Real civil society can only be global.
From the point of view of the taxonomies of the ethnosociological disciplines, global society does not represent a separate social paradigm; it should rather be considered as the completed form of civil society. It is possible to look at this distinction differently, however. If we take global society as the end goal and the paradigm, then civil society can be considered a transitional stage from the nation to global society. In this case, all the qualitative signs of civil society (in the first place, a purely individual identification) are automatically carried over to global society.
Post-Society and the Sociology of Postmodernity
All the models of societies we have looked at, from the ethnos (as a koineme) to global society, are versions of “human society.”36 We meet with ethnoses, narods, and nations, and also certain forms of “civil society,” empirically in the surrounding world. And we can imagine global society by extending into the future certain tendencies that undoubtedly exist already today. All these types of society presuppose man as their participant. All notions of a transition from the stage of beast to primordial human society remain hypothesis. These hypotheses remain rather popular, however, even in sociology (for instance, the Social Darwinism of the famous sociologist Herbert Spencer [1820–1903], which influenced one of the most authoritative schools of Sociology, the Chicago School).
Other hypotheses are popular nowadays, which are not just hypothetical glances back into the pre-human past, but equally hypothetical glances forwards into the post-human future. This trend is known as Postmodernism.
There are postmodern reconstructions that try to reconstruct the next horizon of the future society, beyond the limits of global society. The purpose of such constructions is based on the wish to extend the vector of sociological tendencies existing today not only into “tomorrow” (global society), but also to the day after tomorrow. This hypothesis, even more abstract than the concepts of civil society and global society, is symmetrical with respect to the human society view of the animal “foreword” to human sociality, but can be called a “machine ‘afterword’.” This is the idea of the post-human, who must come to replace the human as an individual.
The post-human is a concept that extends the vector of the breaking-up of identity (which we can see in the figure showing the transformations of identity from collective to individual and the ethnos to global society) to yet another qualitative level and proposes to divide individuality into its components. The human individual can also be thought of as something whole and organic, similar to the ethnos. And as social history (at least of Western societies) is the aspiration to crush this wholeness down to the atomic level, so post-history or the concept “post-human” proposes to crush man himself, replacing him with the machine, cyborg, clone, or mutant. The very idea of the decoding of the gene already contains in itself a quest for the machine code of man, which it will be possible to improve and which it will be possible to control and manipulate. Man himself is considered a machine, a mechanism, whose functioning it is possible to interfere with and to perfect.
On the basis of such a sociological hypothesis, made much use of in contemporary science fiction (fragments of which gradually become reality in accordance with the extent of the progress of genetic engineering, cloning, nanotechnology, etc.) we can construct the last purely theoretical model, transcending the bounds of human society.
The last derivative from the ethnos will be the post-human society or post-society. If within the framework of the human the maximum antithesis of the ethnos is global society (“the third derivation” from the ethnos, as is civil society), then beyond its limits in the projection of post-people (already dividuals, not individuals) we can outline with a dotted line a conditional “fourth derivation” from the ethnos, an association of cyborgs, mutants, clones and machines.
This is the logical limit in which ethnosociology rests in the analysis of man’s hypothetical future.
The main concepts of ethnosociology are exhausted by this taxonomy.
We see a consolidated model of all these types of societies in Figure 6.
II. The Instrumental Concepts of Ethnosociology
The Stereotype — The Ethnic Stereotype
Now let us move to an overview of the fundamental instrumental concepts of ethnosociology, with the help of which we will later describe and interpret the basic ethnosociological phenomena: the ethnos, the narod, the nation, civil society, and post-society.
The concept “stereotype” (from the ancient Greek στερεός, “solid,” “spatial” and τύπος, “mark”) was introduced into scientific use by the sociologist Walter Lippmann (1889–1974). Lippmann himself gives the following definition: “a stereotype is a model adopted in a historical society of perceiving, filtering, and interpreting information during the cognition and recognition of the surrounding world, based on previous social experience.” The purpose of introducing this concept is exceedingly important for the understanding of the essence of society and, in particular, of social opinion, since any society is inclined to explain the new through the old and the unfamiliar through the familiar. For that reason, the stereotype shows the structure of the social consciousness, which always relates to the surrounding world and its transformations selectively, accepting that which corresponds to its settled notions, and approaching the new with distrust (which often leads to the unreliable interpretation of this “new” or to its being ignored).
Society thinks in stereotypes, i.e., in notions that often conflict with processes unfolding inside and outside of society. But more often than not stereotypes prove stronger than the givens of direct experience, since, being lodged in consciousness, they are processed again in agreement with already established stereotypes. Everything that contradicts these stereotypes is rejected or reinterpreted.
Figure 6. Identity in various types of society.
In Ethnosociology the concept of the stereotype finds the broadest application. For instance, it can be applied to various types of society.
At the level of the ethnos, stereotypes will be the most settled and rigid; everything new is rejected or ignored.
