraining nocturnal bonds of an equilibrium ethnic group will most likely behave according to the passionary scenario.
And finally, it can be assumed, in the spirit of Frobenius-Graebner diffusionism, that some ethnic groups or tribes are obviously endowed with increased diurnic properties and have a corresponding structure of myth and a dominant heroism in the unconscious, and the movement of such ethnic groups - sometimes difficult to distinguish in detail - across space generates a series of explosions of passionarity or channels of its spread.
In this case, passionarity can be described (but not explained, which we do not pretend to do) as a concentration of diurn, which serves as combustible material for the dynamics of the processes of ethnogenesis and, accordingly, sociogenesis.
People and diurn
Continuing this line, we can say that the deployment of the heroic principle - diurn - in the structure of the unconscious and in the general architecture of myth - leads
In the first (logical, but not necessarily chronological) stages, to the organization of the ethnic group in accordance with the social order along the vertical axis (in an endogenous or exogenous manner - as we talked about earlier);
In some cases - to the concentration of this principle in special initiatory organizations;
Sometimes - to the mobilization of the entire ethnic group to solve heroic (militant, aggressive, extensive) tasks;
And in the form of a culmination - to the formulation of the heroic myth into a logos, embodied in the creation of empires, religions, and civilizations.
In other words, an extremely high concentration of diurn elements is responsible for the transition from ethnos to people. Gumilyov's theory of ethnogenesis and its stages can well be interpreted with the help of this toolkit.
At first glance, the question may arise: what changed when we replaced one rather mysterious term “passionarity” with another, no less mysterious - “myth of diurna”? A lot has changed. Gumilev's passionarity referred us to the bioenergetic theories of modern science, which is a multiple derivative of basic anthropological and sociological paradigms. This science is a layering of so many layers of sociologically determined conventions that even the metaphorical use of its terms and its procedures can significantly lower the level of hypotheses, not to mention etiology or causation - to believe in this is at least naive. Having interpreted the phenomenon of passionarity as a specific operating mode of the imagineer, we immediately find ourselves at the center of the problem, since the action of this mode fits into the general context of not only psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic topics, but also into the context of sociology and structural anthropology. And moreover, in this case, passionarity can be consistently examined within its core - that is, the mechanics of passionarity can be revealed - demystified (in particular, freeing it from the depressing heliobiology, because the sun is a social and mythological phenomenon, and, as such, belongs to the sphere of imagination) .
Thus, summing up the analysis of the relationship between the people and logos, we can say that the key moment of the transition from ethnos to people (with the corresponding forms of large-scale historical creativity) lies in the sharp dominance of the diurna regime in the structure of the ethnos. Logos is born from a heroic myth, and for this to happen, a high degree of concentration of this particular myth must be achieved both in the numerator and in the denominator of the formula of the ethnos mythos/mythos. When does this formula take the form
the desired leap in passionarity will occur, the diurn in the numerator will turn into logos, and the ethnos will become a people.
Part 4. Nation versus myth
Perenniality of the ethnic group
We meet ethnicity throughout the entire space of the historical syntagm Premodern-Modern-Postmodern. In one form or another, it is everywhere as a constant of human society. Every society is directly or indirectly ethnic, whether it is recognized or not. At different moments of the sociocultural topic, in different relationships with its other components, but myth is present everywhere - as a constant of the collective unconscious, as the imaginer itself. A person is ethnic in an absolute way; he is always an ethnic person. Society is exactly the same: it bears the imprint of ethnicity in the most direct and immediate way. At the same time, ethnicity can be the only content of a person and society as part of a tribe or archaic forms of society, or it can be combined with more complex systems - when we are dealing with the people and more abstract structures built by them - civilization, religion and especially the state. In the first case, ethnos is the only thing that is given (the formula mythos/mythos), in the second, ethnos is combined with a certain supra-ethnic (super-ethnic, according to L. Gumilyov) superstructure (the formula of the people logos/mythos).
Ethnicity has always been and is. This circumstance is deliberately highlighted and justified by the primordialist or perennialist theory (from the Latin “primordial” - original and “perrenis” - eternal, constant, unchangeable). In general terms, it was first formulated by German philosophers Johann Gottlieb Fichte(1762-1814) and Johann Gottfried Herder(1744-1803). From the point of view of the synchronistic approach and structuralism, it is in the ethnos that one should look for the keys to understanding man as such. The entire direction of structural anthropology, which studies institutions, psychology, mentality, symbols, rituals, lifestyles and thoughts of peoples living in a state of ethnicity, is connected with this. Therefore, we encounter ethnicity at all stages of history - from Pre-Modern through Modern and up to Post-Modern.
