Lev Gumilyov Complete Works part 2/3
This partial excerpt is a revelation how the History and Ethos Scientist thinks and works. It is a study of his scientific methodology. It is quite thorough and informative.
The book includes the most important works of L. N. Gumilev: "From Rus' to Russia", "The end and the beginning again", "Ethnogenesis and the biosphere of the Earth". It explains how Gumilev, a historian and anthropologist works. What are the parameters of history and the Ethnos, and what are the mistaken assumptions through the ages. Much of the topics are used to demonstrate that these previous parameters cannot explain the full phenomenon.
Some topics: (page numbers are not correct.)
III. Is There an Ethnos? 31, There is no criterion for determining ethnos 31, Ethnos is not society 32, Language 33, Ideology and culture 35, Descent from one ancestor 37, Ethnos as an illusion 39, Between the West and the East 40, Country and people without names 42, "Ethnos" - a work by S.M. Shirokoev 46, "States" and "processes" 47,
Part Two. The Properties of Ethnos 49, IV. Ethnos and Ethnonym 49, Names are Deceptive 49, Examples of Camouflage 50, The Powerlessness of Philology in History 51, V. Mosaicity as a property of ethnos 52, It is possible to do without patrimonial system 52, What do they replace patrimonial system 53, Formation of subethnic groups 55, Variants of ethnic contacts 56, Role of exogamy 58, Experience of interpretation 60, VI. Ethnic stereotypes of behavior 60, Dissimilarity as a principle 60, Variability of behavior stereotypes 62, Ethnos and the four senses of time 63, VII. Ethnos as a system 66, "System" in popular explanation 66
III. Is There an Ethnos?
There is no criterion for defining ethnicity. According to our definition, the species Homo sapiens is a group of individuals opposing all other groups. It is more or less stable, although it appears and disappears in historical time, which is the problem of ethnogenesis. All such collectives are more or less different from one another, sometimes in language, sometimes in customs, sometimes in the system of ideology, sometimes in origin, but always in historical destiny. Hence, on the one hand, ethnicity is derived from the historical process and, on the other hand, through its productive activity - economy - it is connected with the biocenosis of the landscape in which it was formed. A nationality may subsequently change this relationship, but it is modified beyond recognition, and the continuity of the Migration42 responds to extremely complex human motivations and driving forces. Famines arise when severe conditions for grain production are created, and climatically they can never be deciphered a priori, since they may be meteorological events, sometimes short-lived and insignificant in climatic sense". [Ibid. P.17]. It’s traceable only through historical methodology and the most rigorous criticism of sources, for words are deceptive.
Before moving on, we should at least concede the notion of "ethnos," which has yet to be defined. We have no real attributes to define any ethnos as such, although there has not been and is no human being in the world that is non-ethnic. All of the listed attributes define an ethnos "sometimes," and the totality of them does not define anything at all. Let us test this thesis using the negative method.
The theory of historical materialism recognizes the mode of production, which is realized in socio-economic formations, as the basis of society. Precisely because self-development plays a decisive role here, the influence of exogenous factors, including natural ones, cannot be the main one in the genesis of social progress. The concept of "society" means a totality of people united by concrete-historical conditions of material life common to them. The main force in this system of conditions is the way of production of material goods. People unite in the process of production, and the result of this unification is social relations, which are formed into one of the five known formations: primitive communal, slave-holding, feudal, capitalist and communist.
It is impossible to "unite into an ethnicity," since belonging to one ethnicity or another is perceived by the subject himself directly, and by others is stated as a fact that is not subject to doubt. Consequently, ethnic diagnostics is based on a feeling. A person belongs to his or her ethnicity from infancy. Incorporation of non-tribesmen is sometimes possible, but applied on a large scale, it degrades the ethnos. Specific historical conditions change more than once during the life of an ethnos, and conversely, the divergence of ethnoses is often observed when one mode of production is dominant. Based on Marx's idea of the historical process as an interaction between natural and human history,43 the first and most general division can be proposed: social stimuli, arising in the technosphere, and natural stimuli, constantly coming from the geographical environment.44
Every human being is not only a member of a society at a certain age determined by the action of hormones. The same can be said of long-lived collectives, which in the social aspect form differently characterized class states or tribal unions (social organisms), and in the natural one, ethnoses (nationalities, nations). The mismatch between the two is obvious.
Ethnos is not a society.
But there is another point of view, according to which "ethnos... - Social-historical category, and its genesis and development are determined not by biological laws of nature, but by specific laws of social development45. How is this to be understood? According to the theory of historical materialism, the spontaneous development of productive forces causes a change in production relations, which generates a dialectical process of class formation, followed by processes of class-destruction. This is a global phenomenon inherent in the social form of development of matter. But what does this have to do with ethnogenesis? Does the emergence of well-known ethnic groups, such as the French or the English, coincide chronologically or territorially with the formation of the feudal formation? Or did these ethnic groups disappear with its collapse and the transition to capitalism? In France, for example, the "socio-historical" category, the kingdom of France, already in the 14th century included Celtic-Brettonians and Basques in addition to the French, Provençals and Burgundians. So, were they not ethnoses? Doesn't this fact, one of many, tell us that V.I. Kozlov's definition is one-sided? And if soon it is so, then it is an occasion for a scientific dispute.
43 See Marx K. and Engels F. Opus, Vol. 3, p. 16.
44 Semevsky B.N. Methodological bases of geography // Vestnik LHU. 1968. No 24. С. 58-60; Kalesnik S.V. The problem of geographic environment. The geographic environment // Ibid. 1968. No 12. С. 94.
45 Kozlov V.I., Pokshishevsky V.V. Ethnography and Geography // Soviet Ethnography. 1973. No 1. С. 9-10.
Dialectical materialism distinguishes between different forms of matter motion: mechanical, physical, chemical and biological, classifying them as natural. The social form of motion of matter stands out because of its inherent specificity - it is peculiar only to mankind with all its manifestations. Each individual and collective of people with technology and domesticated animals and cultivated plants is subject to the influence of both social and natural forms of motion of matter, constantly correlated in time (history) and space (geography). In synthesizing the material into a unified, observable and studiable complex (historical geography), we must consider it from two perspectives: the social and the natural.
In the first perspective we will see social organizations: tribal unions, states, theocracies, political parties, philosophical schools, etc.; in the second, ethnicities, that is, collectives of people that arise and collapse over a relatively short time, but which in each case have an original structure, a unique stereotype of behavior, and a peculiar rhythm that has homeostasis in the limit.
As we know, classes are socio-historical categories. In pre-class society, their analogues are tribal or clan unions, such as the Celtic clans. In a broad sense, the notion of "social category" can be extended to stable institutions, such as the state, the church organization, the polis (in Hellas) or the feud.
But anyone who knows history knows that such categories coincide with the boundaries of ethnic groups only in the rarest of cases, that is, there is no direct connection here. In fact, is it right to say that workers, clerks, and Tatars live in Moscow? From our point of view, this is absurd, but according to Kozlov's logic it turns out only so. So, the mistake lies in the postulate. But not enough, economics, which is fully related to the social form of motion of matter, breaks the national framework. It would seem that with the common European market, homogeneous technology, similarity of education in different countries and easy learning of neighboring languages, ethnic differences should disappear in 20th century Europe.
And in reality? The Irish have already fallen away from Great Britain, sparing no effort to learn their ancient and almost forgotten language. There are also Scotland and Catalonia which now claim autonomy even though they have not considered themselves as an oppressed nation for the last 300 years. In Belgium, the Flemish and Walloons, who used to live in harmony, began a violent struggle, including street fights between students of both ethnicities46. And since in antiquity, too, there is only a coincidence of socio-political and ethnic peaks (or recessions), we are obviously seeing an interference of two lines of development or, in the language of mathematics, of two independent variables. One can only ignore this if one really wants to.
Language
Let's try to reveal the nature of the visible manifestation of the presence of ethnicities - the opposition between "us" and "not us". What gives rise to this opposition and what feeds it? Not the unity of language, because there are many bilingual and trilingual ethnicities and, conversely, different ethnicities speaking the same language. For example, the French speak four languages: French, Celtic, Basque and Provençal, and this does not prevent their current ethnic unity, despite the fact that the history of unification, or rather the conquest of France from the Rhine to the Pyrenees by the kings of Paris, was long and bloody. At the same time, the Mexicans, the Peruvians, the Peruvians, and the Indians.
46 Kon I.S. Dialectics of the Development of Nations: Lenin's Theory of Nations and Modern Capitalism // New World. 1970. No 3. С. 133-149.
