1: for the "End and the Beginning Again", full version

Ethnos: Its properties and peculiarities, Man in the biosphere.

Let's put the question this way: why is this problem interesting for us?

After all, simply collecting information never gets into a person's head or arouses interest. And if we do learn something and spend effort on it, why do we need to know? The answer is simple. Mankind, existing on Earth for very little time, 30-50 thousand years, nevertheless, on its surface has made coups, which V. Vernadsky equated to geological upheavals of a small scale. And that is a lot.

How did one species of mammal manage to change to such an extent, and not for the better, the Earth on which he lives?  It is a problem of our generation, and it will become even more relevant for our descendants, because if we don't get to the bottom of what is happening all over the Earth, and what every thinking part of humanity considers the number one problem, then there is no reason to get married, to have children, because the biosphere will die, and all children will die. But in order to understand this issue, we need to investigate its history.

Man as a biological being belongs to the genus Homo. For this genus, when it appeared on Earth, it was characterized by quite a great diversity. This also applies to those Homo species which, strictly speaking, we do not have the right to consider as humans, namely Pithecantropus and Neanderthals (Pithecantropus and Homo primigenius in Latin, but I will call them by common Russian words). These two species differ from modern man as much as a donkey from a horse or a dog from a fox.   But we and they had something in common that makes us very, very similar: these original human species were also very aggressive, had technology and fire, and were also cannibalistic: they ate their own kind, which is not common to other animals. Where did they come from and why did they disappear? I cannot say. There are many hypotheses about it, but they are completely unfounded and unsupported.

Neanderthals differed from modern humans, first of all, by their height; they were bark-like - 155-160 cm (such big, chubby carapaces) - and very strong. Their legs were short, they ran worse than our ancestors, but their cranium was larger, so they had more space for brain matter. So, they were smarter. Stone technology was very advanced. There was also bone technology, which was denied until the 1930s, but I myself have dug up a bone needle in a Neanderthal site. So, they knew how to sew.

Apparently, they had a very highly developed technique made of unstable materials, because they could even kill cave bears. They liked to collect things. They collected the skulls of these cave bears and put them in their caves. Whether they lived in these caves permanently or used them as museums is hard to say. I tend to think that they lived mostly in the open air, and sometimes in caves when they needed to. But nevertheless, huge clusters of cave bear skulls - up to 1000! - are found in Neanderthal caves.

I must say that the cave bear was four times larger than our bear; accordingly, it had better psychophysical qualities - it was more agile, faster, stronger, in general much scarier than our modern bear, which only the most daring hunters went out with a slingshot.

It would have been useless to go out with a slingshot on a cave bear. Even the weaker modern grizzly bear of the Americas is so fearsome that Indians considered grizzly hunting equal to war with a neighboring tribe, and killing a grizzly a feat equal to killing the leader of a neighboring tribe, not just a warrior. It is now illegal to hunt grizzlies in the United States on the grounds that the only way to safely kill a grizzly is with a sniper rifle, but that's not hunting, it's a firing squad. If you use an ordinary rifle and shoot at a rather short distance, but you don't hit him right in the heart and don't kill him right away, he will catch up with you. And he runs at the speed of a horse. That is practically a grizzly, which is weaker than a cave bear, and now with all our technology is not even an object for hunting.

How did Neanderthals exterminate the cave bear so that it did not remain at all? Obviously, they had the means to do so. Which ones? We don't know. But it is better not to know and to confess, than to make some lightweight hypotheses that explains everything and disintegrate when first confronted with practice. I think that's not the best way to go about it. Let's leave the question open.

Did Neanderthals encounter modern humans? Yes! In Palestine in the caves - Schul, Karmel, Kafzeh - burials of strange people have been found, which I. Я. Roginsky defined as mestizo Neanderthal and modern man. How could such strange mestizos appear, given the fact that Neanderthals were cannibals, I do not know. But the fact is that mestizos appeared, obviously not viable and left no trace.

The last data of excavations in the Crimea (they have not been published yet, I was told about them by a Ukrainian archaeologist), are very interesting: there were found Neanderthal-Cromagnon layers, where, let`s say, a Cro-Magnon layer, then a Neanderthal layer, and in the Neanderthal layer the bones of Cro-Magnon men eaten, then again Cro-Magnon layer, then again Neanderthal. That is, in the Crimea there was some kind of terrible struggle between Hominides species, some of which (Neanderthals) disappeared without a trace, while others multiplied and populated the Earth.

The situation was somewhat different in the Far East, where there was a Sinanthrope. Its remains were found near Beijing. It is closer to modern man, a Mongoloid with a flattened face, but also a cannibal and also quite large. It should be noted, however, that both the former and the latter knew fire.

Ancient Hominides species did not survive the Ice Age, and this is very strange. The glacier did not take over the entire landmass of the Earth, and living near a glacier was very good. It is usually said that living near a glacier is cold, hungry. Nowadays, there are also glaciers: in Switzerland - Davos, in the Caucasus - Teberda, in Central Asia - Tien-Shan. These are all resort places. People go there to rest, and pay very dearly for it, which is quite reasonable.

A glacier is a huge accumulation of ice, which exists only because there is a column of pure air with high pressure, i.e. anticyclone.  A huge mass of clean, clear air captures a much larger space than the glacier itself. So, next to the glacier, next to the block of ice, which rises a kilometer, sometimes 2-3 kilometers, there will be a perfectly clear sky, and therefore a huge insolation. The temperature is low, but the sun shines and heats the earth. Grass grows on the ground. The sun warms the bodies of animals and people, they are not cold. There is almost never any wind.

It has been suggested that the blizzards around the glacier brought huge drifts of snow. This is geographical illiteracy peculiar to humanitarians. If it was blowing snow, that would mean there was a warm moist wind, and that would melt the glacier. Nothing of the sort! Very little snow or rain fell. The heated soil created convection currents of air, and sometimes a small amount of air could enter from neighboring latitudes, where there were cyclonic conditions there were small moist air masses which fell as rain or a very light snow cover.

This was enough to spread out behind the glacier in the anticyclone zone a magnificent dry steppe with little snow, which did not prevent herbivorous animals from getting dry grass from under the snow in winter, very caloric, soaked in the sun.

On the other hand, the glacier also melted under the sunlight, i.e. streams and rivulets of pure fresh water flowed down from it and formed lakes along the edge of the glacier. And where there are lakes, there are fish and waterfowl that carry fish eggs on their claws. And where there is moisture, lush vegetation will grow, forests will grow there. When there is a big thaw, water will begin to flow out in the form of rivers, and they will flow wherever the topography tells them to. These rivers will create the necessary watering places for animals in the dry steppe, bordering the glacier from the south. Dry steppe like the Mongolian steppe, where very little snow falls, is a free range for ungulates that can tear the snow with their hooves and get food in winter. And where there are ungulates, (general term for herbivories with hooves), there are predators, and among the predators, there is man. A melting glacier is an optimal environment for human development.

