The Foundations

by Alexander Dugin

  The “lifeworld” is the only world in which the ethnos lives. Simple society (the koineme) is built precisely in this manner. There are no borders in it between culture and nature, the inner and the outer. A person and his surrounding environment comprise an indissoluble unity, a common “living space.” The “lifeworld” is that floor on which the ethnos dwells. In simple societies, this floor is the sole one; in complex ones, other floors are built on top of it.

  From the point of view of ethnosociology, the identity of the “lifeworld” with the ethnic space is fundamental.27

  An Example of the Space of the Ethnos: The Lezghins

  Let us see how this is expressed in practice. We’ll take the contemporary Caucasian ethnos of the Lezghins as our example.

  The Lezghins have their own language, belief in a common origin and shared traditions: we are dealing with a classic ethnos.

  The space in which today’s Lezghins live is from an ethnic point of view something unified (edinoe). It is an accommodating landscape, “native places” for the Lezghins, situated in the mountainous regions of the Caucasus.

  But according to a territorial-political division, the Lezghins today reside partly in Dagestan and partly in Azerbaijan. Dagestan is a subject of the Russian Federation. In Azerbaijan, the Lezghins are citizens of Azerbaijan, subject to its laws and are considered Azerbaijanis from the point of view of the nation. Lezghins living in Dagestan are citizens of Dagestan and accordingly of the Russian Federation. These Lezghins are Russians (by citizenship), the others, Azerbaijanis (by citizenship).

  Legally, Russians (by citizenship), whether they are Lezghins or Great Russians, and Azerbaijanis (by citizenship), whether they are an ethnic majority of Azerbaijanis or ethnic minority, are entirely different categories, which comes about as a result of their being two different sociopolitical organizations, the Azerbaijani and the Russian (i.e. as politico-legal nations, not ethnicities). The legislation of the Russian Federation and of the Republic of Azerbaijan are such that in neither of these countries is it written in the passport of Lezghins that they are Lezghins. It turns out, then, that a Lezghin who lives on one side of the border and his own brother living on the other side of the border are legally members of two different societies and two different political, national, and administrative spaces, while their kinship is not recorded anywhere. One group must know Russian in order to be normal citizens; the other, the Azerbaijani language. Legally the house and lot of one group of Lezghins is anchored to one territorial-administrative unit; the house and lot of the other, to a completely different one. Furthermore, they live according to different laws, in different societies, and in different spaces. The fact that they are Lezghins finds no expression anywhere.

  Nevertheless, outside of direct legal rules and legislations the Lezghins themselves clearly recognize their ethnic unity, their integrity and indivisibility. And the earth on which they live — on both sides of the border — is considered by them as a common earth, as “native places,” the Motherland. Surrounding ethnoses on both the Russian and Azerbaijani sides and in Dagestan also recognize the Lezghins as an ethnic unity, by their silence, and they develop special relations with them and with the territories in which they traditionally dwell.

  Thus, a structured ethnic space is independent of legal, national, and administrative-territorial borders.

  A question arises. If we should want to formalize the Lezghin ethnos, to interpret and describe the structure of Lezghin territories, to which means should we have recourse? The status of the ethnos is not registered in any legislation of the national governments and is not a legal category. But this means that the ethnic space, too, has no legal meaning. Nor is the ethnos (in our case, the Lezghins) a political category. The sole instrument for the description, study and understanding of the ethnos and ethnic spaces is Ethnosociology. No other discipline is able to cope with this problem correctly and by means of a strictly scientific apparatus.

  2.

  The Fundamental Concepts, Instruments, and Methods of Ethnosociology

  I. The Basic Concepts of Ethnosociology (Types of Society)

  The Concepts and Terms of Ethnosociology

  Ethnosociology operates with a set of specific concepts and terms, which in other contexts, and all the more so in common use, might have an entirely different meaning. Thus, we should emphasize these terminological peculiarities and describe the semantic structure of these basic concepts. Then it will merely be a technical problem to correlate the terms and concepts of ethnosociology with classical sociology and political science. Otherwise, a confusion of concepts might arise.

  In this chapter, we shall describe the basic concepts and terms of ethnosociology and give their definitions.

  The Problem of a Synonymous Set

  Let us begin with the concept of the ethnos, the definition of which we gave in the previous chapter. The definitions of Shirokogoroff and Weber, and also the group of additional examples given, reveal the ethnos as a phenomenon with which Ethnosociology operates. The ethnos understood in this way is a scientific concept. At the same time, this concept has as its referent in the world surrounding us a concrete phenomenon. In other words, the concept of the ethnos is phenomenological and is developed not as an abstraction but as the product of scientific observation, as something derived from the phenomenon itself. In a certain sense the ethnos is an empirical concept. We live in a world in which there are ethnoses and we take them as the basis of our theorization.

