Lev Gumilyov Complete Works part 3/3
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.
This writing 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.)
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.
If there is a difficulty with Gumilev, it is that he is so informed about ancient Asian and world history, that his examples include scores upon scores of clans, tribes, cultures and civilizations that a normal student has never heard of. So, it becomes quite difficult to keep it all straight in the mind, and really impossible to fully absorb it. This part you have to “take-it-on-faith”, and digging further into Gumilev, you will see all these names again and again.
How is the clan system being replaced?
What compensates for the absence of tribal groups among fully developed peoples at the stage of a class society? The existence of class structure and class struggle in slave, feudal and capitalist societies are established facts and are not subject to revision. Consequently, the division into classes cannot functionally be 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 which do not coincide at all with classes. They may be called "corporations," but this word corresponds to the concept only in its first approximation and will be replaced thereafter.
For example, in feudal Europe, within the same ethnos, say the French, the ruling class consisted of different corporations: 1) the feudal lords in the literal sense, that is, the holders of the fiefs, bound to the crown by vassal oath; 2) the knights, united in orders; 3) the notables, who constitute the machinery of royal power (Nobless des robes); 4) the high clergy; 5) scholars, such as professors at the Sorbonne; 6) the urban patricians, who is itself divided along territorial lines, etc.
It is possible, depending on the accepted degree of approximation, to allocate more or less groups, but it is necessary to take into account also the belonging to parties, for example Armagnac and Burgundy at the beginning of the XV century.
Sometimes readers are tempted to identify these groups with estates, understanding the latter as social groups. But we must be very precise - social divisions are classes, and estates are administrative divisions, because in the Middle Ages they "did not acquire any particular significance in the political world, but marked as themselves"85.
The groups described here are not even estates in the full sense of the word, but communities which are "prerequisites of production”.86 As variants of professional communities, clan communities - extended families - can also appear. This is why K. Marx called the history of the Middle Ages zoological, noting that these "corporations" were populated by bastards, (illegitimate, unauthorized), who had no rights under the law but achieved them through energy and family connections88. Bastards played a particularly important role after the Hundred Years' War. For example, the bastard Dunois was considered the first knight of France and was a count.
This division applies even more to the masses, as each feudal province had a distinctly individual character at that time. For example, the people of Rouen in the twelfth century were hostile to Philip II Augustus who had freed them from the English, while the people of Marseilles, on learning of the captivity of Louis IX in Egypt, sang "Te Deum" in the hope of getting rid of the "sières"89. In bourgeois society, the corporations are no longer the same, but the principle remains the same. Within ethnoses and beyond classes, there are for each individual people of "his" and "not his" circle. But in relation to foreign expansions, all these groups acted as one: as the French.
That "corporations", as we have called them by convention, are immeasurably less enduring and long-lasting than tribal groups, is indisputable, but even the latter are not eternal. So, the difference between the two is not crucial. The similarity is that they bear the same load, maintaining the unity of the ethnos through an internal division of functions.
And the most important and curious thing is that, at their inception, the "corporations" differ from one another only in nuances of psychology, but over time the differences deepen and crystallize into customs and rituals, i.e. into the phenomena studied by ethnographers. For example, the Old Slavic kissing rite was transformed in Russia and Poland into the kissing of hands to married ladies and was retained by the local nobility, but disappeared from the everyday lives of other estates.
A.M. Gorky, who observed the everyday life of the petty bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia in the large cities of the Volga region, finds such profound differences that he suggests that these newly formed groups of population be considered as "different tribes"90. 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 valid for a short period of about 80 years, but we have already said that the duration of the phenomenon does not influence the principle.
85 Marx K., Engels F. Opus, 2nd ed. Vol. 1. С. 313.
86 Ibid. Т. 13. С. 20.
87 Ibid. С. 37.
88 Archives of K. Marx and F. Engels. Т. VI. М., 1939. С. 356ff.
89 Thierry O. Izbr. voobs. С. 214.
90 Gorky A.M. The Watchman // Collected Works: In 30 vol. Т. 15. М., 1951. С. 81.
The formation of subethnic groups
The concept of "corporation" as proposed is vivid, but insufficient for our analysis, as it suggests 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 this example is a particular case of the general rule we are looking for.
Let us continue with our example of French ethnogenesis. In the 16th century, the Reformation touched this nation and shuffled all its former "corporations" beyond recognition. The feudal aristocracy, the petty nobility, the bourgeoisie and the peasantry were split into "papists" and "Huguenots. The social bases of the two groups did not differ, but the ethno-territorial divisions could be clearly seen. Calvinism was successful 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 descendants of the Albigoean bourgeoisie of the Languedoc joined the movement. But Paris, Lorraine and central France remained faithful to the Roman Church. All former "corporations" disappeared, as belonging to a "commune" or "church" became for two centuries an indicator of belonging to a sub-ethnic entity.
Nor can we say that theology played a decisive role here. Most of the French were "political", that is, they refused to be interested in the Sorbonne-Geneva controversy. Literate 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 Pre-Conception. If they gave their lives for the Mass or the Bible, then both proved to be a symbol of their self-affirmation and opposition to one another, and thus an indicator of underlying contradictions. These contradictions were not class-based, since nobles, peasants, and the bourgeoisie fought on both sides. 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 ample reason.
But what if the Huguenots had defended a piece of territory for themselves and established an independent state there, like the Swiss or the North Americans, say? Probably they would have to be regarded as a special ethnicity, the result of the zigzag of historical destiny, because they would have a special way of life, culture, mental disposition and perhaps language, for they would hardly speak 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 3rd 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 fortunate in conquering Lothian, a lowland area on the banks of the River Tweed populated by descendants of Saxons and Norse Vikings. The Scottish kings gained many rich subjects, tied 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 wealthy 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.91
91 Toynbee A.J. Study of History / Abr. by D. Somervell. London; New York; Toronto, 1946. P. 120-121.
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 the Catholics, along with the Calvinists, were retained in the valleys. In short, the genesis of this people mixed races and cultures, clan system and feudalism, but the complexity of the composition did not break the ethnic monolith, as manifested in the clashes with the English and later with the Irish.
An even more characteristic example of a different order is the Russian Old Believers. It is known to be a small group of Great Russians who did not accept certain church reforms in the seventeenth century. At that time, church service served not only as a religion, but also as a synthetic art, that is, it filled an aesthetic vacuum. Just as no one today enjoys reading bad poetry or looking at ugly pictures, so in the 17th century the replacement of the Thrice-Hallelujah with a Triple Hallelujah, and of the waning icons with new pink-and-blue icons shocked a certain part of the faithful. They simply could not concentrate in an environment that irritated them.
It was essentially the same ethnic schism as Western Europe was at the time of the Reformation, but on a smaller scale. Not all Orthodox Christians, however, favored the old rite. Those who did, however, stood firm, not fearing execution or torture. When the opportunity arose, they took the counteroffensive and dealt with the Nikonians as brutally as they had dealt with them. This manifested itself during the Streltsy uprisings under the regency of Tsarevna Sophia. The intensity of passions was the same for both. In the XVII century there was a dispute only about church ceremonialism, but otherwise - in life, the system of education, in habits - Old Believers were not distinguished in any way from the general mass of Russians. In the second generation, under Peter I, they constituted a certain isolated group of the population. By the end of the 18th century they had, and in part survived, customs, rituals, and clothing that differed sharply from those that had become common.
Catherine II ended the persecution of Old Believers, but this did not lead to their merger with the bulk of the 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 destiny, i.e. the attachment to principles so dear to them that they would die for the sake of these principles, became a group united by a common life, led by spiritual leaders (preceptors) of different styles 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 cited are vivid but rare. More often, the functions of intra-ethnic groupings are assumed by naturally formed territorial associations - zemstvos. (an elective council), The presence of such divisions, just as of the clan system, does not undermine ethnic unity.
We can now conclude that the social forms into which intra-ethnic unities are clothed are bizarre and do not always coincide with the subdivisions of the ethnic group; intra-ethnic fragmentation is the condition that maintains the integrity of the ethnic group and gives it stability: it is typical of all periods and stages of social development.
Variants of Ethnic Contacts
We have so far considered fractional groups within larger ethnic groups, but the problem is by no means exhausted by this. In the real historical process, ethnic groups do not exist in a strictly isolated way, but there are different variants of ethnic contacts arising in territories inhabited by different ethnic groups politically united in multi-ethnic states. Four variants can be distinguished in the study of their relations: (a) coexistence, in which the ethnic groups do not mix or imitate each other, (b) assimilation, i.e. the absorption of one ethnos by another with complete oblivion of origin and former traditions; (c) mestization, which preserves and combines traditions of previous ethnoses and ancestral memory; these variations are usually unstable and exist by adding new mestizos; (d) fusion, which forgets traditions of both primary components and a new, third, ethnos appears alongside (or instead of) two predecessor ones. This (d) is essentially the main variant of ethnogenesis. For some reason, it is observed less often than all the others.
