Важнейшие элементы советской теории этноса: перспективы использования в современных теориях этничности

Abstract

This paper continues the author's previous publication on the Soviet theory of ethnos, considering such elements of this theory as ethnic processes, ethnic self-consciousness, and taxonomic levels of ethnic communities. The paper draws an attention to the fact that the ideas of Russian ethnologists about the philosophical positions regarding the existence of social communities (or large social groups) are limited by the constructivism-positivism dichotomy. Moreover, most of these ethnologists adopt a constructivist position, and some of them deny the very reality of ethnic communities. At the same time, in recent decades, English-speaking philosophers and social scientists have been intensively developing critical-realist theory as an alternative to the two named approaches. The paper offers to consider the problem of ethnicity within the framework of critical realism, using the time-tested elements of the theory of ethnos, such as the abovementioned ethnic processes, self-consciousness (or ethnic identity), and the concept of taxonomic levels of ethnic communities. Simultaneously one should bear in mind that the theory of ethnos itself is not without major drawbacks. From the author's point of view, the main weaknesses in this theory are attempts to tie the typology of ethnic communities to the historical stages in the development of society, and more specifically to Marx's socio-economic formations; to tie rigidly the group characteristics of ethnos to its cultural characteristics, including language; and to remove agency from the framework of this theory, while maintaining structural (in this case, belonging to a group) and cultural components of the theory of ethnos. The use of a critical-realist approach in relation to ethnicity allows us to assert that the removal of ethnic self-identifications from the theoretical model of ethnos leads to the destruction of this model and to the perception of ethnic communities as sets of individuals who are united together by researchers for very different reasons. An ethnologist should conclude that the group is an ethnos, and not some other type of a group, if the majority of its members have a self-identification that coincides with the self-identification of their parents, even when this group consists of representatives of different social strata, has different occupations, native languages, citizenships, and confessions or live dispersed in remote areas.