As for the people, that is, the transition of an ethnic group into a special regime of passionary tension or superconcentration of diurn, this does not happen in all ethnic groups. Ethnicity is something obligatory and necessarily present as a fundamental anthropological and sociological given. We meet people much less often. This is an optional and unnecessary form of society. It is associated with a set of evolving factors that are combined under the influence of many diverse and multi-level reasons. There is no predestination in the fact that an ethnos would become a people, and there is no guarantee that, having become a people, that is, a super-ethnos in Gumilyov’s terms, it will not again disintegrate into ethnic units - either old or new, or that such units will not break away from it . The transformation of an ethnic group into a people is a reversible phenomenon.
Although we meet peoples - namely peoples (not ethnic groups) - at the most ancient stages of history known to us, their existence, while logically probable, is not strictly necessary. In this they differ from the ethnos, which is necessary and present everywhere. The people, as a special case of an ethnos ignited by heroic super-energy, are thus a probabilistic quantity.
Genesis of a nation
The phenomenon of the nation, for its part, has a strictly defined temporal localization and belongs to the New Age. Previously, we do not encounter a nation as such (that is, a Nation-State), it is an exceptional phenomenon of Modernity and completely belongs to its paradigm. Nation is a modern concept, inextricably linked with the Enlightenment and the Modernity paradigm. In this way it differs from both the ethnic group and the people, which are present in all paradigms.
The genesis of a nation is connected with the concept of the state. The state, in turn, as we have seen, is one of three possible forms of embodiment of the creative power of the people (along with religion and civilization). A people is an ethnos that has acquired a logos. And finally, logos is born from the mythological regime of diurn, which in turn, constituting logos, leaves its other equally diurnic and heroic, but not logical, possibilities unused. Everything that does not pass from one state to another does not disappear, but remains as active factors that continue to exert a huge influence on the entire structure. The genesis of a nation can be described as a process of consistent selection of mythological potential.
The diagram shows four logical stages in the emergence of a nation. If we project these logical steps onto the diachronic picture, then the transition to the lower level will be carried out strictly in modern times, which forces us to classify the nation as a purely modern phenomenon. The use of the same term in earlier eras forces us to interpret the statement as referring to either a people or an ethnic group.
Such a strict definition of a nation is extremely important in order to unravel the tangle of countless contradictions, confusions of concepts and anachronisms in the use of the term “nation”.
A nation is linked to an ethnic group genetically, as it emerges from the matrix of the ethnic group. But as it develops, the nation becomes more and more liberated from what was its source, to the point that in its completed form it becomes in absolute opposition to the ethnos.
The Nation-State as an Ethnocide Machine
We see that the Nation-State does not recognize the presence of myth in its structure at all and identifies itself exclusively with the realm of logos. This is strictly clear from the history of the formation of the New Age, which took place under the sign of the complete liberation of the mind from “pre-rational”, “extra-reasonable” impurities. This was the meaning of the Enlightenment - the expulsion of myth.
Therefore, in the political practice of the formation of modern Nation-States, we see the unfolding of systematic ethnocide - the destruction of ethnic groups and even people (as having too much of a myth in itself - even if only in the denominator).
Thus, during the formation of the French State-Nation, dozens of ethnic groups that once inhabited the territory of the French Kingdom became victims. These are the Occi, Aquitanians, Basques, Gascons, Normans, Bretons, Provencals, etc. From several ethnic groups, a single homogeneous field is laid out and laid out from above - by the state, which introduces a common social standard, which includes a normative national language, common law (abolishing ethnic differences), the principle of secular, secular education, the foundations of the economic system are fixed, artificially and uniformly formed authorities, other institutions.
The state develops a certain logos, as a mechanical model of rigid laws, and adapts to this logos not only the small ethnic groups that find themselves within its borders, but also the people themselves, who launched the state, consistently clearing it of myth.
The state as an anti-empire artificially generates a nation
It is significant that a nation is generated only by a state of a non-imperial type. In principle, the modern state, whose theorists were Machiavelli, Hobbes And Jean Bodin, was intended as an anti-empire, as the antithesis of the empire.
The national state is consistently cleared of other forms of creativity of the people - from civilization and from religion. In the history of Europe, this meant ignoring such a phenomenon as European civilization and the desire to base national statehood on the rationally conceived selfish interests of a specific group that created the state and enjoys its fruits. On the other hand, modern states were built in polemics with the universalist claims of papal power, which explains either the secular nature of these theories, or the fact that their creators were Protestants (like Jean Bodin or Thomas Hobbes). And finally, in practical optics they opposed the lines of Austria-Hungary - the last imperial formation of Western Europe.
The empire combines a centralist logos with a polyphony of ethnic groups, and it also preserves the empire-forming people in relative integrity. In terms of logos-mythos, it combines universalistic logos with mythological diversity in the denominator, which is recognized both de jure and de facto.
A nation is not just a certain stage in the existence of a people. Here the sequence is different. The people create a state (at first, as a rule, an empire). An empire under certain conditions (and not always) is transformed into a state of a secular, non-imperial type. And only then does this state of a non-imperial type artificially give birth to a nation, establish it, politically, socially, legally, administratively, institutionally, territorially and even economically constitute it, construct it. A nation is a construct of the state, that is, a completely artificial phenomenon, based on the application of an abstract logos to specific historical, ethnic and political conditions.