It was different when it got warmer there. The glacier was moving all the time. From the Taimyr, it kept growing, going to Fennoscandia and melting in the Atlantic. Cyclones brought rain, fogs, wet snow, which fell on the glacier and increased it. And on the eastern edge, the glacier was melting, so the best conditions were here. The best conditions during the ice age were in Siberia!

And so, it was until the glacier went under the Gulf Stream and melted there. The Gulf Stream broke through and carried the humid Atlantic air all the way to Yenisei and Yakutia where the Pacific monsoons came in, and instead of the steppe the taiga (pine forests) grew. Then things got bad. Huge snow drifts deprived animals of plant food. Mammoths, rhinos, and aurochs died; deer, hares, and mosquitoes that grew in the taiga survived. It became almost impossible for people to live. The population sharply declined. But people survived and, moreover, expanded their range!

Why did Homo sapiens spread over the whole of the Earth's land masses and turn it into its own Ecumen, the place where it lives? What made it possible for man to spread everywhere? After all, all animals live in certain conditions for each species. For example, the wolf is a steppe animal. He lives in the steppe or in the woods, where he hides, but there is no wolf in the deep taiga; the bear is a forest animal, he has nothing to do in the steppe, and he lives in the forest. And what about the polar bear, which lives in the ice? It is another species belonging to the genus of bears. It is so distant from its ancestor that it refers to the modern brown forest bear in the same way a horse refers to a donkey and a man to the Neanderthal, that is, they are different species. The polar bear has adapted to living on the Arctic ice, eating seals and catching fish. But in addition, there is the Himalayan bear, which is so adapted to eating fruit that it lives only in trees.

So, we state that all animals, in order to occupy other habitats, to live in different landscape conditions, evolved outside the species. Humans have remained within the same species. All humans now living on Earth belong to the same species, but nevertheless they have spread from the Arctic to the tropics. They live in the dry areas, in the highlands, in the humid forests of the North, and in the tropical jungles-anywhere, adapting to the landscape.

How did it happen that all the animals lived in their usual conditions, while man spread across the entire landmass of the Earth, capturing in some cases even the gulfs of the sea? And it was not only through technology that man was able to achieve victory. During the Paleolithic period, technology was not yet abundant. And yet man was able to settle in both tropical regions and polar regions, in humid and dry regions, in mountainous and steppe regions. We must admit that man has some ability, not only social but also natural, which also distinguishes him from animals. We can characterize this ability, but what is it?

Mosaic Anthroposphere.

Let us pay attention to one circumstance. The anthroposphere is divided into communities, which we simply call peoples, scientifically - nations, scientifically - ethnoses. "People" is an uncomfortable term, too polysemantic. The term "nation" is used only in the conditions of the capitalist and socialist formations, and before that, it is believed, there were no nations. Let's not argue about the term. But the term "ethnos" is very suitable for referring to the communities into which all of humanity is divided. There is a mosaicism of the anthroposphere, and it is more correct to call it the ethnosphere.

When we are faced with this problem, it seems that there is no mystery, everything is very simple - there are Germans and Frenchmen, Englishmen and Italians. What is the difference between them? There is some difference. When the question arises as to what exactly the difference is, it turns out that the answer is very difficult to find.

Of course, this is why the Institute of Ethnography exists, and it appeared when the complexity of the problem was not yet evident; it was clear to everyone that there are different peoples and they must be studied. But the science is developing. Much that was previously clear now needs to be explained deeper. Therefore, the easiest solution was chosen. As we know, man is a social animal. No one is going to dispute this. And therefore, said some ethnographers, all relations between people are only social relations, that is, social. And since people are divided into ethnic groups, this, too, is a social phenomenon.

At first glance, this sounds convincing and logical. But what do we mean by social relations? Historical materialism teaches us that man develops in accordance with the development of his productive forces; first he lived in the primitive communal formation, then came the slave-owning, feudal, capitalist formation. With such a formation division, is there any room for ethnic divisions? A feudal could be a Frenchman, an Englishman, a Seljuk, a Chinese, a Mongolian, or a Russian. (Yu.V. Bromley joined this point of view).

Similarly with serfs, slaves, wage laborers. In short, the socio-economic characteristic of man ignores the ethnic characteristic. But does this mean that there are no French, Chinese, or Persians, that the difference between them is illusory; there are only feudal lords and serfs, bourgeois and wage laborers - all the rest is irrelevant? If so, why the need for the Institute of Ethnography? Or even ethnography itself? And yet it turns out that ethnography is needed and cannot be thrown out.

So, what is ethnos? What are the transitions from one ethnos to another? What is the difference between ethnoses? Some say that there is no difference. They say that what is written in the passport is fine. You can write anything you want in the passport. For example, anyone can be written down as Malay. But this does not make him Malay.

There is another definition - linguistic and social. "All people speak some kind of language, and so," A. A. Freiman, a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, told me, “The French are those who speak French, the English are those who speak English, the Persians are those who speak Persian, etc.

"Fine," I said to him, "but my own native mother spoke French till she was six years old, and learned to speak Russian later, when she went to school and began to play with the girls in the streets of Tsarskoye Selo. True, after that she became a Russian poet, not a French poet. So, was she French before she was six years old?"

"That's an individual case," the academic scholar quickly found.

"Okay," I tell him, “The Irish spoke English for 200 years, forgetting their language, but then they rebelled, separated from England, and spared no blood for that separation - neither their own nor anyone else's. In your way of judging, have they been true Englishmen for 200 years?"

"I knew you'd give me that example, but what else?"

I gave him a dozen examples and posed the question: "You yourself have been to Central Asia, you know perfectly well that the people of Bukhara and Samarkand speak three languages - Tajik, Uzbek and Russian - with equal ease. Russian is needed for school, and they speak Russian like you and me. Tajik and Uzbek are the languages of bazaars. And yet they do not confuse in the slightest who is an Uzbek and who is a Tajik, even though they can write in their passports as Tajiks when they are Uzbeks and vice versa. Even one of my acquaintances, who, as a Tajik from Samarkand, registered himself as an Uzbek, was described by other Tajiks as "Mil Lat Furush", he who sold out his people, or was a traitor to his people. They wrote down this way because Uzbek nationalists started a rumor that anyone who signed up as a Tajik would be evicted from the cities to the mountains. And everyone was registered as an Uzbek.  But in principle, what difference does it make how you sign up? After all, my acquaintance didn't become an Uzbek.

So, everyone knows that there are different ethnicities. Ethnoses are the French, the Germans, the Papuans, the Maasai, the Hellenes, and the Persians. But to the question, "What are they?" - there was no sensible answer. And I can't give it right away. If I could do it right away, I would limit myself to a short article, rather than offering a book to the reader's attention.

Let us pose another question: does the problem of ethnicity have a practical meaning? In everyday cases we are not confused. If, say, an English scientist comes to us, we immediately see that he is a different person than we are: although he speaks Russian, but not ours, and he wears a suit differently. But when these outward differences are obscured, the meaning of ethnicity is questioned.