The Argentines speak Spanish, but they are not Spaniards. It is not without reason that streams of blood were spilled in the early 19th century just to bring war-torn Latin America into the hands of the trading companies of England and the United States. The English of Northumberland speak a language close to Norse because they are descendants of the Vikings who settled in England, and the Irish until recently only knew English, but did not become English. Arabic is spoken by several different peoples, and for many Uzbeks the native language is Tajik, etc. In addition, there are class languages, such as French in England in the XII-XIII centuries, Greek in Parthia in the II-I centuries B.C., Arabic in Persia in the VII-XI centuries, and so on. Since the integrity of the people has not been violated, we must conclude that it is not a question of language.
Moreover, linguistic diversity often finds practical application, a practice that brings multilingual peoples closer together. For example, during the U.S.-Japanese war in the Pacific, the Japanese were so adept at deciphering U.S. radio transmissions that the Americans lost the ability to transmit classified information by radio. But they found a clever and unexpected solution by teaching morse code to mobilized Indians. The Apache transmitted information to the Nawahu in Athabaskan, the Assiniboin to the Sioux in Dakota, and the receiver translated the text into English. The Japanese disclosed the ciphers, but retreated in powerlessness before the overt texts. Because military service often brings people closer together, the Indians returned home, gaining "paleface" battlemates. But there was no assimilation of the Indians either, for it was their ethnic characteristics, including bilingualism, that the commanders valued. So, although in some cases language may serve as an indicator of ethnicity, it is not the cause of ethnic identity.
Note that the Veps, Udmurts, Karelians, and Chuvash still speak their languages at home, but study in Russian at school, and in the future, when they leave their villages, are virtually indistinguishable from the Russians. The knowledge of their native language does not hinder them at all.
Finally, the Ottoman Turks! In the 13th century, the Turkmen leader Ertogrul, fleeing from the Mongols, brought about 500 horsemen and their families to Asia Minor. The sultan of Iconium housed the newcomers at the border of Nicea in Brusa, for the border war with the "infidel" Greeks. Under the first sultans, "gazia" volunteers from all over the Near East flocked to Brusa for booty and land to settle. They made up the cavalry, the "Spagi”. The conquest of Bulgaria and Macedonia in the 14th century enabled the Turkish sultans to organize an infantry of Christian boys who were torn from their families, taught Islam and military skills and placed as guards - "new troops", janissaries.
In the 15th century, a navy was created, manned by adventurers from all shores of the Mediterranean Sea. In the 16th century light cavalry - "akinji" from conquered Diarbekr, Iraq and Kurdistan were added. French renegades became diplomats and Greeks, Armenians and Jews became financiers and economists. And wives were bought at the slave markets. There were Polish, Ukrainian, German, Italian, Georgian, Greek, Berber, Negro, etc. These women in the 17th and 18th centuries were the mothers and grandmothers of Turkish soldiers. The Turks were an ethnic group, but the young soldier listened to his command in Turkish, talked to his mother in Polish, and to his grandmother in Italian, traded in Greek at the market, and recited Persian verses and Arabic prayers. But he was an Ottoman, for he behaved as befits an Ottoman, a brave and devout warrior of Islam.
This ethnic integrity was shattered in the nineteenth century by numerous European renegades and Paris-trained Young Turks. In the 20th century the Ottoman Empire fell and the ethnos fell apart: people became part of other ethnic groups. The new Turkey was raised by the descendants of the Seljuks from the depths of Asia Minor, and the remains of the Ottomans lived out their days in the alleys of Istanbul. So, for 600 years the Ottoman ethnos was united not by language, but by religious commonality.
Ideology and Culture
Ideology and culture are also sometimes a sign, but not obligatory. For example, only an Orthodox Christian could be a Byzantine, and all Orthodox were considered subservient to the Constantinople emperor and "their own”. But this was broken as soon as the baptized Bulgarians went to war with the Greeks, and Russia, which had converted to Orthodoxy, and did not even think of obeying Constantinople.
The same principle of unanimity was proclaimed by the Caliphs, successors of Mohammed, and it could not withstand competition with life: within the unity of Islam, ethnicities again arose. As we have remembered, sometimes preaching unites a group of people who become an ethnicity: the Ottoman Turks or the Sikhs in Northwest India, for example. Incidentally, there were Sunni Muslims in the Ottoman Empire, Arabs and Crimean Tatars, both subject to the Sultan but not to the Turks. For the latter, even their linguistic proximity to the Ottomans did not play a role. Thus, religion was not a common sign of ethnicity.
A third example of the confessional self-assertion of an ethnic group is the Sikhs, sectarians of Indian origin. The caste system established in India was considered obligatory for all Hindus. It was a special structure of ethnicity. To be a Hindu was to be a member of a caste, even the lowest, of the untouchables, and all others were placed below animals, including captured Englishmen. There was no political unity, but the stereotype of behavior was firmly, even too harshly, held. Each caste was entitled to a certain occupation, and there were few who were allowed military service. This enabled the Afghani Muslims to take over India and abuse the defenseless population, the worst affected being the Punjabis.
In the 16th century a doctrine emerged there proclaiming first non-resistance to evil and then aiming at war with the Muslims. The caste system was abolished, and the Sikhs (the name of the adherents of the new faith) separated themselves from the Hindus. They detached themselves from Indian integrity through endogamy, developed their own stereotype of behavior, and established the structure of their community. According to the principle we have adopted, the Sikhs must be regarded as an emergent ethnos that opposed the Hindus. That is how they perceive themselves. The religious concept has become for them a symbol and for us an indicator of ethnic divergence.
It is impossible to consider the Sikh doctrine only as a doctrine, because if someone in Moscow had fully embraced this religion, he would not have become a Sikh, and the Sikhs would not consider him "one of their own". The Sikhs became an ethnos on the basis of religion, the Mongols on the basis of kinship, and the Swiss on the basis of a successful war with the Austrian feudal lords, which united the population in a country where four languages are spoken. Ethnoses are formed in different ways and our task is to grasp a general pattern.
Most large nations have several ethnographic types, making a harmonious system, but very different from each other both in time and in social structure. Let us compare at least 17th century Moscow, with its boyars' hats and beards, when women were spinning behind mica windows; with 18th century Moscow, when noblemen in wigs and camisoles took their wives to the balls; with 19th century Moscow, when bearded nihilistic students educated young ladies of all classes who were already starting to mix; let us add 20th century decadents. Comparing them all with our era and knowing that it is the same ethnos, we see that without knowledge of history ethnography would mislead the researcher. And no less revealing is the spatial cross-section on one, let us say, 1869. The Pomors, the workers of St. Petersburg, the Old Believers in the Volga, the Siberian gold prospectors, the peasants of the forest and steppe provinces, the Don Cossacks and the Cossacks of the Urals were not at all alike in appearance with each other, but it did not destroy the people's unity, and the proximity in everyday life of, say, Greben Cossacks with Chechens did not unite them.
Strange as it may seem, but this proposed point of view met with active opposition in precisely the places where it should have found understanding. Some ethnographers opposed the author with their own views on the relationship between ethnography and geography, and on the history of the question - that is, historiography47. Without wishing to enter into polemics, I cannot, however, ignore a concept that claims (without sufficient reason) to be canonical. This would be academically incorrect.
V.I. Kozlov and V.V. Pokshishevskii represent the formation of ethnography as a science. Pokshishevsky sees it this way. Until the middle of the 19th century, geography and ethnography developed together, and then ethnography divided into social-historical and geographical branches. The first includes L.G. Morgan, I.J. Bakhofen, E. Taylor, J. Fraser, and L.J. Sternberg; the second includes F. Ratzel, L.D. Sinitsky and A.A. Kuber, as well as the French school of "human geography”. There is a significant defect in the proposed classification, which practically reduces it to nothing. Representatives of "directions" were interested in different subjects and paid their attention to different topics. And if so, then their opposition is unwarranted.
After all, when F. Ratzel tried to justify the geographicality of ethnographic zoning, he by no means challenged the concepts of animism, sympathetic magic or the ritual murder of the priest, that is, the subjects to which J. Fraser devoted his famous "Golden Bough". Yet it is the diverse interests of diverse scholars that the authors attribute to the separation of ethnography from geography and its rebirth as a social science. There is a degree of confusion, with unfortunate consequences. Any science develops by expanding the range of research, not simply by changing topics. Hence, when historical aspects are added to the achievements of geographical ethnography, it is progress, whereas when one subject is replaced by another, it is stagnation, always very damaging.
This is obviously clear to the scholars themselves, who devote another passage to population geography, which is at the intersection of both sciences, but does not include ethnic geography. The difference, in their view, is that "for economic geographers”, man... - For ethnographers the most important subject of production and consumption, but for ethnographers - the bearer of certain ethnic features (cultural, linguistic, etc.)". One cannot agree with the authors of this article.