The citizen is a logical artifact of the nation
The basis of a nation is not some organic community, but the individual, the citizen. The citizen is a unit of purely logical order. It is constructed not on the basis of something existing, but on the basis of a rational imperative. The citizen is introduced as an established identity, subject to the first three laws of logic - “A = A”, “A not not-A”, and “either A or not-A”. A citizen is a unit that fully satisfies this law. He stands out from the general mass of an ethnos or people, connected by numerous threads of mythos in his denominator, and by this separation he breaks off all ties with the natural collective whole (myth in the denominator), moving into a new artificial collective unit based on logical operations. This artificially constructed unit is the nation.
Earlier we talked about how the transfer of an element from the realm of mythos to the realm of logos places it before a cold and impartial analysis, alienated by a mechanical court. The citizen, as the basis of the nation, is man, torn from his natural environment, awakened from his dreams and rhetorical discourses, and called to judgment. The idea of national law is based on this. Law in the Nation-State is the basis for the functioning of the entire mechanism, it is the diagram of the apparatus and the operating instructions. The basis of the nation is the Constitution, as a basic document that defines the main parameters of the drawing and the mechanism for interaction between individual parts of the general national apparatus.
The citizen is a universal part of this logical machine.
If we recall again the concepts of the sociology of Tennis, we can say that a nation is an expression of “Geselschaft” (“society”), as an artificial fastening together of atoms into which an organic whole has been previously divided. A nation is a robot of a people and an ethnic group; one can also say that it is an automatic stuffed animal from which internal organs have been carefully removed and replaced with mechanical parts that approximately imitate these organs.
Hypotyposis of the “people” in Constitutions
A nation is an anti-ethnic group, an anti-people. The memory of the people as the initiator of the emergence of the nation is often still contained in the Constitutions of most nations, but this mention is in the nature of a hypotyposis (that is, an anachronistic euphemism) - “the people” are mentioned as a living reminder of what preceded the emergence of the state and the creation of a nation on its basis. In the present, in the National State, the people no longer exist, instead there is a nation - it is this that is governed by the Constitution and constituted by it. But the hypothetical address to the people in the present tense is a figure of speech, which, among other things, leads to the incorrect and purely anachronistic conclusion that the nation could be what preceded the state (although this is a logical and chronological, syntagmatic contradiction).
Reasons for confusion in definitions of nation (nationalism) in political science
Associated with these nuances is the fact that quite often the “nation”, which has a strictly mechanical and civil content, is understood as other realities - that is, “people” and “ethnicity”, as a society where the positions of myth are completely legitimized, and sometimes even legal. Such a failure of concepts forces the same representatives of Modernity and the modern state to act both as supporters of the nation and as its opponents. They are supporters when they understand by “nation” civil society in the spaces of the state (that is, in fact, what should be understood by “nation”), and opponents - as long as this concept has anachronistic content (“people” and/ or "ethnic group").
The same duality, based not on unclear usage of words, also affects the concept of “nationalism”. “Nationalism,” strictly speaking, is the phenomenon of unity and mobilization of citizens of a state to realize some state goal - victory in a war, expansion of one’s political influence or zone of economic control. Such nationalism does not conceptually conflict at all with the norms of civil society and is quite acceptable in most Modern societies. But if by “nation” it is not legitimate to understand “people” or “ethnic group”, then the meaning of the concept changes to the exact opposite, and by “nationalism” we understand in this case a counterattack of an outlawed mythos against a logos that usurps all powers in a modern state, that is an attempt by the "Gemeinschaft" ("community") to win back some of their rights from the "Geselschaft" ("society"). To emphasize these differences, compound terms such as “ethnonationalism”, “ethnocracy”, “Volk-nationalism” (or “volkisch” - from the German “das Volk”, “the people”), “national intolerance” or “racism” are used. It is obvious that such complex constructions only obscure the essence of the problem, forcing the development of systems of concepts and definitions, including legal ones, based on tensions, ambiguities and omissions, which only harms the coherence of scientific, political and legal discourse. Examples of such inadequate use of the terms “nation” and “nationalism” are full of the world and Russian media, cases of legal practice, typical political polemics that never lead to anything, since terminological confusion serves as the very basis of the discussed positions and priorities.