For example, four people - equally dressed, equally well Russian-speaking, etc. - enter the streetcar. Suppose one of them is Russian, and the others are Caucasian, Tatar, and Latvian from the Baltics. Is there a difference between them or not? It would seem to be clear to everyone, that there is. But one of my opponents said that unless there is some silly, far-fetched national conflict between them, no one will ever know there is a difference between them or that there really isn't one. "No," I replied, "there might not be any national conflict. Any event will cause these people to have different reactions.

For example, a violent drunk gets on the same streetcar and starts hooliganizing. What will happen? Of course, a Russian will sympathize with them, saying, "You, kerch, get out before they take you away. The Caucasian will not bear it, and will kick him in the teeth. The Tatar will step aside and will not get involved. A Westerner will immediately call out a policeman. These are four completely different stereotypes of behavior!

So, it is the stereotypes of behavior that are always more or less different in different ethnic groups, but these differences in close living conditions are often hidden.

We have a large number of Finnish tribes living near Leningrad: Karelians, Vepsians closer to Onega, Chukhns (white-eyed chuds), as if they do not differ from Russians in appearance and speak Russian correctly. And when he walks along Liteynoye Street, he is unrecognizable. But as soon as you get to their home villages, the ethnic differences become apparent.

What does it look like? Let's put the question: what color is the air? You can't see the color of the air in the room because there is relatively little of it, but in the window, the blue sky is the color of the air. So, it is here: the ethnic characteristic is better perceived and grasped in large masses than in isolated cases. But as we saw from the first example, the ethnic stereotype is sometimes revealed in single cases as well. If so, is this a phenomenon of what - human social life or human nature? We need to agree on terms.

Ethnos is not a society

What is social? The Latin word "socium," translated as "society," is used in this sense in all Western European languages for forms of both animal and human organization. In Soviet science, the characteristic "social" is used to refer only to human society. The term "community", a combination of several animal and plant species interconnected by a "food chain," is used to refer to animal collectives. Such a division seems justified because the social form of development is peculiar only to humans. This development is spontaneous and progressive, spiraling and connected to the development of technology and attitudes to labor. Neither technology nor labor exists in animals, so what animals and humans have in common cannot be social. So, is ethnos a phenomenon in common with animals or not?

This is what I argued with my Moscow opponents about: they claim that ethnos is a social phenomenon. I say: how so? Does ethnicity develop spontaneously and spirally, and is it uniquely linked to the development of modes of production? Has any ethnos existed from the very beginning of human development from the pithecanthropus? Is there such a map showing ethnicities at least from the beginning of the historical period? There are none! There were Sarmatians, in their place there is nothing, in the place of Sarmatians were Polovtsians (Kumans), and there are none.

Speaking about ethnic groups, we are saying "was" all the time. There is no spiral development of ethnos-soviets. If we use the word "social" in our, Marxist sense, we should understand it as a form of collective being connected with production - "society". Do human beings have collectives that are not social? Collectives other than and apart from society? Marx expressed himself rather precisely and definitely on this point, although in his early works. He called society by the German word "Gesellschaft," and apart from society, he singled out primary collectives. He called them "Gemeinwesen. Gemein is "common," and Wesen is "essence," "essence of the matter," "being," "foundation.  There is no such word in Russian, but the meaning is clear. Marx considered these very primary collectives, which existed before the emergence of material production in man, as a prerequisite for the emergence of society.

Primordial formations, primordial collectives, individuals of the species Homo sapiens really had nothing to do with productive forces that did not yet exist; people simply lived as collectives-groups, because no fool would live alone. And this group division naturally did not disappear with the emergence of society; on the contrary, gradually evolving, it created those wholes, that we call ethnoses.

Ethnos is not a race

Ethnos in humans is the same as prides in lions, packs in wolves, herds in ungulates, etc. It is a form of existence of the species Homo sapiens and its individuals, which differs both from social formations and from purely biological ones, such as races. The races, according to V. P. Alekseev, are five or six. Both in appearance and in psychophysical features, the representatives of different races are quite different from each other. Race is a relatively stable biological characteristic of the human species, but it is important for us to emphasize here that it is in no way a form of their coexistence, a way of living together. Races are differentiated by purely external features that can be defined anatomically. Apparently, they play some role in the biological process of speciation, but they do not matter in terms of how people live and get along, how they work, how they prosper, or how they die. The thesis seems, at first sight, rather strange, for there is a habit of thinking as if Negroes were the poor, who are abused; all Indians are noble, who are exterminated; there are also civilized whites, numerous yellows, etc. Let us see, however, how these races are distributed on the surface of the earth and what implications this has for the fate of the biosphere.

According to anthropological evidence, the most ancient members of the so-called white race, the Caucasoids, originated in Europe and spread from Europe to Central Asia, Central Asia, Northern Tibet and finally, after crossing the Hindu Kush, they entered India and occupied its northern part. They also inhabited northern Africa and the Arabian Peninsula for a long time.

In our own time members of this race have crossed the Atlantic Ocean, and have occupied most of North America and large parts of South America, Australia, and South Africa. These are all the results of resettlement.

Negros, strangely enough, always seem to be inhabitants of the tropics, because it is thought that the melanin that gives their skin its black color prevents burns from the scorching tropical sun. It does prevent burns, that's true, but when it's hot in summer, what kind of dress do we wear, white or black? It's absolutely clear that even if we don't have skin burns, in the scorching heat to have black skin is completely disadvantageous, especially in high insolation, because black reflects the sun's rays poorly. Consequently, we have to assume that blacks appeared in conditions where it was relatively cloudy.

Indeed, the most ancient finds of the so-called Grimaldi race, a Negro race of the Upper Paleolithic, were found in the Grimaldi Cave in the South of France, in Nice, and then it turned out that all this territory was inhabited in the Upper Paleolithic by Negroes - people with black skin, with woolly hair that allowed them to go around without a hat, with large lips. They were slender, tall, long-legged hunters of large herbivores. And how did they come to Africa? Yes, as a result of the same migrations that brought Europeans to the Americas. South Africa was settled by Negros, the Bantu Negros, the classical ones that we know, in a very late period; Bantu expansion started in the 1st century BC - 1st century AD; so, the first Negroid forest-dwellers were contemporaries of Julius Caesar! Athens had long ago faded, the age of Pericles was forgotten, Egypt had become a colony, but they had only just begun to conquer the forests of the Congo, the savannahs of East Africa, to go south to the great Zambezi River and to the muddy, muddy Limpopo River.

Who were they pushing out of there? After all, there was a population before them. This is the third race, also belonging to the Southern races, and indeed, apparently, the Southern race, which is called conventionally "Koisan". ("Koisan" is also a special group of languages.) The Koisan race includes the Hottentots and the Bushmen. And they differ from the Negroes, first they are not black, but brown; they have Mongoloid features, strongly developed eyelids, they have a completely different throat - they do not speak as we do, not on the exhalation, but on the in-breath, that is, they differ sharply from both Negroes and Europeans, and from Mongoloids.   They are considered a remnant of some ancient race of the southern hemisphere, but they are not ethnically whole, even though there are very few of them left.