Well, is it possible to study Eskimos, not noticing their hunting of sea beasts, but limiting oneself to grammatical forms of the verb or ideas about evil spirits of the sea and tundra? Or describing the Hindus without mentioning their labor in the rice fields, but detailing the theory of karma and the reincarnation of souls? No, the nature of labor, consumption, war, the creation of a state or its fall, are as much objects of ethnographic study as are wedding rites or ritual ceremonies. And the study of peoples in their phases of development and in their opposition to their neighbors is inconceivable without consideration of their geographic environment.
Nor should ethnography be replaced by the study of "economic and cultural types characteristic of peoples who are approximately at the same level of socio-economic development and live in similar natural and geographical conditions (for example, the types of "Arctic sea-beast hunters", "dry steppe herders", etc.)48 . This direction is fruitful for economic geography, but has nothing to do with ethnography and cannot have anything to do with it. For example, the Chukchi reindeer (i.e. shepherds) and Chukchi sea-beast hunters (what they do when they lose their reindeer), as suggested by the classification, it should be divided into different sections, although they are a single ethnos.
47 Kozlov V.I., Pokshishevsky V.V. Ethnography and Geography. С. 3-13.
48 Andrianov B.V., Cheboksarov N.N. Economic and cultural types and problems of their mapping // Soviet Ethno-Graphics. 1972. No 5.
Are not the Russian peasants of Moscow suburbs, Pomors and Siberian sable hunters the same ethnos? There are a lot of examples. V.I.Kozlov's offer comes down to abolition of ethnography and its replacement by demography taking into account occupations of the population. However, this topic will not arouse interest among us. It is equally wrong to equate ethnos with biological taxonomic units: race and population. Races differ from each other by physical traits that are not essential for human life49. A population is an aggregate of individuals inhabiting a certain territory, where they interbreed freely and are separated from neighboring populations by some degree of isolation50.
The ethnos, as we understand it, is a collective of individuals with a unique internal structure and an original stereotype of behavior, both of which are dynamic. Consequently, ethnos is an elementary phenomenon, not reducible to sociological, biological or geographical phenomena.
Reducing ethnogenesis to "linguistic and cultural processes" distorts reality by diminishing the complexity of ethnic history, as Bromley pointed out when he suggested the additional terms "ethnocos" and "E-S-O" (ethno-social organization) to clarify the issue.51 I admit that one may not be satisfied with his solution, but it is not correct to ignore it completely. In conclusion, let us test Kozlov's thesis by consistently applying it to well-known phenomena. According to the logic of his postulate, people capable of learning other languages must belong to more than one ethnic group at the same time. That is nonsense! Although there are many bilingual or even trilingual ethnic groups, they do not merge on the basis of linguistic qualification.
After all, A.S. Pushkin and his friends did not become French! Conversely, Mexican and Peruvian people speak Spanish, practice Catholicism, read Cervantes, but do not consider themselves Spaniards. Moreover, they ruined a million lives in a war they called "liberation”. Meanwhile, the Indians of Upper Peru and the Chaco Desert were fighting for Spain, with which they had nothing in common in culture, economy or language. But this is quite understandable when one considers that the enemies of the Indians were not the distant Spaniards, but the locals, the mestizos, who had partially become commoners but opposed their former tribesmen, as they had formed into independent ethnic groups by the early 19th century. From V. I. Kozlov's point of view52, such late ethnogenesis is inexplicable.
Descent from a single ancestor.
In ancient times it was considered obligatory for an ethnos. Often a beast, which was not always a totem, played the role of the ancestor for the absence of a real figure. For the Turks and Romans, it was a wolf-feeder, for the Uighurs it was a wolf that impregnated a princess, for the Tibetans it was a monkey and a female rakshasa (a forest demon). But more often it was a man whose appearance was distorted beyond recognition by the legend. Abraham, the forefather of the Jews, his son Ishmael, the ancestor of the Arabs, Cadmus, the founder of Thebes and the founder of the Boeotians, etc.
Strangely enough, these archaic views have not died out, only in our day people try to put an ancient tribe in the place of the persona, as the ancestor of the present ethnos. But this is just as wrong. Just as there is no person who has only a father or only a mother, so there is no ethnos that is not descended from different ancestors.
49 Roginsky Ya.Ya., Levin M.G. Fundamentals of Anthropology. М., 1955. С. 325-329.
50 See: Timofeev-Resovsky N.V. Microevolution. Elementary Phenomena. Material and factors of microevolutionary Process // Botanical Journal. 1958. Т. 43. No 3.
51 Bromley Y.V. Experience of typology of ethnic communities // Soviet Ethnography. 1972. No 5. С. 61. - And, apparently, it is no accident that in the same journal a year later another philological study of the term "ethnos" was published, which substantiated its use in the sense in which it appears in L.N. Gumilev and in J.V. Bromley [see: Poplinsky Y.K. To the History of the Emergence of the Term "Ethnos" // Soviet Ethnography. 1973. No 1].
52 Kozlov V.I., Pokshishevsky V.V. Ethnography and geography. С. 10.
And one should not confuse ethnoses with races, which is done often, but unreasonably. The basis for the temptation is the assumption that the processes of racial genesis probably developed in certain areas of the world and were conditioned by the specific natural environment of those areas, that is, by the climate, flora and fauna of the geographical zones. There is an unacceptable substitution of the object, i.e. the primary race is arbitrarily equated with the ethnos. Let's get this straight.
In the Upper Paleolithic era, when subarctic conditions prevailed in Europe, in a highly arid climate the Rhone valley was inhabited by the Grimaldi Negro race, and the tropical forests of Africa were inhabited by the Khoisan race, which combined Mongoloid and Negroid traits. This race is ancient and its genesis is unclear, but there is no reason to consider it a hybrid race. The Bantu Negroes displaced the Khoisanian to the southern outskirts of Africa at a quite historical time, around the 1st century AD, and later the process continued until the 19th century, when the Bechuan drove the Bushmen into the Kalahari Desert. At the same time, the equatorial America did not have a Negro population, although its natural conditions were close to those of Africa.
The arid zone of Eurasia was populated by Cro-Magnon-type Europoids and Mongoloids, but this did not lead to the similarity of racial traits. In Tibet, Mongoloid bots were neighboring with Euro-Peoid tribesmen and Pamirs, and in the Himalayas, Gurkas with Pathans. But the similarity of the natural environment did not affect the racial appearance. In short, we should admit that the functional relationship between the anthropological features between different populations and the geographical conditions of the regions they inhabit is not clear. Moreover, it is not certain that it exists in nature at all, especially since this opinion runs counter to the achievements of modern paleoanthropology, which constructs racial classification not by latitudinal zones, but by meridional regions: the Atlantic region, to which Europoids and African Negroes are assigned, and the Pacific region, to which Mongoloids of East Asia and America are assigned.53 This view excludes the influence of natural conditions on race, since both groups were formed in different climatic zones.
Ethnoses, on the contrary, are always linked to the natural environment through active economic activity. The latter manifests itself in two ways: in adapting oneself to the landscape and in adapting the landscape to oneself. In both cases, however, we are confronted with ethnos as a really existing phenomenon, although the reason for its emergence is clear.
And it is not necessary to reduce the diversity of the topic under study to any one thing. It is better simply to establish the role of these or those factors. For example, the landscape determines the possibilities of the ethnic group at its emergence, and the newborn ethnos changes the landscape according to its requirements. This mutual adaptation is possible only when the emerging ethnos is full of strength and seeks its application. And then comes the habit of the created stop, which for descendants becomes near and dear. Denial of this inevitably leads to the conclusion that peoples do not have a homeland, understood here as a heartily beloved combination of landscape elements. Hardly anyone would agree with this.
This alone shows that ethnogenesis is not a social process, since the spontaneous development of the sociosphere only interacts with natural phenomena rather than being their product. But it is the fact that ethnogenesis is a process and that the directly observed ethnos is a phase of ethnogenesis and thus an unstable system that rules out any comparison of ethnoses with anthropological races and thus with any racial theories. Indeed, the principle of anthropological classification is similarity. And the people who make up an ethnos are diverse. There are always two or more components involved in the process of ethnogenesis. Crossing of different ethnoses sometimes gives a new stable form, and sometimes leads to degeneration. For example, a mixture of Slavs, Ugrians, Alans, and Turks led to the development of the Great Russian nation, and the formations that included - The Mongol-Chinese and Manchurian-Chinese mestizos, which often appeared along the Great Wall of China in the last two thousand years, but proved to be unstable and disappeared as independent ethnic units.
53 Alekseev V.P. In Search of the Ancestors. М., 1972.
In Central Asia in the 7th century lived Sogdians, and the term "Tajik" in the 8th century meant "Arab", i.e., a warrior of the Caliph. Nasr ibn Seyyar in 733, suppressing a revolt of Sogdians, was forced to augment his thinning army with Persians from Khorasan, who had already converted to Islam. He recruited many of them, and therefore Persian became the dominant language in his Arab army. In the aftermath of his victory, when Sogdian men were slaughtered, children were sold into slavery, and beautiful women and lush gardens were divided among the victors, a Persian-language population resembling Khorasan appeared in Sogdiana and Bukhara54.
