The main thing that a scientist - a humanist - creates is a scientific text in the form of a book, article, note or review.
Ethnology and politics. Scientific journalism. M., Nauka, 2001. 240 p.
Ethnicity is a widely used category in science that denotes the existence of culturally distinctive (ethnic) groups and forms of identity. In domestic social science the term is more widely used ethnos in all cases when we are talking about ethnic communities (peoples) of various historical and evolutionary types. Concept ethnos assumes the existence of homogeneous, functional and static characteristics that distinguish the group from others that have a different set of similar characteristics. generally accepted definition ethnicity does not exist, but such definitions as “ethnosocial organism” (Yu.V. Bromley) or “biosocial organism” (L.N. Gumilyov) dominate.
The modern concept of ethnicity questions this view of cultural distinctiveness and draws attention primarily to its procedural (socially constructed) nature, the fluid and multicultural nature of modern societies, and the practical absence of cultural isolates. Among scientists there is also no unity in the approach to defining the phenomenon of ethnicity, but there are some characteristics characteristic of communities that allow them to be considered ethnic or to talk about the presence of ethnicity as such. These characteristics include:
– ideas shared by group members about a common territorial and historical origin, a common language, common features of material and spiritual culture;
– politically formed ideas about the homeland and special institutions, such as statehood, which can be considered part of what constitutes the concept of “people”;
-a sense of distinctiveness, i.e. awareness by group members of their belonging to it, and forms of solidarity and joint actions based on this.
Max Weber's definition of an ethnic community as a group whose members “have a subjective belief in their common origin because of similarity in physical appearance or customs, or both, or because of a common memory of colonization and migration,” remains somewhat valid.” An important role in understanding ethnicity is played by the correlation of social and cultural boundaries, internal (emic) and external (ethnic) ideas about what this or that group is. The characteristic features of ethnic groups cannot be reduced to the sum of the cultural material contained within their boundaries, but must be determined primarily by what the group members themselves consider to be significant (or this significance is imposed from the outside) and what underlies their self-awareness. Thus, ethnicity is a form of social organization of cultural differences.
Based on this, the concept of “people” in the sense of an ethnic community is understood as a group of people whose members have one or more common names and common cultural elementstours, have a myth (version) of a common origin and thus have a kind of common historical memory, can associate themselves with a special geographical territory, and also demonstrate a sense of group solidarity.
The idea that ethnicity is formed and an ethnic community is built on the basis of another ethnic opposition “us - them” is insufficient. Ethnicity as a component of individual self-awareness and as a generally shared collective faith manifests itself through fundamental connections with other cultural, social and political communities, including state ones. This means that ethnic self-awareness is not necessarily built on negative opposition and not necessarily in relation to other ethnic communities, which is the deep error of structuralism, starting with C. Levi-Strauss. To be precise, An ethnic community (people) is a community based on cultural self-identification in relation to other communities with which it has fundamental connections.
Ethnicity is formed and exists in the context of the social experiences with which people are associated or with which they are identified by others as members of a particular ethnic group. From an intragroup point of view, ethnicity is based on a set of cultural traits that members of that group use to distinguish themselves from other groups, even if they are very similar in culture. The distinctions they can make in relation to others are usually quite specific and multi-level, while external representations of the group tend to be generalized and stereotypical criteria when characterizing groups.
Thus, in the internal and external definitions of an ethnic group (people) there are both objective and subjective criteria. It often happens that blood relationship or other objective criteria do not play a decisive role. Ethnicity presupposes the presence of social markers as recognized means of differentiating groups coexisting in a broader field of social interaction. These distinctive markers are formed on a variety of bases, including physical appearance, geographic origin, economic specialization, religion, language, and even characteristics such as clothing or food.
Intellectual history of the term ethnicity dates back to the 1960s, when the concept became a response to changes in post-colonial geopolitics and to minority movements in many industrialized countries. The emergence of interpretations of ethnicity concerned such diverse phenomena as social and political changes, identity formation, social conflict, race relations, nation-building, assimilation, and others. There are three main approaches to understanding ethnicity: essentialist (primordialist), instrumentalist and constructivist.
The primordialist approach assumes that ethnic identification is based on deep ties with a particular group or culture, and therefore on the existence of realities of this identification, which can be considered either primarily biological or culturally historical. This approach was strongly influenced by evolutionism with its interest in biological, genetic and geographical factors. Awareness of group membership is, as it were, embedded in the genetic code and is a product of early human evolution. In its extreme form, this approach views ethnicity in terms of social biology as an extended form of kin selection and connection, as a primordial instinctual impulse. Similar constructions are common in Russian literature within the framework of the so-called theory of ethnicity, where social biologism, together with geographical determinism, serves as the basis for extremely vulnerable constructions of “life and death of ethnic groups”, their “passionarity”, “psychomental complex” and others (L.N. Gumilyov , S.M. Shirokogorov). More socially oriented, but no less essentialist, are the typological constructions of ethnic groups, subethnic groups, meta-ethnic groups that dominate in Russian social science, and the themes of exogamy of ethnic groups as a sign and condition of their existence or “component” theories of ethnicity are present at the level of educational literature (Yu.V. Bromley , V.I. Kozlov, V.V. Pimenov, Yu.I.
The cultural version of primordialism considers ethnicity as, first of all, a community shared by group members with objective characteristics of belonging: territory, language, economy, racial type, religion, worldview and even mental makeup. Most Russian authors believe that the ethnic community is of primary importance as a social archetype and that ignoring it in sociology and politics is a deep mistake. On the basis of “ethnic roots” an entire genealogy of modern nations is created. For group ethnic categorizations, historical-linguistic classifications, historical-archaeological and physical-anthropological reconstructions are widely used, which are tied to the modern nomenclature of ethnic groups and to their historical and spatial mapping.
More modern approaches within this tradition recognize the subjective nature of ethnicity, like any other form of group social identity, only looking back into the past and formalized in modern life through cultural and linguistic characteristics. Scholars and ethnic activists trace these characteristics through the geography and history of a given group. In turn, cultural baggage and its continuity make it possible to find the personal and social meaning of human existence and provide an answer to why an individual behaves in accordance with a certain tradition.
The cultural-linguistic or psychocultural interpretation of ethnicity within the framework of primordialism also considers ethnic identity as an integral psychological part of the “I”, and its change as unnatural and imposed on a person. Such views on ethnicity are widespread in societies where ethnocultural differences are given special significance up to its official registration by the state and even the construction of statehood on an ethnic basis.