The Bushmen are quiet and timid hunters, driven out by the Bechuan Negroes into the Kalahari Desert. They are out there living their lives, forgetting their ancient culture, very rich and fascinating it was; they have myths and art, but in a rudimentary state because life is so difficult, they don't think about art, they think about where to get something to eat.

And the Gottentots (that's the Dutch name for these tribes), who lived in the Cape Province, became famous as incredible brigands, guides for merchants, and cattle enthusiasts. They considered bulls the best thing to have. And when a missionary who converted the Hottentot to Christianity asked: "Do you know what evil is?" - he replied, "I do, if the Zulu take my oxen." - "And what is good?" - "It is if I steal my bulls from the Zulus." That's the principle on which they existed before the Dutch came.

They got on well with the Dutch pretty quickly, became their guides, interpreters, workers on their farms. When the English took over the Cape Colony and drove out the Dutch, the Hottentots mingled with the English, and now they are the most boisterous elements there. Nothing like the Bushmen. It's as if they were the same race, racial traits are the same in both. But they resemble each other as little as the Spanish, for example, resemble the Finns in behavior.

The fourth race, also very ancient, is the Australoids, or Australians. It is not known how they got there, to Australia, but they got there a long time ago. The pre-European population of Australia consisted of a great number of small tribes with different languages and very different customs and rituals. And they did not like each other, they tried to live as far away from each other as possible, because they did not expect anything but unpleasant from their neighbors.

They lived very primitively but they did not die out, because Australia has exceptionally healthy climate; any big wound there heals faster than ours. So, Australoids, or just Australians, are a special race that looks nothing like Negroes, or Caucasoids, or Mongoloids--none at all. They look like themselves. They have huge beards, wavy hair, broad shoulders, exceptionally fast reactions, despite their black skin color. I've heard stories I haven't checked, but I trust them: they show Australian movies twice as fast as we do, because at our speed they see gaps between the shots. With all that said, they have a specificity that hasn't given them the opportunity to develop. What are those specifics? We will find that out at the end of the book.

The fact remains that a single race, inhabiting a single isolated continent, which got there under some conditions obviously by sea and apparently from India, because their closest relatives live on the Deccan Plateau (in southern India), makes up a huge number of the most diverse ethnic groupings.

The fifth race, the most numerous, is the Mongoloids, who are divided into a number of races of the second order: there are Siberian Mongoloids, there are North Chinese, South Chinese, Malay, Tibetan (they were, now they no longer exist), that is a great variety of different subraces, and none of them constitutes an independent ethnos.

To refer back to all this, we note that every ethnos, as it develops, creates its own culture, and expands its capacities, consists of two or more racial types. I know of no monoracial ethnoses. If even now they constitute the last race, the sixth, which we will not discuss, is the Americano-Indians, Americanoids.

They inhabit all of America, from the tundra to Tierra del Fuego (Eskimos are a new people). There are a huge number of languages, so it is even impossible to classify them. Many dead languages are preserved now because the tribes whose languages were recorded are extinct. Americanoids, in general, are quite different in character, in their cultural makeup, and in their way of life, even though they all belong to the same race. In other words, the races into which the species Homo sapiens is divided are conventional biological labels that may have some significance for our theme, but only a subsidiary one, like any classification that in no way reflects the specificity of the ethnic phenomenon.

And with that another important observation. These races, as I said at the beginning, are static in relation to the species.  We know that the species Homo sapiens, Cro-Magnon man-and you and I, Cro-Magnon men-have existed on the European continent for 15,000 years, and during that time, although the named races have changed places, no new ones have appeared and no old ones have disappeared.

You may ask why I left out the Pygmies. They are simply negroes, except that they live in very bad conditions in the rainforest, where they are stunted by malnutrition.

This would seem to be the end of the matter, if race were an instrument of interaction between society and nature and development of ethnicities, there would be no history, just a pre-determined image.

Ethnos is not a population

Just as ethnos is not the same as race, neither is it the same as another biological grouping of individuals, a population. A population is, to quote a textbook, "the sum of individuals living in the same habitat and interbreeding randomly.” For example, two swarms of flies come into the same room. They immediately form a single population and do not compete with each other.

Do ethnic groups exist in this way? First of all, fighting between ethnic groups is quite common, though not obligatory. There can be no struggle between populations; once they scatter into one area like mice, or swarm like flies, they will merge into one population at once. They do not have restrictions on interbreeding; hence geneticists derive their laws, which are true for animals.

There are always mating restrictions in an ethnos. Two ethnic groups can coexist on the same territory for centuries and millennia. They can mutually destroy each other or one can destroy the other. This means that ethnos is not a biological phenomenon, nor is it a social one.

I propose to think of the ethnos as a geographic phenomenon that is always connected with the surrounding landscape that feeds the adapted ethnos. And since the landscapes of the Earth are diverse, so are the ethnoses.

Reality and logic

Thus, in the study of ethnicity we are dealing with a phenomenon of nature, which, obviously, should be studied as such. Otherwise, we would come to such a number of contradictions, logical and factual, in the study of reality, that ethnology itself would be meaningless and unreasonable to study. It would almost cease to have any meaning or reason to study it. The tools of science are methods and ways of study. How can one define what ethnos is and understand its meaning and significance? Only by applying a modern system of notions, a modern system of views.

The ancient Egyptians had no need at all to define what ethnicity was; they did it through color. They painted blacks as black, Semites as white, Libyans as brown and red, and themselves as yellow. And it was clear to everyone who was in the picture. But for us the color is useless because we know not four peoples but many more, there are not enough colors on the palette, and on the other hand it is clear that color does not say much.

The Greeks put the question much more simply: there are Hellenes, "us", and there are "barbarians", everyone else; "us" and "not us", our own and others. But when Herodotus tried to write a history in nine books, dedicated to the nine Muses, he was confronted with the insufficiency of this classification. For example, he was describing the Greco-Persian wars. The Persians, of course, were barbarians, but his countrymen, the Athenians, Spartans, Thebans, and others, were Hellenes. But where do the Scythians fit in? They are neither Persians nor Greeks. And where do you put the Ethiopians, or the Hadhramantes, a tribe of Tibbu, still living in the southern part of Tripolitania? Neither are they Persians or Greeks. Barbarians, of course. But this classification became clearly insufficient.

Later, when the Romans conquered the whole world, that is, what they considered the whole world, they internalized this same understanding of the term. It was simple and easy for them. Romans were Roman citizens, everyone else was either provincial, conquered barbarians, or not yet conquered barbarians; though perhaps not always savage, they were not Romans. Everything was simple.

When the Roman Empire fell at the time of the Great Transmigration of the peoples, it turned out that the system did not work. All the peoples were different, very different from one another. And that's when the idea of a socio-cultural definition of people was first born. (This is a medieval concept.)