Let us illustrate this fourfold system with examples. Variant (a) is the most common. Let us imagine that a Russian, a German, a Tatar, and a Georgian, all belonging to the Caucasoid race, dressed the same way, having eaten in the same canteen and carrying the same newspaper under their arm, enter a streetcar. It is obvious to all that they are not identical, even minus their individual characteristics.92 "So what? - one of my opponents once objected to me. - If there isn't an acute national incident on this streetcar, everyone will go on quietly, 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 also 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 neutralization reaction with a booming hiss only if water is poured over them. In history, as in an aqueous solution, there are reactions all the time, and there is no hope of it ending. Even the mere coexistence of different ethnicities as they come together is not neutral. Sometimes it is necessary. In the upper Congo, for example, the Bantu and Pygmies live in symbiosis. Without the Pygmies' help, the Negroes cannot walk in the forest except along the trails, and the latter quickly become overgrown without being cleaned. 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.
The variant of long coexistence with constant enmity was well described by Leo Tolstoy, who observed clashes between the Grebeno Cossacks and the Chechens. But he correctly noted the mutual respect of the two neighboring ethnic groups and the wariness of the Cossacks toward the soldiers, who on 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 conscience, or loose life. Escape from death by giving up everything dear and familiar in order to become a second-class citizen among the winners. The latter gain little either, for they acquire fellow tribesmen who are hypocritical and, as a rule, inferior, since only the outward behavior of a subjugated ethnos, not its moods, can be controlled. The English were convinced of this in the 19th century by the Irish, the Spanish by Simon Bolivar's partisans, and the Chinese by the Dungans. There are too many examples, but the point is clear.
Variant (c) (mestization) 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 confession Islam and submit to the sultan to become a true Turk.
92 Gumilev L.N. Ethnogenesis and Ethnosphere // Nature. 1970. No 1. С. 46-47.
In other words, they viewed ethnicity as a "condition" that could be changed at will. Thus, the Turks employed any adventurers 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. According to them, the causes of the decline were "adjemoglans", i.e. renegade children93, and the sincerity of the neophytes was not questioned. Some of the Renegades were generous and useful, like the Frenchman Keprilou and the Greek Hyraddine Barbarossa, but most of them sought warmth and sinecures through the harems of the Viziers, full of Polish, Croatian, Italian, Greek, etc. These rascals, having no ni foi ni loi, destroyed the Ottoman ethnos, and the real Ottomans were reduced to the position of an ethnos oppressed in their own country already in the 18th century. The influx of foreigners crippled the stereotype of behavior, which resulted in corrupt viziers, corrupt judges, a falling army and a collapsing economy.
By the early 19th century, Turkey had become a "sick man". In his dissertation, renowned Russian orientalist V.D. Smirnov analyzed the reasons for such a strange transformation of a strong nation into a weak one and wrote: "Would anyone, even in jest, state that Messrs. Tchaikovsky, Langevich, and the like, of the Slavs, Greeks, Magyars, Italians, and others, converted to Islam out of conviction? No one, no doubt. And yet it was the lot of such shapeshifters to profit from the valiant exploits of the Ottoman tribe. They had no religion, they were devoid of any moral convictions; they had no sympathy for the people over whom they ruled, and they lived their lives as animals. Harem rallies superseded politics, the real interest of any true citizen. Family ties were not a product of their own disfigured state, or were made up for by a vile vice ... Their sense of good did not extend beyond the well-being of their own pockets. Their sense of duty was limited to the search for legitimate excuses to cover up their iniquities, without the risk of falling prey to the machinations of others like them. In short, though they were Ottomans in name, they were not really"94. Where is the decisive factor: in nature or in the civil state?
The Role of Exogamy
Thus, the introduction of foreign tribesmen into Turkey exacerbated an already growing crisis of class contradictions, for which the transformation of ethnic integrity into chimerical integrity played a catalyst, for everyone understands that sincere loyal officials are more valuable than hypocritical and unprincipled ones. Conversely, the development of class contradictions played a vector role for the ethnogenesis of the Ottomans. 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 called the countries of the "fertile crescent". The conquests of Selim I in the 16th century placed in the hands of the Ottoman sultans Syria, Palestine, Egypt and Mesopotamia, where intensive farming had transformed the pristine landscape as early as the 3rd millennium B.C.93
The name "renegade" had no offensive connotations in those days, and defecting to the enemy was commonplace. But if the transition within one super-ethnos was not even considered treason, the departure to Muslims deprived the renegade of his former ethnic identity, as the hero sings in the famous operetta "Zaporozhets beyond the Danube" who fled to the Turks: "Now I am Turk, not Cossack".
94 Smirnov V.D. Kucibey Gomurdjinsky and other Ottoman writers of the 17th century on the causes of the decline of Turkey. St. Petersburg, 1873. С. 266-267.
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, which had enough food without importing it from distant countries. Antioch and later Damascus were large, cheerful, and cultured cities that thrived on local resources. Asia Minor fed the huge city of Constantinople.
The cultural landscape, however, needed to be constantly maintained. The Arab Caliphs who bought slaves in Zanzibar to maintain the irrigation of Mesopotamia, the Byzantine autocrats who by special edicts fortified the small farming economy, the most intense in those natural conditions, and even the Mongol Ilkhan Gazan, who organized the construction of a canal in the arid northern part of the Near East, understood this. The disintegration of the cultural landscapes of Western Asia came late: in the 17th and 19th centuries, at a time of deep peace and the decline of the Ottoman Empire, as indentured Syrian, Iraqi, and Cilician peasants abandoned their lands and sought a better life in the pirate cities of the coast, where they could either become rich or die. 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. A French adventurer and physician in the guard of Aurengzeb, François Bernier, who observed similar conditions in India, subject to the "Great Moguls", wrote to Colbert to foresee the imminent fall of the three great Muslim kingdoms of India, Turkey, and Persia; of the latter, he believed that their decline would be slow, since the Persian nobility was of local origin95. And he did not collude with Kuchibey of Gomurdjin. The coincidence happened because the two clever men observed the same process, able to draw conclusions and predictions. And we have to agree that under a stable social structure, under conditions of the same formation, but with a changing ratio of ethnic components in the political system-state, the state of the landscape, as a sensitive barometer, shows the emergence or presence of ups and downs and periods of stabilization.
But if so, we have no reason to deny the reason cited by these authors: the emergence of new ethnic groups in the system, unconnected to the landscapes of the region and free from the restrictions of exogamous marriages, for these restrictions, while maintaining the ethnic diversity of the region, lead to the conservation 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 within our bodies. Since similar phenomena took place in Rome, Ancient Iran and many other countries, it is easy to see the general pattern: with endogamy as an ethnic barrier the processes were slower and less painful, and it is not the same for an ethnic group: it will last three hundred years or a thousand. That is why J.V. Bromley's observation about the stabilizing role of endogamy as a barrier against incorporation is indisputable96.
95 Bernier F. History of the Last Political Coups in the State of the Great Mogul. М., 1936.
96 Bromley Y.V. Ethnos and endogamy // Soviet Ethnography. 1969. No 6. С. 84-91.
The Experience of Interpretation
Let us try to interpret the described phenomenon. If ethnic groups are processes, then when two dissimilar processes collide, interference occurs, disrupting each of the original frequencies. The chimeric associations that are 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 the people involved in this system. This is the general mechanism of disruption of a given pattern, but it has exceptions. It is the instability of the original rhythms that is the condition for the emergence of a new rhythm, i.e. a new ethnogenetic inertial process. We will not talk about what this is due to yet, because it is too serious a question to be solved in passing. But it is clear that endogamy is necessary for preservation of ethnic traditions, because endogamous family transmits to the child a stereo-type of behavior, and exogamous family transmits him two stereotypes, mutually extinguishing each other. So, exogamy, which is not at all related to "social states" and lies on a different plane, turns out to be among the factors of ethnogenesis, i.e. a real destructive factor in contacts at the super-ethnic level. And even in those rare cases when a new ethnos appears in the conflict zone, it absorbs, i.e. destroys, both former ones.
To conclude, let us say that in this example, as well as in the vast majority of cases, the racial principle plays no role. The question is not about somatic differences, but behavioral ones, because the steppe people, Tibetan mountaineers and Chinese belonged to one and the same Mongoloid race of the I order, and when we specify to the II order, we see that northern Chinese are closer to Xianbians and Tibetans than to southern Chinese by racial traits. However, the external similarity of the cranial indicators, eye and hair color, epicanthus, and other features did not matter for the ethnogenetic processes.
The connection of ethnos with the landscape, sometimes questioned, is also evident from this example. The Huns, having occupied the Huang He valley, grazed cattle there, the Chinese sowed fields and built canals, and their mixtures, having no skills in either cattle-breeding or farming, rapaciously offended their neighbors and subjects, resulting in the formation of fallow lands and the restoration of the natural biocenosis, although impoverished due to deforestation and the extermination of ungulates (deer-like creatures), during the royal hunts. Everything agrees.
Thus, not only theoretical considerations, but also the need to interpret the actual data makes it necessary to reject the concept of ethnicity as a state. But if ethnos is a long processes, it is part of the earth's biosphere, and since technological change in the landscape is also connected with ethnos, ethnology should be seen as a geographical science, even though it gets its material from history in the narrow sense, that is, the study of events in their coherence.
VI. Ethnic stereotypes of behavior Dissimilarity as a principle
Every ethnos has its own internal structure and its own inimitable stereotype of behavior. Sometimes the structure and the stereotype of behavior of an ethnos change from generation to generation. This indicates that the ethnos is developing and ethnogenesis is not dying out. Sometimes the structure of an ethnos is stable, because the new generation reproduces the life cycle of the previous one. Such ethnoses can be called persistent, i.e. they have outlived themselves, but this aspect of the matter will be discussed below, and for now let us clarify the meaning of the concept "structure" as applied to the stereotype of behavior, regardless of the degree of its stability and the nature of its variability.