  At the same time, in common use, the term “ethnos” is used very loosely: as a synonym of people, peoplehood, the nation, nationality, and race. We add to this the shades of meaning that these words acquire in their translation into European languages. In the last chapter, we listed the set of Greek synonyms of the concept “ethnos”: génos, phylé, démos, laós. Latin gives us two words, populus and natio, from which are formed the majority of the corresponding words of contemporary European languages (the English “people” and “nation,” the French peuple and nation, the Italian popolo and nazione, and the Spanish pueblo and nación, as well as the German Nation, etc.). The synonymy of this set, to which we could add various derivatives, is rather subtle: all its members indicate approximately the same phenomenon, but in each case and in each linguistic context there occurs semantic shifts, which essentially change the meaning of the word. All of this gives rise not only to numerous problems in political journalism, debates, and discussions, where this terminology is employed freely, but also in scientific circles, in particular in sociology, where the meaning of these words is also modified substantially depending on the national context, the school, or even the specific author. Sometimes different phenomena are indicated by the same term; other times, the same phenomenon is given different names.

  The Structure of Basic Ethnosociological Terms and Concepts

  Ethnosociology establishes in its sphere a strict semantic structure and gives each term only one concrete meaning. This allows for the systematization of ethnosociological studies as a whole and gives them the necessary scientific rigor.

  In Ethnosociology, the above-listed synonyms are not synonyms at all. Each word is a term and indicates an entirely distinct phenomenon. Thus, we get a specific ethnosociological taxonomy of social phenomena and a structure, which lies at the basis of the entire discipline.

  The basic concepts of the ethnosociological taxonomy are the following chain:

  Ethnos — narod (the Greek laós, the German Volk) — nation (the Latin natio) — civil society — global society — post-society or post-modern society.

  Each of these concepts has a strictly defined meaning and sense, which does not overlap with any of the others. This chain can be depicted in the form of logical succession, which in the case of Western society coincides on the whole with historical succession:

  Ethnos → narod → nation → civil society → global society → post-society

  In order to elucidate the struc
ture of the ethnosociological method, we should also arrange these concepts hierarchically. But inasmuch as this hierarchy, as we showed in the previous chapter, describes only the degree of complexity of a society and nothing else, it is built on the principle “from simple to complex,” from less differentiated to more differentiated. At the same time, we can describe this hierarchy as a vector directed from the organic and integral to the mechanical, combined, and complex.

  Figure 3. The main ethnosociological concepts in their hierarchical order.

  Identity and Identification

  For an introduction into the essence of the ethnosociological problematic we offer a preliminary description of the basic ethnosociological concepts, which will be considered in detail in the corresponding chapters and sections of the book.

  It is convenient to do this through a consideration of the way the identity of a society changes during transition from one ethnosociological category to another.

  But first let us define identity and the process of identification.

  Identity is a form of identification of an individual, social group, or entire society with a certain independent structure — whole, collective, or individual. The term “identity” is formed from the Latin pronoun id, “that” (to). Hence the Russian copy “тождество” (tozhdestvo). The “identical” is the “то же (самое),” (we might say the id-enti, the being-that-thing).

  The structure of identity is based on the act of “identification,” i.e., the conscious or unconscious act, in the course of which someone (an individual, group, or society) asserts, “I (we) am that.” In the process of identification there is asserted the content, structure, meaning, and significance of “that” with which the unit identified itself, and through this act the unit that identifies itself with something describes its own content, structure, meaning, and significance. Identity is a property of human consciousness; animals and other forms of life do not know this operation. A bird is a bird, but this fact is not for it a fact of consciousness; a bird does not assert in a voluntary and conscious manner its belonging to the type “bird.” Being a bird, it does not have a “bird identity.” Only man executes an act of identification — first and foremost of self-identification. He determines himself, his being and his meaning through appeal to “that” (id); he invests “that” with content, and directs this content towards himself. He can reflect upon this process or carry it out unconsciously, but in either case, it is consciousness that is active in this process, whether actively (with the involvement of reason), or passively (automatically).

  Ethnic Identification: Do Kamo

  The basic form of collective identity, inherent in all types of societies, from the simplest to the most complex, is ethnic identity. This means that a person answering the question “Who am I?” responds “I am an ethnos.” In this case, the “that” (id) coincides with the concept of the ethnos.

  The peculiarity of ethnic identity is its utter impersonality. In the ethnos, there are organic ties between all members; all share a language, belief in a common origin, and common customs. In the ethnos, the collective identification of all its members with one another and with common (often mythological) ancestors (totems, spirits, chiefs, fetishes, etc.) is so great that the individual principle almost does not exist at all. The ethnos itself as the “that” prevails entirely over all other possible responses to the question “Who am I?” This very question is formulated in the structure of the ethnos as “Who are we?,” and the substance of the answer indicates a sort of all-embracing, indivisible and global whole. This whole is the ethnos.