It was decided that all people are the same, but there are believers in the true God and non-believers, that is professing the true religion and non-believers. The true religion in Europe was considered to be Catholicism (not Orthodoxy), in Byzantium and Russia - Orthodoxy (not Catholicism), in the Middle East - Islam (but not Christianity), etc. For the rest, people were considered to be divided according to known social gradations. And so, the Turkic emirs were considered by the Crusaders to be barons and earls, only Turkish, and the Turks considered the Crusaders to be emirs or beks, only infidels, that is, French. If these Emirs had occasion to read the works of a philosopher such as Plato, they regarded Plato as a mere sorcerer. They had their own magicians. It worked very well. The professional division (also social) suited them.

And more than that. When the Spaniards came to America and encountered the socially highly organized nations of the Aztecs, Incas and Muiscos, they enrolled all the chiefs of their tribes in the Hidalgoes, gave them the title of "dawn" if they were baptized, exempted them from taxes, compelled them to serve with the sword, and sent them to Salamanca to study. And they were quite happy about it. The Indians thought it suited them just fine. Although the Incas and Aztecs did not, in fact, become Spaniards, the Spaniards turned a blind eye. They married the Indian beauties, because there were few women of their own, spawned a huge number of mestizos, and believed that the Spanish language, the Catholic faith, a single culture, a single social community ensured the unity of an empire in which the sun did not set.

Anaguac is New Spain, Chibcha is New Grenada, etc. But they paid for this speculative delusion in the early nineteenth century with such a massacre, in comparison with which all the Napoleonic wars pale into insignificance. Instead of seeing natural processes and phenomena, which should be studied, the Spaniards substituted their own ideas, which made perfect sense according to their point of view, but which were not adapted to reality.

Thus, we consider the popular notion that ethnicities are reduced to certain social phenomena to be an unproven hypothesis, although we will return to this hypothesis more than once as we go along. The fact is that we are obliged to study social phenomena when we formulate our problem, because when we study our subject, we see them only. But this does not mean that they exhaust the problem.

Let me explain my point. It is quite complicated, although it seemed perfectly simple to me until I confronted my opponents. Here, for example, is electric lighting. The phenomenon would seem to be socio-technical: the wiring was made in a factory, and the installer, a union member, installed it, and it serves, say, university employees. And that's all important to consider when looking at this phenomenon. But, you see, there would be no light here if there were no physical phenomenon- electric current. There is no way we can classify electricity as a social phenomenon. It is the combination of a natural phenomenon and those socially conditioned, artificial conditions under which we can observe, study and use this natural phenomenon.

It's the same with ethnicities. We see and feel ethnic differences between us. We see and feel the difference between Germans and, let us say, Poles, just as we feel the difference between light and darkness, cold and heat. Like with physical phenomena, where it turns out we needed thermodynamics to explain thermal phenomena, optics to explain light phenomena. And most importantly, all of this was needed in order to get practical results.

Subethnos

Structure, the second characteristic of ethnicity, is always more or less complex, but it is complexity that provides ethnicity with stability, enabling it to live through centuries of turmoil, turmoil and peaceful withering. The principle of ethnic structure can be called “hierarchical subordination” of subethnic groups, meaning that the latter are taxonomic units within the ethnos as a visible whole and do not violate its unity.

At first glance, this thesis seems to contradict our own position on the existence of ethnicity as an elementary whole, but remember that even a molecule of matter consists of atoms, and an atom consists of protons, electrons, neutrons, etc. particles, which does not negate the claim of integrity at one level or another: molecular, atomic, or even subatomic. It is all about the nature of structural bonds. Let us explain this with an example.

A Karelian from the Tver province calls himself a Karel in his village, and when he came to study in Moscow, he calls himself a Russian, because in the village the opposition of Karelians to Russians has meaning, but in the city it does not, because the differences in everyday life and culture are so negligible that they are hidden. But if it is not a Karelian, but a Tatar, he will call himself a Tatar, because the former religious difference has deepened the ethnographic dissimilarity with the Russians. To sincerely declare himself a Russian, a Tatar must go to Western Europe or China, and in New Guinea he will be perceived as a European not of the tribe of the English or the Dutch, that is, those who are known there. This example is very important for ethnic diagnostics and thus for demographic statistics and ethnographic maps. After all, when the latter are compiled, one must agree on the order and degree of approximation, otherwise it will be impossible to distinguish between sub-ethnoses that exist as elements of the structure of an ethnos, and those that exist as active ethnoses.

Now let us dwell on the subordination of ethnic groups. For example, the French, a striking example of a monolithic ethnos, include the Celts of Breton, the Gascon of Basque origin, the Lorraine, descendants of the Alemannes, and the Provençal, an independent people of the Romance group. In the 9th century, when the ethnic name "French" was first documented, all the peoples mentioned above as well as others such as Burgundians, Normans, Aquitanians, Savoyards, did not yet constitute a single ethnos; only after an ethnogenesis of thousands of years did they form the ethnos which we call the French nation. The process of amalgamation did not, however, cause the levelling of ethnographic features.   They have survived as local provincial characteristics that do not violate the ethnic integrity of the French.

But in France we see the results of ethnic integration because the course of events of the Reformation led to the fact that the product of differentiation - French Huguenots - were forced to leave France in the seventeenth century. In saving their lives, they lost their ethnicity and became German nobles, Dutch burghers and, in large numbers, Boers who colonized South Africa. The French ethnos got rid of them as a superfluous element in an already diverse structure.

The Structure of the Ethnosphere of Medieval France

It may seem strange that we attribute to ethnos the ability of self-regulation, but almost all biological systems, including biocenoses, have it. Ethnos is dynamic in its historical development and, therefore, like any long-running natural process, it chooses the feasible solutions to maintain its existence. Others are cut off by selection and fade away.

All living systems resist destruction, i.e. they are anti-entropic and adapt to external conditions as much as possible. And since a certain complexity of structure makes an ethnos more resistant to external shocks, it is not surprising that where an ethnos was not so mosaic at birth, as in Velikorossiya in the 14th and 15th centuries, it began to form sub-ethnic entities, sometimes masquerading as classes, but not classes at all. The Cossacks emerged on the southern fringe, while the Pomors - on the northern fringe. Eventually they were joined by pioneers (as if just an occupation), who intermingled with the natives of Siberia to form the sub-ethnos of the Siberians, or Cheldon.

The church split led to the emergence of another sub-ethnic group, the Old Believers, ethnographically distinct from the mainstream Russians. In the course of history, these sub-ethnic groups dissolved into the main body of the ethnos, but at the same time new ones emerged.

The purpose of these sub-ethnic formations was to maintain ethnic unity through internal non-antagonistic rivalry. Obviously, this complexity is an organic part of the mechanism of the ethnic system and as such emerges in the very process of ethnic formation, or ethnogenesis. When the ethnic system simplifies in the phase of decline, the number of sub-ethnos is reduced to one, which marks the persistent (surviving) state of the ethnos.

