4. Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere, Gumilev
Part two, CHARACTERISTICS OF ETHNOS, CONTAINING A LIST OF THE FEATURES OF ETHNIC PHENOMENON
[Note: Here we are still defining Ethnos, by comparing it to the many other markers and finding they do not explain it. There are so many examples given from all cultures that it is a potpourri of history. Perhaps the examples are exciting, or even overwhelming. Because each is a snippet of history, and not the full story. But as the book progresses, those snippets get consolidated. Even though, painting a complete history is not the objective of this writing.]
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COMPILED IN ORDER TO BE ABLE TO GIVE A GENERAL EXPLANATION OF ETHNOGENESIS, A PROCESS - IN WHICH ETHNIC GROUPS ARISE AND DISAPPEAR.
IV. Ethnos and Ethnonym
In studying the general laws of ethnology we must first of all learn that the real ethnos, on the one hand, and the ethnic name (ethnonym) adopted by its members, on the other hand, are not adequate to each other[1]. Often we meet several different ethnoses bearing the same name, or, on the contrary, one ethnos can be called differently. Thus, the word "Romans" (romani) originally meant the citizens of the polis of Rome, but by now means their neighbors, the Italics, and not even the Latins who lived in the other cities of Latium.
In the era of the Roman Empire of the first and second centuries, the number of Romans increased by including all Italics: Etruscans, Samnites, Ligurs, Cisalpine Gauls and many inhabitants of the provinces, not at all of Latin origin. After Caracalla's edict of 212. "Romans" were defined as all free inhabitants of the municipalities within the Roman Empire, including Greeks, Cappadocians, Jews, Berbers, Gauls, Illyrians, Germans, and others. The concept of "Roman" seemed to have lost its ethnic meaning, but this was not really the case: it simply changed it. The common point instead of unity of origin and language became unity not even of culture, but of historical destiny.
In this form, the ethnos existed for three centuries - a considerable period - and did not disintegrate. On the contrary, it was transformed in the IV-V centuries due to the adoption of Christianity as a state religion, which became after the first three Councils a defining feature. Those who recognized these Councils, sanctioned by the state power, were their own, a Roman. And those who did not recognized them became the enemy. On this principle a new ethnos was formed, which we conventionally call "Byzantine. Remember, however, that those we call Byzantines called themselves "Romans," i.e., "Romans," even though they spoke Greek. Gradually many Slavs, Armenians, and Syrians joined the ranks of the Romans, but they retained the name "Romans" until 1453, i.e., until the fall of Constantinople.
The Romans regarded themselves as "Romans" and not the population of Italy, where the feudal lords were the Lombards, the townspeople were the Syrian Semites, who in the 1st-3rd centuries populated an empty Italy, and the peasants were the former prisoners of war from all the peoples ever defeated by the Romans of the Empire. But the Florentines, Genoese, Venetians and other inhabitants of Italy considered themselves "Romans" rather than the Greeks, and on this basis claimed the priority of Rome, where only ruins remained of the ancient city.
A third branch of the ethnonym "Romans" originated on the Danube, where Dacia was a place of exile after the Roman conquest. Here they served sentences for rebellions against Roman rule: Phrygians, Cappadocians, Thracians, Galatians, Syrians, Greeks, Illyrians, in short, all eastern subjects of the Roman Empire. To understand each other, they explained themselves in common Latin. When the Roman legions left Dacia, the descendants of the exiles remained and formed an ethnic group, which in the nineteenth century adopted the name "Romanians," i.e., "Romans.
If between the "Romans" of the times of the Republic and the "Roman citizens" of the late Empire it is still possible to see a continuity, at least as a gradual extension of the concept which is functionally connected with the spread of culture, the Byzantines and Romans do not even have such a connection.
Hence it follows, that the word changes its meaning and content and cannot serve as an identifying sign of an ethnicity. Obviously, it is also necessary to take into account the context in which the word carries its meaning, and thus the era, because the meaning of words changes over time. This is even more indicative when parsing the ethnonyms "Turk," "Tatar," and "Mongol" - examples which cannot be overlooked.
EXAMPLES OF CAMOUFLAGE
In the 6th century the Turks were called a small people, inhabiting the eastern slopes of the Altai and Khangai. By several successful wars Turks were able to conquer all the steppes from Khingan to the Sea of Azov. The subjects of the Great Kaganate, preserving their own ethnonyms for internal use, also began to be called Türks, because they were subordinated to the Türkic khan. When the Arabs conquered Sogdiana and encountered nomads, they started calling them all Turks, including Ugric-Magyars. The European scientists in the 18th century called all nomads "les Tartars", and in the 19th century, when the linguistic classifications became fashionable, they assigned the name "Turks" to a particular language group. Thus, the category of "Turks" includes many peoples, which were not part of them in ancient times, such as the Yakuts, the Chuvash, and the Ottoman Turks.
The latter were formed before the eyes of historians by mixing the hordes of Turkmens who came to Asia Minor with Ergogrul, Gazis - voluntary fighters for Islam, among whom were Kurds, Seljuks, Tatars and Circassians, Slavic youths who were slaves taken as janissaries, (captured and sold young slaves, who were trained in the army), Greeks, Italians, Arabs, Cypriots, etc., the renegade Frenchmen and Germans who sought career and fortune, and the huge numbers of Georgian, Ukrainian and Polish women sold by the Tatars in the slave bazaars. Only the language was Turkic, because it was accepted in the army. And this mishmash during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries merged into a monolithic people which borrowed the name "Turks" in memory of those steppe warriors who 1000 years ago won glory on the plains of Central Asia and died without leaving descendants[2]. Again the ethnonym reflects not the true state of affairs, but traditions and claims.
The modification of the ethnonym "Tatars" is an example of direct camouflage. Before the XII century it was an ethnic name for a group of thirty large clans that lived on the banks of the Kerulen. In the twelfth century this ethnic group became stronger, and Chinese geographers began to use this name for all Central Asian nomads: Turkic-speaking, Tungus-speaking, and Mongolian-speaking, including Mongols. When Chinggis (Genghis) adopted the name "Mongol" as the official name for his subjects in 1206, his neighbors, out of habit, continued to call Mongols as Tatars for some time. In this form the word "tatar", as a synonym of the word "Mongol", got to Eastern Europe and grafted into the Volga region, where the local population, as a sign of loyalty to the Khan of the Golden Horde, began to be called Tatars.
But the original bearers of this name - Keraites, Naymans, Oirat and Tatars began to call themselves Mongols[3]. Thus, the names changed their places. At that time the scientific terminology arose, when the Tatar anthropological type was called "Mongoloid", and the language of Volga region Kipchak Turks was called Tatar language. In other words, we use a knowingly camouflaged terminology even in science[4].
But further goes not simply a confusion, but an ethnonymic phantasmagoria. Not all nomadic subjects of the Golden Horde were loyal to its government. Rebels who lived in the steppes west of the Urals became known as Nogai,[5] and those who lived on the eastern edge of the ulus of Dzhuchye, Tarbagatai and on the banks of the Irtysh, and due to the remoteness from the capital were virtually independent, they became the ancestors of the Kazakhs.
