Thanks to his fundamental work, Ethnosociology has received the following:
1. A thorough description of simple society (the ethnos as koineme);
2. A strict isolation within simple society of three social types and their corresponding subtypes;
3. An explanation of the algorithm of the “phase transition” from the ethnos to its first derivative (the narod), i.e., from an undifferentiated (or weakly differentiated, in the case of complex ethnoses) society to a society with clearly expressed differentiation;
4. Systematization of a mass of ethnographical and anthropological material, distinctly assessed along a sociological marker.
These four points comprise the foundations of the scientific program of Ethnosociology as a discipline. The task of the ethnosociologist is to work in one or more of these orientations at once:
1. Deepening the comprehension of the structure of simple societies;
2. Clarifying the details and variants of the typologization of simple societies;
3. Studying further the structure of the first phase transition (from the ethnos to the narod, laos) and applying its algorithms, made more accurate as one goes along, to other phase transitions (from the narod to the nation, from the nation to civil society, from global society to post-society);
4. Gathering new ethnographic material and sorting it according to basic ethnosociological criteria.
Wilhelm Mühlmann: Ethnos, Narod, Ethnocentrism
Another key figure in contemporary Ethnosociology is Thurnwald’s disciple and colleague, the ethnosociologist, sociologist and philosopher Wilhelm Mühlmann (1904–1988).
Mühlmann considered himself to be continuing the business of the Russian ethnologist Shirokogoroff and admitted that he borrowed the ethnos as a sociological category from him. Shirokogoroff’s field studies among the Evenki (a Tungusic people) left a big impression on Mühlmann, since the myths, rites, social institutions and economic practices of this small Siberian ethnos allow one to see in miniature the paradigm of the ethnos as such, and through it also the structure of more complex societies.
On the whole, in his books and studies Mühlmann followed the tradition established by Thurnwald, developing his methods, specifying the nuances of sociological and ethnic classifications, and supplementing the fallow or weakly worked cells in the general models of ethnosociological knowledge. But there are a number of directions in which Mühlmann attained serious results, substantially enriching the structure of ethnosociological knowledge.
Mühlmann was the first to propose introducing the concept of the ethnos in a strict sense, following Shirokogoroff and defining thereby the simplest of the possible forms of organization of a society (koineme). Neither Gumplowicz (who, as we saw, used the term “race,” despite the fact that he himself introduced such concepts as “Ethnosociology” and “Ethnocentrism”), nor Thurnwald, who used the term ethnos (Ethnie, Ethnos) and Volk by turns without any semantic nuance, had such a strict definition.
Mühlmann clearly distinguished four concepts: “ethnos,” Volk, “nation,” and “race” as independent concepts, loaded completely with determinate and non-intersecting sociological meaning.
The ethnos is the simplest society.
The Volk (narod) according to Mühlmann, is, on the contrary, the highest form of cultural and spiritual development, the peak of a society’s sociological possibilities. In the 1930s and 1940s, Mühlmann separated narods into “genuine narods” (echte Völkern), “floating narods” (schwebende Völkern) and “imaginary narods” (Scheinvölkern), but later he repudiated such a classification. But it is important that the concept of the “narod” (Volk) first acquired the status of a scientific sociological concept (in Mühlmann’s work).133
The nation, according to Mühlmann, corresponded to the contemporary state-political and legal form of citizenship, and he did not pay much attention to it.
In relation to the term “race,” Mühlmann proposed to separate biological (a-race) and sociological (b-race) racism. Belongingness to a biological a-race can be proved by the method of genetic and anthropometric studies, as in the case of animal species, plants and minerals.
In itself, sociological knowledge does not bear an a-race. But b-race is the notion that people have of their belonging to one or another kinship line of the belongingness of others. The sociological b-race, on the other hand, has a big significance in certain life, cultural, historical and political situations and can act as a sociological category.
From a philosophical point of view, Mühlmann was a follower of Edmund Husserl and considered the ethnos as a phenomenological datum, which is fundamental for the constitution of both the object (environment) and subject (the human) and precedes all individualization. For this reason, he refused to set “nature” and “culture” at odds with one another: the ethnic phenomenon does not know such a duality, and in order to understand the ethnos and its nature deeply, it is necessary to knowingly reject the dual model, customary for Western European man, of the division of everything into subject and object, subjective and objective.
Mühlmann’s introduction of the term “Ethnocentrism” as the basic structure of ethnic phenomenon is extremely important.134 Ethnocentrism is the format of the world in the ethnic consciousness, where society, nature, myths, right, the economy, religion, and magic are placed into a unified model, at the core of which is the ethnos itself, and everything else is unfolded around it in concentric circles — what is more, the pattern of small circles and the distant periphery of ethnocentrism are preserved as a constant. In the structure of ethnosociological knowledge, the concept of “Ethnocentrism,” its transformation, and its derivatives sometimes play a decisive role.