The structure of the ethnic stereotype of behavior is a strictly defined norm of relations: a) between the collective and the individual; b) individuals among themselves; c) intra-ethnic groups among themselves; d) between the ethnos and intra-ethnic groups. These norms, which in each case are peculiar, varying now and then very slowly, exist tacitly in all spheres of life, and life being perceived in every ethnos and in every particular epoch as the only possible way of living, so they are not at all burdensome for members of an 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 or her 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, having visited Olbia, was indignant when he said that the Scythians had no houses, and during their feasts were drunk out of their minds. The Scythians, watching the bacchanalia of the Greeks, were so disgusted that 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, the Arabs considered the uncovered faces of French ladies to be shameless, etc. Examples are innumerable.
Ethnographic science has overcome this immediacy and has introduced the principle of a system into observations, as a valid norm of interrelations between individuals. This norm determines the relationship of individuals to each other as well as to 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, for some people naivety is obligatory for a girl at marriage, and in others - prior training in the techniques of love. Sometimes divorce is easy, sometimes difficult, sometimes impossible at all. In some peoples the cohabitation of wives with strange men is punished as marital infidelity, in others it is encouraged (for example, the Uighurs in the oasis of Hami, as we have already mentioned, were so used to giving up their wives to passing merchants that, even after becoming rich under the patronage of the Genghisids, they would not give up the custom, which seemed shameful to their neighbors).
Similarly, we can analyze variations in the perception of debt. In feudal England or France, a vassal was obliged to serve his suzerain only if he received a benefice ("salary"): if he lost that, he had the right to transfer to another suzerain (for example, the Spanish king). Only a transfer to a non-Christian, such as a Muslim, was considered treason, but this was practiced so often that a special term, renegade, arose. On the contrary, in Rome or Greece, public duties were not accompanied by payment, but were the duty of the citizen of the polis. However, these citizens profited so much from public work that they rewarded themselves excessively.
The power of ethnic stereotypes is enormous, because the members of an ethnos perceive them as only worthy and all others as "savage”. That is why European colonizers called Indians, Africans, Mongols and even Russians savages, even though they could just as easily have said so about the English. The Chinese arrogance was even more unquestioning. Here, for example, is what was stated in the geographical reference of the Minsk era in France: "Lies in the southwestern sea... In 1518 the king sent an envoy with zemstvo works and asked to be recognized as king"97.
The Variability of Behavioral Stereotypes
The stereotypical 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 the descendant of the fierce Saxon, who killed Celtic children, in the merry poacher Robin Hood or the gunslinger of the "White Squad", and his direct descendant in the corsair sailor Francis Drake or in the "iron-clad" soldier Cromwell? And their heir - a clerk of the City of London, now neat and prim in the Victorian era, now a long-haired decadent and drug addict of the 20th century? And England has always been a conservative country.
What about other ethnic groups, whose image is influenced not only by internal development but also by external influences - cultural borrowings, conquests involving forced changes in customs, and, finally, economic pressures that change occupations and forcibly regulate the needs of the ethnic group?
When speaking of the stereotype of the behavior of an ethnic group, we must always specify the era in question. And we should not think that the so-called "savage" or "primitive" tribes are more "conservative" than civilized nations. That opinion is due entirely to the lack of knowledge of Indians, Africans and Siberians. It was enough to sell vodka in Canada and canned food in Tahiti, and the stereotype of the Dakotas and Polynesians changed, rarely for the better. In all cases, however, the changes were made in 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 pattern here as well; we only need to be able to find it.
The number of examples can be cited, including standards of behavior concerning legal, economic, social, domestic, religious and other relationships, however complex, which is the basic principle of maintaining intra-ethnic structure. From the perspective of the humanities, this phenomenon is known as tradition and modification of social relationships, while from the perspective of the natural sciences it is, just as naturally, interpreted as a stereotype of behavior that varies across 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 that is applicable to all the cases we know. Language, origins, customs, material culture, ideology are sometimes determinative and sometimes not. The only thing we can put out of brackets is the recognition by each individual: "We are this and all the others are that”. Since this phenomenon is universal, we can assume that it reflects some physical or biological reality, which for us is the quantity 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 particular ethnic groups. However, it must be remembered that the behavior of an ethnos changes. -
97 Bichurin N.Ya. A Collection of Information on the Historical Geography of East and Middle Asia / Comp. L.N.Gumilev, M.F.Khvan. Cheboksary, 1960. С. 638.
98 This was the case, for example, with the importation of opium into China in the 19th century. Demand for it was created by distributing it at cheap prices. The sale of liquor to the Indians of Canada for furs is similar.
The ethnic group's age is determined by its age, which is conveniently counted from the moment when the ethnos entered the historical arena. Therefore, it is necessary to introduce into the analysis a way of fixing ethnodynamics, in order to proceed to the definition of "ethnos" in the second approximation. This will be a psychological moment, on the one hand, inherent in 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. But people have learned to measure it. Even the most primitive peoples, who have no need for a linear countdown of time from some conditional date ("The Foundation of Rome," "The Creation," "The Birth of Christ," "The Hijra" - Mohammed's flight from Mecca to Medina, etc.). The Turkic-Mongolian calendar is based on the concept of a "living chronology", distinguishing between day and night, the seasons, a "living chronology" based on the dates of one's own life and, finally, on the cycles - a week, a month, and twelve years, where each year is named after a beast (Turkic-Mongolian calendar). According to comparative ethnography, linear timekeeping emerges when an ethnos begins to feel its history not as an exceptional phenomenon, but in connection (relationship) with the history of neighboring countries.
As knowledge accumulates, time is quantized in people's consciousness, that is, it is divided into epochs that are quite unequal in duration, but equivalent in the content of events. Here the category of "time" is juxtaposed with the category of "force" - the cause that accelerates, in the particular case of the historical process.99
This diversity of reference frames shows that it corresponds to a major change in ethnopsychology, which, in turn, is determined by the changing ages of the ethnos. What matters for our purposes is not this or that frame of reference, but the distinction in notions of past, present and future.
When an ethnic community enters its first creative period, the leading part of its population, which pushes 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 in relation to time is transformed into a feeling that can be called "passéisme". 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" shows that the past is not gone, that it is in the person, and that it is therefore worth adding something new, because by doing so, the past accumulates and pushes forward. Every minute we live is perceived as an increase to an existent past (Passe, existente). The heroes who voluntarily gave their lives for their country - the Spartan king Leonidas at Thermopylae, the Consul Attilius Regulus at Carthage, Roland in the Ronseval Gorge - are the fruits of such a perception, whether the historical Breton Margrave or the literary hero of the "Song of Roland". Such were the heroes, monks Peresvet and Oslyabya, novices of Sergei Radonezhsky who perished at the Kulikovo Field, and Khadakh-Batur, a Keraitian warrior who diverted Genghis's warriors to give his "natural khan" refuge. Europeans of this stock erected Gothic cathedrals without immortalizing their names, Hindus carved marvelous statues in cave temples, Egyptians built tombs, Polynesians discovered America for their compatriots and brought kumara (sweet potatoes) to the islands. They were characterized by a lack of personal interest. It was as if they loved their cause more than themselves. But this is not altruism: the subject of their love was in themselves, although not only in them.
99 Gumilev L.N. Ethnos and the category of time // Papers of the Geographical Society of the USSR. Vol. 5. Л., 1970. С. 143-157.
100 Kozin S.A. The Sacred Tale. MOSCOW; L., 1941. С. 140.
They felt themselves heirs not only to great traditions, but part of them, and, giving for the sake of these traditions sweet life, quickly, as warriors, or slowly, as architects, they acted according to their neuro-psychophysical warehouse, which determined the vector and character 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 heroic deeds for their own greed, in search of high positions of power, because for them only the present is real, and inevitably this means their own personal world.
Such are Gaius Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla in Rome, Alcibiad in Athens, Prince Grand Condé, Louis XIV and Napoleon in France, Ivan the Terrible in Russia, and the Emperor Yang Di of Sui (605-618) in China. And writers, artists, professors, etc., who sometimes did something grandiose just to make their name famous, it is impossible to even enumerate! Such are the merrymakers, the bon vivants, the prodigals; they, too, live for today, if only for the duration of their lives. When the percentage of people of this type within an ethnos increases, the inheritance accumulated by their sacrificial ancestors is quickly squandered, and this gives a deceptive impression of abundance, which is why it is considered a "flourishing".
Readers may think that the author is condemning this kind of people. No! Their perception of time is as much a phenomenon as the one described above, and depends not on their desire, but on the peculiarities of higher nervous activity. They could not be otherwise, even if they wanted to be. The famous maxims "Even if the day is mine" and "After us, the deluge is ours" are not cynicism, but sincerity, and the presence of such people in an ethnos does not lead to its extinction but only to a halt in growth, which is sometimes even advisable, since, without sacrificing themselves, these people do not aim to sacrifice their neighbors, and the desire to expand the ethnic range indefinitely is replaced by the establishment of natural borders.
