Wiener B. E. Contradictions of the Soviet Theory of Ethnos: The History of the Concept and its Prospects. Bulletin of the Irkutsk State University. Geoarchaeology, Ethnology, and Anthropology Series. 2022, Vol. 40, pp. 37–51. https: ...

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Abstract

The article discusses why the concept of ‘ethnos’ originated in the Russian Empire, and then in the second half of the 20th century, was developed in the USSR. The revival of the concept of ‘ethnos’ in the 1940s was caused by the need to solve such an applied problem as the drawing of post-war borders in post-war Eastern Europe. Later, Soviet ethnos theorists tried to combine incompatible Marxist ideas about the social class nature of society with the idea of an ‘ethnos’, close to Weber's understanding of an ethnic group, as a group with a specific culture and identity. At the turn of the 1980-1990s discussions began about the crisis of Soviet/Russian ethnology, primarily in the explanation of ethnicity, and several theorists suggested reorienting to the constructivist approach to ethnicity, which became dominant in English speaking science. The author considers the modern constructivist approach to ethnicity to be exhausted, since it failed to explain why members of ethnic minorities often prefer to self-identify with their ethnic ancestors more than with the states of which they are citizens, despite the efforts of states to reverse this orientation. It seems appropriate to abandon attempts to tie the ethnos to the social class structure of a particular socio-economic formation, that is, to abandon the concepts of ‘nation’ and ‘nationality’ (‘narodnost’). In theoretical terms, it makes sense to rely on the criticalrealist theory developed by sociologists and representatives of other social sciences, which makes it possible to show the derivativeness of identities from structural and cultural factors and the reverse effect of identities on them. The use of the concept of ‘ethnos’ within the framework of such an approach has the advantage that it can describe the mechanism that leads to the possibility of the long-term existence of ethnic groups as important components of the social structure of society. Such a mechanism is the intergenerational transmission of ethnic identity, the core of which is ethnic self-identification, due to mono-ethnic marriages. And the most salient feature of this mechanism includes ideas of members of ethnic communities that ethnicity is associated with the ethnic origin of people and is transmitted, as it were, by inheritance from parents to children.