  Such ethnic identification manifest itself must vividly in some archaic tribes with a very specific, systematic notion of their own beginning. The ethnologist and sociologist Maurice Leenhardt (1878–1954) studied this theme in detail in his famous book dedicated to the phenomenon of Do Kamo.28

  Leenhardt studied the Melanesian ethnos of the Kanak in New Caledonia and discovered that among the Kanaks there was no word for the indication of the individual “I.” In different cases when the majority of languages proposes the utterance “I,” “to me,” “mine,” etc., the Melanesians utter Do Kamo, which means “a living being,” “that which lives.” Do Kamo is the person, the group of people, the clan, the fetish-snake on the head gear of the chief, whose wife addresses him also as Do Kamo.

  Then Leenhardt noticed that Melanesian youths never walked around alone, but always in groups. And speaking of themselves, they always appealed to Do Kamo, which indicated their group as a common, indivisible being. Even when they met with girls the Melanesian youths went in small groups, as did the girls. The Kanaks do not have a notion of the individual body; for them the body is the “clothing of Do Kamo.”

  If we were to ask a Melanesian what Do Kamo represents and what he is like “in himself,” he will shrug his shoulders in perplexity. Do Kamo is he who is, he is not explained through anything else. But it is possible to be deprived of Do Kamo. If a person carries out some crime or offence, he is thrown out of the social structure, he loses his status. After this he has no name, no being. This is the most frightening thing for a Melanesian, to become a social outcast, to lose Do Kamo. This is much worse than death, since in the social context a deceased member of society becomes a spirit and continues to live in other parts of the clan; i.e., Do Kamo is preserved. To lose Do Kamo means to disappear without a trace, even if biological individuality still remains.

  In this case by the figure of Do Kamo the tribe of the Kanaks describes the phenomenon of the ethnos, the synthesizing “that” with which they identify themselves. The Melanesian tribe has its name for that which ethnosociology calls the ethnos and ethnic identification.

  The Inner Structure of the Ethnos: Family, Lineage,29 Clan

  Before we move to more complex types of society than ethnic society, let us consider the structure of the inner core of the ethnos.

  Ethnosociology equates the ethnos with the koineme, since there are no independent societies that might have a scale smaller than the ethnos. But this does not mean that the ethnos has no divisions within itself. It has them, but these divisions — which are various and often placed on top of one another — do not yet form an independent social structure. They always remain part of something else, from which they draw the fundamental paradigms and meanings of their existence. The most minimal form of society is precisely the ethnos, while those parts into which it is divided are not autonomous or self-sufficient; that is to say, they are not full-fledged societies in their own right, but only parts of a larger whole (the ethnos).

  A koineme may have parts and, moreover, must have them, but it is not composed of these parts mechanically. A koineme is holomorphic and holistic in itself, but its inner divisions are properties of its organism.

  Let us take for example the biological structure of a human organism. This organism necessarily has organs, but these organs have meaning only in a whole organism. Independently the organs are not organisms. Parts of the body do not grow from one another, for instance the head from the neck, the neck from the shoulders, etc. They exist all together as the structure of an integrated organism, which lives fully only when all its organs are present.

  It is the same with the ethnos. This is the primary social unit. It is autonomous and vital, but inside of it function various vitally important elements.

  We can distinguish as functional instances in the ethnos the lineage, the clan, and the family.

  There are various taxonomies of the inner segmentation of the ethnos. Thus, L. N. Gumilev distinguishes the “subethnos,” “consortia,” and “convictia.”30 Certain schools of anthropologists and sociologists make more detailed and nuanced taxonomies, but we will limit ourselves to the most common.

  The most basic social cell of the ethnos is the family, consisting of a husband and a wife, along with their progeny (the nuclear family), and in some cases their parents and relatives (extended family). Family types vary widely: mono
gamous (one husband, one wife), polygamous (one husband, numerous wives), and polyandrous (one wife, numerous husbands). The types of extended families can also vary widely, depending on where the newly married couple traditionally dwells (in the house/village of the husband’s parents, or with the wife’s parents, etc.).

  The structure of the family in all societies, without exception, is based on an exogamous principle. This is fixed in common for all types of societies by the fundamental socio-generative prohibition of incest, i.e., marriage between the members of one family. We do not know of any societies built on another principle. And partial deviations from this norm are met with only as episodes of social history, most often in specific castes (Egyptian Pharaohs) or specific religious cults (some forms of Iranian Zoroastrianism). We should consider separately levirate and sororate, specific marriage institutions, securing the rights of the remaining brothers to the wife of one of them and the symmetrical right for the husband of one of a number of sisters.

  The exogamous principle of the family assumes the existence of at least two lineages, without which it is not possible. (The Russian word rod corresponds terminologically exactly to the Greek génos and the Latin genus). It is for this reason precisely that the family is not considered the primary cell of society. In order to get one family, it is necessary to have two lineages and an exogamous rule of marriage. But two lineages and the exogamous rule is the minimal format of the ethnos as that instance which precedes both the lineage and the family. A family can be formed only on the basis of two unrelated lineages. This is the absolute law of society as such.