A third possible and realistic option concerns 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 dreams are recognized as real. The best examples of this are Plato's idealism in Greece, Jewish Hilianism in the Roman Empire, and the Manichaean (Albigensianism) and Marxist (Bohumilist) sectarian movements. The Arab Caliphate did not avoid the futuristic influence (that is the most correct name for it), where beginning in the ninth century the Bedouins of Bahrain adopted the ideological system of Karmati and spread throughout 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 Ishmaelites, the Crusaders called them Assassins.
The ideology of the Karmatians was blatantly idealistic, but not religious. According to their teachings, the world consisted of two halves, mirroring each other. In the otherworldly world, they, the Karmatians, felt badly oppressed, abused and robbed. In the antipersonal world it should be the opposite: they, the Karmatians, would oppress, offend, rob Muslims and Christians.
The only way to get to the anti-world is with the help of a "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 activities 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 in the interests of their politics. And can a gang or a sect express the interests of the masses?
In ancient China, however, the futuristic perception of time, as manifested in the third century, led the people to the peasant revolt of the "yellow armbands. Along with the real class contradictions of the Younger Han dynasty (25-220), Taoist scholars were forced out of all positions of state service by Confucianists, and the Taoists had to earn their living by treating illnesses and predicting the weather. They did not accept this miserable existence, and the theory developed among them that the "blue sky of violence" would be replaced by a "yellow sky of justice. In fact, the sky turned purple with the glow of the blood spilled: during the period of turmoil that followed the uprising, China's population shrank from 50 million to 7.5 million. It would be frivolous to blame the Taoist propaganda alone for the troubles, since the vast majority of the participants were alien to any philosophical conceptions.
From this perspective, it is important to note the presence of a futuristic worldview and its activation, along with the decline of the passétistic worldview, which has been suppressed from the life of the people. The third century is considered to be the period separating ancient and medieval China. The new accumulation of values, both ideological and material, began in the sixth century under the Sui Dynasty and developed into a passéistic (its meaning is that each active builder of ethnic integrity feels like a continuator of the ancestral line to which he adds something), a passéistic trend in the seventh century under the Tang Dynasty. Conrad called this phenomenon the Chinese Renaissance, when a new and original culture was being created under the banner of "returning to the ancients," resisting the moral decay and brutality of the soldierly and nomadic kingdoms of the Five Barbarians era.101
One could conclude that a futuristic perception of time is so rare that it is an anomaly. This is wrong; it is legitimate, like the other two, but it has such a devastating effect on the ethnic community that any ethnos perishes altogether, either the "dreamers" perish, or the "dreamers" declare their dream realized and become actualists, that is, begin to live like everyone else. The futuristic worldview is dangerous to others only in its pure forms and high "concentrations". When it is mixed with other worldviews, it can even be sympathetic. John of Leiden, for example, was able to achieve high passions in Münster and the bloodshed inevitably associated with it, but modern Baptists are philistines, and as such they are closer to philistines, Catholics, Protestants, and atheists in our classification than to their ideological and spiritual ancestors.
In other words, the confession of an idea does not reflect the attitude to time and is not connected to it. The invariance of the futurist 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, the disappearance of ethnic groups is obviously no accident, nor is the emergence of new ones. Both are components of the same dialectical process, ethnogenesis, and if, as human beings, we can sympathize with any mindset or disposition, as scientists we must simply determine the ratio and vectors of the constituent values in the general direction of the movement under study.
Passaism, actualism and futurism reflect the three stages of ethnic dynamics, but there should also be, and indeed is, a system for evaluating the category of time that corresponds to the static state of ethnicity. It consists in ignoring time as such. People of this disposition are not interested in time, because they do not derive any value from time counting for the activity that feeds them. These people (we called them philistines above), live in all stages, but in the presence of other categories they have little visibility.
101 Conrad N.I. The West and the East. М., 1966. С. 119-149, 152-281.
When with the triumph of "futurism" all their rivals disappear, the inextinguishable mediocrities crawl out of the cracks and historical time stops and the earth lies fallow.
Thus, we have closed all the lines of our analysis and received confirmation of the hypothesis of a four-part construction of ethnic formation. This is neither a coincidence nor an 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, through which new ethnic communities emerge. This is why humanity's ethnic history does not cease, and will continue to do so as long as there are human beings on Earth. For ethnos is not the arithmetic sum of human units, but a "system" - a concept that must be explored in detail.
VII. Ethnos as a System "System" in popular explanation
A well-known example of a social system is the family living in one house. The elements of the system are the family members and their belongings, including husband, wife, mother-in-law, son, daughter, house, well, cat. They make up the family until the spouses divorce, the children split off and start earning their own money, the mother-in-law fights with her son-in-law, the well blossoms, and the cat has kittens in the attic. If after that they will stay in the house, even if they have a plumbing there, it will not be a family, but a settled plot, i.e. all the elements of living and indirect nature will remain in place, but the family system will disappear.
Conversely, if the mother-in-law dies, the house is rebuilt, the cat escapes, the loving son leaves, the family will remain, despite the change in the number of elements. This means that the real existing and acting factor in the system is not objects, but connections, even though they have no mass, no charge, and no temperature.
This internal connection between individuals, while mutually dissimilar, is the real manifestation of the systemic connection and cannot be defined through any other indicators.
The links in the system can be both positive and negative, and some of the subsystem links can change their sign during the life of an individual. Let us continue with our example. A newborn infant's relationship with elders has a certain orientation and "weight"102. He is taken care of, brought up, and taught. When he becomes an adult and the father of a family, the sign of the bond is reversed: he takes care of his parents and teaches his children. Finally, when he becomes an old man, he again requires care and nurturing. This pattern shows that any system is not static, but is either in dynamic equilibrium (homeostasis), or in motion from some impulse whose momentum is outside this system. Of course, it is possible that this impulse is limited to a higher-ranking system, but this does not change the mechanism of influence.
The family is an obvious example of a system. However, more complex systems such as ethnos, social organism, species, biogeocenosis follow the same pattern, even though they are built according to the hierarchy principle: subsystems form a system integrity - super-system; super-systems form a hypersystem, etc. Thus, the existence of all-general connections that create dynamic stereotypes is more or less stable, but never eternal.
102 Or the quotient at the fact of connection (in the cybernetic sense), for example, the measure of a father's care for his son.
Thus, the measure of stability of an ethnos as a system is determined not by its mass, i.e. the number of the population and the accuracy of ancestral copying, but by the average set of connections. A drastic departure from certain limits results either in death or in rapid development. This creates the elasticity of the ethnos, which allows it to absorb external influences and even regenerate sometimes, because the "multi-connected" system makes up for the damage of reconstructing connections.
After this popular explanation, let us move on to scientific definitions, that is, cybernetics and systemology to the extent that we will need them.
"System" in ethnology
Н. Wiener defined cybernetics as the science of control and communication in animals and machines.103 “The merit of cybernetics lies in the method of studying complex systems, for in the study of simple systems cybernetics has no advantage."104 The subject of the study of cybernetics is the ways in which an object behaves: "it asks not 'what is it?' but 'what does it do?'"105 "Therefore, the properties of an object are the names of its behavior."106 Cybernetics deals with all forms of behavior because they are regular, or deterministic, or reproducible. Materiality is irrelevant, as is observance or non-observance of the ordinary laws of physics.107
These theses show that the ethnologist who is interested in the essence of the phenomenon of ethnicity and has to reconcile his own observations with the laws of nature that he knows, must not put absolute trust in Wiener's methods of cybernetics. The application of cybernetic research methods can serve as a corrective to extrapolate empirical generalizations, but no more. Therefore, it is advisable to base the methodology of systemic study of ethnicity not on the ideas of N. Wiener, but on those of L. Bertalanffy,108 who combined physical chemistry and thermodynamics with cybernetics.
According to L. Bertalanffy's system approach, "a system is a complex of elements in interaction"109 , that is, the usual elements of information are not separate facts, but connections between the facts. According to A.A. Malinovsky, "the system is built of units, groupings of which have an independent meaning, links, subsystems, each of which is a unit of a lower order, which ensures the hierarchical principle that allows us to conduct research on a given level".
Based on this principle, we have the right to consider ethnos as a system of social and natural units with their inherent elements. An ethnos is not simply an assemblage of people who resemble one another in some way, but a system of individuals of different tastes and abilities, the products of their activities, traditions, the host geographic environment, the ethnic environment, and certain tendencies that prevail in the development of the system. The latter, which is the direction of development, is especially important, because "common to all cases of sets, is the property of elements to possess all kinds of activity, leading to the formation of static or dynamic structures"111.
103 Ross Ashby W. Introduction to Cybernetics. М., 1959. С. 13. 104 Ibid. С. 18.
105 Ibid. С. 13.
106 Ibid. С. 21.
107 Ibid. С. 14.
108 Bertalanffy L. General systems theory: a critical review//Researches on general systems theory / Ed. by V.N. Sadovsky and E.G. Yudin. М., 1969. С. 28.
109 Sadovsky V.N., Yudin E.G. Tasks, methods and applications of the General Systems Theory // Ibidem. С. 12. Malinovsky A.A. General Problems of System Structure and Their Meaning for Biology // Problems of Methodology of Systems Research. Ed. by I.V. Blauberg et al. М., 1970. С. 145-150.
111 Rashevsky N. Organizmic sets. An Essay on the General Theory of Biological and Social Organisms.
Applying this approach, in other words, it is connected to the problem of historicism, since all observed facts are included in the dynamic system of historical development, and it only remains for us to analyze the part of world history that is directly related to our theme.