At the same time, the social meaning of ethnicity includes, in addition to emotional aspects, also rational-instrumentalist orientations. Ethnicity, as if in a latent (“sleeping”) state, is brought to life and used for the purposes of social mobility, overcoming competition, dominance and social control, mutual services and solidarity behavior, for political mobilization and achieving hedonistic aspirations. The instrumentalist approach, with its intellectual roots in sociological functionalism, views ethnicity as the result of political myths created and exploited by cultural elites in their quest for advantage and power. Ethnicity arises in the dynamics of elite competition within boundaries that are determined by political and economic realities. Sometimes functionalism takes on a psychological overtone, and then manifestations of ethnicity are explained as a means of restoring lost collective pride or as therapy for trauma.
Within the framework of these approaches, many works have been carried out in domestic ethnography, including those based on the sociological method of analysis (Yu.V. Harutyunyan, M.N. Guboglo, L.M. Drobizheva). There are their authoritative supporters in foreign science (W. Connor, D. Miller, R. Stavenhagen, E. Smith).
All approaches to understanding ethnicity are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The integration of the most significant aspects into a coherent theory of ethnicity is most promising on the basis of a constructivist synthesis, in which there is sensitivity to context. Ethnicity can be considered in a system of social dispositions and situational dependence at different levels and contextual horizons: the transnational level of world cultural systems and diaspora connections, within nation-states from the point of view of the doctrine of minorities, “internal colonialism” or “structural violence”, the intergroup level in in the context of cultural boundary theory and intragroup within psychological theories of reactive, symbolic and demonstrative ethnicity and stigmatized identities.
It seems productive to develop an approach to ethnicity outside of “traditional cultural types”, as cultural hybridity and as multiple loyalties or ethnic drift. This approach I propose allows us to consider not a person in ethnicity (in Russian scientific jargon “ethnophora”), but ethnicity in a person, which brings us closer to a more sensitive and adequate perception of “reality” and to a more constructive impact on ethnicity in the sense of public management.
The concept of “ethnicity” includes a historically established stable group of people who have a certain number of common subjective or objective characteristics. Ethnographic scientists include these characteristics as origin, language, cultural and economic characteristics, mentality and self-awareness, phenotypic and genotypic data, as well as the territory of long-term residence.
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The word "ethnicity" has Greek roots and is literally translated as “people”. The word “nationality” can be considered a synonym for this definition in Russian. The term “ethnos” was introduced into scientific terminology in 1923 by the Russian scientist S.M. Shirokogorov. He gave the first definition of this word.
How does the formation of an ethnic group occur?
The ancient Greeks adopted the word “ethnos” designate other peoples who were not Greeks. For a long time, the word “people” was used in the Russian language as an analogue. Definition of S.M. Shirokogorova made it possible to emphasize the commonality of culture, relationships, traditions, way of life and language.
Modern science allows us to interpret this concept from 2 points of view:
The origin and formation of any ethnic group implies great length in time. Most often, such formation occurs around a certain language or religious beliefs. Based on this, we often pronounce such phrases as “Christian culture”, “Islamic world”, “Romance group of languages”.
The main conditions for the emergence of an ethnic group are the presence common territory and language. These same factors subsequently become supporting factors and the main distinguishing features of a particular ethnic group.
Additional factors influencing the formation of an ethnic group include:
- General religious beliefs.
- Intimacy from a racial perspective.
- The presence of transitional interracial groups (mestizo).
Factors that unite an ethnic group include:
- Specific features of material and spiritual culture.
- Community of life.
- Group psychological characteristics.
- General awareness of oneself and the idea of a common origin.
- The presence of an ethnonym - a self-name.
Ethnicity is essentially a complex dynamic system that is constantly undergoing processes of transformation and at the same time maintains its stability.
The culture of each ethnic group maintains a certain constancy and at the same time changes over time from one era to another. Features of national culture and self-knowledge, religious and spiritual-moral values leave an imprint on the nature of the biological self-reproduction of an ethnic group.
Features of the existence of ethnic groups and their patterns
The historically formed ethnos acts as an integral social organism and has the following ethnic relations:
- Self-reproduction occurs through repeated homogeneous marriages and the transmission from generation to generation of traditions, identity, cultural values, language and religious characteristics.
- In the course of their existence, all ethnic groups undergo a number of processes within themselves - assimilation, consolidation, etc.
- In order to strengthen their existence, most ethnic groups strive to create their own state, which allows them to regulate relations both within themselves and with other groups of peoples.
The laws of peoples can be considered behavioral models of relationships, which are typical for individual representatives. This also includes behavioral models that characterize individual social groups emerging within a nation.
Ethnicity can simultaneously be considered as a natural-territorial and sociocultural phenomenon. Some researchers propose to consider the hereditary factor and endogamy as a kind of connecting link that supports the existence of a particular ethnic group. However, it cannot be denied that the quality of a nation’s gene pool is significantly influenced by conquests, living standards, and historical and cultural traditions.
The hereditary factor is tracked primarily in anthropometric and phenotypic data. However, anthropometric indicators do not always completely coincide with ethnicity. According to another group of researchers, the constancy of an ethnic group is due to national identity. However, such self-awareness can simultaneously act as an indicator of collective activity.
The unique self-awareness and perception of the world of a particular ethnic group may directly depend on its activities in developing the environment. The same type of activity can be perceived and evaluated differently in the minds of different ethnic groups.
The most stable mechanism that allows preserving the uniqueness, integrity and stability of an ethnic group is its culture and common historical destiny.
Ethnicity and its types
Traditionally, ethnicity is considered primarily as a generic concept. Based on this idea, it is customary to distinguish three types of ethnic groups:
- Clan-tribe (species characteristic of primitive society).
- Nationality (a characteristic type in the slave and feudal centuries).
- Capitalist society is characterized by the concept of nation.
There are basic factors that unite representatives of one people:
Clans and tribes historically were the very first types of ethnic groups. Their existence lasted several tens of thousands of years. As the way of life and the structure of mankind developed and became more complex, the concept of nationality appeared. Their appearance is associated with the formation of tribal unions in the common territory of residence.
Factors in the development of nations
Today in the world there are several thousand ethnic groups. They all differ in level of development, mentality, numbers, culture and language. There may be significant differences based on race and physical appearance.
For example, the number of ethnic groups such as Chinese, Russians, and Brazilians exceeds 100 million people. Along with such gigantic peoples, there are varieties in the world whose number does not always reach ten people. The level of development of different groups can also vary from the most highly developed to those living according to primitive communal principles. For every nation it is inherent own language However, there are also ethnic groups that simultaneously use several languages.
In the process of interethnic interactions, processes of assimilation and consolidation are launched, as a result of which a new ethnic group can gradually form. The socialization of an ethnic group occurs through the development of such social institutions as family, religion, school, etc.
The unfavorable factors for the development of a nation include the following:
- High mortality rate among the population, especially in childhood.