In 1510, however, the fortunes of Iran and Central Asia diverged. The Turk Ishmael Sefevi, a zealous Shiite, took control of Iran and converted the Persians to Shi'a Islam. The Sunni Uzbeks inherited Central Asia, and the Persian-speaking population there retained the old name "Tajik", which had not been given any significance before the fall of the Mangytes dynasty in 1918. When Uzbek and Tajik republics were formed in the former Turkestan, the descendants of Khorasan Persians, invaders of the 8th century who lived in Bukhara and Samarkand, were registered as Uzbeks in the census, and the descendants of Turks, invaders of the 11th and 16th centuries who lived in Dushanbe and Shakhrisabz - as Tajiks. They knew both languages from childhood, were Muslims, and did not care how they were recorded.
Over the past 40 years, the situation has changed: Tajiks and Uzbeks formed into socialist nations, but how to consider them until the 20s, when religious affiliation determined the ethnicity (Muslims and Kafirs), and the Tajiks had no clans? And both ethnic substrates, Turks and Iranians, were "imported" ethnicities in Central Asia a thousand years ago - enough time for adaptation. Apparently, there is a certain pattern that has to be uncovered and described. But it is clear that common descent cannot be an indicator for ethnicity, because it is a myth inherited from the primitive science of primitive times.
Ethnos as an illusion
But could it be that "ethnos" is simply a social category formed during the compounding of a society55? Then "ethnos" is an imaginary value, and ethnography is a pointless pastime, because it is easier to study social conditions. This point of view is mistaken, which is evident when speculation is replaced by observation of natural processes accessible to a thoughtful person. Let us explain this with real examples. In France there are the Celts-Bretons and Iberians-Gascons. In the forests of the Vendée and on the slopes of the Pyrenees they dress in their costumes, speak their language, and clearly distinguish themselves from the French in their homeland. But can it be said of the Marshals of France, Murat or Lannes, that they are Basques and not French? Or d'Artagnan, the historical character and hero of the novel by Dumas? Can the Breton nobleman Chateaubriand and Gilles de Retz, comrade-in-arms of Joan of Arc, not be considered French?
Isn't the Irishman Oscar Wilde an English writer? The famous orientalist Chokan Valikhanov himself said about himself that he considered himself equally Russian and Kazakh. Examples abound, but they all point to the fact that ethnicity as found in the minds of people is not a product of consciousness itself. Obviously, it reflects some aspect of human nature that is much deeper, external to consciousness and psychology, by which we mean a form of higher nervous activity. The whole of the Russian Federation is a part of the Russian state. In other cases, for some reason, ethnic groups show great resistance to the influences of their environment and do not assimilate.
54 Gumilev L.N. Ancient Turks. М., 1967. С. 359-360.
55 Kozlov V.I. Dynamics of the Number of Peoples. М., 1969. С. 56.
The Roma have been cut off from their society and India for a thousand years, they have lost touch with their homeland, and yet they have not merged with the Spanish, the French, the Czechs or the Mongols. They did not accept the feudal institutions of the societies of Europe, remaining a tribal group in every country wherever they went. The Iroquois still live as a small ethnic group (only 20,000 people), surrounded by hypertrophied capitalism, but do not participate in the "American way of life. Turkic ethnic groups live in the Mongolian People's Republic: Soyots (Uryanghais), Kazakhs and others, but despite the similarity of "material and spiritual development of society," they do not merge with Mongols, constituting independent ethnic groups. And yet "the level of development of society and the state of its productive forces" are the same.
Conversely, the French immigrated to Canada in the eighteenth century and still retain their ethnic face, although the development of their forest villages and industrial towns in France is very different. The Jews in Thessaloniki have lived as an endogamous group for over 400 years after their expulsion from Spain, but, according to 1918 data, they look more like Arabs than like their neighbors, the Greeks. Likewise, the Germans in Hungary look more like their countrymen in Germany and the Roma look more like the Hindus. Selection changes the ratio of characters slowly, and mutations are notoriously rare. Therefore, any ethnic group living in a familiar landscape is almost in a state of equilibrium.
One should not think that changing conditions of existence never affect ethnic groups. Sometimes it affects them so much that new traits are formed and new ethnic variants, more or less stable, are created. We have to understand how these processes take place and why they produce different results.
The famous Soviet researcher S.A. Tokarev put forward a sociological concept that, instead of defining ethnicity, referred to "four historical types of nationality in four formations: The tribe, in communal-patrimonialism, encompasses the entire group of people in a given territory, uniting them by blood and blood ties; the demos, in slave-holding, only free population, not including slaves; the nationality, in feudalism, all the working population of the country, not including the ruling class; the nation, in capitalism and socialism, all strata of population divided into antagonistic classes.56
This excerpt shows that the concept of "ethnic community" has a very different meaning, which may be helpful in some respects, but is beyond the scope of historical geography and the natural sciences in general. So, an argument with this concept would be unfruitful, because it would boil down to what to call ethnicity. And what is the use of arguing about words?
Between East and West
While we were getting to know the cultures of the Mediterranean, we were surrounded by familiar notions and attitudes. Religion meant belief in God, the State, a territory with its own order and power, the countries and the lakes, in particular places. But the familiar names "East" and "West" didn't really act geographically, Morocco was considered the "East", Hungary and Poland the "West". But this convention was applied to all and there was no confusion. This was greatly helped by the knowledge of the subject, which even non-specialists know from reading fiction and the existence of a living tradition.
56 Tokarev S.A. The Problem of Types of Ethnic Communities // Problems of Philosophy. 1964. No 11. С. 52-53. See also: Agaev. A.G. Narodnost as a social community // Problems of Philosophy. 1965. No 11. С. 30.
But once we cross the mountain passes separating Central Asia from East Asia, we enter a world of a different frame of reference. Here we encounter religions that deny not only deity but the world around us. Orders and social structures will be contrary to the principles of the state and power. In nameless lands we will find ethnicities without language or economy, or even territory, and rivers and lakes wandering like herdsmen. Those tribes which we used to think of as nomadic will be sedentary, and the strength of the troops will not depend on their numbers. Only the patterns of ethnogenesis will remain unchanged.
Other material requires a different approach and, consequently, a different scale of research. Otherwise, it will remain incomprehensible, and the book will become unnecessary to the reader. The reader is used to European terms. He knows what a "king" or a "count", a "chancellor" or a "bourgeois commune" is. But there were no equivalent terms in the east of the Oikumene. "Hagan" was not a king or emperor, but a military leader chosen for life, who also performed ancestor worship rites. Can one imagine Richard the Lionheart celebrating a requiem mass for Henry II, whom he had given a heart attack? And that this mass was attended by representatives of Gascon and the English nobility? This is nonsense! And in the east of the Great Steppe, he would have been obliged to do so, or else he would have been instantly killed.
Appellations such as "Chinese" or "Hindus" are not equivalent to "French" or "Germans," but to Western Europeans in general, for they are systems of ethnicities, but united on other cultural principles: the Hindus were bound by the caste system, and the Chinese by hieroglyphic writing and humanitarian education. As soon as a native of Hindustan was converted to Islam, he ceased to be a Hindu, because for his countrymen he became a renegade and fell into the category of the untouchable. According to Confucius, a Chinese living among barbarians was regarded as a barbarian. On the other hand, a foreigner who observed Chinese etiquette was regarded as Chinese.
To compare the ethnoses of the East and the West, we need to find the right correspondences, with the same price of division. For the sake of this, let us examine the properties of ethnicity as a natural phenomenon inherent in all countries and centuries.
To achieve this goal, we have to be very attentive to ancient traditional information about the world, not rejecting it in advance just because it does not correspond to our modern ideas. We keep forgetting that people who lived thousands of years ago had the same awareness, capacity and quest for truth and knowledge as our contemporaries. The treatises that have come down to us from different peoples in different times bear witness to this. This is why ethnology is an almost indispensable discipline, for without its methods much of the cultural heritage of antiquity remains inaccessible to us.
To understand the history and culture of East Asia, the conventional approach is inadequate. When we study the history of Europe we can divide it into sections: the history of France, Germany, England, etc., or ancient, medieval, and modern history. Then, when we study the history of, say, Rome, we only deal with neighboring peoples insofar as Rome encountered them. For the Western countries, such an approach is justified by the results obtained, but for the study of Central Asia, we do not obtain satisfactory results in this way. The reason for this is profound: it lies in the fact that the Asian understanding of the term "people" and the European understanding of it are different. In Asia itself, ethnic unity is perceived differently, and even if we discard the Levant and India and Indochina as not directly related to our theme, there are still three different understandings: Chinese, Iranian and nomadic. At the same time, the latter varies especially strongly depending on the epoch. In the Hun's time it is not the same as in Uyghur or Mongolian times.