Thus, we can define real ethnicity as a dynamic system that includes not only people, but also elements of the landscape, cultural tradition, and interrelationship with neighbors.112 In this way, we can define real ethnicity as a dynamic system that includes not only people, but also elements of the landscape, cultural tradition, and interrelationship with neighbors. In such a system, the initial charge of energy is constantly expended and entropy continuously increases. Therefore, the system must constantly remove the accumulated entropy by exchanging energy and entropy with the environment. This exchange is regulated by controlling systems, which use hereditary information reserves113. In our case, tradition plays the role of governing systems, interacting equally with the social and natural forms of matter movement. Transmission of experience to offspring is observed in most warm-blooded animals. However, the presence of implements, speech, and writing sets humans apart from other mammals, and ethnos is a form of collective being that is unique to humans.
Levels and Types of Ethnic Systems
The approach we have taken allows us to replace ethnic classification with ethnic systematics. The classification can be made according to any arbitrary characteristic: language, race, religion, occupation, and state affiliation. Either way it is a very arbitrary classification. Systematics, on the other hand, reflects precisely what is inherent in the nature of things, allowing us to explore humanity with technology and domesticated animals and cultivated plants. The largest unit after humanity as a whole (as an amorphous anthroposphere - one of the Earth's shells) is the super-ethnos, that is, a group of ethnoses which emerged simultaneously in one region and which manifests itself in history as a mosaic of ethnoses. It is these that are the ethnic taxa observed directly. Ethnoses, in turn, are divided into sub-ethnoses, that is, units that exist only because they are part of the unity of an ethnos. Without ethnos, they fall apart and perish.
Belonging to one or another section of taxonomy is determined not by the absolute identity of individuals, which never happens in nature, but by the degree of similarity in a certain aspect at a given level. At the level of super-ethnos (take the Middle Ages as an example) Muslims - Arab, Persian, Turkmen, Berber were closer to each other than to the members of the Western Christian ethnos - "Franks", as they called all Catholics of Western Europe. And the French, the Castilian, the Scottish, who were part of a common super-ethnos, were closer to each other than to members of other super-ethnoses - the Muslim, the Orthodox, etc. On the level of ethnos, the French were closer to each other than they were to the English. This did not prevent the Burgundians from supporting Henry V and taking Joan of Arc prisoner, even though they knew they were going against their own. But by no means should the diversity of visible history be reduced to an awareness of ethnic unity, which is only sometimes the main factor determining human behavior. But the sense of ethnic affinity is always present and can be attributed to human nature as an invariant. In other words, no matter how mosaic and diverse is the ethnos, at a given level it is an integrity.
And the most interesting thing is that historians have practically already grasped the possibility of such an approach. Involuntarily, they group ethnicities into constructions that they call either "cultures, or "civilizations" or "worlds. It is not a biological system and not only a social one, since "analogies of the biological and social levels are not ethnicities”.
112 Malinovsky A.A. General Dynamics... P. 182]. М., 1969. С. 445.
113 Sviridov M.N. At the forefront of space science // Nature. 1966. No 8. С. 112.
For example, for the twelfth and thirteenth centuries we find meaning in such notions, which at the time denoted really existing wholes. Western Europe, for example, under the ideological supremacy of the Pope and the formal sovereignty of the German Emperor, which was never actually exercised, called itself the "Christian world. Thus, West Europeans opposed not only the Muslims with whom they had fought in Spain and Palestine, but also the Orthodox Greeks and Russians and, amazingly, the Irish and Welsh Celts. It is clear that they did not mean a religious community, but a systemic integrity, which was named by an arbitrary indicator.
Likewise, the "World of Islam" opposed the Greeks, the French, and the pagan Turks, but it was not unified in terms of religion. The teachings of the Shi'a (theists), the Karmati (atheists), and the Sufi (pantheists) bore little resemblance to one another and to the orthodox doctrine of Islam, or Sunnism. But the Christian Europeans were by no means friends with each other either. When they encountered Muslims or pagans, however, they immediately found common ground and ways to compromise. This meant, for example, that a Venetian could fight a Genoese, but only as long as there were no Muslim Arabs or Berbers. Then the former enemies would throw themselves upon a common foe.
We know from history that violent wars are often fought between close relatives. Yet they are fundamentally different from wars at the level of large systems. In the latter, the adversary is seen as something foreign, interfering and to be eliminated. But personal emotions such as anger, hatred, envy, etc. do not become a motive for the cruelty being pursued. The further the systems are apart, the more coldly the mutual extermination becomes, turning into a kind of dangerous hunt. Is it possible to be angry with a tiger or a crocodile? Conversely, the struggle within the system is not about annihilating the enemy, but about defeating him. Since the enemy is also part of the system, the system cannot exist without him. Thus, the leader of the Florentine Ghibellines, Farinata degli Uberti, helped the enemies of his homeland to victory, but did not allow Florence to be destroyed. He declared, "I fought this city in order to live in it." And he lived there to the death, after Arbia had turned black with the blood of his opponents, the Florentine Guelphs.
But that would have been nothing! It was the brother of the famous Ghibelline Ezzelino da Romana, Alberrigo, who was treated much more badly by the Venetians. When in 1260 he surrendered his castle near Treviso, six of his sons were beheaded before his eyes, then he himself was beheaded and his wife and two daughters were burned alive in the square of Treviso. Why such senseless atrocities?
To understand this situation, it is necessary to understand that "the Guelphs and the Ghibellines are algebraic signs that can hide any meaning"114. The Ghibellines are supposed to be feudal lords and the Guelphs to be burghers, but the popolani of certain towns were on the side of the Ghibellines, some Guelphs became Ghibellines, and vice versa, and occasionally both parties acted together against Arabs or Greeks. Major city republics like Genoa and Venice repeatedly switched from one camp to the other, on the basis of purely political calculations115. So, what was the reason for the bloodshed?
The way of maintaining the integrity of a system depends on the era, or more precisely, on the phase of ethnogenesis. In young systems, the elements come into contact with each other in a tense, one might say passionate, way that causes clashes. Often bloody feuds have no ideological or class meaning, occurring within the same social stratum, such as the War of the Scarlet and White Rose in England, the Armagnacs and Burgundians in France. But this strife maintains the integrity of ethnic systems and states are better off than when the population is apathetic - although then it is easy to live, ethnicities disintegrate and disappear as wholes.
114 History of Italy: In 3 vols. Т. 1. / Ed. by V.D. Skazkin. М., 1970. С. 233.
115 Sokolov N.P. Venice between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines // Problems of History. 1975. No 9. С. 142-153.
Often ethnic systems, as we have already mentioned, are not equivalent to state formations: one ethnos can live in different states or several in one. So, in what sense can we treat them as systems?
There are two ideal types of systems: rigid and corpuscular, or discrete. In rigid systems, all parts (elements) are fitted to each other so that their simultaneous existence is necessary for normal functioning. In corpuscular systems the elements interact freely, are easily replaced by similar ones, the system does not stop functioning, and even the loss of some elements with the following restoration is possible. If it doesn't follow, the system simplifies, its destruction being in the limit.
Another division of systems is also possible: into open systems receiving energy constantly and exchanging positive and negative entropy with the environment, and closed systems only spending the initial charge until their potential is equalized with the potential of the environment. When comparing the two characteristics, four versions of systems are possible: 1) rigid open; 2) rigid closed; 3) corpuscular open; 4) corpuscular closed. This division is arbitrary, since any functioning system combines features of all types, but, since it is closer to one pole or to the other, this division is practically justified, since it allows classifying systems according to the degree of subordination of their elements.
Whether we study state or ethnic history, we find all kinds of systems except for the extreme ones, rigid or discrete, because they are both unsustainable. Rigid systems cannot recover from failures, while discrete systems lack the ability to resist external shocks. Therefore, in practice, we encounter systems with different degrees of rigidity, the greater the degree of rigidity brought into it by human labor, and the less the less the creation of the system is initiated by the processes of nature, which are constantly transforming its constituent elements. At the limit, this is the opposition between the technosphere and the biosphere.
But where is the boundary between the biosphere and the technosphere if the human organism itself is part of nature? Obviously, the boundary between the sociosphere, (technosphere) and the biosphere passes not only beyond human bodies, but also within them. But this does not make the distinction irrelevant. On the contrary, here we find a real moment of interaction between the social and the biological. It is a self-evident natural phenomenon, well known to all - the ethnos.
Ideally, ethnos is a corpuscular system, but in order not to be annihilated by its neighbors, the people that make it up establish some learned or borrowed instincts that are auxiliary and rigid systems in relation to ethnos. These are, for example, the authority of elders in the clan, leadership in hunting or war, obligations towards the family and, finally, the formation of the State. Thus, the rigid systems are sociopolitical formations: states, tribal unions, clans, druzhiny, etc. The coincidence of the systems of both types, i.e. the ethnos and the state or tribal union, is not necessary, although it seems natural. Consider the great empires of antiquity that united diverse ethnic groups or the medieval feudal fragmentation of ethnic groups. Apparently, the quirkiness of the combination is as natural as the coincidence. Both types of systems are dynamic, that is, they arise and disappear in historical time. The seeming exception is homeostatic ethnic systems, whose change is related only to external influences. But we should not forget that homeostasis emerges only after intense development, when the forces that created and moved the system have dried up. Therefore, statistics should be perceived as a slowed down inertial movement with zero in the limit, practically unattainable.