But what is the mechanism of the emergence of sub-ethnoses? To answer this, it is necessary to go down an order of magnitude, where the taxonomic units we have classified into two classes: consortia and convixia. These divisions conveniently include small tribes, clans, corporations, local groups and other associations of people of all epochs.

Let us agree on the terms. Consortia we will call groups of people united by one historical destiny. This category includes circles, artels, sects, gangs, and other unstable associations. Most often they disintegrate, but sometimes they survive for generations. Then they become convixia, that is, groups of people with the same kind of life and family ties.

Convixia are little resistant. They are corroded by exogamy and shuffled by succession, that is, by a dramatic change in their historical environment. Surviving Convixia grow into sub-ethnos. Such are the aforementioned pathfinders, a consortium of desperate travelers who spawned a generation of steadfast Siberians, and the Old Believers, a consortium of religious and aesthetic devotees, including Boyarina Morozova, priests, Cossacks, peasants, and merchants.

The structure of the ethnosphere in Russia in the XVII-XVIII centuries.

In the 17th century, they did not yet stand out externally from the rest of the population. In the second generation, under Peter I, they already formed an isolated group, which at the end of the XVIII century retained rituals, customs and clothing that differed from the generally accepted. The consortium evolved into a conviction, and in the 19th century, having increased to 8 million people, it became a sub-ethnos. In the twentieth century it dissolved, as the reason for its emergence disappeared, and only inertia remained.

Both pioneers and Old Believers remained as part of their ethnos, but the descendants of the Spanish Conquistadors and English Puritans formed distinct ethnic groups in America, so that this order can be considered the limit of ethnic divergence. And it should be noted that the most ancient tribes evidently formed in the same way, only a very long time ago. The original consortium of vigorous people in isolation evolved into the ethnos that we now call a tribe.

Ethnology ends at this orderly level, but the principle of hierarchical coherence can continue to operate if necessary. At the order level below, we will find one person related to his environment. This can be useful for biographers of great men.

Going down another order of magnitude, we encounter not a complete biography of a person, but one episode of his life - for example, a crime committed that must be solved. And even lower, a random emotion that might inspire a poem or an accidental fight.

Sources of Energy

It should be remembered that this infinite fragmentation, which lies in the nature of things, does not remove the need to find wholenesses at a given level important for the task at hand. In particular, super-ethnic wholenesses are even more important to us, standing an order of magnitude above ethnicities, since our science also aims to achieve practical results, namely the protection of nature from man, the salvation of the biosphere in which we live.

As we know, man is part of the biosphere. What is the biosphere? It is not only the biomass of all living beings, including viruses and micro-organisms, but also the products of their vital activity: soils, sedimentary rocks, and free oxygen in the air. All this is the creation of the bio-sphere. These are the corpses of animals and plants that died long before us, but which provided us with the possibility of existence. And the energy that powers us comes from several sources.

On the one hand, from the corpses of our ancestors - animals, plants, micro-organisms. We eat them, we walk on them. We breathe them, they give us oxygen.

On the other hand, we draw energy from three sources that have completely different meanings. The maximum amount of energy that the Earth consumes, according to Vernadsky, is the energy of the sun. It is accumulated through photosynthesis in plants, plants are eaten by animals, this solar energy passes into the flesh and blood of all living beings that exist on Earth. An excess of this energy creates greenhouse effects, that is, conditions are very unfavorable. We do not need more of it than we need, we need as much as we are used to mastering.

The second type of energy is the energy of decay inside the Earth of radioactive elements. Once upon a time, these elements were plentiful. Gradually, radioactive decay is taking place inside the planet, the planet is heating up, and someday, when all these elements have decayed, it will either explode or turn back into a piece of rock.

They have a very negative effect on our life processes. Everyone knows what radiation sickness is; there is nothing good about it. Nevertheless, these phenomena inside the Earth, the so-called "chthonic" phenomena, have a great impact on us, but locally. The fact is that clusters of uranium and other ores are unevenly distributed over the Earth. There are large areas where the radioactivity is negligible, and where the ores are close to the surface, it is very high; so, the effects of this kind of energy on animals and humans are quite different.

And there is a third kind of energy, which we receive in small portions from the cosmos, these are the beams of energy coming from the depths of the Galaxy, which strike our Earth (like hitting a balloon with a whip), embracing some part of it, and lightning their energy effect on the biosphere, sometimes large, sometimes small. They come more or less rarely, at least not rhythmically, but from time to time, but it turns out impossible not to take them into account, too.

This last type of cosmic energy was only recently explored, so those scientists who are used to thinking of the Earth as a completely closed system, cannot get used to the fact that we are not living isolated from the world, but inside a huge galaxy, which affects us as well as all other factors determining the development of the biosphere.

The described phenomenon is the mechanism of each person and each group's belonging to the cosmos. Of course, it's not just about humans, but our topic, Natural Science, leads us to focus on human beings and see how these energetic influences influence the destiny of each of us, or the groups to which we belong.  What is needed to solve this question? It turns out that what is needed here, oddly enough, is an ordinary story.

Ordinary History

The word "history" has a huge number of meanings. You can say "social history" - the history of social forms. You can say "military history" - the history of battles and campaigns, and it will be a completely different history, with a different content and a different approach to the material. It can be the history of culture, the history of states and legal institutions, it can be the history of disease, after all. And in each case, the word "history" should have an addition - the history of what?

We should be interested in ethnic history, in ethnogenesis, the history of the origin and disappearance of ethnic groups.  But since the origin and disappearance of ethnic groups is first of all a process that we have not yet uncovered, and secondly a process that we need to uncover, we need to have the material, the archive of information from which to approach the solution of our problem. And that is the history of events in their coherence.

But what is an "event" when it comes to ethnic history? From a trivial position, the question does not deserve an answer. But let us remember that such phenomena as light and darkness, heat and cold, good and evil are just as obvious. To the layman everything is clear without optics, thermodynamics, ethics. But since we are introducing the concept of "event" into the scientific world, it is necessary to define it, that is, to agree on the meaning of the term.  Herein lies another difficulty: we have to use the term in the same sense as our sources, the ancient chroniclers. Otherwise, reading their writings will become exceedingly difficult and often futile. But once we have learned to understand their way of thinking, we have a wealth of information that the reader can grasp without the slightest difficulty.

The easiest way to define "event" is through the concept of "connections”. The growth and complication of ethnicity appears to contemporaries as the norm, but any loss or split is celebrated as something noteworthy, that is, it’s an event. But if so, then an event is the breaking of one or more ties either within the ethnos or on its border with another ethnos. The consequences of the rupture can be any, sometimes very favorable, but for the theoretical statement of the problem it does not matter. Either way, an event is a loss, even if it is something useful to be gotten rid of.

So ethnic history is the science of loss, and cultural history is the codification of objects that have survived and are preserved in museums, where they are to be catalogued. This is the basic difference between these two disciplines, which we will not confuse henceforth.  The events of history are known to us from the moment written sources began to describe events coherently across the entire Oikumene, or at least in the Old World.