All three of these ethnic groups arose in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries due to the rapid mixing of different ethnic components. The ancestors of the Nogai were the Cumans who survived the defeat of Batyev (Batu a Mongol Khan), the steppe Alans, the Central Asian Turks who came as part of the Mongol army, and the inhabitants of the southern edge of Russia who converted to Islam, which became at that time a symbol of ethnic consolidation. The Tatars included the Kama Bulgars, Khazars and Burtases, as well as part of the Cumans and Ugrians - Misharis. The same mixture was the population of the White Horde, from which in the XV century were formed three Kazakh Juks. But this is not all.
At the end of the XV century. Russian detachments from the Upper Volga began attacking Tatar cities in the Middle Volga region, forcing a part of the population to leave their homeland and go to Central Asia under the leadership of Sheibani-khan (1500-1510). There they were met as the worst enemies, because the local Turks, who at that time were called "Chagatai" (after the second son of Genghis, Chagatai, the head of the Central Asian ulus), were ruled by the descendants of Timur, an enemy of the steppe and Volga Tatars, who devastated the Volga region in 1395-1396.
The Horde, who left their homeland, took a new name-"Uzbeks", in honor of Khan Uzbek (1312-1341), who established Islam as a state religion in the Golden Horde. In 16th century "Uzbeks" defeated the last Timurid - Babur, who took the rest of his followers to India and won a new kingdom for himself. So, the Turks who remained in Samarkand and Fergana bear the name of their conquerors - the Uzbeks. The same Turks, who left for India, became known as "Mongols", in memory of the fact that three hundred years before they submitted to the Mongolian prince. And the real Mongols, who settled in the XIII century in Eastern Iran, even retaining their language, are called Khezareans, from the Persian word "Khezar" - a thousand - (implying a combat unit, division).
And where are the Mongols, after the name of which is called "yoke", hanging over Russia for 240 years? As an ethnic group, they did not exist, because all the children of Jochi in the three hordes were bequeathed by Genghis only 4 thousand warriors each, of whom only part came from the Far East. These latter were not called "Tatars" but "Khins," from the Chinese Chzhurchenskogo name of the empire Kin (today. Jin)[6]. This rare name last mentioned in "Zadonschina", where "Khinovin" called Mamay[7]. Hence, the "yoke" was by no means Mongolian, but was carried out by the ancestors of nomadic Uzbeks, who should not be confused with the settled Uzbeks, although in the 19th century they mingled, and now form a single ethnos, equally revering the Timurids and the Sheibanids, who were in the 16th century their worst enemies, because this enmity lost its meaning and significance in the 17th century.
THE POWERLESSNESS OF PHILOLOGY IN HISTORY
The above examples are enough to state that the ethnic name or even self-name and the phenomenon of ethnicity as a stable group of individuals of the species Homo sapiens do not overlap. Therefore, the philological methodology, which studies words, is not applicable to ethnology, and we should turn to history in order to check how far this discipline can help us in our problem statement. But here, too, we encounter unexpected difficulties.
The unit of inquiry used by historical scholarship is a social institution, which can be a state, a tribal union, a religious sect, a trading company (e.g., the East India), a political party, etc., in short, any institution in any age and in any nation. Sometimes the institution of the state and the ethnos coincide, and then we observe in some cases nations of the modern type. But this is a case characteristic of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while in antiquity such coincidences were rare. It happens that a religious sect unites like-minded individuals who, like the Sikhs in India, merge into an ethnos, and then the origin of the individuals incorporated by the community is not taken into account. But often such communities are unstable, and disintegrate into ethnicities, as was the case with the Muslim community founded by Muhammad in the seventh century. If under the first four caliphs in the countries of Islam there was a process of fusion of Arab tribes, Syrians and partially Persians into a single ethnos, then already under the Umayyads (661-750), this process stopped, and under the Abbasids the descendants of conquerors and the subjugated began to merge into new ethnoses with a single interethnic culture.
The process stopped, and the descendants of the conquerors and the conquered began to put together new ethnic groups with a single inter-ethnic culture, conventionally called "Muslim", with the Arabic language, the awareness of their unity in comparison with Christians and pagans, with different historical fates and different stereotypes of behavior, which manifested itself in the creation of various sects and ideological concepts.
It would seem that the emirates and sultanates that emerged as a result of the isolation of ethnic groups should have conformed to ethnic boundaries, but this was not the case. Successful warlords subjugated territories with multilingual populations for a short time and then fell prey to their neighbors, i.e. political entities had different destinies than ethnic entities. Of course, the common historical fate contributes to the formation and preservation of ethnic groups, but historical fate [8] can be the same for two or three nationalities and different within one nationality.
For example, the Anglo-Saxons and Welsh Celts were united by the state in the XIII century, but they did not merge into a single ethnos, which, however, does not prevent them from living in peace, and the Eastern Armenians, subordinated to Iran in the III century, and the Western Armenians, connected with Byzantium, had different fates, but the ethnic unity was not broken. In the 16th-17th centuries French Huguenots and Catholics were very different in their historical destinies, and also in the nature of their culture, both before the Edict of Nantes and after its revocation. But the ethnic integrity of France remained unchanged despite the bloody wars and dragonades. Consequently, the formation of ethnoses, and ethnogenesis, lies deeper than the visible historical processes recorded by the sources. History can help ethnology, but does not replace it.
V. Mosaicism as a property of ethnicity
IT IS POSSIBLE TO DISPENSE WITH THE TRIBAL SYSTEM
Many ethnic groups are divided into tribes and clans. Can this division be considered an obligatory belonging of ethnos or at least a primary stage of its formation, or at last a form of a collective which preceded the appearance of ethnos itself[9]? The reliable material at our disposal allows us to answer: no!
First of all, by no means all modern peoples have or have ever had during their existence a clan or tribal division. The Spanish, French, Italians, Romanians, English, Ottoman Turks, Great Russians, Ukrainians, Sikhs, Greeks (not Hellenes) and many others did not and do not have it. But the clan, or clan system exists in the Celts, Kazakhs, Mongols, Tungus, Arabs, Kurds, and a number of other peoples.
It is difficult to consider the clan system an earlier stage, because the Byzantines or Sassanid Persians, peoples formed 1000 years earlier than the Mongols, and 1200 years earlier than the Kazakhs, got along splendidly without clans and phratries. Of course, it is possible to assume that in antiquity the clan system was ubiquitous, but even if so, by the historical period when peoples (ethnoses) emerged before the eyes of the historian, such an assumption is inapplicable. It is more correct to recognize that the scheme "clan - tribe - people - nation" refers to social development, i.e. lies on a different plane. The fact that the dominant forms of sociability throughout mankind during the existence of Homo sapiens were different families, is not directly relevant to the problem, since ethnic integrity does not coincide with either the family unit or the level of production and culture. Therefore, in our study we must look for other criteria and other identifying features.
At the same time, it should be noted that in the peoples with a clan-tribal division (with the Celts), fraternities, bones ("seok" with the Altaians) and tribal associations ("jus" of the Kazakhs), etc. are constructive. These intra-ethnic units are necessary to maintain ethnic unity itself. The division into groups regulates the relations both of individuals to the ethnos as a whole, and of clan or family collectives among themselves. It is only through this division that exogamy is preserved, preventing incestuous marriages. The representatives of the clans express the will of their fellow tribesmen in popular assemblies and form stable alliances for external wars, both defensive and offensive.