Reasons for confusion in definitions of nation (nationalism) in ethnology
Another type of confusion of concepts occurs in the scientific community. This is related to theories of "ethnicity" discussed in modern ethnology and anthropology. In Russian science, an extremely incorrect and irrelevant practice has developed of contrasting the primordial (perennialist) theory of ethnos (we outlined it above) and the so-called “social constructivism” with each other. Primordialism recognizes “ethnicity” as a primordial and fundamental phenomenon, given as the deployment of structures of the unconscious (with or without the addition of the idea of ancestral connections - we have seen that in any ethnos both kinship and property are involved, and both of them are constitutive for the definition of an ethnos only in the aggregate , which makes the criterion of the presence of tribal ties when determining an ethnic group incomplete and misleading). Constructivism, which is opposed to it, tries to explain the emergence of an ethnos by an artificial cultural-political and linguistic initiative of elites or individual small groups. And here, as in the everyday language of politicians and journalists, we are faced with a confusion of concepts and anachronistic extrapolations. Ethnicity is a strictly and unambiguously primordial phenomenon, and no other explanation of its origin exists. The only thing is that the processes of ethnogenesis can be interpreted differently - through the energy theory of passionarity (as in Gumilyov), through a combination of modes of the unconscious (especially with an emphasis on the socio-forming function of the diurn) or in some other way. Herder metaphorically defined “ethnicities” (= “peoples”) as “the thoughts of God.” In the religious ideas of Jews and partly Christians, the explanation of the differences between ethnic groups and peoples is given through the idea/plurality of angels - each people (ethnic group) has its own angel, symbolically personified by the prince of a given people. Thus, members of the chain angel-prince-people (ethnos) can act as metonymic concepts.
Constructivism fully begins where the creation of a nation occurs. Here, indeed, there is nothing primordial or perrenial - this national construction is being built completely artificially and with the help of mechanical and logical laws. Here, indeed, a major role is played by the power and intellectual elites, who develop, purely logically and speculatively, those ideas, principles, interests and values around which the artificial civil community they constitute is intended to unite. In the case of large nations this is obvious and does not require proof. Problems can only arise with small nations, the emergence of which is taking place before our eyes. In the post-Soviet space, in each of the CIS Republics, except Russia, the process of creating new nations, which, as a rule, have never existed in history, is in full swing.
Similar attempts are being made at a lower level - within the separatist tendencies and within Russia itself, and in this case the appeals of the operators of the creation of new nations to the ethnic factor are even more striking. A superficial reflection on these phenomena led a group of incompetent Russian scientists from the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences ( V.ATishkov) to the opposition of primordialism and constructivism. The fact is that appeals to ethnic principles in the creation of a nation do not determine the essence of ethnogenesis and lose sight of the very content of the ethnos. This factor, indeed artificial and mechanically constructed, serves as a nuance for the formation of a nation in its civil political sense. The general civilizational spirit of Modernity makes itself felt in this.
With the collapse of imperial formations or the collapse of large states that did not have time or did not want to completely destroy the original ethnic groups within their borders, ethnic elites try to imitate the example of Western Nation-States and repeat the entire cycle of ethnos-people-nation, even if for the internal prerequisites for this have not matured. In this case, we are dealing with archeomodernity or pseudomorphosis, which we have repeatedly talked about. Ethnic elites are educated in Modern institutions. And then they project the received epistemes - in the political, cultural, sociological sense - onto their own ethnic groups that continue to live within the framework of traditional society. In such cases, we see constructivism, but this constructivism has nothing to do with either the essence of the ethnos or ethnogenesis (no matter how it is understood); it explains only the behavior of the elite, which projects the procedures for creating a nation onto a fundamentally and invariably primordial ethnos (and, more often than not, if not always, Nation-States), gleaned from the experience of others through education in other social contexts and in a different historical paradigm - in the paradigm of Modernity, where no ethnic group is already assumed. From such attempts, only another pseudomorphosis can emerge, as we see in the example of crippled Georgia, torn apart by the contradictions of modern Ukraine, or the complete failure to build a Nation-State Dudaev(1944-1996) and Maskhadov(1951-2005), which was rightly criticized by Chechen traditionalists and ethnocrats (in particular, HA. Nukhaev).
The fate of mythos in modernity
If we carefully follow the development of the course when describing the nation, we come across a certain contradiction. On the one hand, we said that the logos/mythos fraction and the two-story topic itself, which underlies structural sociology, is a universal model applicable to all sociological, psychological and anthropological phenomena. But when describing the Nation-State, we are talking only about logos, and one that declares war to destroy the mythos - to the point that it does not recognize its very existence and tries to describe the society of Modernity as a pure Geselschaft, which has no denominator at all. This corresponds to the diachronic sequence with which we began the presentation of the course. Modernity believes that only the diachronic scheme of temporal syntagm is correct:
We have shown that thanks to the discoveries of structuralists, linguists and psychoanalysts, it became clear: mythos did not disappear anywhere, it remained in the unconscious and continues to exist there, despite the logos denying this very existence. Therefore, when we say that the nation, as a purely logical and artificial phenomenon, is based entirely on logos, we are describing the situation from the perspective of logos itself: this is how the nation and the state think about themselves and their atomic composition (citizens). For clarity, you can build the following chain:
It strictly corresponds to the equivalent chain:
In a nation, logos seeks to abolish mythos, to cross it out, to remove it as a phenomenon. If you believe the nation and Modernity as a whole, then ethnos and mythos were abolished during the transition to the New Age. Nations are replaced by peoples and ethnic groups. Nominally and legally, this is how it is, and the logos and the nation have nothing in the denominator. But structuralism reveals this “nothing” as a film, and gradually, through its methodology, through the study of narrative and rhetoric, through the discovery of the collective unconscious and the paradigmatic approach, the features of a long-familiar phenomenon appear in the “empty place”, which, as it turns out, has not disappeared anywhere. This discovery forces sociologists, anthropologists and linguists (starting with the most prominent E. Durkheim, M. Mauss, C. Lévi-Strauss, R. O. Jacobson, N. S. Trubetskoy, etc.) to turn to primitive societies, archaic tribes, ancient languages, to traditions, fairy tales and legends in search of the content of this “nothing”, exposed as something.