- High prevalence of respiratory infections.
- Alcohol and drug addiction.
- Destruction of the family institution - a high number of single-parent families, divorces, abortions, and parental abandonment of children.
- Low quality of life.
- High unemployment rate.
- High crime rate.
- Social passivity of the population.
Classification and examples of ethnicity
Classification is carried out according to a variety of parameters, the simplest of which is number. This indicator not only characterizes the state of the ethnic group at the current moment, but also reflects the nature of its historical development. Usually, formation of large and small ethnic groups proceeds along completely different paths. The level and nature of interethnic interactions depends on the size of a particular ethnic group.
Examples of the largest ethnic groups include the following (according to data from 1993):
The total number of these peoples is 40% of the total population of the globe. There is also a group of ethnic groups with a population of 1 to 5 million people. They make up about 8% of the total population.
Most small ethnic groups may number several hundred people. As an example, we can cite the Yukaghir, an ethnic group living in Yakutia, and the Izhorians, a Finnish ethnic group inhabiting territories in the Leningrad region.
Another classification criterion is population dynamics in ethnic groups. Minimal population growth is observed in Western European ethnic groups. The maximum growth is observed in the countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Based on the criteria of aggregate anthropological characteristics, cohabitation in one or several territories, type of ethnic community, common features of life and culture, common historical fate, linguistic kinship, all peoples can be divided on the following grounds: geographical, anthropological, linguistic and economic-cultural.
Geographical classification. Geographical classification is based on the fact of the geographic proximity of peoples and reflects the joint nature of their residence within a certain, most often vast, territory. Through geographical classification, conditional geographic regions are identified in which various peoples of the world are settled. This is how the concepts of “peoples of the Caucasus”, “peoples of Eastern Europe”, etc. appeared. Such a geographical unification of peoples is possible only to the extent that the geographical principle of classification coincides with the ethnic one. This principle of classification is used quite widely, since it applies to large areas within which it is relatively similar to the ethnic principle.
Geographical classification does not answer questions about the origin of peoples, the processes of their formation, economic and cultural appearance, or the level of socio-economic development, but it allows for spatial ordering and distribution of ethnic groups by region. It is used for external description, and not for a detailed study of peoples. At a lower level, within spatially insignificant territories, the consistent implementation of a geographical classification of ethnic groups leads to insurmountable contradictions with ideas about the kinship of ethnic groups. Therefore, geographical classification is of an auxiliary nature and is used only to the extent that it reveals its coincidence with the grouping of peoples according to other criteria, i.e. only within large regions. When classifying ethnic groups within limited areas, it has to be abandoned.
There is no single geographical classification accepted in all countries. The simplest division: the peoples of Australia and Oceania, the peoples of Asia, the peoples of America, the peoples of Africa, the peoples of Europe.
Anthropological classification. Racial characteristics. Anthropological classification places emphasis not on cultural, but on biological, genetic kinship between different ethnic groups. However, genetic relationships alone do not allow us to identify a clear set of objective criteria for dividing people into certain types. Therefore, ethnology uses many methods for determining family relationships between peoples; Most often, ethnologists proceed from racial differences between ethnic groups, which form the basis of anthropological classification.
Biologically, humanity is united; all people on our planet belong to the same biological species. But the modern ethnic picture of the world convincingly shows that there is an indisputable biological reality of the phenotypic diversity of people, i.e. There are physical (bodily) differences between people. This phenotypic diversity primarily reflects the ability of any life form to evolve, through the mechanism of which the diversity of human types arises. Racial differences are always hereditary: they are passed on from parents to children over many generations. Therefore, to study these differences, data from the science of heredity - genetics - are of great importance. The similarity of many hereditary physical characteristics in different people or entire groups of them serves as strong evidence of their common origin or genetic relationship.
So, the characteristics of the physical structure of people, transmitted by inheritance and characteristic of large groups of people, are called racial characteristics. The most important of them are the following:
1) hair shape. Two features are taken into account here - rigidity and tortuosity. The cross-sectional area of hard hair is 2 times larger than soft hair. According to the tortuosity, hair is divided into straight, wide-wavy, narrow-wavy, curly of different degrees. The tortuosity of hair is determined by the location of its roots in the skin and the cross-sectional shape of the hair. Straight hair comes out of the skin at an angle close to a straight line, and its root has no bend. In wavy hair, the root is curved and the exit angle is sharper. In curly hair, the bend of the root is even greater, and the exit angle is even smaller. The cross-section of straight hair is close to a circle in shape, while the cross-section of wavy and curly hair is oval;
2) tertiary hairline. Its development is graded from 1 (very weak) to 5 (very strong). This takes into account the thickness of the hair and the surface area of the skin that it occupies;
3) color of the skin. It can vary from pale pink to dark brown and almost black. The skin color scale has 36 shades. The lightest skin is among the inhabitants of Northern Europe, the darkest among the inhabitants of Central Africa;
4) hair color. It is customary to distinguish between black, dark brown, light brown, blond, and red hair;
5) eye color(color of the iris). Dark eyes – black, brown, yellow; eyes of mixed or transitional colors - yellow-green, green, gray; light eyes - light gray, blue, blue;
6) height. The average human body length is 165 cm for men and 154 cm for women. The smallest average height on the planet is recorded among the pygmies of the Congo Basin - 141 cm for an adult man. The highest average height – 182 cm – was observed for the population living south of Lake Chad. The average height is more than 175 cm - among Montenegrins, Scots, Swedes, Norwegians, Polynesians;
7) body proportions. According to the proportions of the ratio of the length of the limbs to the length of the body, the width of the shoulders and pelvis, the following types of figures are distinguished: brachymorphic (brachymorphic - short, morpho-shape) type - relatively short arms and legs, long torso, broad shoulders and pelvis; dolichomorphic (dolichos - long) type - relatively long limbs, short body, narrow shoulders and pelvis; mesomorphic (mesos – middle) type – occupies an intermediate position between the first two; .
8) head parameters. Here the main indicator is the ratio of the width of the head (transverse diameter) to the length (longitudinal diameter), expressed as a percentage. The ratio is less than 75.9% – dolycephaly (cephalos – head); between 76 and 80.9% – mesocephaly; more than 81% – brachycephaly. In addition to the racial characteristics listed above, anthropologists use such characteristics as width, height, horizontal profile of the face, protrusion of the jaws (prognathism), the presence epicanthus (fold of skin of the upper eyelid at the inner corner of the eye, covering the lacrimal tubercle), nose parameters, height and thickness of lips.