Вut in Scotland, for example, the clan system survived the Viking raids of the tenth century, attacks by feudal lords in the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, the war with the English bourgeoisie in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and only the capitalists and the nobles were able to destroy it. And where the clan system was less pronounced, such as with the Polabian Slavs, the Danish and German knights, it took two centuries (11th and 12th centuries) to dismantle it, despite its undoubted bellicosity, undeniable militancy and enviable courage of the Bodricians, Lutyches and the inhabitants of the island of Ruga. The division of the ethnos into tribes has the function of a skeleton on which muscles can be built up and thereby gain strength to fight against the environment.
Let us try to propose another system of reference, suitable not for a part but for the whole totality of the observed collisions.
HOW IS THE CLAN SYSTEM BEING REPLACED?
How is the absence of tribal groups compensated for in fully developed peoples at the stage of a class society? The presence of class structure and class struggle in slave-holding, feudal and capitalist societies are established and not subject to revision. Hence, the division into classes cannot be functionally analogous to the division into tribes. Indeed, in parallel with the division of society into classes, we find the division of ethnic groups into groups that do not coincide at all with classes. They may be called "corporations," but this word corresponds to the concept only in a first approximation and will be replaced later on.
For example, in feudal Europe within a single ethnos, say the French, the ruling class consisted of different corporations: 1) feudal lords in the literal sense, i.e., holders of tenements bound to the crown by an oath of vassalage; 2) knights, united in orders; 3) notables, forming the apparatus of royal power (Nobless des robes); 4) high clergy; 5) scholars, such as professors at the Sorbonne; 6) the town patricians, themselves divided along territorial lines, and so on. It is possible, depending on the degree of approximation adopted, to distinguish more or less groups, but one must necessarily take into account the affiliation to parties, for example Armagnac and Burgundy at the beginning of the fifteenth century.
Sometimes readers are tempted to identify these groups with estates, understanding the latter as social groups. But we must be precise: social divisions are classes, and estates are administrative divisions, because in the Middle Ages they "did not acquire any special importance in the political world, but denoted themselves"[10].
The same groups described here are not even estates in the full sense, but communities, which are "prerequisites of production."[11] As variants of professional communities the clan communities - extended families - may also appear[12]. That is why K. Marx called the history of the Middle Ages zoological, noting that "corporations" of this type were populated by bastards (born without rights), who had no rights under the law, but who achieved them through energy and family ties. Bastards played a particularly large role after the Hundred Years' War. The bastard Dunois, for example, was considered the first knight of France and was an earl.
In relation to the masses, however, such a division applied to an even greater extent, since each feudal province then had a distinctly individual character. For example, the Rouenians in the twelfth century showed enmity toward Philip II Augustus, who had freed them from the English, and the Marseilles, learning of Louis IX's captivity in Egypt, sang the "Te Deum," hoping to get rid of "sires."[14] In bourgeois society we no longer see those corporations, but the principle remains the same. Within ethnoses and beyond classes there are for each individual people a "his" and "not his" circle. But in relation to foreign expansions, all these groups acted as one: the French.
That "corporations," as we have called them conventionally, are immeasurably less enduring and long-lasting than tribal groupings is indisputable, but the latter are not eternal either. So, the difference between the two is not fundamental. The similarity is that they bear the same load, maintaining the unity of the ethnos through the internal division of functions.
And the most important and curious thing is that at their emergence, the "corporations" differ from each other only in nuances of psychology, but with time the differences deepen and crystallize, passing into customs and rites, i.e. into the phenomena studied by ethnographers. For example, the Old Slavic kissing rite was transformed in Russia and Poland into a hand-kissing for married ladies and was preserved among the local nobility, but disappeared from the everyday life of other estates.
А. Gorky, who observed the everyday life of the petty bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia of the raznochinets in the large cities of the Volga region, states such profound differences that he suggests that these newly formed population groups should be considered as "different tribes" [15]. In the sense in which he uses this notion (referring to differences in everyday life, morals, and perceptions), he is right, and his observation is fruitful. In our time these differences have almost disappeared. They were characteristic of a short period of about 80 years, but we have already said that the duration of the phenomenon does not affect the principal side of the case.
FORMATION OF SUBETHNIC GROUPS
The concept of "corporation" as proposed is clear, but not sufficient for our analysis, since it assumes that this unit is not only composed of ethnographic features, but is also delimited by social partitions from other "corporations." Often sub-ethnic units do not coincide with social ones. This shows that the example given is a particular case of the general rule that’s sought.
Let us continue with our example of the ethnogenesis of the French. In the 16th century, the Reformation touched this nation and shuffled all the former "corporations" beyond recognition. The feudal aristocracy, petty nobility, bourgeoisie and peasantry were split into "papists" and "Huguenots. The social bases of the two groups did not differ, but the ethno-territorial divisions were clearly visible. Calvinism was a success among the Celts of the lower Loire, and the mercantile La Rochelle became a mainstay of the Reformed. The Gascon lords and kings of Navarre embraced Calvinism. The descendants of the Burgundians, the peasants of the Cevennes, and the heirs of the Albigensians, the bourgeois of Languedoc, joined the movement. But Paris, Lorraine and central France remained faithful to the Roman Church. All the former "corporations" disappeared, as belonging to a "community" or "church" became for two centuries an indicator of belonging to a particular sub-ethnic entity.
And it cannot be said that theology played a decisive role here. Most Frenchmen were "politicians," that is, they refused to be interested in the disputes of the Sorbonne and Geneva. Illiterate Gascon barons, half-wild Highlanders, dashing corsairs of La Rochelle, or artisans in the suburbs of Paris and Angers were not at all familiar with the subtleties of the interpretation of predestination or transubstantiation. If they gave their lives for the Mass or the Bible, then both both proved to be a symbol of their self-affirmation and opposition to each other, and thus an indicator of underlying contradictions. These contradictions were not class-based, since both sides were fought by the nobility, the peasantry and the bourgeoisie. But Catholics and Huguenots did differ in stereotypical behavior, and this, as we agreed at the beginning, is the basic principle of ethnic separation, for which there was sufficient reason.
Well, what if the Huguenots had defended a piece of territory for themselves and established an independent state there, like, say, the Swiss or the North Americans? They would probably have to be regarded as a special ethnos, arising as a result of the zigzag of historical destiny, because they would have a special way of life, culture, mental disposition and perhaps language, for it is unlikely that they would explain themselves in a Parisian dialect, but would rather choose one of the local dialects. It would have been a process analogous to the separation of the Americans from the English.