Ethnicity as the subconscious of a nation
The same is true with a nation. The nation believes that it has “got rid of ethnicity” and ignores ethnicity in legal, conceptual, political, administrative and institutional systems. The nation pretends that “there is no ethnic group,” and when it declares itself, it seeks to suppress it, or even simply destroy it - either through nationalization (forcible conversion to a national type through language, culture, law, etc.), or by extermination. When the American nation was created around white colonialists with a dominant Anglo-Saxon and Protestant sociocultural code, the local population, the Indians, turned out to be completely unable (both subjectively and objectively) to integrate into it. This led to their extermination or to apartheid, which essentially de facto exists in the United States to this day. The Indians were ethnic groups, with developed purely ethnic traits, and could not integrate into the nation. The situation was more complicated with black slaves, torn from the soil and randomly mixed by white planters without taking into account their ethnicity (after all, among the black slaves there were representatives of completely different ethnic groups, captured in Africa for purely economic purposes). African Americans were thus included in the American nation on an individual basis - as black citizens without any ethnic context. Therefore, the question of their integration was easier, and when the North and the abolitionists defeated the Confederates and planters of the South, legally the way for the integration of blacks into the American nation was open. One took more than one hundred and fifty years until this theoretical equality was realized to such an extent that the first mulatto with an African phenotype in the history of this nation became the President of the United States. The Indians remained behind the line.
But in fact, ethnicity has not disappeared anywhere, and clearly shines through the formal claims of nations to create purely logical societies. Ethnicity affects the behavior of elites, the historical choice of the masses, and the system of values and interests, which, although rational outwardly, are always irrationally internally chosen as national priorities. Ethnicity does not have a legal place in the nation, but it controls to a great extent legitimation procedures (19), which are unformalized. And it already quite openly dominates public opinion and collective consciousness, predetermining its semantic chains, including failures and such phenomena as heterothelia.
The status of an ethnos in the Nation-State fully corresponds to the status of the unconscious (or subconscious) in a person of Modernity. The unconscious, of course, exists and actively influences the personality, the functioning of the mind, the very structure of the ego - whether the ego recognizes it or not. The same is true for ethnicity, which can be called the “unconscious” of a nation. He is strictly denied, neglected, suppressed, driven underground, but he continues to live there - illegally and without registration, predetermining much, if not all, of what happens at the level of logos - as in the main titular composition of the nation ("titular nation" - that is, in the people who created the state, who founded the nation), and in ethnic minorities - both autochthonous and those who entered the nation as a result of migration.
Nation and Diurn
If we turn again to the scheme of the genesis of the nation, we will see that the nation is a product of the work of the heroic regime of the unconscious - diurn. If we remember what we said at the beginning of this section about the participation of the work of the diurn in the social structures of the ethnos (regardless of the dominant archetypes in the ethnos), then we can trace the entire chain.
1) The diurnic myth deploys a social vertical that organizes the ethnos into a social structure.
2) The next stage of development of the diurn leads to the appearance of logos and transforms the ethnos into a people (superethnos).
3) The people (superethnos), through their logos (with everything based on that diurn - but already in the unconscious, in the denominator) creates a civilization and/or religion and/or state (like an empire).
4) In the case of an empire state, the absolutization of logos (again continuing the trajectory of the diairetic myth and its energy aimed at rationalization and division of the external world) can lead to the creation of a Nation State, where the state establishes a nation instead of a people and an ethnic group.
5) Diurnic aggressiveness turns into a battle between the logos and its own denominator, and the nation begins to repress the ethnos, leading to its destruction.
Thus, at all stages we see the predominance of the diurnic principle, brought to its absolute forms and coming into conflict even with what gave birth to it - that is, with the diurnic myth as an unconscious archetype. In logos, Diurn saw the opportunity to be conscious from now on (4 laws of logic) and turned this opportunity against his own roots. This is the project of civil society in its purest form (as represented by Kant), where the continuation of the same logic requires the abandonment of the irrationalism of war and, ultimately, of the state.
Civil society is the final stage of development of the diurn, in which it comes to the negation of the nation itself and the state itself in favor of pure logic and a purely logical unit - the citizen, at the previous stage constituted and constructed by the state and the nation.
Therefore, to the 5 steps listed above in the development of diurn, we can add a 6th.