Going further back in time will inevitably lead to aberrations of distance and to the blurring or disappearance of the boundaries of events. As a consequence, we will make things up instead of studying them. This must be avoided, because making things up is almost never adequate to reality. But we must also avoid the aberration of proximity - uncorrectable errors of exaggeration. Contemporary ethnic processes are not complete; we cannot tell how they will go on. And we can establish patterns, which is our goal, only on completed processes.

We will therefore take that middle period where the facts are known, their proportionality is clear, their validity has been established by the three thousand years' study of the first-class historians who came before us, and use this middle period as a model on which we will base all our considerations.

The chronology of this period is approximately from the 11th to 10th century B.C. to the beginning of the 19th century A.D., or from the fall of Troy to the surrender of Napoleon. Between these dates, there is absolutely enough material to grasp the full complexity of the problem.

Systemic Approach

One material is not enough to understand the problem. We need a tool, a methodology. What is the basis of our methodology? After the Second World War, there was a great discovery, not in our country, but in America, but it was also accepted in its entirety.

It's something called the systems-approach or systems analysis. Its author, Leo von Bertalanffy, is a German-American who worked in biology at the University of Chicago. In 1937, at a philosophy seminar, he gave a paper on a systems approach to the definition of "species”. The paper was not understood at all, and the author "put all his papers in a desk drawer”. Then he went off to war. Fortunately, he was not killed. When he returned to Chicago, he retrieved his old notes, repeated his report, and found a very different intellectual climate.

And what did he propose? No biologist knows (and Bertalanffy was a biologist) what a species is. Everyone knows that there is a dog, and there is a crow, and there is a bream, a flamingo, a beetle, a bedbug... Everyone knows this, but no one can define what it is. And why are animals of the same species and plants of the same species connected in some way? Bertalanffy proposed the definition of species as an open system.

A system is a method of analysis that pays attention not to the individuals that make up a species, say, not to specific dogs or cats, but to the relationships that exist between dogs or cats.  Let's say the student audience represents a system, but not because a certain number of people sit in it - students and a professor - but because there is a relationship between them - the professor talks and the students listen. In reality, it is as if this relationship does not exist; we cannot measure it, we cannot weigh it, we cannot determine its gradient, but students and professor exist only for the sake of this relationship, and it is possible to describe its nature. Let us condition the meaning of the terms and the way they are applied in practice. Too much striving for precision is not useful, and is often a hindrance to the research process. After all, looking at the Himalayas through a microscope makes no sense. Therefore, for planetary phenomena, we should accept the primary generalized categories of systemic connections, excluding the detailing, which will not give anything for understanding the whole. Let us divide the systemic relations into four types, which are necessary and sufficient for the method applied. Let us divide systems into open and closed (or closed), into rigid and corpuscular, or, as they are otherwise called, discrete. What is the meaning of this division?

An open system is, say, our planet Earth, which receives sunlight all the time, through which photosynthesis occurs, and the excess energy is released into space. An open system is a species that gets its energy supply in the form of food, which is absorbed by the animals of that species. They harvest that food, reproduce, give birth, die, and give their bodies to Mother Earth. It is an open system, which receives energy from outside and is renewed.

An example of a closed system is a stove, for example. It is in a room, and there is wood in it. It is cold. We light the stove, we do not add more wood, we close it, the wood burns down, the stove heats up, the temperature in the room rises, it is equal to the stove, and then they both cool down. That is the energy reserve in the form of wood is obtained once. After that the process comes to an end. It is a closed system.

Now the second kind of division. It is a rigid system. It is a well-coordinated machine where there is not a single extra part; it only works when all the screws are in place; it gets enough fuel, or vice versa, it stands and serves some purpose, like a microscope; there is nothing extra in it. In its pure form, a rigid system can never adapt to other tasks.

For example, a car still needs to be painted, but you can paint it blue, yellow, or green; the color does not matter. But ideally in a rigid system, everything should matter. Such a machine works very efficiently. But if one part breaks, it stops and fails.

A corpuscular system is a system of interaction between separate parts that are not connected but nevertheless need each other. The biological species is a corpuscular system; the family is a corpuscular system, not a rigid one, it is based on the husband loving his wife and the wife loving her husband. And children (there can be five or three of them), mother-in-law, mother-in-law’s relatives - although all of them are elements of this system, you can do without them. The only important thing is the connecting axis - the love of the husband for his wife and the wife for her husband, mutual or one-sided love. But as soon as this invisible connection ends, the system falls apart, and its elements are immediately incorporated into some other systemic integrity.

On the other hand, culture, the creation of human hands and mind, is a rigid system, though closed, incapable of independent development. Every other object, man-made, takes a form that preserves the material, be it stone, metal, or words and musical melody. The creation of human hands goes beyond the limits of natural self-development. It can either be preserved or destroyed.

The pyramids last a long time; during the same time mountains collapse, because the rocks that constitute them crack and become rubble due to the effects of variations in temperature and humidity. Rivers change their channels, eroding their banks and forming terraces. The forest swells up on the steppe in wet periods, and moves back down in dry ones. This is the triumphant life of the planet, and especially of the biosphere, the most plastic of all earth’s shells. And works of art and even technology have gained eternity instead of life. And if their closed systems turn into open ones, they die. The iron oxidizes, the marble crumbles, the music fades, the poetry is forgotten. The cruel old man Chronos devours his children. But this is understandable; what is important is another: how are such systems as ethnoses born and mature?

 A condition without which one cannot pose the problem of the primary emergence of ethnic integrity from individuals (people) of mixed origins, different levels of culture and different characteristics, we are entitled to ask ourselves: what attracts them to each other?   Obviously, the principle of conscious calculation and the pursuit of profit is absent, because the first generation is faced with a huge challenge - the need to break established relationships in order to replace them with new ones that meet their needs.

This is a risky business, and the starters seldom manage to reap the rewards. Nor is the principle of social proximity suitable, since the new ethnos destroys the institutions of the old. Consequently, one must disintegrate in relation to the old ethnos in order to enter the new ethnos at the moment of formation. Everything, otherwise! people unite according to the principle of complimentarity (compliment - hello, from the Latin complimentus). Complimentarity is unconscious sympathy for some people and antipathy for others, that is, there can be positive and negative complimentarity.

When an initial ethnos is created, the initiators of this emerging movement pick up the active guys because they simply like them.  "Come to us, you're right for us," was how the Vikings selected young men for their campaigns. They did not take those they considered unreliable, cowardly, grumpy or not fierce enough. All this was very important, for it was a question of taking a man in a boat, where each man had to carry the maximum weight and responsibility for his own life and the lives of his fellows.

It was the same way Romulus and Remus selected their fellows when they organized a bandit gang on the seven hills and began to terrorize the surrounding peoples. These guys became patricians, founders of a powerful social system.