In Europe ethnonym is a stable concept, in Middle Asia it is more or less fluid, in China it is absorptive, in Iran it is exclusionary. In other words, in China, in order to be considered Chinese, one had to adopt the basics of Chinese morals, education and behavior; origin was not taken into consideration, neither was language, since even in ancient times the Chinese spoke different languages. It is therefore clear that China inevitably expanded, absorbing smaller peoples and tribes. In Iran, on the contrary, one had to be born a Persian, but one also had to honor Aguramazda and hate Ahriman. Without this, one could not become "Aryan. The Medieval (Sassanid) Persians did not even think of including anyone in their ranks because they called themselves "noble" (Nomdoron) and did not consider others as such. As a result, their numbers steadily declined. It is difficult to judge about the Parthian understanding, but, apparently, it did not differ fundamentally from the Persian one, only it was a little wider.
To be considered a Hun, one had to become a member of a clan either by marriage or by command of a Shanyu, then one became one's own. The descendants of the Huns, the Turkuts, began to incorporate entire tribes. On the basis of perception, mixed tribal unions emerged, such as the Kazakhs, Yakuts, etc. The Mongols, generally very close to the Turks and Huns, had a prevailing horde, that is, a group of people united by discipline and leadership. It required neither background, nor language, nor religion, but only courage and readiness to obey. Clearly, the names of hordes are not ethnonyms, but with hordes there are no ethnonyms at all because there is no need for them - the concept of "people" coincides with the concept of "state.
We must therefore remember firmly that "state" is different in all these cases, and is indispensable in translation. The Chinese "go" is represented by a character: a fence and a man with a spear. This does not correspond to the English "state" or the French "etat" or even the Latin "imperium" and "respublicae". The Iranian "shahr" or the above-mentioned term "horde" are just as distant in content. The nuances of difference are sometimes more important than the elements of similarity, and this determines the behavior of those involved in history: what seems monstrous to a European is natural to a Mongol, and vice versa. The reason is not in the different ethics, but in the fact that the subject, in this case the state, is not identical.
Therefore, we will record not only the similarities but also the differences, so as not to drive the peoples we study into the Procrustean bed of the scheme.
Of course, we cannot but be dismayed by the widespread view that all state forms, social institutions, ethnic norms, and even manners of speaking that are not like European ones are simply backward, imperfect, and inferior. Banal Eurocentrism is sufficient for ordinary people, but not for scientific understanding of the diversity of observed phenomena. After all, from the point of view of a Chinese or an Arab, Western Europeans seem inferior. That is just as wrong as it is unpromising for science. Obviously, we have to find a frame of reference where all the observations are made with equal precision. Only such an approach makes it possible to compare dissimilar phenomena and thus to draw reliable conclusions. All the conditions of research listed here are indispensable not only for history, but also for geography, since it is concerned with man and geographical names. In the West, countries are distinguished by names, but in the East?
A country and a people without a name
Between the eastern border of the Muslim world and the northwestern edge of the Middle Empire, which we call China, lies a country that has no name. This is strange, since the geographical boundaries of this country are very clearly defined, its physical and climatic conditions are original and unique, and its population is numerous and has long been part of its culture.
This country was well known to Chinese, Greek, and Arab geographers; it was visited by Russian and West European travelers; it has been the object of many archaeological discoveries. All have called it by some descriptive name; it does not have a name of its own. So, we will just point out where the country is located.
From Pamir to the east stretches two mountain ranges: Kunlun, south of which is Tibet, and Tien Shan. Between these ranges lies a sandy desert, the Takla Makan, cut through by the water-rich Tarim River. This river has neither source nor mouth. Its beginning is considered the "Aral," that is, the "island" between the branches of three rivers: the Yarkendarya, the Ak-Staraya and the Hotandarya. Its end is sometimes lost in the sands, sometimes it reaches Lake Karaburankel, and sometimes it fills Lob-nor, a lake that constantly changes place.57 In this strange country, rivers and lakes are nomadic, and the people huddle around the mountain foothills. Fresh streams flow from the mountains, but immediately disappear under piles of scree and surface at a considerable distance from the ridges. Oases are located there and then the rivers are lost again, this time in the sands. This extra-arid country contains the deepest depression, whose bottom lies 154 metres below sea level. The ancient cultural center, the Turfan Oasis, is located there. How could people practice science and art in the summer heat reaching +48 °С, and in winter frost reaching -37 °С, in incredibly dry autumn air and in strong spring winds? But they did, and with great success.
The ancient people of this country did not have a name for themselves. Nowadays, it is customary to call these people Tokhars, but this is not an ethnonym, but a Tibetan nickname, which means "white-headed" (blond). The inhabitants of the different oases spoke various languages of the Indo-European group, among which was even Western Aryan, not unlike those known in Europe. In the southwestern part of the country, in the foothills of the Kunlun Mountains, Tibetan tribes roamed in close contact with the inhabitants of Khotan and Yarkand but did not mix with them58.
In the first centuries A.D., the Saks, who had settled south of Kashgar to Khotan, and Chinese immigrants who had fled the horrors of the civil wars at home, entered this country from the west. The Chinese set up a colony in the Turpan oasis - Gaochan. It lasted until the IX century and disappeared without a trace.
As it is seen, it is impossible to pick up a name for the country by its ethnonym, but it was a cultured population which established the economy, which should be considered the best in the ancient world.
The nature of Central Asian oases has long been brought into harmony with human needs. Turfan people mastered the Iranian system of underground water supply - qanats, thanks to which the irrigated area fed a large population. Crops were harvested twice a year. The Turpan grapes can be rightly considered the best in the world; melons, watermelons, apricots - from spring to late autumn; the long-fiber cotton crops are protected from winds by pyrrhilly poplars and silkworm trees. And all around is a stony desert of cracked rock fragments, rubble and boulders, through which no tree or bush can penetrate59. This is a reliable defense of the oasis against large armies. It is very difficult to move a foot army across the desert, because one must carry not only food but also water, which excessively increases the transport. And raids by light nomadic cavalry are not afraid of the fortress walls. The second large center of this country - Karashar lies in the mountains near the fresh water lake Bagrash-kul. This city "has fertile lands... Abundant in fish... It is well fortified by the nature itself and easily defends itself.
57 Murzaev E.M. The Nature of Xinjiang and the Formation of Deserts of Central Asia. М., 1968. С. 185-190.
58 Gumilev, L.N. Terracotta figurines of monkeys from Khotan (Experience of interpretation) // Messages of the Hermitage. 1959. VOL. XVI. С. 55-57.
59 For an excellent description of the nature of these places see: Murzaev E.M. Travels without adventure and fantasy. М., 1962, С. 52-58.
60 The Konchedarya, which feeds the Lob-nor, flows out of the Bagrash-kul. Along its banks one can reach the abundant water Tarim, fringed with thickets of poplar, tamarisk, buckthorn and tall reeds that hide herds of noble deer and wild boars without suffering from thirst61.
The ancient ideology of the sedentary inhabitants of this country was Buddhism in the form of Hinayana ("little crossroads" or "little chariot," that is, the most orthodox teaching of the Buddha without admixtures), which cannot be called a religion. The Hinayanists deny God, putting in his place the moral law of karma (causal succession). The Buddha is a man who attained perfection and is an example for any other man who wishes to be free from suffering and rebirth by attaining nirvana, a state of absolute peace. Nirvana can only be attained by an arhat (saint) who is not dependent on divine mercy or outside help. "Be a lamp unto yourself," say the Hinayanists.
It goes without saying that "becoming perfect" is the work of a few. What about the rest of us? They simply went about their daily business, respected the arhats, listened to teachings in their spare time, and hoped that in future rebirths they could become saintly ascetics themselves. But we have already seen from other examples how little influence dogma has on ethnic stereotypes of behavior. The Arhats, merchants, warriors and farmers of Turfan, Karashar and Kuchi constituted a single system for which Buddhism was only a coloring.
The coloring of the subject, however, plays its part, sometimes a significant one. The Hinayana community survived until the fifteenth century, while the Mahayana, a vague, diverse and complex doctrine, in Yarkand and Khotan, evidently gave way to Islam as early as the eleventh century for a reason.
The nomadic Uigurs who came to Turfan practiced Manicheism62, but apparently just as formally as Turfan people practiced Buddhism. As an independent confession, Manichaeism disappeared before the XII century, but Manichaean ideas were incorporated into some Buddhist philosophical movements and into Nestorianism, which made a victorious march across Central Asia in the XI century. During these centuries the inhabitants of Turfan, Karashar, and Kutcha began to call themselves Uyghurs.