It is quite obvious that all the racial characteristics described above are secondary, insignificant for the general direction of biological evolution and the historical development of mankind. There is no doubt about the species unity of all modern people, the common origin of the races. The study of racial characteristics is very important precisely for proving the unity of the origin of mankind, the equality of peoples and races, as well as for resolving many biological and historical problems related to the origin of man and his races, their settlement on Earth, mixing and interaction, although racial characteristics in themselves have nothing to do with the level of social development of different human groups. These signs in many cases serve as indicators of kinship and interaction of peoples, a kind of markers by which one can trace the historical destinies of different ethnic communities.
Language classification. In this group of cultural components, language is an important ethno-differentiating feature, but it does not always show which ethnic group a person belongs to. There are cases when several ethnic groups speak the same language - English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, etc., it is also possible that one ethnic group speaks several languages - Mordovians speak Erzya and Moksha.
Other situations are also possible. For example, most of today's Irish speak English, and only a few of them continue to use the language that all Irish spoke 300-400 years ago, but neither the Irish themselves nor scholars have any doubt that the current English-speaking descendants of the medieval Irish belong to to the same people as their ancestors. We must not forget about cases where parts of the same people speak very divergent dialects; Thus, the northern, eastern and southern groups of Germans and especially Chinese simply do not understand each other. It often happens that the main part of an ethnic group retains the traditional language, and the separated part, living in a foreign ethnic environment, switches to the language of this environment without losing its ethnic identity.
And yet, according to most experts, language occupies the most important place among the foundations of ethnic identity, and it is impossible to argue with this, despite all the exceptions. In the case when several ethnic groups speak the same language (English, Spanish, Portuguese, etc.), as a rule, each ethnic group introduces its own specifics into this language - a different alphabet or spelling, different phonetics, vocabulary, specific expressions and phraseological combinations. Thus, a clear, specially cultivated originality is characteristic of Argentine-Spanish and Brazilian-Portuguese.
Religious classification. In the early stages of the formation of ethnic groups, one of the decisive factors was confessional (religious), thanks to which a large number of interethnic communities emerged. Today this feature exists mainly in the form of the main world religions: Christianity, Buddhism, Islam. The interethnic confessional communities formed on their basis cover many peoples of the world. However, world religions are also not indicators of a person's ethnicity. The reality is that there are far fewer religions in the world than ethnic groups.
Household classification. Economic sign . A more important role in ethnic differentiation is played by cultural and economic characteristics, which involve the differentiation of ethnic groups by type of economy (hunting, gathering, fishing, farming), by way of life (sedentary, semi-nomadic, nomadic), forms of tools, clothing and other elements of material culture .
As an example, we can consider an ordinary plow - the oldest arable tool, with the help of which peasants in Eastern Europe plowed the land for hundreds of years. At the beginning of the 20th century. there were several dozen types of dry. Residents of the Center of Russia, Lithuania, and Belarus used different plows. The Ukrainian cart, which was mostly harnessed to oxen, was very different from the Russian cart, which was usually pulled by a horse. The Japanese anvil is completely different from the Russian one. In the old days, Polish and Russian blacksmiths gave different shapes to an ordinary ax. The dwellings of different peoples of the world are unique. These are pile buildings (among some Melanesians and Micronesians), and floating dwellings (among some peoples of Southeast Asia), and portable houses - yurts, tents, tipis (among the peoples of the North, Prairie Indians), and tower houses (among the peoples Caucasus). Russian peasants, wherever they went, always sought to build a log house made of wood. For example, in the polar tundra it was built from driftwood (logs nailed to the seashore), and in the treeless regions of Kuban and Kazakhstan, Russians preferred to live in dugouts for a long time in order to save money and bring timber for construction.
And the interior of houses of different nations has its own. For example, no matter how different the houses of the Eastern Slavs were in material, fixed benches were placed along the walls, shelves were hung above them, a case with icons was in the red corner, shelves and cabinets for dishes were placed near the stove. We slept on a wooden platform (Russian beds). The Slavs usually placed the table in the corner, but among the Karelians, whose interior was practically no different from the Slavic one, it stood in the middle of the front wall.
Household sign. Traditional clothing varies greatly. Based on the clothing of a Russian peasant woman from the early 19th century. It was often possible to determine its homeland with precision down to a specific village. The Uzbeks once could unmistakably tell from just one skullcap which area a person came from. Until now, among some peoples of Indochina, you can find out from women’s clothing exactly where the owner came to the big city from. Now both the houses and clothing of different peoples are becoming more and more the same type, losing their ethnic character, so their importance as ethnically differentiating features is decreasing.
Differences between peoples are manifested in the composition of the food consumed, in the methods of its preparation, and in the time of its consumption. These differences continue to exist today, as food preferences are difficult to change. Thus, for some peoples, the basis of the diet is agricultural products (Slavic peoples), for others - meat (most peoples of the North), for others (they are called ichthyophages) - fish. It is well known that many nations have various prohibitions on certain types of food. Thus, the peoples of India do not eat beef, and the peoples who profess Islam and Judaism do not eat pork. A number of peoples do not consume milk (Khmers). Some peoples consider dog meat a delicacy (Polynesians), others consider snakes (many Asian peoples), still others consider frogs (the French), etc. Especially firmly established traditions are preserved among the rural population, but the food of city dwellers continues to remain generally traditional, despite many changes and familiarity with the food of other peoples. By the way, this is why diets offered by representatives of other nations as a panacea for some diseases or for losing weight are useless and even harmful. Many of the products listed in them may simply not be absorbed by organisms unadapted to them. Thus, in Russia they often prepare milk porridge for breakfast, but the Chinese, who hardly consume milk, simply do not digest this product. And although familiarity with the food of other peoples can say a lot about them, you should eat new foods with great caution.
Even in the way people sleep, ethnic differences can sometimes be found. A Malay, for example, does not place a pillow under his head, but a curved wooden bench with short legs. In India, when going to bed, they often slip a soft cushion under their knees. Some peoples are accustomed to sleeping on a raised platform, others on the floor.
More important ethno-differentiating features are the rituals and customs that a person adheres to.
Family trait. Family life, marriage customs and rituals differ significantly. Along with the monogamous (monogamous) family, which is common today among the vast majority of humanity, some peoples still maintain both polygamy (polygamy) and polyandry (polyandry). Among some peoples (the Punan tribe on the island of Kalimantan), in order to get married, it is enough for the bride and groom, in the presence of an elder, to declare mutual consent to marry; among other peoples (Koshis in Afghanistan), the wedding lasts two days, and for others, as long as eight (some peoples of India). For most European peoples, weddings are typical, at which only close relatives and acquaintances are present, but among the peoples of the Caucasus, hundreds of guests are traditionally invited to the wedding, etc.