6) The diurnic logos of the nation comes to the need to replace the nation as a cohesive agglomerate of citizen-atoms with the same atoms in a free state, and in the course of the general program of liberation from mythos, it begins to tear out the roots of the diurn itself, which led, along a consistent chain of deployment of the diyretic myth, to the emergence of civil society. Hence pacifism, the denunciation of the will to power (as an irrational form of diurn), Popper’s “open society”, liberal democracy, and, ultimately, postmodernity. Diurn, starting with his priority self-affirmation, comes to self-denial and self-destruction.
At this 6th point, the work of the diurn reaches its logical limit and exhausts its potential.
Within the framework of our topic, we can trace where the synchronic moment dominates over the diachronic one, and therefore, build a picture of the movement of the diurn from myth to logos and from ethnos to nation, and from the position of what is discarded during the unfolding of this process. If for the diurn itself, and captured by its energy, this has no meaning, for the overall picture of society-fraction this is extremely important, since it illuminates changes in the structure of the denominator, which, being fundamentally identical, is capable of accepting some elements that “fall” into him from the numerator during the “great purge” - which is what Diurn is fundamentally doing.
We can call this logic a scheme for the accumulation of “residues” (residui), a replenishment of a kind of “residual thesaurus”. This thesaurus includes everything that is discarded by the successive actions of the diurn, which asserts its “heroic” (diayretic) order.
From this diagram we see how the denominator (unconscious) of the Modern era is replenished with content that was previously the competence of the diurn. Thus, not only the nocturne, but also the irrational aspects of the diurn, and, moreover, those manifestations of logos - religion, civilization, empire, which were the property of the logos - the numerator (!) - at previous stages fall into the realm of the marginal, illegal in the regime of a nation.
If we extend this chain further - into postmodernity, which will be discussed below - we will see how this thesaurus will be replenished with such completely logos concepts as nation and state, if we apply to them in a new round and with new diligence the criteria of strict adherence logo requirements.
The structure of the residual thesaurus, where in the era of Modernity there is not only an ethnos, but also a people and its creations other than the Nation-State, that is, certain forms of logos, and not just mythos, significantly nuances the general topic of structural sociology, since it includes in the denominator area a series of positions that in the early stages belonged to the numerator and belonged to the order of logos.
Cyborg Nation
The idea of the transition from an ethnos and people to a nation during the diurna regime, as we have shown, at a certain moment performs the most important operation - it transfers a piece of myth - a fragment of an ethnos or a collective unconscious striving for individuation (Do Kamo) - into the space of logic. This is the citizen as an atomic unit of the nation. But being placed in a mechanical system according to mechanical logic, the citizen at some point approaches a decisive point. Either he will continue to deploy unconscious structures in his civic status (albeit illegally, but still brought by him from the previous states of Premodernity, that is, from the ethnos, from myth), and in this case he will remain not just a citizen, but something also, violating the three laws of logic; or at some point he will have to be replaced by a normative citizen with a consciousness and behavioral systems completely adequate to the nation, without any deviation from logical standards. The first case will mean that the nation gives up before the impossibility of fully realizing its task and establishing a system of citizens instead of organic collective units. But such a recognition would be tantamount to Modernity admitting that it was unable to fulfill its program (the philosophers of the Frankfurt School or Levinas(1906-1995), who thought “from Auschwitz and Auschwitz,” that is, they stated the inability of Western European Modernity to change the ethnic and mythological nature of man and replace it with a clearly functioning mechanism). Even taking into account this statement, the very diurnic nature of the logos, albeit dialectically overcome and condemned by its subsequent editions, contradicts such “fatalism”, and the spirit of Modernity will look for ways to overcome this.
And here we come to the next most important step: a full-fledged member of the nation, a normative citizen, moving along strictly prescribed trajectories of logic without any danger of falling into an ethnicity or myth, will be a humanoid, but artificial creature - a cyborg, a clone, a mutant, a product of genetic engineering . The optimal atom of a nation and civil society is a person without a subconscious, without ethnic properties, a person completely created by the tools of culture and its ultralogical form.
Civil society and a fully logical nation in its singularities and in its generalization can only be built if humanoid devices, machines, and posthumans take the place of people. An ideal nation, strictly corresponding to the criteria of logos in its most complete development, is a nation of cyborgs, computers, biomechanoids.
Here we again come to the line where Modernity ends with its achievements in creating logos as a mythos (nation of ethnos) and we enter postmodernity, where new metamorphoses of logos and posthuman “anthropology” of an “open society” of mutants, clones and cyborgs await us. The cleansing of a nation from ethnicity leads to liberation from man and his structures. And the concept of “civil society” as the optimal form of development of the same impulse that led logos to the formation of a nation can be realized in practice only through going beyond the framework of man, who, as it turns out, is so closely and inextricably linked with ethnicity and myth that an attempt tearing it away from ethnicity and myth leads to only one result - to the end of a person, to his death. This is what the “new philosophers” stated ( Bernard-Henri Levy, Andre Glucksman etc.), declaring that “the person died.”