Nestorians in Uyghuria got along with Buddhists, despite their inherent intolerance. Apparently, Christianity was desirable for people of a religious disposition far removed from the atheistic abstractions of Hinayana. Merchants also became Christians, since the Buddhist teaching forbade those who "took the path" to touch gold, silver and women. Thus, people who were religious, but who participated actively in economic life, had to seek a doctrine that would not prevent them from living and working. Consequently, one can conclude that suitable ecological niches were found for both ideological systems.
The wealth of this country was based mainly on its advantageous geographical location; two caravan routes ran through it, one to the north and one to the south of Tien Shan. Along these routes, Chinese silk flowed to Provence, and luxury goods of France and Byzantium to China. In the oases, caravan drivers rested from their arduous journeys across the deserts and fattened their camels and horses. In this connection, the local women very much developed the "first ancient profession" and their husbands allowed their wives these earnings, part of which went into their pockets. And the Uyghur women got so used to this business that even when, thanks to the alliance with the Mongols, Uyghuria became fabulously rich, its inhabitants asked the Mongol khan Ugedei not to forbid their wives to entertain travelers.63
60 Bichurin N.Ya. A Collection of Information on the Historical Geography of East and Middle Asia / Comp. Compiled by L.N.Gumilev and M.F.Khvan. Cheboksary, 1960. С. 558.
61 Murzaev E.M. Travelling without adventures and fantasy. С. 113-129.
62 For more details see: Gumilev L.N. Ancient Turks. С. 381-386.
63 The Book of Marco Polo / Edited by I.P. Magidovich. M.; L., 1956. С. 81-82.
This custom, or, more correctly, an element of ethnic stereotype of behavior, turned out to be more persistent than language, religion, political structure and self-name. The stereotype of behavior is formed as an adaptive trait, that is, as a way for the ethnos to adapt to the geographical environment. The names here changed more frequently than the ethnic groups that bore them, and the change of ethnonyms was explained by the political conjuncture.
The rich and numerous populations of these fertile oases could easily feed the warlike nomads, especially since first the Uighurs and then the Mongols took it upon themselves to protect their subjects from external enemies. Within three hundred years the Uighurs had dissolved among the natives, but forced them to switch from Tocharian to Turkic. However, it did not cost them an effort, because in the 11th century all peoples, from the azure waves of the Sea of Marmara and the wooded slopes of the Carpathians to the jungles of Bengal and the Great Wall of China, were speaking Turkic. Such a widespread Turkic language made it a convenient oasis for trading operations, and the inhabitants of both halves of Central Asia were equally fond of trade. That is why the change of the native, but little-used language to the generally understood one took place without difficulties not only in the north-eastern part of the Tarim basin, but also in the southwest, where the role of Uigurs was assumed by the Türkic tribes: Yagmas and Karlukes. However, the difference between them and the Uighurs was enormous. The Uigurs did not affect the life, religion, or culture of their subjects, while the Karluks, who accepted Islam in 960, turned the oases of Kashgar, Yarkend, and Khotan into the likeness of Samarkand and Bukhara.
Thus, geographically the monolithic region turned out to be divided into two ethno-cultural regions, not at all friendly to each other. But the forces were equal and the distances between the oases were vast and difficult to travel. The situation was therefore stabilized for a long time.
This situation explains why the country remained without a single name. In ancient times, the Chinese called it Xiyu, that is, "The Western Region", and considered the "Onion Mountains" - Pamir and Alai as its end. The Hellenes called this country "Serica," and the precious commodity obtained from it was "sericum" (silk). I do not undertake to explain the etymology of this word.
In modern times, conventional names were also used: Kashgaria, Eastern Turkestan, or Xinjiang, that is, literally "the new frontier" established by the Manchus in the 18th century. What for the ancient Chinese was the "West-Home," in the XII-XIII centuries became the middle. To call a country inhabited by Indo-Europeans, who learned to understand Turkic speech, "Turkestan" is absurd. Kashgar has not yet become the capital, and a "new frontier" does not even loom on the horizon. It would be better to keep the geographic name, the Tarim basin. The river is a reliable reference point, at least a neutral and durable one. In addition, the term "Xinjiang" includes Dzungaria (also a conditional and late name), located north of the Tian Shan, which had quite different historical fortunes.
It is difficult to determine the eastern border of Uiguria. Over the centuries, it changed considerably, and many of the changes are undated. One might think that the oasis of Hami and perhaps the cave city of Dunhuang, a treasury of Buddhist art, belonged to the Uighurs. But the more eastern lands, the oases of the Nanshan foothills, were taken away from the Uighurs by the Tanguts. It is a people that, like the Uighurs, no longer exists, although there are people who call themselves that. But this, too, is a mirage. Those who call themselves Uigurs are Fergana Turks, who migrated to the East in XV-XVIII centuries. And those mistaken for Tanguts are nomadic Tibetans, a relic ethnic group, once the Tanguts' worst enemies.
Thus, historical criticism showed that in Asia the meaning of the names and their sounding do not always coincide. To avoid unfortunate and, alas, frequent mistakes, it is necessary to develop such a frame of reference that would be valid for Europe, for Asia, and for America, Oceania, Africa, and Australia. But in this system meaning is preferred to phonetics, that is, it is based not on linguistics but on history.
"Ethnos" - a work by S.M. Shirokogorov
The first general concept of ethnos as an independent phenomenon, rather than a secondary one, belonged to S.M. Shirokogorov64. He regarded ethnos as "a form in which there is a process of creation, development and death of elements that enable humanity as a species to exist.”65 Ethnos, however, is defined as "a group of people united by a common origin, customs, language and way of life.66 Both of these theses mark the state of science at the beginning of the 20th century. In terms of geography, it is recognized as "an environment to which the ethnos adapts and to which it submits, becoming part of this environment, its derivative". This concept was re-created by V. Anuchin as "integrated geography", but it did not gain recognition. Social structure is seen as a biological category, a new form of adaptation, the development of which comes at the expense of the ethnic environment: "Ethnos receives impulses of changes from its neighbors, raising, so to speak, its specific weight and giving it properties of resistance "67. Here S.M. Shirokogorov's concept echoes A. Toynbee's view of "challenge and response," where the creative act is interpreted as a reaction to the "challenge" of the environment68.
The "general conclusions" of S.M. Shirokogorov cause less resistance: "1. Ethnic development follows the path of adaptation of the entire complex... Along with the complication of some phenomena, simplification of others is possible. 2. Ethnoses themselves adapt to their environment and adapt it to themselves. 3. The movement of ethnic groups follows the line of the least resistance".69 Now this is nothing new.
And it is not surprising that Shirokogorov's views have become obsolete in half a century. Worse is the mechanical transposition of zoological laws to history, which is the source material for ethnology. The application of Shirokohorov's principles is therefore immediately met with insurmountable difficulties. For example, the thesis that "any form of existence is acceptable to an ethnos if it ensures its existence, the purpose of its life as a species,70” is simply wrong. The Indians of North America and the nomads of Dzungaria could have survived under U.S. or Chinese rule at the cost of abandoning their identities, but both preferred an unequal struggle with no hope of success. Not every ethnos agrees to submit to the enemy, just to survive. This is clear without further argument. That "the desire to seize territory, develop culture and population numbers is the basis of every ethnos' movement"71 is also incorrect, because relic ethnoses are not aggressive at all. The statement that "less cultured ethnic groups survive"72 is only partly correct, as in some cases they die in the face of a more cultured neighbor. And the statement that "the more complex the organization and the higher the form of special adaptation, the shorter the existence of the species" (i.e. the ethnic group) is completely unacceptable.73 On the contrary, the disappearance of ethnoses is associated with the simplification of the structure, which will be discussed below.
64 Shirokogorov S.M. Ethnos: A Study of the Basic Principles of Changing Ethnic and Ethnographic Phenomena // Izv. of the Oriental Faculty of the Far Eastern University (Shanghai). 1923. XVIII. Т. 1. Preface. С. 4-6.
65 Ibid. С. 28.
66 Ibid. С. 122.
67 Ibid. С. 124-126.
68 Toynbee A.J. Study of History / Abridgement by D. Somervell. London; New York; Toronto, 1946. 69 Shirokogorov S.M. Ethnos... С. 126-129.
70 Ibid. С. 100.
71 Ibid.
72 Ibid. С. 118.
73 Ibid. С. 119.
Still, Shirokogorov's book was a step forward for its time, for it broadened the perspective of ethnography's development into ethnology. And what I write will probably be rethought in half a century, but this is the development of science.
Unlike S.M. Shirokogorov, we have a systems approach, the concept of eco-systems, teaching about the biosphere and the energy of living matter (biochemical), as well as material on the emergence of anthropogenic landscapes on a global scale. All this makes it possible to offer a better solution to the problem than it was possible half a century ago.