1. Primordialism
The primordialist trend arose in 1950-1960. The term “primordialist connections” was introduced into scientific circulation by the American sociologist E. Shils to characterize intrafamily relations. In relation to ethnic issues, the primordialist approach was first developed by the American anthropologist K. Geertz. He formulated the essence of this approach as follows: “In every society at all times, some attachments stem more from a feeling of natural, some would say spiritual, intimacy than from social interaction.” Proponents of primordialism believe that “the awareness of group membership, embedded in the genetic code, is a product of early human evolution, when the ability to recognize members of a kin group was necessary for survival.” Proponents of primordialism consider ethnicity as an original characteristic inherent in an individual as a member of a really existing ethnic group. It is based on consanguinity, common origin and ancestral territory.
2. Instrumentalism
Instrumentalism (also known as situationism, mobilizationism or the hedonistic concept of ethnicity) is an approach that became widespread in the treatment of ethnicity in the mid-70s in Western ethnology. Instrumentalism combines primordialist and constructivist principles. The essence of the concept is that the main thing in the existence of an ethnos is serving certain goals and interests. S.V. Sokolovsky identifies three groups in this approach: 1) ethnicity as a way to overcome alienation; 2) ethnicity allows one to cope with the information complexity of modern life; 3) ethnicity is one of the powerful resources in the political mobilization of a group, helping the national elite to realize their own interests. Thus, ethnicity is seen as a utilitarian value. Consideration of ethnicity as a means of achieving social control, realizing one’s interests, and an ideology created by the elite to mobilize a group is characteristic of political science, the sociology of power and political anthropology. Domestic researchers M.N. Guboglo, L.M. Drobizheva, V.A. Yadov are working within the framework of this approach.
Instrumentalism is often based on socio-psychological theories, where ethnicity is interpreted as an effective means for overcoming alienation, achieving a more comfortable state and acts as social therapy. The positions of the instrumentalist approach to ethnicity are also adhered to by foreign researchers, including J. De Voe, A. Peterson-Royce, NHleizer, D. Moynihan. J. De Voe considers the fundamental role of ethnic identity as the most important means of overcoming various forms of alienation in modern society (as A.A. Belik writes about in his work). N. Glaser and D. Moynihan consider “interest” to be the defining property of an ethnic group.
Thus, the main thing for the instrumentalist approach is the emphasis on the functional sense, where ethnicity is seen as a way to achieve certain goals.
The instrumentalist direction is often called the hedonistic direction, where ethnicity acts as a means to achieve group interests and mobilization in political struggle.
3. Constructivism
The constructivist approach to the concept of ethnos and ethnicity is most widespread in the ethnology of the United States and in the scientific circles of Canada and Australia (in the so-called emigrant countries). The constructivist approach proved popular in these countries due to historical reasons: they lacked the natural rootedness of ethnic groups (with the exception of the indigenous Indians and Australian Aboriginal tribes).
For the constructivist movement, the main thing is the idea of a common territory, a common culture, “an idea or myth about the common historical fate of the members of this community.” According to followers of constructivism, “ethnicity is rooted not in the hearts, but in the heads of individuals who are members of ethnic groups - “imagined communities” or “social constructs.” In foreign scientific thought, the ideas of constructivism were developed and developed in the works of B. Anderson , P. Bourdieu, F. Barthes, E. Gellner, E. Hobsbawm. Thus, B. Anderson in 1983 published a book about the emergence of modern nations, where the concepts of the constructivist direction in scientific thought are developed. The key concept in nation-building according to B. Anderson is “imaginary communities,” believing that people who consider themselves members of a nation “everyone has an imaginary image of their community living in their heads.” He examines the question of the origin of nations and assigns a decisive role in this process to representatives of local elites. E. Gellner in his theory of nations assigns a key role to power, education and culture in the formation of a nation. According to Gellner, "the standardization of language, the creation of a national labor market, compulsory education - everything that the nation-state brings with it gradually forges a single nation." B. Anderson and E. Gellner both view nations as ideological constructs, the purpose of which is to find a way of communication between a self-defined cultural group and the state. Despite the fact that B. Anderson and E. Gellner say little about ethnicity and ethnic identity in their works, there is a connection between theories of nationalism and anthropological theories of ethnicity. As many researchers believe, ethnic and national identities are constructs.
In the work of F. Barth “Ethnic Groups and Borders,” a new concept is proposed for understanding the concept of ethnicity. F. Barth considers ethnicity as a form of social organization of cultural differences, placing the focus on ethnic boundaries, which, in his opinion, establish ethnic communities. He identifies self-categorization and external categorization as the most important aspect in determining ethnicity, thereby noting that membership in an ethnic group is a matter of consciousness. The policy of ethnic entrepreneurship and myth-making plays a key role in the construction of ethnicity. Thus, the meaning of ethnicity comes down to considering this phenomenon as a form of social organization of cultural differences, while not the positivist and naturalistic interpretations of ethnic phenomena (for example, territory or historical facts), but their subjective side: group consciousness, myth-making, a sense of solidarity, acquire particular significance . At the same time, the process of social construction can be aimed, according to V.A. Tishkov, at compensating for the deficit of cultural distinctiveness.
Thus, ethnicity in the constructivist approach is the process of social construction of a community of people based on the belief that they are connected by natural and natural ties, a single type of culture and the idea or myth of a common origin and a common history. Accordingly, nationality seems to be not an innate, but a dynamic, changing characteristic of a person.
Primordialism has two varieties: radical, sociobiological, and moderate, evolutionary-historical.
Sociobiological primordialism understands ethnicity as a biological phenomenon (“blood”, “genes”). The emergence of this type of primordialism is associated with the formation of the mystical concept of the “folk spirit” (Volksgeist) within the framework of German “populist” (volkisch) and racist, ariososophical nationalism of the 18th-19th centuries (in particular, in the works of representatives of German romanticism). The early German nationalist romantics believed that there was a certain "folk spirit" - an irrational, supernatural principle that embodied in different peoples and determined their originality and difference from each other, and which found expression in "blood" and in race. From this point of view, the “national spirit” is transmitted with “blood”, that is, by inheritance, thus, the people are understood as a community descended from common ancestors, connected by consanguineous ties. In the nexus of nationalism and racism in Germany, oddly enough, a decisive role was played by linguistic research, which also had its origins in romantic nationalists such as Jacob Grimm. They discovered similarities between modern European languages and Sanskrit, on the basis of which the doctrine of “language families” was created, where the relationships between languages were likened to consanguineous relationships (ancestral languages and descendant languages). As we see, from the fact of the similarity of languages, a conclusion was drawn about the consanguinity of the peoples speaking them, in particular, from the postulation of the existence of the Indo-European family of languages, a conclusion was drawn about the biological origin of all European peoples, and especially the Germans, from the Proto-Indo-Europeans, the mythical ancient “Aryans”, who endowed with idealized traits.