The Scots are certainly an ethnicity, but they are made up of the Guilders (Highlanders), the Celts, and the Lowlanders (Tweed Valley people). Their origins are different. The ancient population, the Caledonians, who were decorated with tattoos (Picts), fought off the onslaught of the Romans in the 1st and 2nd centuries. In the third century, they were joined by the Scots who migrated from Ireland. Both tribes made devastating raids on Romanized Britain and then on the northern outskirts of England and fought the Norse Vikings who had established themselves in the east of the island. In 954 the Scots were lucky: they conquered Lothian, a plain on the banks of the river Tweed inhabited by descendants of the Saxons and Norse Vikings. The Scottish kings gained many wealthy subjects, bound them to themselves, and with their help reduced the independence of the Celtic clan chiefs. But they had to adopt many of the customs of their subjects, particularly feudal institutions and manners. The rich and vigorous inhabitants of Lothian forced their Celtic overlords to turn Scotland into a small kingdom because they took over the protection of the border with England[16]. In the fourteenth century French adventurers, associates of kings Jean Baliol and Robert the Bruce, poured into Scotland to wage war against England. The French multiplied the number of frontier feudal lords. The Reformation was more embraced by the Celts, and Catholics were retained in the valleys along with the Calvinists. In short, in the genesis of this nation races and cultures, clan system and feudalism mixed, but the complexity of the composition did not disturb the ethnic monolithic, as manifested in the clashes with the English and later with the Irish.
The Russian Old Believers are an even more typical example of a different order. It is known that this is a small part of Velikorosses who did not accept some church reforms in the seventeenth century. At that time church service was not only a religious but also a synthetic art, i.e. it filled an aesthetic vacuum. The requirements for the performance of the rite were very high, because just as nowadays one cannot derive pleasure from reading bad poetry or admiring ugly pictures, so in the XVII century the replacement of the profane alleluia by the troguba, and replacing the blackened images by the new pink-and-blue icons, was a shock for a certain part of the worshippers. They simply could not concentrate in the the environment, which irritated them.
In essence, it was the same split ethnos as in Western Europe during the Reformation, but on a smaller scale. At the same time, not all Orthodox Christians were in favor of the old rite. Those who did so stood firm, not fearing execution or torture. At the opportunity, they took the counteroffensive and dealt with the Nikonians as harshly as they dealt with them. This manifested itself during the Streltsy uprisings under the regency of Tsarevina Sophia. The intensity of passions was the same for both. In XVII century there was a dispute only about church ceremonialism, but in everything else - in life, in education system, in habits - Old Believers were not distinguished from the general mass of Russians. In the second generation, under Peter 1, they constituted a certain isolated group of the population. By the end of the XVIII century they had, and partly preserved, customs, rituals, dress, sharply different from those that had become common.
Catherine II ended the persecution of Old Believers, but this did not lead to their merger with the mainstream ethnos. The newly formed intra-ethnic unity included millionaire merchants, Cossacks, and semi-impoverished peasants from the Trans-Volga region.
This unit, first united by a common fate, i.e., an attachment to principles so dear to them that for the sake of these principles they went to death, for the sake of those principles, became a group united by the commonality of life, led by spiritual leaders (instructors) of various schools and directions. In the twentieth century it gradually began to dissolve, as the reason for its emergence had long ceased to exist, only inertia remained.
The examples we have given are vivid but rare. More often the functions of intra-ethnic groupings are assumed by naturally formed territorial associations - zemlyachestvo. The presence of such divisions, as well as the factions in the clan system, does not undermine ethnic unity.
Now we can draw the following conclusion: social forms of intra-ethnic unities are bizarre and do not always coincide with subdivisions of the ethnos; the intra-ethnic fragmentation is a condition of maintaining the unity of the ethnos and giving it stability: it is typical for any epoch and stage of social development.
VARIANTS OF ETHNIC CONTACTS
So far we have considered fractional groups within large ethnic groups, but the problem is by no means exhausted by this. In the real historical process there is no strictly isolated existence of ethnic groups, but there are different variants of ethnic contacts arising in the territories inhabited by the different ethnic groups politically united in multi-ethnic states. When studying their relations, it is possible to distinguish four variants:
(a) coexistence, in which ethnic groups do not mix and imitate each other, borrowing only technical innovations; (b) assimilation, i.e. absorption of one ethnos by another with complete oblivion of origin and former traditions; (c) mestization, in which traditions of previous ethnoses and ancestral memory are preserved and combined; these variations are usually unstable and exist due to the addition of new mestizos; (d) fusion, in which traditions of both primary components are forgotten and a new, third ethnos appears alongside with (or instead of) two preceding ones. This is essentially the main variant of ethnogenesis. For some reason it is observed of all other variants.
Let's illustrate this four-member system with the help of vivid examples. Variant (a) is the most common. Let's imagine that a Russian, a German, a Tatar and a Georgian get in a streetcar,
German, Tatar, and Georgian, all belonging to the Europoid race, wearing the same clothes, having had lunch in the same canteen and with the same newspaper under their arm. It is obvious to all that they are not identical, even minus their individual differences.[17] "So what? - One of my opponents said - “If there is not an acute national incident on this streetcar, all four will quietly ride on, presenting an example of people who have broken away from their ethnicities."
No, in our opinion, any change in the situation will cause these people to react differently, even if they act at the same time. Let's say a young man appears on the streetcar and begins to behave inappropriately toward a lady. How would our characters act? The Georgian is likely to grab the offender by the chest and try to throw him out of the streetcar. The German will squeak and call the police. The Russian will say a few sacramental words, while the Tatar will prefer not to participate in the conflict. A change in the situation, which requires a change in behavior, makes the difference in stereotypes of behavior among the representatives of different ethnic groups (super-ethnoses) especially noticeable.
And this is quite understandable. All things and phenomena are learned in combinations. Soda and citric acid poured side by side will give a reaction of neutralization with a rapid hiss only in the tone if you scorch them with water. In history, as in an aqueous solution, there are reactions all the time, and there is no hope of it to come to an end. Even the mere coexistence of different ethnicities in bringing them closer together is not neutral. Sometimes it is simply necessary.
For example, in the upper Congo, the Bantu and Pygmies live in symbiosis. Without the Pygmies' help, the Negroes cannot walk in the forest except on trails, and the latter quickly become overgrown without the Pygmies' help. A Bantu negro can get lost in the forest like a European and die within twenty meters of his own home. And Pygmies need knives, utensils and other household items. For these two ethnic groups, dissimilarity is a guarantee of well-being, and this is what their friendship is based on.
L.N. Tolstoy, who observed clashes between Chechens and Grebenka Cossacks, accurately described a variant of prolonged coexistence with constant enmity. But he correctly noted the mutual respect of the two neighboring ethnic groups and wariness of the Cossacks to the soldiers, who on the Terek were the pioneers of the assimilation of the Cossacks by the Great Russians. The latter ended in the early 20th century.
Option (b) (assimilation) is most often carried out by methods that are not so bloody as they are offensive. The object of assimilation is given an alternative: to lose either your conscience or your life. Escape from destruction by giving up everything dear and familiar in order to become a second-class citizen among the winners.
The latter, too, have little to gain, for they acquire fellow tribesmen who are hypocritical and, as a rule, inferior, since one can only control the outward manifestations of the behavior of a subjugated ethnos, not its moods. The English were convinced of this in the 19th century by the Irish, the Spanish by Simon Bolivar's guerrillas, the Chinese by the Dungans. There are too many examples, but the point is clear.
Variant (c) (mestización) is observed very often, but the offspring from exogamous marriages either perish in the third or fourth generation, or split up into paternal and maternal lines. For example, the Turks in the sixteenth century believed that it was sufficient to utter the formula of confessing Islam and obeying the Sultan to become a true Turk. In other words, they viewed ethnicity as a "condition" that could be changed arbitrarily. Therefore, the Turks accepted any adventurers into their service as long as they were experts in a particular craft or military art. The consequences were felt a hundred years later.