"States" and "processes"
The totality of these facts shows that the system of categories underlying the concept of formations is fundamentally inapplicable to ethnogenesis. This system captures the "states" of society, determined by the mode of production, which, in turn, depends on the level of productive forces, in other words, on the technosphere. This reference frame is very convenient to study the history of material culture, state institutions, styles in art, schools of philosophy, in short - everything created by human hands. Over the last century, it has become so familiar that it has been mechanically transferred to the analysis of ethnogenesis, declaring, for example, the following theses:
The ethnos, like the class, is not a social organization, but an amorphous state, assuming any social form - tribe, tribal union, state, church, party, etc., and not just one, but several at the same time.
Moreover, it is recommended "not to confuse ethnos with biological categories such as races and with different kinds of social organization"75. If the first definition breaks down immediately with the above examples, the second deserves careful consideration, since empires have been built and dissolved on the basis of this, albeit unconscious, view, which of course has had an impact on the fate of their subordinated peoples.
The notion of "state" has a place both in nature and in society. In nature, there are four states: solid, liquid, gaseous and plasma. Transition of a molecule of a solid substance from one state to another requires additional energy equal to the latent heat of melting or vaporization. This transition occurs in a small jerk, and the process is reversible. In living matter of the biosphere, such a transition is associated with the death of the organism and is necessary. It could mean that there are only two states for the organism: life and death, but since death is annihilation of the organism as a whole, it is absurd to call this moment of transition a "state". As for life of the organism, it is not a "state" but a process: from birth through maturity and old age to death. Analogous to the process of life in the mundane matter is the crystallization of minerals and their subsequent metamorphization into amorphous masses.
When investigating "states" and "processes" we always use different methods. For "states" - classification, according to any arbitrarily accepted principle, convenient for viewing the phenomenon as a whole. For "processes", especially those related to evolution or formation, a taxonomy based on the hierarchical principle - a juxtaposition of similar, though not identical, groups of different ranks - is necessary. This is the systematics of Linnaeus, perfected by C. Darwin. The hierarchical nature of the system of the organic world is determined by the course and character of evolutionary processes, which are inseparable from life and are obligatory for it. But as soon as life dies down, a "state" emerges, more or less quickly corroded by the influence of the environment, even if the latter consisted of other dead "states" also subject to irreversible deformation. So, for an organism, including a human being, there is only one way to get into a "state" - to become a mummy, and for an ethnos - an archaeological culture.
74 Kozlov V.I. What is ethnos? // Nature. 1971. No 2. С. 74. 75 Artamonov M.I. Again, "Heroes" and "Crowd" // Ibid. С. 77.
The technosphere and the industrial relations connected with it are a different matter. There are "states" here. It is easy to make a garbage truck and a tractor out of a garbage truck. It is only necessary to expend some (alas, not insignificant) energy. There are also "states" in social life. Today they are called civil states and are registered by the registry office. They used to be called estates (etat). But we have to remember that it is a product of production relations and productive forces, that is, of the technosphere. This state is extremely unstable.
A captive warrior became a slave, and if he escaped, he could become a feudal lord. There is no place or need for a hierarchical principle in the fate of such a person; a simple fixation is enough here. Thus, the changes of social states are similar (although not identical) to the changes of natural states: they are reversible and require the investment of additional energy for the transition from one state to another. But is the ethnos the same? Is it possible to change one's ethnicity by making an effort? Apparently not! But this alone shows that ethnos is not a "state" (much less a civil one), but a process.
The aberration that fuels the concept of "state" is related to the observer's lack of historical perspective. The complete decay of the process of ethnogenesis, without extraneous disturbances, takes place within 1200-1500 years, whereas a researcher devotes two or three years at the most to a planned subject. Therefore, the past appears to him as a kaleidoscope, without any system or regularity, and, having recorded several changes in a limited region and an era, he sees only a collection of "states" that are not related to each other, but only coincide in place and time. Thus, before the appearance of geomorphology, people did not connect the presence of terraces with the erosive activity of the rivers flowing somewhere below, and they considered mountains as eternal, almost original forms of relief. Alas, all evidence in science is valid only if the opponent has a certain degree of erudition. Even the heliocentric system of Copernicus-Kepler convinced only those who knew astronomy well enough in the 17th century, and H. Mendel's discovery was repeated by De Frees.
A second argument against the concept of "state" is the blurring of boundaries between ethnic groups in areas of ethnic contact. Whereas the civil (i.e. social) state can be changed at once, for example, by granting nobility, being demoted to the army, being sold into slavery, being released from captivity, etc., ethnic contacts in the Huanghe Valley, Constantinople or North America are always a painful, long and highly variable process in the sense that the results of mestización are often unexpected and certainly always unmanageable. The latter is mainly due to the lack of a developed ethnological theory that would allow one to act not blindly, but with an eye to the consequences of ethnic processes.
Part Two. Properties of Ethnicity.
Containing the list of peculiarities of ethnic phenomenon as such, made in order to be able to give a general explanation of ethnogenesis, a process, in which ethnic groups appear and disappear.
Ethnos and Ethnonym Names are Deceptive
In the study of the general laws of ethnology, we must first recognize that the real ethnos, on the one hand, and the ethnic name (ethnonym) adopted by its members, on the other, are not adequate to each other.76 Often we find several different ethnic groups bearing the same name, or on the contrary, one ethnic group may be called by different names. Thus, the word "Romans" (romani) originally meant the citizens of the polis of Rome, but not at all their neighbors, the Italians, and not even the Latins who lived in other cities of the 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 fourth and fifth centuries due to the adoption of Christianity as the state religion, which, after the first three Councils, became the defining characteristic. Whoever recognized these Councils, sanctioned by the state power, was his own, a Roman, and whoever did not recognize them became an enemy. On this principle a new ethnos was formed, which we conventionally call "Byzantine”. However, we must remember that those whom we call Byzantines called themselves "Romans," that is, "Romans," even though they spoke Greek.
Gradually, many Slavs, Armenians, and Syrians joined the Byzantines, but they retained the name "Roman" until 1453, the fall of Constantinople. The Romans considered themselves "Romans" rather than the population of Italy, where the Lombards were the feudal lords, the Syrian Semites, who settled an empty Italy in the first and third centuries, were the townspeople, and the former prisoners of war of all the peoples who had ever been defeated by the Romans in the Empire, were the peasants. On the other hand, the Florentines, Genoese, Venetians and others in Italy considered themselves "Romans" rather than the Greeks, and on that 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 the Phrygians, Cappadocians, Thracians, Galatians, Syrians, Greeks, Illyrians, in short, all eastern subjects of the Roman Empire, served their sentences for rebellions against Roman rule. To understand each other, they explained themselves in common Latin. When the Roman legions withdrew from Dacia, the descendants of the exiled76, they needed to examine this thesis due to the fact that there is a widely held opinion that ethnic self-consciousness is one of the social factors that determines not only the existence of ethnicity, but also its emergence [Bromley Y.V. Ethnos and ethnography. M., 1973. P. 121-123]. Self-consciousness manifests itself in the self-name. Consequently, if the mismatch of the two is proven, then the question of their functional relationship falls away. Settlers still remained and formed an ethnos that in the nineteenth century adopted the name "Romanians", that is, "Romans".
If between the "Romans" of the era of the Republic and the "Roman citizens" of the late Empire we can still see continuity, if only as a gradual expansion of the concept, functionally connected with the spread of culture, the Byzantines and Romans do not even have such a connection. Hence, the word changes its meaning and content and cannot serve as an identifying sign of ethnicity. Obviously, we must also 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 telling when parsing the ethnonyms "Turk," "Tatar," and "Mongol"-an example not to be missed.
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 began referring to them all as Turks, including the 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" included many peoples who in ancient times were not part of them, such as Yakuts, Chuvashes, and Ottoman Turks.
The latter were formed before the eyes of historians by a mixture of hordes of Turkmens who came to Asia Minor with Ertogrul, Gazis - voluntary fighters for Islam, among whom were Kurds, Seljuks, Tatars and Circassians, Slavic youths who were taken as janissaries, Greeks, Italians, Arabs, Cypriots, etc., Turks, who were recruited to the navy, renegade Frenchmen and Germans in search of career and fortune, and a great number of Georgians, Ukrainians, and Poles, who were sold by the Tatars in the slave markets. Only the language was Turkic, because it was accepted in the army. During the 15th-16th centuries this mishmash merged into one monolithic nation which assumed the name "Turk" in memory of those steppe warriors who had triumphed over the Central Asian plains a thousand years earlier and perished without leaving an offspring. Once again, the ethnonym reflects traditions and claims, rather than the true state of affairs.