Nowadays, the racist form of primordialism, being compromised by the political practice of the National Socialists, has few adherents among ethnological researchers. Modern sociobiological primordialism is based not on the mysticism of blood, but on the provisions of genetic theory. For example, a well-known modern representative of primordialism, biochemist and geneticist Pierre Van den Berg states that ethnic groups are “extended kin groups” that arise due to the fact that representatives of a certain people are genetically predisposed to interbreeding with relatives. Features of behavior, temperament, likes and dislikes, and value differences between representatives of one or another ethnic group are explained here by common genetics.
A unique version of sociobiological primordialism was developed by a Soviet ethnologist L.N. Gumilev, which he saw in ethnic groups, in contrast to socio-economic formations, natural phenomena, inextricably, at the biochemical, geophysical and astrophysical levels associated with a particular territory, its soils, climate, flora and fauna, as well as with magnetic fields, solar radiation and etc. All these factors together create an “ethnic field”, which, influencing the human body, sets its own rhythms and dictates certain behavioral stereotypes. According to Gumilyov, ethnicity is not inherited and a born baby is deprived of ethnicity (this is how Gumilyov’s theory differs from racism, which proclaims that a person already from birth belongs to a certain ethnic group, much less a race). But communication with relatives and fellow tribesmen, being in a certain landscape with its specific flora and fauna gives a person ethnicity.
Currently, both in the West and in Russia there are few supporters of radical, sociobiological primordialism. Most experts share the point of view that man is not so much a biological as a historical and cultural being and that there is nothing in human biology that would make a man a man (otherwise, children raised in animal communities would become full-fledged people, and experience has shown it is not so). Consequently, such purely human phenomena as ethnicity are also determined not by biology, but by culture. This is the point of view of moderate historical-evolutionary primordialism.
According to him, among the distinctive features of an ethnic group, what should be highlighted is not the commonality of biological nature, but the commonality of culture - a common language, features of collective psychology, a system of values, a common historical past associated with being on the same territory, and self-awareness of belonging to a given ethnic group. The classic definition of ethnos within the framework of historical-evolutionary primordialism was given by the largest Soviet specialist - ethnologist Y. Bromley: “an ethnos in the narrow sense of the word can be defined as a set of people who have common, relatively stable cultural characteristics and a corresponding mental make-up, as well as a consciousness of their unity and endogamy.” A moderate-primordialist, historical-evolutionary understanding of ethnic groups was characteristic of Soviet Marxism and found expression in the classic Stalinist definition of a nation, which in Marxism was understood only as a modernist form of an ethnic group: “A nation is a historically established stable community of people that arose on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life and mental makeup, manifested in a community of culture."
Modern experts, as a rule, do not identify another third direction of primordialism, which should be called “theological primordialism”, and which considered the essence of ethnic groups and nations not “blood” or culture, but a certain “Divine Spirit” or “Divine Plan”. Theological primordialists were representatives of Russian religious philosophy - V.S. Soloviev, S.N. Bulgakov, for whom peoples were embodiments on earth of Divine plans and unique mystical living organisms. The theological primordialism of Russian philosophers should be distinguished from the German racist concepts of the "folk spirit", which understood blood mystically and irrationally. Representatives of Russian religious philosophy tend to have a critical attitude towards the identification of the Divine principle in man and “blood”.
Constructivist understanding of ethnic groups and nations
Since the 1950s of the twentieth century, ethnological primordialism has rapidly begun to lose ground in Western science. The reason for this was, first of all, a fact pointed out by one of the main opponents of primordialism Benedict Anderson:“Theorists of nationalism have often been perplexed, if not irritated, by the following three paradoxes: (1) The objective modernity of nations in the eyes of a historian, on the one hand, and their subjective antiquity in the eyes of a nationalist, on the other...” The point is that historical research has shown that nations were formed in Western Europe not so long ago - in the early modern era, and in other regions even later - in Eastern Europe in the 19th century, in Asia and Africa in the 20th century , so it is very problematic to elevate them to any one ethnic group, of which this nation is supposedly a higher stage of development. For example, the French nation was formed during the Enlightenment and the Great French Revolution as a result of the union of culturally diverse peoples - Gascons, Burgundians, Bretons, etc. Many of them continued to exist in the 19th and 20th centuries, never fully “Frenchizing”. In this regard, an expression like: “French culture of the 12th century” looks dubious. Moreover, after the collapse of the colonial system in the 1950s and 1960s, new nations rapidly began to form in Asia and Africa, including a wide variety of ethnic groups. And this is despite the fact that just a few decades ago, the peoples of Africa, who later became part of certain nations, did not even have an idea of such a community as a nation and nationality; they, along with the ideas of a nation state and the ideology of nationalism, were brought to them by the European colonialists.
These numerous facts contradicted the conviction of primordialists about the natural and stable, almost eternal nature of ethnic groups and nations, and immediately a school of Western ethnology, an alternative to primordialism, emerged - constructivism. Based on its very name, it is clear that its main thesis reads: ethnic groups and nations are artificial formations, purposefully designed, created by intellectual elites (scientists, writers, politicians, ideologists) on the basis of a national project - the ideology of nationalism, which can be expressed not only in political manifestos, but also in literary works, scientific works, etc. According to constructivists, nationalism does not awaken the nation, which until then remains a thing-in-itself, but creates a new nation where there was none.
Thus, according to constructivists, there is no objectively existing ethnicity, ethnicity is not common “blood” or genetics and not national character, it is a way of identifying individuals that exists only in the minds of individuals and can easily be changed. Ethnicity is the result of an agreement, it is subjective, not objective, and therefore self-awareness of ethnicity is important, how this or that community calls itself, representing itself as ethnic, how it describes its “character”, etc. One of the main theorists of constructivism, Benedict Anderson, already mentioned by us, defines nations and ethnic groups as “imagined communities”: “I propose the following definition of a nation: it is an imaginary political community, and it is imagined as something inevitably limited, but at the same time sovereign.” What is meant, of course, is not that nations are generally some kind of fiction, but that only rationally thinking individuals really exist, and the people, the nation, exist only in their heads, “in the imagination”, due to the fact that they identify themselves precisely in this way and not in any other way.
Constructivists deny continuity between the ethnic groups of pre-industrial society and modern nations; they emphasize that nations are products of industrialization, the spread of universal standardized education, the development of science and technology (in particular, printing, mass communications and information) and that in the pre-industrial era, ethnic groups and ethnic identity did not play such an important role, since traditional society offered many other forms of identity (class, religion, etc.).