Conclusion
In this chapter we have clarified the following fundamental positions of ethnosociology:
1) Ethnicity is a primordial component of man as a phenomenon and retains its fundamental significance throughout the entire historical cycle of the development of the syntagma from archaic to modern times. The primordialist (perennialist) theory of ethnos is the only adequate and operational one.
2) The formula of an ethnos is the ratio mythos/mythos, where the numerator differs from the denominator in proportion to the superiority of the diurn, which is responsible for the deployment of social (vertical) structures and institutions in the ethnos.
3) In Western society, the fate of an ethnos goes through all stages of development of the dominant diurna according to a chain of formulas:
mythos/mythos (=enos) => logos/ethnos (=people) => logos/0(zero) (=nation)
4) Diurn, by unfolding his inherent scenario, gives birth to a people, then a state, then a nation, then a figure of a citizen, then a civil society.
5) Along the line of logos, each previous stage is removed and disappears into nothingness; along the line of mythos, discarded possibilities accumulate in the denominator, forming a rhizidual thesaurus.
6) During the transition from Modernity to Postmodernity, the task is to create a new subject, as a completely logical unit of civil society, devoid of a denominator. The figure of a cyborg, mutant, clone, robot becomes such a posthuman singularity.
7) Taking into account Postmodernity, the complete chain of transformations of the ethnos in the sociological perspective of the diachronic syntagm is as follows:
ethnicity - people - nation - civil society - nation (society) of cyborgs (posthumans)
Notes
(1) Shirokogorov S.M. "Ethnicity: A Study of the Basic Principles of Change in Ethnic and Ethnographic Phenomena. - Shanghai", 1923.
(2) Max Weber “Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriß der verstehenden Soziologie.” Tübingen 1976
(3) A. Dugin “Social studies for citizens of the new Russia.” M., 2007
(4) Y. Bromley Essays on the history of ethnic groups M., 1983, Modern problems of ethnography. M., 1981
(5) Shirokogorov S.M. "Ethnos", op. op.
(6) Ibid.
(8) C.Levy-Strauss Les structures élémentaires de la parenté, P., 1949
(9) Huizinga Johan. Homo Ludens. Articles on the history of culture M., 1995
(10) Decree. Op.
(11) Afanasyev A. N. Russian folk tales. In 3 vols. Moscow, 1984
(12) Ivanov V.I., Toporov V.N. Slavic language modeling semiotic systems. - M., 1965 See also Voronin N.N. Bear cult in the Upper Volga region in the 11th century // Local history notes. -Yaroslavl, 1960. Issue. IV, Gromyko M.M. Pre-Christian beliefs in the life of Siberian peasants in the 18th - 19th centuries // From the history of the family and life of the Siberian peasantry in the 17th - early 20th centuries. - Novosibirsk, 1975.
(13) Shirokogorov S.M. "Ethnos", op. op.
(14) Ibid.
(15) Ibid.
(16) Vyach. Sun. Ivanov. The dual organization of primitive peoples and the origin of dualistic cosmogonies (rec. on the book Zolotarev 1964). - Soviet Archeology, 1968, No. 4; aka Notes on the typological and comparative historical study of Roman and Indo-European mythology // Semeiotike. Works on sign systems. T.4. Tartu, 1969, aka “Binary symbolic classification in African and Asian traditions // Peoples of Asia and Africa. M., 1969, No. 5, aka “Binary structures in semiotic systems” // System Research. Yearbook 1972. See also A.M. Zolotarev. Tribal system and primitive mythology. M., 1964.
(17) L. Gumilyov “Ethnogenesis and the Earth’s biosphere”, Leningrad, 1989
(18) See A. L. Chizhevsky. “Physical factors of the historical process”, Kaluga, 1924, also known as “Theory of heliotaraxy”, M., 1980
(19) The differences between legality and legitimacy were studied in detail by the German philosopher and jurist Carl Schmitt, see Carl Schmitt, “Legalitat und Legitimitat,” Munich, 1932
Subject of ethnosociology. Types of ethnic groups - tribe, nationality, nation. Signs of a nation.
Ethnic communities occupy a prominent place in social life. Ethnos - this is a historically established stable set of people who have common features and characteristics of culture, social psychology, and ethnic identity. The external form of expression of an ethnic group is ethnonym , ᴛ.ᴇ. self-name (Russians, Germans).
Ethnic communities are also called consanguineous . These include clans, tribes, nationalities, nations, families, and clans.
Family- the smallest consanguineous group of people related by common origin (grandmother, grandfather, father, mother, children).
Several families entering into an alliance form genus. Clans were united into clans
Clan- a group of blood relatives bearing the name of an alleged ancestor. The clan maintained common ownership of the land, blood feud, and mutual responsibility. As relics of primitive times, they remained in some areas of Scotland, among the American Indians, in Japan and China. Several clans united to form tribe.
Tribe- a higher form of organization, covering a large number of clans and clans. Tribes have their own language or dialect, territory, formal organization (chief, tribal council), and common ceremonies. Their number reached tens of thousands of people.