VIII. Subethnos, The Structure of Ethnos
The structure of ethnos is always more or less complex, but it is the complexity that provides ethnos with stability, thanks to which it is able to survive centuries of turmoil, turmoil and peaceful fading. The principle of ethnic structure can be called hierarchical subordination of subethnic groups, meaning that the latter are taxonomic units within the ethnos as a visible whole and do not violate its unity. At first glance, this thesis seems to contradict our position on the existence of ethnos as an elementary whole, but let us remember that even a molecule of matter consists of atoms, and an atom consists of elementary particles, which does not negate the claim of wholeness at one level or another: molecular, or atomic, or even subatomic. It is all about the nature of structural bonds.
Let us explain this with an example. A Karelian from Tver province called himself a Karel in his village and called himself a Russian when he came to Moscow to study, because in the village the opposition of Karelians to Russians mattered, but in the city it didn't, because the differences in everyday life and culture were so slight that they were hidden. But if it was not a Karelian, but a Tatar, he would continue to call himself a Tatar, for his religious significance added to the ethnographic dissimilarity with the Russians, and was not so little as to sincerely declare himself a Russian. A Tatar who went to Western Europe or China would have been considered a Russian there and would himself have agreed with that, while in New Guinea he would have been perceived as a European, only not of the "tribe" of the English or the Dutch. This example is very important for ethnic diagnostics and thus for demographic statistics and ethnographic maps. After all, when the latter are compiled, one must agree on the order and degree of approximation, otherwise it will be impossible to distinguish between sub-ethnoses that exist as elements of the structure of an ethnos and those that are active ethnoses.
Let us now dwell on the subordination of ethnic groups. For example, the French, a striking example of a monolithic ethnos, include, as already mentioned, the Breton Celts, the Gascon of Basque origin, the Lorraine, descendants of the Alemannes, and the Provençal, a self-styled people of the Romance group. In the mid-9th century, when the ethnic name "French" was first documented, all these peoples and others such as Burgundians, Normans, Aquitanians and Savoyards were not yet a coherent people and only after a thousand years of ethnogenesis did they form the ethnic group which we now call the French. The process of amalgamation did not, however, lead to the leveling of local customs, rituals, etc. They were preserved as local provincial peculiarities that did not violate the ethnic cohesion of the French.
In France, we see particularly clearly the results of ethnic integration, because the course of events of the Reformation led to the fact that the French Huguenots were forced to leave their homeland in the seventeenth century. In saving their lives, they lost their former ethnicity and became German nobles, Dutch burghers, and in large numbers Boers who colonized South Africa.
The French ethnos got rid of them as a superfluous element in a structure that was already diverse. As a sociopolitical entity, however, France was not weakened; on the contrary, it was strengthened. The fields and gardens abandoned by the zealous Huguenots were taken over by indifferent people who in the eighteenth century rebuilt an economy no longer plagued by internal wars. The ethnic monolithic structure that emerged allowed Napoleon to mobilize his people and create the largest and most docile army, the defeat of which prevented France from falling apart despite all the vestiges of provincial separatism.
The Self-Regulation of Ethnicity
It may seem strange that we attribute to ethnos the ability of self-regulation. However, the ethnos is dynamic in its historical development and, therefore, like any long-running process, is realized with the least amount of energy to maintain its existence. Others are cut off by selection and fade away. All living systems resist destruction, i.e. they are anti-entropic and adapt to external conditions as much as possible. And since some structural complexity makes an ethnos more resilient to external shocks, it is not surprising that where an ethnos was not sufficiently mosaic at birth, as in Velikorossiya in the 14th and 15th centuries, it began to separate sub-ethnic entities, sometimes taking the form of estates116. The Cossacks stood out on the southern outskirts, the Pomors on the northern. Later on, they were joined by pioneers (at first glance, mere representatives of certain occupations), and peasants following them, who mixed with the aborigines of Siberia and formed the sub-ethnos of Siberians, or "Cheldons". The church split led to the emergence of another sub-ethnic group, the Old Believers, ethnographically different from the mainstream Russians. In the course of history, these sub-ethnic groups dissolved into the main body of the ethnos, but at the same time new ones emerged.
For example, in the second half of the 18th century, part of the wealthy nobility began to hire French governesses for their children. After 1789, the influx of Frenchmen into Russia increased, and together with language, manners, and tastes, French attitudes spread, which created a new stereotype of behavior at the sub-ethnic level. Emigrants supported the Russians during the war with Napoleon. And afterwards, the tradition of teaching European culture was created as inertia, for the main stream of life, i.e. ethnogenesis, returned to its former course. The descendants of the Europeanized Oneginians ended their days in Chekhov's "cherry orchards," giving way to other sub-ethnoses.
Distinguishing between sub-ethnoses is very easy, as late nineteenth-century ethnography worked at this very level. Ethnographers studied everyday life, that is, the fixed stereotype of behavior in those population groups that differed sharply from those in the capital, such as the life of the Olonets peasants, but ignored the life of the professors of St. Petersburg. And in vain, because for our time such a description would have been very useful and interesting, and now we have to read A.P. Chekhov, and even with adjustments for his subjectivism.
In short, sub-ethnoses are directly observable because, on the one hand, they are within an ethnos and, on the other hand, the bearers of sub-ethnic stereotypes of behavior differ from all the others in manners, mannerisms, ways of expressing feelings, etc. The emergence of sub-ethnoses is due to different historical circumstances, sometimes coinciding with estates, but never with classes, and they dissolve relatively painlessly, being replaced by others, outwardly dissimilar, but with the same functions and destinies. The purpose of these sub-ethnic formations is to maintain ethnic unity through internal non-antagonistic rivalry. Obviously, this complexity is an organic part of the mechanism of the ethnic system and, as such, emerges in the process of ethnogenesis itself. When the ethnic system is simplified, the number of sub-ethnoses is reduced to one; this marks the persistent (remnant) state of the ethnos. But what is the mechanism of the emergence of subethnoses? To answer this, we have to go down an order of magnitude, where the taxonomic units are divided into two divisions: consortia and convictia. These divisions include small tribes, clans, the corporations already mentioned, local groups, and other associations of people of all epochs.
116 Speaking of a natural process in this way, we are not suggesting anthropomorphism, just a familiar turn of phrase like "a brook has channeled itself and formed a bend.”
Consortia and Convictions.
Let us define the terms. We call consortia a group of people united by one historical destiny. This category includes "circles," artels, sects, gangs, and the like unstable associations. Most often they disintegrate, but sometimes they persist for generations. Then they become convivia, that is, groups of people with the same character and family ties. Convixia are not very resistant. They are eaten up by exogamy and reshuffled by succession, i.e. by a drastic change in their historical environment. The surviving Convixia grow into sub-ethnoses. Such are the aforementioned explorers, a consortium of desperate travelers who spawned a generation of steadfast Siberians, and the Old Believers. The first colonies in America were created by a consortium of Englishmen, which turned into convicts. New England was founded by the Puritans, Massachusetts by the Baptists, Pennsylvania by the Quakers, Maryland by the Catholics, Virginia by the Royalists, Georgia by the supporters of the House of Hanover. Out of England left a consortium that did not put up with either Cromwell or the Stuarts, and on new ground, where former disputes were irrelevant, they became the Convicts, opposing their new neighbors, the Indians and the French.
The pioneers and Russian Old Believers remained as part of their ethnos, but the descendants of the Spanish conquistadors and the English Puritans formed distinctive ethnic groups in America, so that this level can be considered the limit of ethnic divergence. And it should be noted that the most ancient tribes once evidently formed in the same way. The original consortium of vigorous people in isolation turns into an ethnos, which for the earliest epochs we call a "tribe".
Ethnology ends at the taxonomic level of the consortium, but the principle of hierarchical subordination can continue to operate if necessary. On an order of magnitude below, we will find one person related to the environment. This can be useful for the biography of great people. Going down another order of magnitude, we encounter not the complete biography of a person, but one episode of his life, such as a crime that must be solved. And below that, a random emotion with no major consequences. But we must remember that this infinite fragmentation, which is in the nature of things, does not obviate the need to find wholeness at a given level, essential to the task at hand.
IX. Superethnos, The Reality of Superethnos - The Franks
We call a super-ethnos a group of ethnic groups that emerged simultaneously in a certain region, interconnected by economic, ideological and political communication, which by no means excludes military clashes between them. However, unlike clashes at the super-ethnic level, where wars lead to extermination or enslavement (such as the contact between Europeans and the aborigines of North America in the 16th and 19th centuries), wars within a super-ethnos lead only to temporary domination (such as the Guelphs and Gibellines in medieval Europe or the strife of ancient Russian princes) while striving for compromise. Like the ethnos, the super-ethnos, represented by its representatives, opposes all other super-ethnoses, but unlike the ethnos, the super-ethnos is not capable of divergence. A super-ethnos is defined not by its size or power, but solely by the degree of inter-ethnic affinity. I ask that this thesis be accepted temporarily without proof, promising such proof at the end of the book.