The modification of the ethnonym "Tatars" is an example of direct camouflage. Before the 12th century it was an ethnic name for a group of thirty large clans on the banks of the Kerulen. In the 12th century this ethnic group became stronger, and the Chinese geographers began to use this name to refer to all Central Asian nomads: Turkic-speaking, Tungus-speaking, and Mongolian-speaking, including Mongols. When Genghis adopted the name "Mongol" as the official name for his subjects in 1206, his neighbors, out of habit, continued to call Mongols - Tatars for some time. In such a form the word "tatar", as a synonym of "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 call themselves Tatars. On the other hand, the original bearers of this name, the Keraites, Naymans, Oirats, and Tatars, began to call themselves Mongols.78 Thus, the names changed places. At that time the scientific terminology emerged, when the Tatar anthropological type began to be called "Mongoloid", and also the language of the Volga-Kipchak Turks. In other words, even in science we use terminology that is obviously camouflaged79.
77 For more details see: Gumilev L.N. Ancient Turks.
78 Grumm-Grzhimailo G.E. When did and what was the reason of disintegration of Mongols on east and west nations // IRGO. 1933. VOL. XVI. Vol. 2.
But what follows is not just confusion, but also ethnonymic phantasmagoria. Not all nomadic subjects of the Golden Horde were loyal to its government. Rebels inhabiting the steppes west of the Urals became known as Nogai80, while those who lived on the eastern edge of the Jura ulus, in Tarbagatai and on the banks of Irtysh, and who were virtually independent due to their remoteness from the capital, became the ancestors of the Kazakhs. All three of these ethnic groups arose in the XIV-XV centuries due to the rapid mixing of different ethnic components. The ancestors of the Nogai were the Cumans who survived the defeat of Batyi, the Alans of the steppes, 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 at the time became a symbol of ethnic consolidation. The Tatars included the Kama Bulgars, Khazars and Burtases, as well as part of the Cumans and the Ugrians - Mishars. The same mixture was the population of the White Horde, from which three Kazakh dzhus were formed in the 15th century. But this was not all.
At the end of the 15th century Russian troops from the upper Volga began attacking Tatar towns on the Middle Volga, forcing a part of the population to leave their homeland and go to Central Asia under the leadership of Sheibani-khan (1500-1510). The local Turks, then called "Chagatai" (after the second son of Genghis - Chagatai, head of the Central Asian ulus), were ruled by the descendants of Timur, an enemy of the steppe and Volga Tatars who had devastated the Volga region in 1395-1396.
The Horde, who left their homeland, adopted a new name, "Uzbeks," in honor of Khan Uzbek (1312-1341), who established Islam as the state religion in the Golden Horde. In the 16th century, "Uzbeks" defeated the last Timurid, Babur, who took the remnants of his followers to India and won a new kingdom for himself. 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 ago they submitted to the Mongol Prince. The true Mongols who settled in 13th century in eastern Iran, even though they retained their language, are called Khezareans, from the Persian word "Khezar" meaning a thousand, implying a military unit, a division.
But where are the Mongols, after whom the "yoke", which held sway over Russia for 240 years, is named? As an ethnic group, they did not exist, because all the children of Jochi in the three hordes at the bequest of Genghis received 4 thousand warriors, of whom only part came from the Far East. These latter were not called "Tatars", but "Khins", from the Chinese name of the Jurchen empire Kin (modern Jin)81. This rare name is mentioned for the last time in the "Zadonschina", where Mamai is called "hinovin"82. Though in the 19th century the "yoke" was not Mongolian but was realized by the ancestors of nomadic Uzbeks, who should not be confused with sedentary Uzbeks, although in the 19th century they mingled and nowadays form a single ethnos, equally revering Timurids and Sheibanids, who were their worst enemies in the 16th century, because this hostility already lost its meaning and importance in the 17th century.
The Powerlessness of Philology in History
These examples are enough to state that the ethnic name or even self-name and the phenomenon of ethnicity as a stable collective of individuals of the species Homo sapiens by no means overlap each other.
79 Nikonov V.A. Ethnonymy // Ethnonyms / Ed. by V.A. Nikonov. М., 1970. С. 10-11.
80 Shennikov A.A. Dwelling Houses of the Nogais of the Northern Black Sea Coast / / Slav-Russian Ethnography / Edited by I.N. Ukh-
I.N. Ukhanov. Л., 1973. С. 47-52.
81 Gumilev L.N. Quest for an imaginary kingdom. М., 1970. С. 311-313.
82 Cf: Rybakov B.A. 1) About overcoming self-deception // Problems of History. 1970. No 3; 2) "Slovo o polku Igoreve" i ego contemporaneity. М., 1971. С. 28; Gumilev L.N. Can a Work of Fine Arts be a Historical Source? // Russian Literature. 1972. No 1.
Therefore, the philological methodology, which studies words, is not applicable to ethnology, and we have to 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 science is a social institution, which can be a state, a tribal union, a religious sect, a trading company (such as the East India Company), a political party, etc., in short, any institution in any age and among any people.
Sometimes the institution of the state and the ethnos coincide, and then we see 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 people 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 ethnic groups, as was the case with the Muslim community founded by Muhammad in the seventh century.
During the reign of the first four caliphs in the lands of Islam, the Arab tribes, the Syrians, and partly the Persians merged into a single ethnos; under the Umayyads (661-750). The process stopped, and the descendants of the conquerors and the conquered began to form new ethnic groups with a single inter-ethnic culture, conventionally referred to as "Muslim", with the Arabic language, the awareness of their unity in comparison with Christians and pagans, but with different historical fates and different stereotypes of behavior, which manifested itself in the creation of a variety of sects and ideological concepts.
It would seem that the emirates and sultanates that emerged as a consequence of the isolation of ethnic groups should have conformed to ethnic boundaries, but this was not the case. Successful polities subjugated territories with multilingual populations for a short time and then fell prey to their neighbors; in other words, political entities had different destinies than ethnic entities. Of course, the commonality of historical destiny contributes to the formation and preservation of ethnicity, but historical destiny83 can be the same for two or three nationalities and different within one nationality.
For example, the Anglo-Saxons and Welsh Celts were united in the 13th century, but they did not merge into a single ethnos, which, however, does not prevent them from living in peace, and the Eastern Armenians, who were subordinated to Iran in the 3rd century, and the Western Armenians, connected with Byzantium, had different fates, but the ethnic unity was not violated. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries French Huguenots and Catholics differed greatly in their historical fortunes and in their culture, both before and after the Edict of Nantes. But the ethnic integrity of France remained intact, despite the bloody wars and dragonades. Consequently, the formation of ethnicities - ethnogenesis - lies deeper than the visible historical processes recorded by the sources. History can help ethnology, but it does not replace it.
Mosaicism as a Property of Ethnicity
It is possible to do without the clan system. Many ethnic groups are divided into tribes and clans. Is it possible to consider this division as an obligatory part of an ethnos, or at least as the initial stage of its formation, or, finally, as a form of a collective, which preceded the appearance of the ethnos itself84? The reliable material we have in our possession allows us to answer no!83 We call historical destiny a chain of events casually linked by their internal logic.
84 Eats R.F. Introduction to Ethnography. Л., 1974. С. 50.
First of all, not 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 one. But the clan or clan system exists among the Celts, Kazakhs, Mongols, Tungus, Arabs, Kurds, and a number of other peoples.
It would be difficult to consider the clan system as an earlier stage, because the Byzantines or Sassanian Persians - a people which had been formed a thousand years earlier than the Mongols, and a thousand years earlier than the Kazakhs - got along splendidly without clans and clan-fratries. Of course, one can assume that in ancient times the clan system was ubiquitous, but even if this is true, such an assumption is untenable for the historical period, when the peoples (ethnic groups) emerged before the historian's eyes. It is better to recognize that the scheme "clan - tribe - nation - people" refers to social development, that is, it lies on a different plane. The fact that the dominant forms of social life throughout mankind during the existence of Homo sapiens were different forms of the family is not directly relevant to the problem, since ethnic integrity does not coincide with the family unit, nor with 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 tribal structure the division into clans (Celts), fraternities, bones ("seok" of the Altai) and tribal associations ("jus" of the Kazakhs), etc. is 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 thanks to this division that exogamy is preserved, preventing incestuous marriages.
Clan representatives express the will of their fellow tribesmen in popular assemblies and form stable alliances for external wars, both defensive and offensive. In Scotland, for example, the clan system withstood Viking raids in the 10th century, feudal attacks in the 12th and 15th centuries, war with the English bourgeoisie in the 17th and 18th centuries, and only capitalist relations managed to destroy it. And where the clan system was less pronounced, such as with the Polabian Slavs, the German and Danish knights did away with it in two centuries (the 11th and 12th centuries), despite the undeniable bellicosity and enviable courage of the Bodricians, Lutyches and 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 a different frame of reference, suitable not for a part but for the totality of the observed collisions.
In Part Three see:
How is the clan system being replaced?
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