The decline of the Sublime Porte in the seventeenth century attracted the attention of contemporary Turkish writers. In their opinion, the cause of the decline was "ajemoglans," i.e., children of renegades,[18] and the sincerity of the neophytes was doubted. Some of the renegades were energetic and useful men, like the Frenchman Keprilou and the Greek Hyraddin Barbarossa, but most of them sought a warm place and obtained their sinecures through the harems of the viziers, filled with Polish, Croatian, Italian, Greek, etc. women. These rogues, having no ni foi ni loi, were destroying the Ottoman ethnos, and the real Ottomans were already in the XVIII century reduced to the position of an ethnos oppressed in its own country. The influx of foreigners crippled the stereotype of behavior, which affected the venality of viziers, the corruptness of judges, the fall of the army's combat efficiency and the collapse of the economy.
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Turkey had become a "sick man. Analyzing the reasons for such a strange transformation of a strong nation into a weak one and talking about the role of renegades, a famous Russian orientalist V.D. Smirnov wrote in his dissertation: "Would anyone, even in jest, assert, that Messrs. Tchaikovsky, Langevich, etc., of the Slavs, Greeks, Magyars, Italians, etc., converted to Islam by conscience? No one, no doubt. And meanwhile it was the fate of such shapeshifters to enjoy the fruits of the valiant exploits of the Ottoman tribe. Having no religion, they were devoid of any moral conviction; feeling no sympathy for the people over whom they ruled, they lived one animal life. Harem intrigue replaced the real politics that interested every true citizen. Family ties were not caused to them by a disfigured state of the body or made up for by a vile vice... Their concept of the good did not go beyond the welfare of their own pockets. Their sense of duty was limited to the search for legitimate excuses to cover their lawlessness, without the risk of becoming a victim of the machinations of other similar public figures. In a word, being Ottomans in name, they were not really"[19]. Where is the decisive factor: in nature or in the civil state?
THE ROLE OF EXOGAMY
So, the introduction of foreign tribesmen into Turkey exacerbated the already growing crisis of class contradictions, for which the transformation of ethnic integrity into chimerical (chimera, a destructive hybrid), integrity played the role of a catalyst, for everyone understands that sincere loyal officials are more valuable than hypocritical and unprincipled ones. Conversely, the development of class contradictions for the ethnogenesis of the Ottomans played the role of a vector. The combination of ethnic and social processes in one region proved to be a factor in the anthropogenic breakdown of the landscapes of the once richest countries of the world, which in ancient times were referred to as the countries of the "bountiful Crescent". The conquests of Selim I in the 16th century put Syria, Palestine, Egypt and Mesopotamia in the hands of the Ottoman sultans.
The third millennium B.C. had transformed the pristine landscape. The Sumerians in the lower reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates "separated the water from the land", and the country they created was called "Eden" by their contemporaries. The Akkadians built Babylon, the "Gate of God," the world's first city with a population of millions, for which there was enough food without importation from distant countries. Antioch and then Damascus were large, cheerful, and cultured cities that thrived on local resources. Asia Minor fed the vast city of Constantinople.
But the cultural landscape needed to be constantly maintained. This was understood by the Arab caliphs who bought slaves in Zanzibar to maintain irrigation in Mesopotamia, the Byzantine autocrats who by special edicts strengthened small peasant farming as the most intensive in those natural conditions, and even the Mongol Ilkhan Gazan who organized the construction of a canal in the arid part of Northern Dvurech. The collapse of the cultural landscapes of West Asia came late: in the 17th and 19th centuries, during the deep peace and decline of the Ottoman Empire, as Syrian, Iraqi and Cilician peasants, tortured by extortion, abandoned their plots and sought a better life in coastal pirate cities, where they could either get rich easily or lay down their heads. And those who remained at home because of laziness or cowardice ran the irrigation and turned the country, once rich and plentiful, into a wasteland.
The beginning of this terrible and destructive process was already noted by contemporaries. The French adventurer and doctor in the guard of Aurengzeb, François Bernier, who observed similar orders in India, subject to the "Great Moguls," in a letter to Colbert foresaw the imminent weakening of the three great Muslim kingdoms: India, Turkey and Persia, with respect to the latter he believed, that the decline would be slow, as the Persian aristocracy of local origin[20].
And yet he did not collaborate with Kuchibey Gomurdzhinsky. The coincidence occurred because two intelligent people observed the same process, able to draw conclusions and predictions. And we have to agree with the fact that under a stable social structure, under conditions of the same formation, but with a changing ratio of ethnic components in the political system - the state, the state of the landscape, as a sensitive barometer, shows the occurrence or presence of ups and downs as well as periods of stabilization.
But if so, we have no way to deny the reasons mentioned by the above authors: the emergence in the system of new ethnic groups not connected to the landscapes of the region and free from the restrictions of exogamous marriages, for these restrictions, maintaining the ethnic diversity of the region, lead to the preservation of landscapes that accommodate small ethnic groups. But if so, then nature and culture are ruined by free communication and free love!
The conclusion is unexpected and frightening, but it is a paraphrase of Newton's second law: what is gained in social freedom is lost in contact with nature, or rather, with the geographical environment and our own physiology, for nature is also inside our bodies.
Since similar phenomena took place in Rome, ancient Iran and many other countries, it is easy to notice the general pattern: in the presence of endogamy (inbreeding) as an ethnic barrier the processes were slower and less painful, and for an ethnic group it does not matter: whether it will survive for three hundred years or a thousand. And that is why Yu.V. Bromley's observation about the stabilizing role of endogamy - a barrier against incorporation - is indisputable[21].
THE EXPERIENCE OF INTERPRETATION
Let us try to interpret the described phenomenon. If ethnicities are processes, then when two dissimilar processes collide, interference occurs, disturbing each of the original frequencies. The associations formed are chimeric, which means that they are not resistant to external influences and are short-lived. The death of a chimeric system entails annihilation of its components and extinction of people involved in the system. This is the general mechanism of disruption of a given pattern, but it has exceptions. It is the instability of the initial rhythms that is a condition for the emergence of a new rhythm, i.e. a new ethnogenetic inertial process.
What is this connected with, we won't talk about because it is too serious a question to solve in between other subjects. But it is clear that endogamy is necessary for the preservation of ethnic traditions, because endogamous family transmits to the child a stereotype of behavior, and exogamous family transmits to it two stereotypes, mutually extinguishing each other. So, exogamy, which does not belong to "social states" and lies in another plane, turns out to be among the factors of ethnogenesis, i.e. a real destructive factor in contact at the superethnic level. And even in those rare cases when a new ethnos appears in the conflict zone, it absorbs, i.e. destroys, both former ones. In conclusion, let us say that in the above example, as well as in the vast majority of cases, the racial principle plays no role. It is not a question of somatic differences, but of behavioral differences, because the Steppe, Tibetan Highlanders and Chinese belonged to a single Mongoloid race of order I, and when refined to order II, it is clear that the northern Chinese are closer to the Xianbi and Tibetans than to the southern Chinese by racial traits. However, the external similarity of the cranial indicators, eye and hair color, epicanthus and others did not matter for the ethnogenetic processes.