At the level of the narod the structure of stereotypes becomes more complicated and is created by a field (of history), in which the new is admitted; although again this new is interpreted most often with the help of the stereotype.
The nation puts as its goal to generate stereotypes artificially and rationally. The production of stereotypes and their inculcation society comprises the sphere of ideology, politics, and propaganda.
Civil society strives to transfer stereotypes from the collective level to the individual level. Global society proposes a complete eradication of collective stereotypes.
Post-society (and this is a very important program of postmodernism) is thought of as the kind of sphere in which stereotypes will be subject to decomposition even on an individual level.
In a narrower sense, we can speak of ethnic stereotypes, i.e., of one or another society’s settled notions about an ethnos, narod, or nation.
Stereotypes can be separated into two kinds: autostereotypes and heterostereotypes. An autostereotype is a group’s system of stereotypes concerning itself. A heterostereotype is this same group’s system of notions concerning other groups. In ethnosociology studies, the method of revealing auto- and heterostereotypes is widely employed.37
The American sociologist William Sumner (1840–1910), one of the founders of American sociology, formulated the sociological concept of the “we-group” and “they-group” as an instrument for the study of the structure of identity.38 Sumner also introduce the term “ethnocentrism,” in order to emphasize the specific character of the structure of social identity, where the “we-group” (in this case taken as the ethnos) is always found in the center, and the “they-group” always on the periphery. The structure of the “we-group” is determined by autostereotypes; that of the “they-group,” by heterostereotypes.
Another very important instrument of ethnosociological analysis is the sociological concept of attitude.
Attitude is the psychological condition of the predisposition of a subject to a certain activity in a certain situation. The phenomenon was discovered by the German psychologist L. Lange (1863–1936). The American sociologists W. Thomas (1863–1947) and F. Znaneskty (1882–1958) applied it to the sphere of Sociology. The defined social attitude as a “psychological process considered in relation to the social world and taken first and foremost in connection with social values.” Value, according to them, was “the objective side of attitude. Consequently, an attitude is the individual (subjective) side of social value,” they affirmed.39
Attitude precedes social action and is found on the borderline between the inner and outer as an instance, where is formed the strategy of social behavior and even social perception even before the moment of direct contact with the social milieu arrives.
The American sociologist Milton Rokeach (1918–1988) showed that attitude is of two types: towards the object and towards the situation. An attitude towards the object is a knowing relation (basic stereotype) to some phenomenon, social, or ethnic group. Within this attitude there is no reverse connection; it is projected onto the external world without taking account of its specifics. An attitude towards the situation includes a reverse connection, since it puts the subject in a concrete, individual moment, with which he must reckon.
In Sociology, Lapiere’s experiment, which has ethnosociological significance, is famous. In the early 1930s, the American sociologist Richard Lapiere (1899–1989) undertook a trip to a number of American cities with two Chinese assistants. At that time in America there was a rather careful relationship towards the Chinese. When Lapiere sent out correspondence to the inn-keepers with a request to book a room for his and his pair of Chinese assistants, in the majority of cases he did not receive a response, or else he was told that no rooms were available. But when he arrived to a hotel together with his Chinese assistants, the majority of innkeepers agreed to accept them without any particular problems. The “attitude towards the object” (the Chinese) was negative (activated ethnic heterostereotypes), but the “attitude towards the situation” depended on many factors (the personal charm of the professor, the neat outer appearance of the Chinese students, the possibility of earning money on a client, etc.) and more often than not overpowered the “attitude towards the object.”
Assimilation
In the study of the contact of two ethnoses with one another, one often finds the process of ethnic assimilation. This signifies the gradual absorption of one ethnos by another right up to its disappearance. Under the influence of one ethnos (stronger, more energetic, more active, more tenacious) another ethnos (weaker, passive, languid) can lose its specific features and merge with the first one. At the same time, there occurs the loss of language, belief in a common origin, and the specific traditions that distinguished the given ethnos from the one with which it is assimilated.
Assimilation can bear a smooth or abrupt character, can be relatively voluntary and strictly compulsory, planned or spontaneous, and can occur in conditions of war or peace. The situation often arises when a conquered ethnos assimilates the conqueror (for instance, today’s Bulgarians are a Slavic ethnos who originated in present-day Bulgaria and were conquered in ancient times by the Turks under the leadership of Khan Asparukh, and who gradually assimilated the Turkic elite, which had lost its language, the memory of its origin, and its ethnic traditions in the Slavic masses).
During assimilation, which is considered from without as a unidirectional process — the disappearance of one ethnos and its dissolution into another — a much deeper interaction of the ethnoses occurs. The absorbed ethnos often introduces into the other ethnos its original features, which are capable of influencing the structure of the more active, absorbing ethnos.
Thus, the autochthonous residents of India (mostly its own Dravidian tribes), conquered by Indo-European nomads, after accepting the ethnic culture of the Hindus, their traditions, language, and beliefs, fundamentally transformed the original Vedic culture and imported to it an entirely unique orientation.