Criticism of constructivism and primordialism
Despite the fact that in the 1960s and 1970s, constructivism became widespread in the West, so that not a single modern study in the field of ethnology can do without taking into account the results achieved by this theory (primarily theses about the significance of the activity of the nationalist intelligentsia in the emergence of nations and that nations are the property of only an industrial society), Western science and philosophy of the late 20th - early 21st centuries is beginning to show a certain skepticism towards classical constructivism (although in Russia, Western-oriented intellectuals continue to consider Western fashion of fifty years ago to be the “last word” Western, or, as they put it, “world thought”). This skepticism was expressed in the emergence of post-constructivism ( I. Wallerstein, R. Brubaker) and others, who subjected classical constructivism to the operation of deconstruction developed within the framework of postmodern philosophy. They showed that bringing to its logical conclusion the constructivist thesis about the imaginary nature of nations and the non-essentiality of ethnicity leads to the affirmation of the fictitiousness of ethnicity. To put it simply, if the constructivists were right that there is no ethnicity as a stable entity and nations are just imaginary communities existing in the heads of individuals, then no ethnicity as such exists, it is an illusion that prevents people from uniting into a global, non-ethnic postmodern community. Moreover, constructivists, in fact, reduce ethnicity to the self-awareness and self-identification of individuals (“Russians are an ethnos or a nation because they consider themselves Russian, including in this self-determination certain values and stereotypes of behavior”), and as the postmodern philosopher rightly noted A. Elez this makes the scientific definition of ethnicity impossible, since it gives rise to a “vicious circle” in thinking: “ethnicity” cannot be defined without defining “ethnic self-awareness,” and “ethnic self-awareness” cannot be defined without defining “ethnicity.” The conclusion of the post-constructivists: there is such a community as citizens of the Russian Federation or France, or such a community as speakers of Russian or French, but there is no community of Russians or French, this is nothing more than a phantom that was created by an error of self-determination. To rid people of this mistake means to destroy an ethnic group (not in the sense of the physical death of people, but in the sense of their refusal of such self-identification).
So, both primordialism and constructivism, having their positive sides, at the same time turn out to be dead-end theories: primordialism is broken by the facts of the variability of ethnic groups, and constructivism, taken to its logical conclusion, generally deprives ethnology of its subject of study.
It is interesting to note that despite all the contradictions between primordialism and constructivism, they have a lot in common and if we understand their dialectical connection, then perhaps we will get closer to a correct understanding of ethnicity. Thus, not only primordialism, but also constructivism is based on the ideas of the philosophy of European romanticism, only primordialism borrows from the romantics the doctrine of the mysticism of blood and race, and constructivism is the doctrine of creativity as a demiurgic act. In fact, constructivists argue that the intellectual elite “creates” or constructs the people as something new, something that has not existed before, just as the Demirurg God creates the world. The national elite or, let's call it by its name, the nationalist intelligentsia here appears as a creative, higher principle - heroes, and the people who are subject to construction - as passive, inert individuals - the crowd. What we have before us is the romantic exaltation of the creative personality, the theory of the hero and the crowd, which, by the way, has been just as thoroughly and firmly broken by modern science as biologizing primordialism (which will be discussed below). It is not entirely a property of constructivism alone, as the constructivists themselves are convinced; it is by no means alien to primordialism, which, as we have already noted, is also closely connected with the ideas of the European romantics. Early German populist nationalism, whose ideologists were at the same time the creators of the primordialist concept of ethnos (the concept of “folk spirit”), was characterized by the desire to remake the German people before their eyes, rid them of their worst traits and unite them into a kind of community (Volk), permeated by blood and spirituality -mystical unity. The same can be said about the German National Socialists, who, of course, professed a primordialist, racist understanding of the people, and at the same time were outright constructivists in the sense that they not only considered it possible, but also necessary to reconstruct the German people through eugenic measures . As rightly noted A. Ioffe in a critical review of the book by the ideologist of constructivism S.G. Kara-Murza“Dismantling a people” from the understanding of ethnicity as a biological entity does not at all imply the eternity and immutability of the substance of an ethnic group; experience shows that biological nature can be purposefully changed, for example, with the help of selection. Let us only add to this that we need to take into account the difference between constructivists and primordialists. Thus, the primordialists, the ideologists of German nationalism, believed that the ideal, pastoral German community, the image of which inspired them for nation-building, existed in reality - in the Middle Ages, or even in the legendary era of the Aryans, and their task was only to recreate it using contemporary German ethnicity as material. Of course, at the same time, there is also the belief that the modern and German ethnic group retained an essential connection with the ancient German community - a certain substantial German identity. Strictly speaking, this is characteristic of all nationalists, and the creators of the nations of Africa and Asia argued that they were not embodying a disembodied dream, but recreating an ancient reality. Probably, otherwise it is generally impossible to mobilize the masses for nation-building, because spontaneous primordialism is characteristic of ordinary consciousness. Constructivists believe that the national project is ideal and exists only in the heads of nationalists, and that since there is no essential connection between this project and the material of the existing ethnic group, it is possible to make anything out of anything, say, in Africa, using the material of black tribes, to construct a Russian national culture (we deliberately exaggerate to make the constructivists’ thoughts understandable).
Using this deliberately absurd example, we see that the concept of creativity underlying the constructivist understanding of ethnic groups is the Renaissance-Romantic concept of creativity as a demiurgic act. If the nationalist intelligentsia creates an ethnos like God - a world out of nothing, then, of course, by converting blacks to Orthodoxy, teaching them to speak Russian and forcing them to learn Pushkin, it is possible to create a Russian nation in Africa. In reality, from the very metaphor of a nation as a construction it follows that this is impossible: after all, when constructing, we use material and what we get in the end depends on the nature of the material; From a car, by disassembling it into parts, you can assemble another, better car, but you cannot assemble an airplane. In the same way, nation builders cannot create any nation; they start from the existing views and stereotypes of the people or peoples that they are going to reconstruct, or as S.G. puts it. Kara-Murza, “reassemble.”
Founder of French structuralism Roland Barthes in his article “The Death of the Author” he well showed the depravity of the Renaissance, bourgeois, demiurgic concept of creativity. “The figure of the author belongs to new times; Apparently, it was formed by our society as, with the end of the Middle Ages, this society began to discover for itself (thanks to English empiricism, French rationalism and the principle of personal faith approved by the Reformation) the dignity of the individual... it is not the author who speaks, but the language as such; writing is an initially impersonal activity... which makes it possible to achieve the fact that it is no longer “I”, but language itself that acts...” writes R. Barth. In other words, structuralism proves that creativity is not the emergence of something completely new from nothing, in accordance with the free will of the creator, which is understood as a person or group of people; when creating, the “author” uses ready-made cultural matrices - language, styles, writing practices, they he is limited, forced to speak one way and not another; in the end, the author turns into only a “writer,” a scriptor, an instrument through which language, the text, reproduces itself. The same logic can be transferred to nation-building: of course, subjectively everything seems to be that the nationalist intelligentsia freely creates, “constructs” this or that nation, but objectively it is limited in its “creativity” and is forced to take into account the already existing cultural matrices of the ethnos or ethnic groups, which become material for the future nation. For example, the Czech “awakeners” could not create any nation; from the material of the language, legends, and cultural stereotypes of the Western Slavs, only the nation that turned out could be created - the Czech one.