The connection of the ethnos with the landscape, sometimes questioned, is also evident from the cited example. The Huns, occupying the Huang He valley, grazed cattle there, the Chinese sowed arable lands and built canals, and their mixtures, having no skills in either cattle breeding or farming, were predatory to their neighbors and subjects, which led to the formation of fallow lands and to the restoration of the natural biocoenosis, though depleted by the logging and extermination of the ungulates during the royal hunts. It all adds up.
Thus, not only theoretical considerations, but also the need to interpret the actual data makes it necessary to reject the concept of ethnos as a state. But if ethnos is a long lasting process, it is part of the Earth biosphere, and since the change of landscapes by the use of technology is connected with ethnos, ethnology should be ranked as a geographical science, although the primary material it draws from history in the narrow sense, i.e., the study of events in their connection and sequence.
VI. Ethnic Stereotypes of Behavior
UNSUCCESS AS A PRINCIPLE
Every ethnos has its own internal structure and its own inimitable stereotype of behavior. Sometimes the structure and stereotype of behavior of an ethnos changes from generation to generation. This indicates that the ethnos is developing and ethnogenesis is not fading. Sometimes the structure of an ethnos is stable, because the new generation reproduces the life cycle of the preceding one.
Such ethnic groups can be called persistents, i.e., survivors of themselves. This aspect of the matter will be discussed below, but for now let us clarify the meaning of the concept "structure" as applied to a behavior stereotype regardless of its stability and character of variability.
The structure of ethnic stereotype of behavior is a strictly defined norm of relations: a) between a collective and an individual; b) individuals among themselves; c) intra-ethnic groups among themselves; d) between ethnos and intra-ethnic groups. These norms, peculiar in each case, changing now quickly, now very slowly, tacitly exist in all areas of life, and being perceived in each ethnos and in each separate epoch as the only possible way of living, so they are not at all burdensome for members of the ethnos. Coming into contact with another norm of behavior in another ethnos, each member of that ethnos is surprised, lost, and tries to tell his fellow tribesmen about the oddity of another people. As a matter of fact, such stories constitute ethnography, a science as old as inter-ethnic relations. The difference between its primary state and scientific generalization is only in the breadth and systematization of information, and also in the fact that the ethnographer is not shocked by the customs and rituals of another ethnic group.
Let us explain by examples. An ancient Athenian, visiting Olbia, said with indignation that the Scythians do not have houses, and during their feasts are drunk to insanity. The Scythians, watching the bacchanalia of the Greeks, felt such disgust that when they once saw their king, who was a guest in Olbia, wearing a wreath and holding a thyrus in his hands as part of a procession of cheering Hellenes, they killed him. The Jews hated the Romans because they ate pork, and the Romans considered the custom of circumcision unnatural. The knights who conquered Palestine resented the Arab custom of polygamy and the Arabs considered the uncovered faces of French ladies shameless, etc. Examples abound.
Ethnographic science has overcome such directness and has introduced the principle of a system into observation - as a valid norm of interrelations between individuals. This norm defines interrelations both between individuals and between them and the collective as a whole. For example, let us take the simplest case of marriage and sexual relations. Roughly speaking, the forms of such relationships are very diverse: from the monogamous family to complete freedom of sexual relations. For example, in some peoples, naivete is obligatory for a girl at marriage, while in others, prior instruction in the techniques of love is required. Sometimes divorce is easy, sometimes difficult, sometimes impossible at all. In some peoples cohabitation of wives with strange men is punished as adultery, in others it is encouraged (for example, the Uighurs in the oasis of Hami, as the Khagyars were so accustomed to giving up their wives to passing merchants that, even after becoming rich under the patronage of the Chinggisids, they did not want to give up the custom, that to their neighbors seemed shameful).
Similarly, we can analyze variations in the perception of the sense of duty. In feudal England or France a vassal was obliged to serve his suzerain only if he received a benefice ("salary"): if he lost it he had the right to pass to another suzerain (for example, to the Spanish king). The only treason considered was to go to another faith, such as Muslims, but this was practiced so often that a special term emerged: renegade. On the contrary, in Rome or Greece, public duties were not accompanied by payment, but were the duty of the citizen of the polis. These citizens, however, profited so much from public work that they rewarded themselves...beyond measure.
The power of the ethnic stereotype of behavior is enormous because members of an ethnos perceive it as the only worthy one, and all others as "savagery. That is why European colonizers called Indians, Africans, Mongols, and even Russians savages, even though they could just as easily have said the same about the English. The Chinese arrogance was even more unquestioning. Here, for example, is what the geographical reference of the Ming era in France stated: "Lies in the southwestern sea... In 1518 the king sent an envoy with land works and asked to be recognized as king."[22]
VARIABILITY OF BEHAVIORAL STEREOTYPES
The stereotype behavior of an ethnos is as dynamic as the ethnos itself. Rites, customs, and norms of relations change slowly and gradually, then very quickly. Let's look at England, for example. Is it possible to recognize a descendant of the fierce Saxon who killed Celtic children, in the merry poacher Robin Hood, or the gunfighter from "The White Squad", and his direct descendant in the corsair sailor Francis Drake, or the ironclad soldier of Cromwell? And their heir - the clerk of the City of London, now neat and prim in the Victorian era, now the long-haired decadent and drug addict of the 20th century? And England has always been a conservative country.
What about other ethnic groups, whose appearance is influenced not only by internal development, but also by extraneous influences - cultural borrowings, conquests entailing forced changes in customs, and, finally, economic pressures changing the occupation and forcibly regulating the needs of the ethnic group[23]?
When speaking of the stereotype of an ethnos' behavior, we are always obliged to indicate the epoch in question. And we should not think that the so-called "savage" or "primitive" tribes are more "conservative" than civilized nations. This opinion arose solely because of the lack of study of Indians, Africans and Siberian peoples. It was enough to organize the sale of vodka in Canada and canned foods in Tahiti, and immediately the stereotype of Dakotas and Polynesians changed, rarely for the better. In all cases, however, the changes went their own way, on the basis of already established skills and perceptions. This is the uniqueness of any ethnogenetic process and the reason why the processes of ethnogenesis never copy each other. However, there is a regularity here as well, it is only necessary to be able to find it.
Any number of examples can be given, including with regard to standards of behavior concerning legal, economic, social, domestic, religious and other relations, no matter how complicated they are, which is the main principle of maintaining the intra-ethnic structure. In the aspect of the humanities, the described phenomenon is known as tradition and modification of social relationships, while in the aspect of the natural sciences, it is just as naturally interpreted as a stereotype of behavior that varies in local zones and species populations. The second aspect, though unaccustomed, is fruitful, as we shall see later.