Ethnic Conservation
The opposite of assimilation is ethnic conservation. Conservation means the preservation of an ethnos in the face of a massive impact with another ethnos, resisting assimilation. But in certain circumstances the weaker ethnos is able to dodge assimilation and to preserve its identity.
Most often the conservation of an ethnos occurs at the cost of the ethnos’ retreat to the peripheral zone of influence of the stronger ethnos, areas hard to access and difficult to master: mountains, forests, deserts, tundra, ices, etc. In these territories, difficult for habitation, it is often possible to meet the members of ancient ethnoses, which had undergone in conditions of conservation not a few waves of stronger and more aggressive newcomers. Eskimos, Chukchi, Evenki, and other small ethnoses of the North are examples of such archaic ethnoses. Some highland narods have many ancient features: the Ossetians, Avars, Dargins, Svans, Chechens, Ingush, Tabasarans, Lezgins, etc.
Acculturation
Another form of interethnic influence is acculturation. This process does not affect the entire society, but one a specific section of it. Acculturation is the transfer of the cultural code of one ethnos to another, as a rule without taking account of the specific model of ethnic arrangement of that society towards which acculturation is directed.
In the process of acculturation there occurs the cultural transformation of that social group towards which it is directed, but this does not lead (as in assimilation) to the complete merger of the two groups or to the absorption of one of them by the other.
In the 19th century acculturation was thought of only in the form of the transmission of the cultural code of a more complex society to a simpler one (for instance, from the narod or nation to the ethnos). That is how it happens in most cases. However, the ethnologist F. Boas underscores that there is no such society (simple or complex) as would not be subject to the cultural influence of other societies. Thus, he gives the example of the form of harpoon of Norwegian fishermen, which are exact reproductions of the much older fishing instrument of the Eskimos of Greenland.40
Acculturation can be understood broadly, as the cultural impact of one society on another without their mixing in the course of cultural exchange (the formula of the ethnosociologists R. Redfield, R. Linton, and M. Herskovits further developed the approach of F. Boas), or more narrowly as the uni-directional impact of a more complex culture on a less complex one.41
Integration
Another form of interethnic influence is integration. It is a kind of inclusion of one ethnic group in another, most often voluntarily. The process of integration differs from assimilation by its conscious character and ritual formalization, and also in that it affects the individual members of the other ethnic group. There are a number of rites that serve this purpose.
The main forms of integration are:
1. Adoption
2. Blood brotherhood
3. The patron/client model
Adoption is a rite of acceptance into an ethnic community by a member of another ethnic community (as a rule, on an individual basis and with the request of the accepted person). In the course of rites of adoption (which have many variants) the initiate imitates “birth” into the ethnos, attests to his faith in an ancestor common to the tribe (i.e., an ancestor of the tribe becomes his own ancestor), and becomes familiarized with traditions and customs. It is intended that the adopted member will live among the given ethnic community and will speak its language.
Blood brotherhood is also connected with a ritual, the point of which is the mixing of blood of two individuals, which symbolizes integration into one and the same tribe (which one precisely is necessarily specified). Having become “blood brothers” with a member of another tribe, a person is henceforth subje
ct to all social forms — taboo, marriage rules, rewards and punishments: he is accepted by all as a full-fledged member of that community. He belongs to the same lineage as his “blood brother,” exactly as though he were his blood brother [TN: by birth]. From a sociological point of view, ritual forms of “blood brotherhood” are entirely identical in their results with real family ties.
In some cases, a relationship taking the form of patron/client is established between two ethnoses. This proposes that one ethnos (the patron) takes another under its cover, is obliged to guard it against the possible attack of an enemy, and in exchange the other ethnos (the client) undertakes to supply the patron-ethnos with various material objects, most often food-products or other types of goods. Sometimes the integration of ethnoses along the patron/client model becomes very stable and lasts for centuries, being depicted in myths, social institutions and rites. Ethnoses influence one another, dwelling together in inseparable symbiosis, but all the while without losing their particular features.
In more complex societies the difference between integration and assimilation consists in the fact that integration allows for the preservation of a set of special ethnic signs, while assimilation intends their full displacement by the characteristics of that society which implements the assimilation.
The Applicability of Ethnosociological Methods to Complex Societies
Ethnosociology studies the ethnos as a koineme, the simplest form of society. More complex types of society — the narod, state, religion, civilization, nation, civil society, etc. — are derivations from the ethnos. A more detailed study of the qualities of these derivations and their sociological meaning will be given in the following chapters. It is already possible, however, to outline the most important vector of the ethnosociological approach: those sociological and instrumental concepts which we met with at the level of the ethnos we shall also be able to discover easily in more complex systems of society and to apply them to the study thereof. The structure of these concepts will change somewhat in parallel with the transformations of identity (from collective to individual, and even “dividual”); hence, they can be called instrumental derivatives.
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