In the course of further cultural and economic development, the tribes were transformed into nationalities, and those - at higher stages of development - in the nation.
Nationality- an ethnic community that occupies a place on the ladder of social development between tribes and the nation. Nationalities emerge during the era of slavery and represent a linguistic, territorial, economic and cultural community. A nation is larger in number than a tribe; consanguineous ties do not cover the entire nation; their significance is not so great.
Nation- an autonomous political grouping not limited by territorial boundaries, whose members are committed to common values and institutions. Representatives of one nation no longer have a common ancestor and common origin. They do not necessarily have to have a common language or religion.
So, the following ethnic communities have emerged in history: tribe, nationality and nation.
Prerequisite The formation of an ethnic group is a common territory, which creates conditions for close communication and unification of people. At the same time, diasporas (dispersion) are then formed, although ethnic groups retain their identity. Another important condition for the formation of an ethnic group is a common language. But the greatest importance is the unity of spiritual culture, values, norms, patterns of behavior, traditions and associated socio-psychological characteristics of consciousness.
Ethnic groups self-replicate through internal marriages and through socialization and the creation of national statehood. In other words, society is individuals taken in stable, regular and institutionalized connections and interactions. They are united by a single system of social institutions and communities that ensure the satisfaction of people's vital interests.
Subject of ethnosociology. Types of ethnic groups - tribe, nationality, nation. Signs of a nation. - concept and types. Classification and features of the category "Subject of ethnosociology. Types of ethnic groups - tribe, nationality, nation. Signs of a nation." 2017, 2018.
Social communities of people were historically preceded by ethnic ones, on the basis of which they emerged in the process of development and complication of human relations.
In social philosophy, the study of ethnic communities of people began to be carried out much later than many other things, but in terms of its importance and significance it occupies a leading place. To date, there is no common point of view among scientists on this issue.
- these are large groups of people united by a common language, cultural and historical identity. These usually include tribes, nationalities and nations.
Such communities take shape in a certain territory during joint activities. Their members have common psychological traits, and are also clearly aware of their unity and difference from other similar communities. For a group to be recognized as an ethnic community, at least one of the following conditions must be met:
- members of the community are aware of their belonging to it;
- the common origin of members of the community is assumed;
- members of the community have linguistic and cultural unity;
- there is an internal social organization that normalizes relationships within the community and contacts with others.
Tribe
Historically, the formation of ethnic communities can be counted from the moment of the collapse of the primitive human herd. Initially occurs genus- a group of people united by blood. Members of the clan were aware of their kinship and bore a common family name. The genus included several or many families.
The emergence of the clan was facilitated by the emergence of a primitive community, the economic basis of which was communal property. Joint farming on the basis of communal property, natural-equal distribution of things, primarily food, common life and entertainment contributed to the formation of such a community as a clan. It can be said that the genus acts as the very first industrial, social and ethnic group of people, united into one whole by joint labor activity, consanguineous origin, common language, common religious and mythological beliefs, customs and features of life.
Several genera could be combined into clans - tribal unions. The unity of the clans was based on the belief in a common origin.
Several clans could make up tribe. The basis of the unity of the tribe is blood ties; in addition, a tribe lives in a certain territory, its members have a common language or dialect, their own customs and cult, joint economic activities, the beginnings of an internal organization (tribal council).
The appearance of the tribe is explained primarily by the need conservation and protection of habitat(territories of residence, hunting and fishing areas) from encroachment by other human associations. The larger population made the task of resettlement and establishing life in new territories much easier. Of no small importance was also the protection against the degeneration of the race, which threatened it due to sexual relations between consanguineous Homosapiens.
Nationality
Nationalities begin to consist of tribes after the appearance of the first states. The nationality is characterized by a territorial community united by economic and cultural activities, as well as a single language. Belonging to a nationality is no longer determined only by blood ties.
Nation
Nation - the highest form of socio-ethnic community. And this is not surprising, because It is the unification of people along national lines that creates the best preconditions for people to live and organize production, economic, socio-political and cultural life. A common economic life, a single language, a common territory, some features of the mental make-up of people, manifested in the specific features of culture - these are the main features of a nation.
It can be said that nation- this is a stable association of people connected by a common language, a common territory, a common economic life and some features of the mental makeup of people, expressed in the specific features of the culture of a given people.
The unity of the nation is promoted by:
- general historical memory;
- developed national identity.
Historical memory - this is knowledge of the past, the best achievements of national culture, outstanding representatives of the nation in the field, as well as the desire to act in accordance with the best examples presented in history.
However, since in the history of every nation there were not only heroic pages, but also unpleasant ones, historical memory also suggests that a nation must admit its guilt for the mistakes it has made and draw conclusions from the lessons of the past.
National identity - a sense of belonging to a nation, identifying its interests with your own.
These interests imply, on the one hand, the desire to preserve national culture and protect its identity, and on the other, the desire to enrich one’s national culture with the best achievements.