The first Muslims did the same thing; they demanded that everyone accept the faith of Islam, but they also tried to include in their ranks people who fit in with them. It must be said that the Muslims departed from this principle rather quickly. The Arabs, as we already know, began to take everyone and paid very dearly for it, because as soon as the hypocritical Muslims, those who were, in general, absolutely indifferent to whether there was one God or a thousand, but profit, income and money were important, they came to power.

They were led by Moawiya ibn Abu Sufyan - the son of Muhammad's enemy - and declared something like this: "The faith of Islam must be observed, and I will drink wine at my house, and anyone who wishes may also drink. Everyone is obliged to pray, but if you miss namaz I won't pay any attention to that, and if you plunder the state treasury but I like you, I won't pay any attention to that either." That is, as soon as the principle of selection according to complementarity was replaced by the principle of universality, the system suffered a terrible blow and became warped.

The principle of complementarity also appears at the level of ethnicity, and in a very effective way. Here it is called "patriotism" and is in the competence of history, because you cannot love a people without respecting its ancestors. Internally, ethnic complimentarity is usually good for the ethnos as a powerful protective force. But sometimes it takes an ugly, negative form of hatred for everything alien; then it is called "chauvinism.

But complimentarity at the level of cultural type is always speculative. Usually it is expressed in arrogance, in which all outsiders and dissimilar people are called "savages”.  The principle of complementarity is not a social phenomenon. It is found in wild animals, but in domestic animals it is known by everyone, both in a positive (a dog or horse's attachment to its owner) and in a negative way. If you have a dog, then you know, that it treats your guests selectively - for some reason it treats some better and others worse. This is the principle on which animal domestication is based, the same principle which is family.  But when we take this phenomenon on a historical, large scale, these ties grow into a very powerful factor - the ethnic system is built on complimentarity.

So, the birth of any social institution is preceded by an embryo, an association of a certain number of people sympathetic to each other. As they begin to act, they enter the historical process, cemented by their chosen purpose and historical destiny. Whatever their future, their common destiny is the "condition without which one cannot".

Such a group may become a Viking band of brigands, a religious sect of Mormons, an order of Templars, a Buddhist community of monks, an Impressionist school, etc., but the one thing that can not be taken out of the equation is subconscious mutual engagement, if only to argue with one another. This is why we have called these germinal associations consortia. Not every consortium survives; most dissolve in the lifetime of its founders, but those that do manage to survive enter the history of society and immediately take on social forms, often creating a tradition.  Those few whose fate is not cut short by external blows, survive to the natural loss of increased activity, but retain the inertia of attraction to one another, expressed in common habits, worldviews, tastes, etc.

We called this phase of complimentary union conviviality. It no longer has a force of influence on the environment and is subject to the competence not of sociology, but of ethnography, because this group is united by everyday life. Under favorable conditions, convictions are stable, but their resistance to the environment tends to zero, and then they disintegrate among the surrounding consortia.

The Energy of Living Matter

It is clear from the above that ethnic groups are biophysical realities, always clothed in a social shell. Consequently, the debate over what is primary: the biological or the social, is akin to the debate over what is primary in an egg: the protein or the shell. Clearly, one is impossible without the other, so there is no point in arguing about it. There is, however, another point of view. "...The social factors that form ethnos, including ethnic identity, lead to the emergence of a population that is conjugated with it, that is, we face a picture directly opposite to the one given by L.N. Gumilev". Thus, the debate is whether being is the basis of consciousness or, conversely, consciousness is the basis of being. Indeed, with such a formulation of the question, there is a point of contention. Let us look into it.

Bromley has the right to choose any postulate for his logical construction, even a quite idealistic one, according to which the real existence of the ethnos is not only determined, but also generated by its consciousness. This, however, risks placing him in the position of Teilhard de Chardin, rejected by the French Communists and Catholics alike. The situation is similar. The act of creating material reality is ascribed to human consciousness, placed above or in His place as the Creator of the world. Catholics will not agree with this. And materialist philosophers will not accept the thesis that consciousness is primary.

But even empirical scientists do not have the right to agree with Bromley's thesis, because it violates the law of conservation of energy. After all, ethnogenesis is a process that manifests itself in the work (in the physical sense). Campaigns are carried out, temples and palaces are built, the landscape is reconstructed, the oppression of dissenters inside and outside the created system is suppressed. And to do this work you need energy, the most ordinary kind of energy, measured in kilograms or calories. To think that consciousness, even an ethnic one, can be an energy generator is to allow for the reality of telekinesis, which is only appropriate in science fiction.

Explanation. The stone blocks on the top of the pyramid were lifted not by ethnic self-consciousness, but by muscular force of Egyptian workers according to the principle: "one-two-three, take it". If it was the Libyans, the Nubians, the Canaanites... the case did not change. The role of the consciousness, and in this case not an ethnic consciousness but a personal consciousness, was to coordinate the forces at its disposal, and the difference between managing a process and the energy that makes it happen is obvious.

What form of energy is it? Clearly it is not mechanical, even though it shows up in mechanical movements, migrations, walks, construction of buildings, but it is a manifestation, it is not mechanical. It is clear that it is not electric either: electricity behaves differently and could be detected by machines. It's also clearly not thermal. What form of energy is that? - The author pondered.

In the Soviet Union, we published a wonderful book - a posthumous work by V.I. Vernadsky,, The Chemical Structure of the Earth's Biosphere and its Environment, described this very form.   Vernadsky called it the geo/bio/chemical energy of the living matter of the biosphere. This is the same energy, which is obtained by plants through photosynthesis and then assimilated by animals through food. It makes all living things expand through reproduction to the maximum possible extent.

A single petal of cussweed in a large lake can, under favorable conditions, cover the entire lake with cussweed and stop only where there are banks. A single seed of the dandelion, if its offspring are not destroyed, will cover the whole earth. Elephants are the slowest to reproduce. V. I. Vernadsky, in his book, calculated how long it would take for elephants, at the normal rate of reproduction, to occupy the entire landmass of the Earth - 735 years.

The Earth is not overflowing with life only because this energy is multidirectional and one system lives at the expense of the other, one extinguishes the other. "Killing and resurrecting, swelling the universal soul - this is the Earth's holy will, incomprehensible to itself." Now we know the name of this universal soul - it is the geo-biochemical energy of the living matter of the biosphere.

But if energy is the engine of events, then it must behave according to all the laws of energy. First of all, it has to correspond to the energy equivalent, i.e. it has to convert into other forms of energy, for example into mechanical energy, or into thermal energy. And it does. To electrical energy? Probably, too. Where is this energy contained, in which organs of the human body? Physiologists can probably answer this question.

Obviously, the living person himself creates some tension around himself, has some real energy field or a combination of fields, like an electromagnetic field, consisting of some power lines, which are not at rest, but in rhythmic oscillation with different frequency.

The question is logical: what does the human energy field have to do with the problem of ethnicity and ethnogenesis that interests us?   To answer this question, let us remember that the basis of the ethnic division is the difference in the behavior of the individuals that make up the ethnos. Therefore, we are primarily interested in the influence that the presence of an individual's biofield has on its behavior.

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