At first glance, this seems strange, for it is not clear where do super-ethnoses come from? Obviously, the nature of their emergence is different from that of ethnic groups and even more so of sub-ethnic units. But if so, one should suppose that the mystery of the origin of ethnoses has not been solved because its solution is higher, and therefore the visible and felt phenomenon of ethnicity is only a variant of super-ethnos into which it enters as an element of mosaic systemic integrity, just as a column or caryatid (it’s a stone statue, female figure, used as a column in a building), enters into the integrity of a palace, although one can see the caryatid standing with it, and the palace can be fully observed only from a great distance. Without one caryatid, however, the palace continues to function, and the statue becomes, at best, a museum piece and, at worst, construction waste. Let's explain this with examples from history.
Super-ethnic unity is as real as sub-ethnic unity. Already at the beginning of the Middle Ages, the French ethnos was part of an entity called Chretienté, which included the Catholic countries of Europe, part of whose population was Arian (Burgundians) or linguistic (Frisians). But no one cared about such details at the time. The territory united by the Carolingians was inhabited by two large ethnic groups: the Germanic-speaking Teutons (teutskes) and the Latin-speaking Wolochs (welskes). Under Charlemagne's grandsons, these ethnic groups forced their sovereigns to break the iron hoops of the empire and reached their goal at the Battle of Fontane in 841: Charles the Bald and Ludwig the German swore in Strasbourg in 842 to uphold the division of the empire between the nations.
But it was a split in the first approximation. This "territorial revolution"117 ended with the lawful Teutonic dynasty of the Carolingians being overthrown in Paris itself, where Count Ed, son of Robert of Anjou, reigned in 895. For a century, the Carolingians fought against the disintegration of their country, but the ethnic groups that emerged from a wide range of dislocations stubbornly refused to submit to them. In the aftermath of the "feudal revolution" that ended in the tenth century, Western Europe disintegrated politically, but continued to act as a super-ethnic entity, opposing the Muslim Arabs, the Orthodox Greeks and Irish, and the pagan Slavs and Normans. It later expanded to include the Anglo-Saxons, then the Western Slavs, the Scandinavians, and the Hungarians through conversion to Catholicism. Ethnic mosaicism did not hinder the development of the super-ethnos.
The birth of the super-ethnos - Byzantium
Second example. In ancient times there was a single Hellenistic culture in the Mediterranean, which in the course of its development included Latium and the Phoenician cities. In its ethnic aspect it resembled Western European culture, because the basic Hellenistic core did not exhaust all the variants of the diversified Hellenistic culture. Of course, Rome, Carthage, and Pella had their own local characteristics and represented independent ethnicities, but in a super-ethnic sense they were part of the broad circle of Hellenistic culture. This, however, is not new, but it is important for us as a starting point. Roman domination contributed to ethnic leveling, and the equalization of Greek with Latin resulted in almost the entire population of the Mediterranean merging into a single ethnos.
But in the first century A.D., new people, unlike any of its neighbors, emerged in the Roman Empire and formed a new unity over the next two centuries. Already at the beginning of their emergence they opposed the "Gentiles", that is, all the others, and indeed set themselves apart from them, certainly not on anatomical or physiological grounds, but on their nature of behavior.
117 Thierry O. Selected Works, p. 244-247.
They treated each other differently, thought differently, and set themselves goals in life that seemed meaningless to their contemporaries: they aspired to an afterlife of bliss. The Hellenistic world was alien to asceticism, the new people created Thebaid; the Greeks and Syrians spent their evenings in theaters and admired the "dance of the wasp" (the ancient striptease), while these gathered for conversation and quietly went home; The Hellenes and Romans had already for several centuries considered their gods as literary images, preserving their cult as a state tradition, and were guided in their everyday life by numerous omens; the new preachers and neophytes considered with full confidence the reality of otherness and prepared themselves for an otherworldly life. Loyal to the Roman government, they refused to recognize its divine nature and did not worship statues of emperors, although this often cost them their lives. The nuances of their behavior did not break the fabric of society, but out of ethnic integrity, the new people aroused the searing hatred of the urban poor, who demanded their extermination on the basis of the principle of denying the right to dissimilarity.
To think that the reason for the animosity arose was a difference of convictions is wrong, for the uneducated pagans at this time had no firm and clear convictions, while the new breed had a variety of convictions. But somehow the Hellenes and Romans did not quarrel with Mithras, Isis, Cybele, Helios, making an exception only for Christians. Obviously, it is not the ideological or political attribute that should be put out of the bracket, but the ethnological, that is, the behavioral one, which for Hellenistic culture was really new and unaccustomed.
As we know, the new wholeness triumphed despite enormous losses. The Gnosticists disappeared, the Manicheans scattered throughout the world, and the Markeonites (later, the Peacchians) closed themselves into a narrow community. Only the Christian Church proved viable and gave birth to a wholeness that had no name of its own. We will call it tentatively Byzantine or orthodox Christian. On the basis of the early Christian community, which in the 5th century expanded into the boundaries of the Roman Empire and some neighboring countries, an ethnic group emerged that called itself by the old word "Romani". From the fifth to the tenth century Bulgarians, Serbs, Hungarians, Czechs, Russians and Alans were converted to Orthodoxy, and then a super-ethnic cultural unity of the Orthodox world was created, which was broken in the thirteenth century.118, "the Franks," "the Turks," and the Mongols. In the 14th century, the Orthodox tradition was revived with the emergence of the Great Russian people.
But Moscow Rus' cannot be considered a cultural periphery of Byzantium because local traditions made Rus' an independent entity. The Nestorians and Monophysites, who broke away from the Universal Church in the fifth century, although they were cursed at Ecumenical councils, continued to feel their unity with the Orthodox. The 1054 schism, when the conflicting sides declared their adversaries as heretics, formalized a rupture in a single super-ethnic unity: Catholicism became a new structure of the "Christian world". The area of "Catholic" Europe differed from that of Byzantine Europe in the behavior of its inhabitants. In Western Europe, medieval Nations emerged, from which grew up modern nations, chivalry, urban communities, and everything that distinguishes the European from the other super-ethnoses of the world.
But even after the schism of 1054 the dogma of Christianity remained the same, so it is not about it, and the history of religion only reflects, as a sensitive indicator, the underlying processes of both social and ethnic history.
118 "Franks" in the Middle East in the thirteenth century were referred to as all Western Europeans.
Super ethnos breakdown - the Arabs in the VII-X centuries.
The Arabs are such an ancient people that by the beginning of our era the former sense of ethnic unity had been lost. The most educated Arabs lived either in Byzantine Syria or in Iranian Iraq, participating in the political and cultural life of these empires. Only the legends in the Book of Genesis attest to the origins of the ancient Arabs; historically, it is recorded that for nearly a millennium, Arabia was inhabited by disparate tribes of Bedouins and horticulturalists, who traded frequently and did not even have a common denomination. Their way of life and tribal structure were largely determined by subsistence farming and, consequently, by the landscape of the country they inhabited. No tendency towards unification emerged, and the fighting ability of the Arabs was at its lowest level. In Arabia itself, the most active were the Jewish communities of Hijas and Yemen.
In the sixth century A.D. there is a sudden rise in poetry all over Arabia, which should be regarded as a modus operandi of activism. Is it necessary to prove that it is impossible to compose good poetry without a gust of passion? In the seventh century, Mohammed preached a strict monotheism, and with a small group of fanatical, strong-willed, and madly brave followers, he first destroyed poets as his rivals. The members of the Muslim community severed the clan ties of the past, forming a new and distinctive collective that, like the Byzantine one, had a confessional dominant and ethnogenetic nature, for Muhammad declared that a Muslim could not be a slave, and accepted into his community those slaves who had uttered the formula of Islam. The propagation of the new faith was also preceded by an incubation period of ethnic energy.
The resulting consortium evolved into a sub-ethnos during the lifetime of Muhammad and Abu Bakr. Growing from a few tens of people to several tens of thousands, the Muslim sub-ethnos conquered all of Arabia and imposed the dogma of monotheism on the Arabs. Indifferent Meccan merchants and desert Bedouins preferred death or slavery to hypocritical conversion to Islam. Thus, a new ethnos was created with a changed stereotype of behavior, but with the self-name "Arabs”.
Using the forces of the subdued and outwardly converted to Islam, the second caliph, Omar, conquered Syria, Egypt and Persia, but under the third caliph, Othman, the pseudo-converts made their way to the highest positions in the new state and used the religious impulse of the original collective for personal enrichment. The zealots of the faith assassinated Othman, but this provoked an explosion of indignation among those who were not fanatics, and an internecine struggle ensued between a friend of the prophet, Ali, and the son of his enemy, Moabi, in which the "pseudo-Muslims" were victorious. However, they did not change their policy and official ideology, and continued their conquests under the slogan of Islam. The empire of the descendants of Moab, the Umayyads, absorbed not only Arab, but also Syrian, Iranian, Sogdian, Spanish, African, Caucasian and many other elements, spreading from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indus.
The Arabs imposed their language and spiritual culture (Islam) on the multi-ethnic population of the Caliphate. Most of the conquered peoples became Arabic-speaking, and where their own language was retained, such as in Persia, more than half of the words of the literary language were Arabic.
But already in the tenth century the Caliphate broke up into separate regions, which coincided with tribal areas. The Idrisids (789-926), Rustamids (777-909), and Zirids (972-1152) were supported by Berbers. The Bunds (932-1062) were supported by the Gilyan and Deylem highlanders, the Samanids (819-999) by the Tajiks, etc. Even the Arabs themselves were divided. The Spanish Arabs raised the green banner of the Abassids, the Egyptian Arabs raised the white banner of the Fatimids, and the Bahraini Bedouin tribes created a community first, and then a Karmat state, and all of them actually separated into separate ethnoses, hostile to each other.