So, an ethnos is a collective of individuals that distinguishes itself from all other collectives. Ethnos is more or less stable, although it appears and disappears in historical time. There is no one real attribute for defining ethnos, applicable to all the cases that we know of. Language, ancestry, customs, material culture, ideology are sometimes determinative and sometimes not. The only thing we can take out of the brackets is the recognition by each individual: "We are so and so, and all the others are different”. Since this phenomenon is universal, we can assume that it reflects some physical or biological reality, which is the value we are looking for. We can only interpret this "quantity" by analyzing the emergence and disappearance of ethnic groups and establishing the fundamental differences of ethnic groups among themselves. In order to identify their differences, we need a consistent description of the stereotype of the behavior of certain ethnic groups. It must be remembered, however, that the behavior of an ethnos changes depending on its age, which is convenient to count from the moment the ethnos enters the historical arena. Therefore, it is necessary to introduce into the analysis a way of fixing ethno-dynamics in order to proceed to the definition of "ethnos" in the second approximation. This will be a psychological moment, on the one hand, characteristic of all people without exception, and on the other, sufficiently variable to serve as an indicator of ethnic dynamics: the attitude of the ethnos as a whole to the category of time.
ETHNOS AND THE FOUR PERCEPTIONS OF TIME
No one knows what "time" is ~. However, people have learned to measure it. Even the most primitive peoples who have no need in linear time calculation from some conditional date ("The foundation of Rome," "The Creation," "The Nativity of Christ," "Hijra," the flight of Mohammed from Mecca to Medina, etc.), they distinguish day and night, seasons, "living chronology" by the dates of their own life, and, finally, cyclicality - a week, a month, twelve years, where each year is named after a beast (Turkic-Mongolian calendar).
According to comparative ethnography, the linear counting of time appears when an ethnos begins to feel its history not as an exceptional phenomenon, but in connection with the history of neighboring countries. And with the accumulation of knowledge emerges the quantization of time in people's consciousness, i.e. its division into epochs, quite unequal in duration, but equivalent in the filling of events. Here the category of "time" is in contact with the category of "force" - the cause that causes acceleration, in the particular case-historical process[24].
This variety of reference systems shows that it corresponds to serious changes in ethnopsychology, which, in turn, is determined by the changing ages of the ethnos. For our purposes it is not this or that frame of reference that is important, but the difference in notions of past, present and future.
When an ethnic community enters its first creative period of formation, the leading part of its population, pushing the whole system along the path of ethnic development, accumulates material and ideological values. This accumulation in the field of ethics becomes an "imperative" and with regard to time is transformed into a feeling that can be called "passéisme, passionism. Its meaning is that each active builder of ethnic integrity feels like a continuator of the ancestral line to which he adds something: another victory, another building, another manuscript, another forged sword. This "more" suggests that the past is not gone, it is in man, and therefore it is worth adding something new to it, because by doing so, the past, accumulating, moves forward. Each minute lived is perceived as an increment to the past that exists (Passe existente).
This perception of time results in the deeds of the heroes who laid down their lives for their country - the Spartan Varvara Leonidas at Thermopylae, the Consul Attilius Regulus at Carthage, Roland at Ronceval Gorge, and this equally applies to the historical Breton Margrave and the literary hero in the “hero of the Song of Roland”. The same were the warrior-monks Peresvet and Oslyabya, novices of Sergei Radonezhsky, who perished at the Kulikovo field, and the Keraitian warrior Khadah-Baatur, who diverted Genghis's warriors to hide "his natural khan."[25] Europeans of this stock erected Gothic cathedrals without immortalizing their names, Hindus carved marvelous statues in cave temples, the Egyptians built shrines, the Polynesians discovered America for their compatriots and brought kumara (sweet potatoes) to the islands. They were characterized by a lack of personal interest, as if they loved their cause more than themselves. But this was not altruism: the object of their love was in themselves, though not only in them.
They felt themselves heirs not only to great traditions, but part of them, and giving for the sake of these traditions, whether quickly, as soldiers, or slowly, as architects, they acted according to their neuro-psychophysical warehouse, which determined the vector and nature of their activity. People of such a warehouse are found in all epochs, but in the initial stages of ethnogenesis there are more of them. As soon as their percentage decreases, there comes a time, which we used to call "blossom", but it would be more correct to say "squandering".
In the place of passéisme comes actualism. People of this type forget the past and do not want to know the future. They want to live now and for themselves. They are courageous, energetic, talented, but what they do, they do for themselves. They do deeds too, but for their own greed, seeking high position to enjoy their power, because for them only the present is real, which is inevitably understood to be their own, personal.
Such are in Rome - Gaius Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla, in Athens - Alcibiad, in France - Prince "Grand Condé", Louis XIV and Napoleon, in Russia - Ivan the Terrible, in China - Sui Emperor Yan Di (605-618). And writers, artists, professors, etc., who sometimes did something grandiose just to to make their name famous, it is impossible even to enumerate! Such are the merrymakers, the bon vivants, the proifers; they, too, live for today, if only for the duration of their lives. When the percentage of people of this stock within an ethnos increases; the inheritance accumulated by their sacrificial ancestors is quickly squandered, and this gives a deceptive impression of abundance, that’s why it is considered "flourishing".
Readers may think that the author is condemning people of this stock. No! Their perception of time is as much a phenomenon as the one described above, and depends not on their will, but on the peculiarities of higher nervous activity. They could not be otherwise, even if they wanted to be. The famous maxims "Even the day is mine" and "After us, the deluge is ours" are not cynicism, but sincerity, and the presence of people of this type in an ethnos does not lead to its extinction, but only to a halt in growth, which sometimes happens even expediently, since, without sacrificing themselves, these people do not aim to sacrifice their neighbors, and the desire for limitless expansion of the ethnic area is replaced by establishing natural borders.
A third possible and real option applies to time and peace: ignoring not only the past but also the present for the sake of the future. The past is rejected as gone, the present as unacceptable, and only the dream is recognized as real. The most vivid examples of this worldview are Plato's idealism in Hellas, Jewish Chiliasm in the Roman Empire, the sectarian movements of the Manichaean (Albigoyism) and Markean (Bohumilism) persuasions. The Arab Caliphate did not escape the futuristic (that is the most correct name for it) influence.
Bahrain adopted the ideological system of Karmatism and it spread to Syria, Egypt and Iran. In Egypt, the Karmatians established their own dynasty, the Fatimids; in Iran, they seized the mountain strongholds of Alamut, Girdekuh and Lumbasar, from where they dictated their will to the Muslim sultans and emirs. The Persians called them Ismalites, the Crusaders called them Assassins.
The ideology of the Karmatians was openly idealistic, but not religious. According to their teachings, the world consisted of two halves, mirroring each other. In the one world, they, the Karmatians, felt bad: they were oppressed, abused, robbed. In the anti-personal world it should be the opposite: they, the Karmatians, would oppress, offend, rob Muslims and Christians. To get to the anti-world is possible only with the help of the "living God" and his appointed elders-teachers, to whom one must unconditionally obey and pay money. There is nothing religious about this system. The notion of the Karmati activity as a struggle of the oppressed against the feudal lords reflects only one, and not the most important, side of the matter. The Fatimids in Cairo and Hassan Sabbah in Alamut were exactly the same oppressors of the peasants, as their opponents, although they sometimes used social contradictions to further their policies. And can a gang or sect express the interests of the masses?
In ancient China, however, the futuristic perception of the times, as manifested in the third century, led the people to the peasant revolt of the "yellow armbands”. Along with the real class contradictions during the Younger Han dynasty (25-220), the Taoist scholars were forced out of all civil service positions by the Confucians, and they were forced to earn their living by curing diseases and predicting the weather. This miserable existence did not suit them, and a theory developed among them that the "blue sky of violence" would be replaced by a "yellow sky of justice. In fact, the sky turned crimson from the glow of the blood that had been shed: during the period the population of China had fallen from 50 million to 7.5 million in the period of turmoil that followed these uprisings.