Here it is impossible not to touch upon the issue of the substantiality of ethnicity, about which there is so much confusion among constructivists, largely related to the unfortunate gap between philosophy and the private sciences, which, alas, is observed today. Ethnological specialists, as a rule, have a very vague idea of \u200b\u200bphilosophy and its problems, otherwise they would know that even if we consider the value systems that bind ethnic groups and nations into single communities to belong to the human consciousness, it does not at all follow that they are completely subjective . More Immanuel Kant the concept of intersubjectivity of experience was introduced, which avoids the slide into solipsism that awaits those who solve the problem of universals in a crude nominalist manner (which is what constructivist ethnologists essentially discuss, perhaps without knowing it). Simply put, if a certain value system that unites a community of individuals into an ethnic community exists in the minds of these individuals in the same form, and this is obvious, if their communication is successful, then it turns from an individual value system into a collective one. In this sense, we can already talk about the collective consciousness of a given community, of course, not in the sense that the community exists as a special living being with its own soul and character, this would be too literal an understanding of the metaphor, but in the sense that thinking and the activities of all individuals within a community are determined by the same values and they think and act as a single whole. This system of values is the substance of ethnicity, but not material, “blood”, but quite ideal, intelligible, but constantly embodied in the material artifacts of a given ethnic culture (from national costumes and gastronomic recipes to songs and poems). Of course, these values are created by people (“inventors” as the French sociologist called them G. Tarde), but are created according to certain rules and in accordance with already existing exemplary values, which again are the content of the collective consciousness of the ethnos. In this sense, we can talk about the stability of systems of ethnic, national values and their relative independence from the will of specific individuals. It is appropriate here to compare ethnicity and language, so understood, as the opposite of speech. More F. de Saussure proposed to understand language as a sign system and the rules of its decoding, rooted in the public consciousness and allowing us to understand speech - acts of individual linguistic activity. And Saussure pointed out that language does not directly depend on the will of the people who use it: we cannot, on our own initiative, rename a table into a chair or abolish the system of cases; if language develops, it does so according to its own laws, keeping its internal forms unchanged. In the same way, we cannot arbitrarily change the basic values of national culture on our own initiative.
One might ask: why do constructivists believe that the idea of a nation exists only in the heads of individuals who consider themselves to belong to that nation? Obviously, because it is a known fact that nations are created, they are artificial, not natural phenomena. But strictly speaking, the second does not logically follow from one. The table is also an artificial object, it did not grow from the ground, but was created by a carpenter according to an engineer’s design, but from this the “idea of the table”, or as it was defined A.F. Losev, the principle of organization that shapes and connects boards and bolts so that a table is obtained, and not a cabinet, does not cease to be an objective idea that exists “inside” the table itself (of course, we are not talking about the spatial localization of the extra-spatial principle, but about its inextricable connection with matter things), regardless of the wills of its creators - the engineer and the carpenter. And if the engineer and the carpenter agree that the table supposedly does not exist, the table will not disappear. The same applies to the nation: even if it was created by awakeners, it exists objectively, and the system of values that unites people into a nation is also completely objective. Moreover, like any work of creativity, it does not fully correspond to the intentions of its authors and develops on its own, according to its own internal laws.
Another contradiction of constructivism is the belief that ethnic groups are constructed in the same way as nations. As he notes K.S. Sharov: “Classical constructivism, trying to reveal the “true” essence of the nation and nationalism, freeing it from the dense veil of perennialist mythology, in its criticism, although in many cases completely justified, at least “threw out the baby with the bathwater.” ... On the one hand, modernists argue that we cannot and should not attribute any features of modern nations and nationalism to earlier, pre-modern communities and sentiments, i.e. take the position of “retrospective nationalism” (“presentism”), since this will interfere with our understanding of the fundamentally different forms of identities, communities and relationships that existed in antiquity and the Middle Ages. But then it turns out that ethnic communities characteristic of the pre-national period cannot be considered as social constructions created on the basis of certain interests and for certain purposes, and, therefore, are a completely natural, natural product of nature, history and culture. On the other hand, followers of modernism constantly declare their fundamental unacceptability of such views on ethnicity that resemble primordialism or perennialism. Thus, it turns out that classical modernism, in a hidden form, contains within itself easily detectable contradictions and inconsistencies.” Indeed, constructivism does not take into account the fact that the phenomenon of a creative active individual, or as the structuralist philosophy of the “author” calls it, as we have already noted, appeared only in the Renaissance and Enlightenment and is a product of capitalism with its cult of private initiative (in this sense, the intelligentsia constructing nation, structurally identical to the entrepreneur creating his own “business”). The specificity of the model of human behavior in traditional society was the understanding of creativity as imitation (Plato) of copying samples; the medieval artisan did not strive to create something new, which had not existed before, but only to reproduce a “masterpiece”; the medieval scientist did not strive to create a new theory, but explain the old, well-known one. Creativity in the modern sense was a marginal phenomenon in traditional society, including such a form of creativity as “nation building” (not to mention the fact that the phenomenon of a nation as a secular non-religious community was generally unthinkable before the Enlightenment). It follows from this that, according to the logic of constructivism itself, the ethnic groups of a traditional society could not be created by the intellectual elite, like the nations of a modernist society.
— Filippov V.R. The phantom of ethnicity (my post-constructivist misunderstanding of ethnic identity) http://ashpi.asu.ru/studies/2005/flppv.html
— Ioffe Ilya Anti-Marxism and the national question (some thoughts on the book by S.G. Kara-Murza “Dismantling the People”) http://left.ru/2007/11/ioffe163.phtml
— Sharov K.S. Constructivist paradigm in the study of nationalism and national issues. National identification///Bulletin of Moscow State University. Political Sciences 2006 No. 1 Series 7 http://www.elibrary.az/cgi/ruirbis64r/cgiirbis_64.exe?C21COM=2&I21DBN=JURNAL&P21DBN=JURNAL&Z21ID=&Image_file_name=E:%5Cwww%5Cdocs%5Cjurnal%5C42j.htm&Image_file_ mfn=178
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