In short, the same thing happened to the Caliphate in the ninth and tenth centuries as happened to Charlemagne's empire: the living forces of the ethnic groups tore the iron hoop of the empire, both Christian and Muslim, just as grass breaks through the asphalt. But the political division here and there did not break the super-ethnic unity reflected in a certain similarity of certain cultural elements and literary language - Arabic and Latin. The Muslim super-ethnos proved to be much more viable than the Arab ethnos that produced it. Already in the XI-XII centuries, the idea of the Caliphate was defended by the Seljuk Turkmen, and in the XIII century by the Cuman (Polovtsi) and Sudanese Negroes bought at the slave markets and enlisted in the army. The inertia of the system created by Muhammad's companions was tremendous.
Now let us ask the question: Can the religious concept be considered dominant in the process described? As an outward manifestation, no doubt. But internally, in content, the matter is more complicated. Karmatism differs from Islam in its philosophical concepts much more than Christianity or even Judaism,119 and yet it lies not only within a super-ethnic construct, the Muslim culture, but even within the Arab ethnos itself. Turkish mercenaries and Moroccan thugs thought the least about religion, and yet they were the only ones who supported Sunni orthodoxy with their sabers in the 11th century.
Muhammad was preceded by a pleiad of Arab poets - pagans, Christians, Jews - so the flowering of poetry was the starting point of the process described, as well as the development of intermediary trade, the hunting of blacks to sell them into slavery, and the condottieri of tribal chiefs.
However, the dominant feature of the whole process of the formation of the Arab ethnos (and, in the superethnic sense, of all Muslim culture) was Mohammed's conception of Islam, for which the preceding era of flourishing Arab poetry had proved a suitable ground. Islam as a symbol became an object of fanatical self-assertion and a way of introducing uniformity. The usual emergence (as a kind of inevitable antithesis) of various heresies and modifications of religious and ideological content during the onset of the new religious system only stimulated the tumultuous course of the main process. Further, within the Arab ethnos itself as well as within the super-ethnic culture, a multifaceted intellectual life developed, leading to a flourishing of science, art, and peculiar forms of life. This process is an example of the formation of a super-ethnos, outwardly characterized by religious and ideological dominance. Such wholenesses have long been known to science; sometimes they are called "cultural types," sometimes "civilizations.
By the 10th century, the energy of the Arab-Muslim ethnos had dried up, even though the economy had blossomed, social relations had normalized, and philosophy, literature, geography, and medicine had produced their greatest number of masterpieces in this era. The Arabs changed from warriors to poets, scholars and diplomats. They produced a brilliant architectural style, and built cities with bazaars and schools, and irrigated and nurtured gardens which nourished their growing population. But the Arabs did not know how to defend themselves against their enemies. Instead of an era of conquest, it was a time of loss. The French Normans took Sicily from the Muslims. The Highlanders of Asturias seized Central Spain, and turned it into a "country of zadoks" - Castile. The Byzantines retook Syria (except Damascus). The Georgians liberated Tiflis from its Arab garrison. The Turks, Berbers and Tuaregs were called for help. These helped them out. In the XI century. Almoravids drove the Spaniards north, and the Seljuks subjugated Armenia and Asia Minor. However, the aliens were not protecting the Arabs120 ethnos, whom they did not put a penny in, but the super-ethnos, the "world of Islam," for this latter became the ethno-cultural dominant for them.
119 Bertels A.E. Nasir-i-Khosrow and Ismailism. М., 1959. С. 202-247.
120 Currently, the Arabic-speaking population of the Middle East is referred to as an Arab. This is incorrect. Most of the 77 Ethnogra-populations of Syria, Iran and North Africa, a mixture of ancient ethnicities in the contact zone. The descendants of the true Arabs are the Bedouins of Saudi Arabia.
The Central Asian Turks, the Sudanese Negroes and the wild Kurds, as part of the structure of the disintegrating Caliphate, assimilated the mores, customs, beliefs, etc., adopted there, becoming continuators of the community established by Muhammad. It was these peoples who stopped the Crusader onslaught. For all this, there remained a culture, a work of human hands that had no self-development and was capable of destruction. But the destruction was slow, and the fascination of this culture was spreading to new areas in Africa, India, the Malay Archipelago and China. The culture has survived the rise of its founder for a thousand years, and it still exists today.
In the twelfth century, this culture, having absorbed so many elements foreign to it, brought in and incorporated by ethnic groups, changed its appearance and gave birth to new forms, bizarre to the point of monstrosity. Muslims ethnically alien to the Arabs became Shi'a, Ismaili, Sufi, or confessors of teachings outwardly faithful, but in fact original and far removed from the original worldview of Muhammad's companions and the first caliphs. And since in this era ethnic differences were clothed in confessional forms, by going backward from culture to ethnogenesis one can uncover and characterize the ethnic contacts of any super-ethnos, such as those of Central Asia and the Far East. A special excursus will be devoted to this complex problem, when the author and the reader will have mastered a few more techniques of ethnological methodology.
All the above examples show that super-ethnoses are not contingent constructs of historians, but entities no less real than ethnoses, although they have some peculiarities, to which we will pay attention below. Thus, we can state that the super-ethnos, like the ethnos, is a systemic integrity that is an order of magnitude higher than the ethnos. An even higher form of integrity is possible: hyper-ethnic, i.e., formed by several super-ethnoses that oppose another group. However, these are usually ephemeral, and a study of this level is unnecessary for our purposes.
X. Algorithm of ethnogenesis Ethnic relics
Ethnic history can count more than twenty super-ethnoses that have disappeared in historical time and have been replaced by presently existing ones. For the time being, the task is to describe the mechanism of disappearance of super-ethnoses, while we will speak separately about their emergence and spread. Let us note as an important detail that often in the place of a grandiose super-ethnos, eroded by historical processes, there remain islands that have survived the epoch of their prosperity and decay. Examples of such small ethnic groups are the Basques, the Albanians, a number of Caucasian ethnic groups and the curious, very stable Iroquois ethnic group in North America. Unlike the majority of the extinct or assimilated tribes of North and Central America, the Iroquois retained their numbers (20 thousand people), their language and their opposition to all non-Iroquois. True, they changed their way of life and turned from warriors into "museum pieces".
Relict ethnic groups are quite numerous, and some of them die out, some are assimilated by other ethnic groups, and some, like the Iroquois, retain their identity, more or less stable numbers and the territory they occupy. We call these ethnic groups permanent, that is, they have outlived themselves and are in a phase of homeostasis.
The history knows a great many isolated ethnic groups, which, due to their geographical position, have not been involved in communication with other ethnic groups or have been involved in it only in the last 100 years. These were many tribes of Canada before the fur companies appeared there; the Indians of the interior of Brazil before the rubber rush; the Australians, before the Europeans appeared there; some highlanders of the Caucasus (even after the capture of Gunib by the Russian troops). There are many other peoples and tribes with greater or lesser degrees of isolation in India, Africa, and even Europe. But, most importantly, isolates emerge before the eyes of the historian. Such are the Icelanders, descendants of the Vikings, who settled the island in the ninth century and lost the warrior spirit of their ancestors in three hundred years. The descendants of the Norwegian, Danish and Swedish Vikings and slaves captured in Ireland formed a small but independent ethnos already in the 9th century, preserving some ancient traditions and intermarrying only within their island.121
The absence of frequent contact with foreigners inevitably leads to the stabilization of relations within the ethnos. A structure that we call "stagnant" emerges, and a "simplification of the system" takes place within the ethnos. Let me illustrate this with an example.
In ancient Egypt, the united Hamitic tribes formed a powerful ethnos and created an extensive social system. There was a pharaoh and advisers, princes of nomes and warriors, priests and scribes, merchants, farmers and poor peasants. The system became more complex as encounters with foreigners arose. Conquests in Nubia and Syria were made by professional warriors, treaties with Babylon were made by experienced diplomats, and canals and palaces were built by specialists - engineers trained from childhood. The ramified system survived the Hyksos invasion and revived, as if infused with renewed power.
But from the 11th century B.C. onward a process of simplification began and the resilience of the system declined. From 950 B.C. power over Egypt fell into the hands of the Libyans. In 715 BC domination fell to the Ethiopians, who had lost the war with Assyria and the Asians occupied Egypt, which itself had stopped defending itself. The Syrian dynasty liberated the country but held out on the spears of the Libyans and Hellenes. This too fell in 550 BC, after which Egypt was ruled successively by Persians, Macedonians, Romans, Arabs, Berbers, Mamelukes, and Turks. Of all the social groups, only the Fellahi farmers and a small handful of Hellenized Coptic townspeople survived by the first century AD. The Phellachians became an isolate. Although there was an active historical life around them, they did not care about it. They lived in a society ethnically alien to them, but remained for two thousand years by themselves. This we might call ethnic statics, or rest. It means that development has slowed down so much that it may not be taken into account in describing it.
121 Steblin-Kamensky M.I. The Culture of Iceland. Л., 1967.
End of introductory fragment.
WE’LL STOP HERE FOR NOW.
(I enjoyed reading and working with this condensed book. For some it may be a bit dry, studying methodology, and not the first place to start reading in our library. I may look for the complete book, and add some chapters onto these three parts?)
I already have other long projects in line for further work. So we’ll see?
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