It would be frivolous to blame all the troubles solely on Taoist propaganda, since the vast majority of those involved in the events were alien to any philosophical concepts. In our aspect, it is important only to note the presence of a futuristic worldview and its activation with the simultaneous decline of the passéistic, as if displaced from the life of the people. It is not by chance that the third century is considered the era separating ancient and medieval China. A new accumulation of values, both ideological and material, began in the 6th century under the Sui Dynasty and took shape as a passelistic trend in the 7th century under the Tang Dynasty. N. I. Konrad called this phenomenon the Chinese Renaissance when the new original culture was created under the slogan of "return to the ancients" in opposition to the moral decay and brutality of the soldierly and nomadic kingdoms of the age referred to as the "Five Barbarians"[26].
One might conclude that the futuristic perception of time is so rare that it is an anomaly. This is wrong; it is legitimate, like the other two, but it acts so destructively on the ethnic community that any ethnos perishes entirely, either the "dreamers" perish, or the "dreamers" declare their dream realized and become actualists, i.e. begin to live like everyone else.
Futuristic worldview is dangerous to others only in pure forms and high concentrations. When it is mixed with other worldviews, it can even be sympathetic. For example, John of Leiden was able to achieve a high level of passion in Münster and the bloodshed inevitably associated with it, but modern Baptists are philistines, and as such they are closer to philistines - Catholics, Protestants, atheists - than to their ideological and spiritual ancestors in the classification we have adopted. In other words, the confession of an idea does not reflect a relationship to time and is not related to it. The invariance of the futuristic perception of time lies in the fact that its triumph causes a process of ethnic disintegration. Since such processes are observed in all the periods we study, it is obvious that the disappearance of ethnic groups is not a coincidence, nor is the emergence of new ones. Both are components of the same dialectical process, ethnogenesis, and if, as humans, we can sympathize with any mindset or stock, as scientists we must simply determine the ratio and vectors of the constituent quantities in the general direction of the movement under study.
Passaism, actualism, and futurism reflect the three stages of ethnic dynamics, but in addition, there must be, and indeed does exist, a system of evaluating the category of time that corresponds to the static state of the ethnos. It consists in ignoring time as such. Time does not interest people of this type, because they do not derive any benefit from the reference to time for the activity that feeds them. These people (above we called them philistines) live in all stages, but with other categories they have little visibility. When, however, with the triumph of "futurism," all their rivals disappear, the indestructible mediocrities crawl out of the cracks, and historical time stops, and the earth lies fallow.
So, we have closed all the lines of our analysis and received confirmation of the hypothesis of the four-part construction of ethnic formation. This is not a coincidence or arbitrary construction, but a reflection of the essence of the process of ethnic disintegration. But if our analysis were to exhaust the topic, not only ethnology, but also the ethnoses themselves would have long ago ceased to exist, because all of them would have disintegrated during the elapsed historical time. Obviously, along with destructive processes of intra-ethnic evolution there are creative ones, thanks to which new ethnic communities emerge.
Therefore, the ethnic history of mankind does not cease and, as long as there are people on Earth, it will not cease. For ethnos is not an arithmetic sum of human units, but a "system" - a concept that should be disclosed in detail.
NOTES
[1] The need to examine this thesis is due to the fact that there is a widespread belief that ethnic self-consciousness as a social factor determines not only the existence of ethnicity, but also its emergence (Bromley V. Ethnos and ethnography. M., 1973. P. 121-123). Self-consciousness manifests itself in the self-name. Consequently, if the mismatch of one and the other is proven, then the question of their functional relationship falls away.
[2] For more details see: Gumilev L.N. Ancient Türks.
[3] Grumm-Grzhimailo G.E. When there was and what was caused the disintegration of Mongols on east and western / / IRGO. 1933. VOL. XVI. Vol. 2.
[4] Nikonov V.A. Ethnonymy // Ethnonyms / Ed. by V.A. Nikonov. A. Nikonov. М., 1970. С. 10-11.
[5] Shennikov A.A. Dwelling houses of the Nogai of the Northern Black Sea Coast / / Slavo-Russian ethnography / Ed. N. Ukhanova. Л., 1973. С. 47-52.
[6] Gumilev L.N. Pursuit of an imaginary kingdom. М., 1970. С. 311-313.
[7] Cf: Rybakov B.A. 1) About overcoming self-deception // Voprosy Istorii. 1970. - 3, 2) "Slovo o polku Igoreve" i ego contemporaneity. М., 1971. С. 28; Gumilev L. N. Can a work of literature be a historical source? // (in Russian Literature). 1972. - 1.
[8] We call historical destiny a chain of events, casually connected by internal logic.
[9] Eats R.F. Introduction to Ethnography. Л., 1974. С. 50.
[10] Marx K. Engels f. Collected Works, 2nd ed. Vol. С. 313.
[11] Ibid. Т. 13. С. 20.
[12] Ibid. С. 37.
[13] Archives of K. Marx and F. Engels. Т. VI. М., 1939. С. 356ff.
[14] Thierry O. Iebr. sot. М., 1937. С. 214.
[15] Gorky A. M. Watchman // Collected Works: In 30 vol. Т. 15. М.. 1951. С. 81.
[16] Toynbee A. J. Study of History /Abr. by D. Somervell, London; New York; Toronto, 1946. P. 120-121.
[17] Gumilev L.N. Ethnogenesis and ethnosphere // Nature. 1970. - 1. С. 46-47.
[18] The name "renegade" in those days had no offensive connotations, and the transition to the service of the enemy was a commonplace phenomenon. But if the transfer within the framework of one super-ethnos was not even considered as treason, the departure for Muslims deprived the renegade of his former ethnic belonging, as in the famous operetta "Zaporozhets m Dunay" the hero, who ran to the Turks, sings: "Now I am Turk, not Cossack".
[19] Smirnov V. D. Kucibey Gomürtsky and other Ottoman writers of XVII century on the causes of the decline of Turkey. SPb., 1873. С. 266-267.
[20] Bernier F. History of the last political upheavals in the Great Mongolian state. М., 1936.
[21] Bromley Y.V. Ethnos and endogamy / / Soviet ethnography. 1969. - 6. С.84-91.
[22] Bichurin N. Я. (Iakinthos). Collection of information on historical geography of East and Middle Asia // Compiled by L.N.Gumilev, M.F.Khvan. L.N.Gumilev, M.F.Khvan. Cheboksary, 1960. С. 638.
[23] This was, for example, the case of the importation of opium into China in the 19th century. And first the demand for the drug was created by distributing it at cheap prices. The sale of liquor to the Indians of Canada for furs is similar.
[24] Gumilev L.N. Ethnos and the category of time // Reports of the Geographical Society of the USSR. Vyp. 5. Л., 1970. С. 143-157.
[25] Kozin S. A. The sacred tale. M.; L., 1941. С. 140.
[26] Konrad N.I. West and East. М.. 1966. С. 119-149, 152-281.
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