Mühlmann paid a great deal of attention to interethnic ties, studying the processes which unfold at the border of two or more of ethnoses. His book Assimilation, The Surroundings of a Narod, the Establishment of Narods is dedicated to an examination of the processes of ethnic assimilation, the inclusion of ethnoses in a narod, and analogous processes of interethnic interaction.135
To Mühlmann was also the author of the classic German-language work History of Anthropology.136
Georg Elwert: Ethnic Conflicts and “Markets of Violence”
The German scholar Georg Elwert (1947–2005), a specialist on the ethnoses of Africa and Central Asia and professor of ethnology and sociology, was a bright member of the next generation of ethnosociologists. Elwert was the main editor of the journal Sociologus, founded by Thurnwald and led by Mühlmann. Elwert continued and further developed the traditions of his predecessors, working in the Institute of Ethnology, founded by Thurnwald, in the Free Berlin University.
Elwert applied the ethnosociological principle to the analysis of the condition of contemporary African countries, describing in ethnosociological categories the processes of development and modernization.137 Elwert paid special attention to the problems of contemporary forms of imperialism, including “market imperialism,” showing how the penetration of contemporary Western economic technologies in certain cases worsens the social picture in developing countries and carries in itself destructive consequences.138
Elwert is a recognized authority in the sphere of ethnic conflicts and international terrorism. In particular, he coined the popular term “market violence,” which describes the international criminal structure, connected with the service of terrorist networks and sometimes influencing the ethnic balance in the countries of the Third World, including the artificial provocation of interethnic conflict.139
II. The American School of Ethnosociology, Cultural Anthropology, The History of Religions, & Ethnomethodology
Terminological Clarification
In familiarizing ourselves with the American school of Ethnosociology, we should take note of the previously mentioned circumstances connected with its name. The discipline that in Germany (especially after Thurnwald and Mühlmann) and in Russia is persistently called “Ethnosociology,” historically has be
en known in the United States as “Cultural Anthropology.” This discipline predominantly studies “simple societies” (i.e., ethnoses), and on that basis builds systems and classifications of more generalized cultural and social phenomena; i.e., methodologically and conceptually it does exactly what Ethnosociology does.
Before we move to an overview of the principal authors of this school, we should mention the first American anthropologists and sociologists, who maintained evolutionary and individualistic conceptions, for the overcoming and refutation of which “Cultural Anthropology” was established.
Louis Morgan: Ancient Society
The American historian and ethnologist Louis Morgan (1818–1881) was the founder of contemporary anthropological studies in the USA and laid the foundations for the work of the following generation of anthropologists. He studied the structure of Iroquois tribes and on the basis of his observations of archaic societies he formulated his basic theories. The gist of what he observed is laid out in the summarizing work Ancient Society, which compares the level of a society’s technical development with the its structure of kinship and attitudes toward property. In an evolutionary spirit, Morgan separates the history of human societies into three phases: savagery, barbarism, and civilization.140
He juxtaposes each phase with a level of technological and legal progress and arranges between them a self-evident hierarchy, which is apparent from the names themselves. If we do not pay attention to the offensive sound of the first two terms and try to find an analogue to them in ethnosociology, we can correlate “savagery” with the ethnos, “barbarity” with the narod, and “civilization” with the nation. Morgan’s ideas influenced Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) and predetermined in many respects the structure of “historical materialism,” which was also maintained in the spirit of “evolutionary racism.”
Morgan authored some of the first serious studies of the structure of kinship in archaic societies, which subsequently became the central theme of anthropology.
William Sumner: Folkways and Mores
William Graham Sumner (1840–1910) was the founder of the American sociological tradition and an indisputable giant in the field. Moreover, his key work, Folkways, pays great attention to archaic simple societies and can be considered a properly ethnosociological study.141
Sumner is located in the framework of an evolutionary paradigm under the decisive influence of Spencer. He had no doubts about the ideas of evolution and progress of human societies, nor about the claim that man is driven by animal instincts — hunger, sex, fear, etc. Thus, Sumner belongs entirely to the tradition of Social Darwinism.
At the same time, his works, especially his best-known one, Folkways, contain extremely important elements of ethnosociological knowledge, developed by the next generation of sociologists and anthropologists.
Sumner was the first to introduce the dual concepts of “in-group” and the “out-group” (or “we-group” and “they-group” respectively) into sociology, which thereafter became a classic instrument of any sociological analysis of group behavior and group identity. In particular, on this fundamental division are based autostereotypes and heterostereotypes, which predetermine the basic structure of interaction between diverse segments of society. The stereotypes and structure of the in-group and the out-group are found in an especially vivid form, precisely in the sphere of the ethnos, and Sumner introduces this concept, based on the material of archaic collectives or ethnoses. This is already apparent in the fact that he describes the phenomenon of the in-group as “Ethnocentrism,” borrowing this term from Gumplowicz, with whose works he was familiar. The processes occurring inside the “we-group” Sumner calls “in-group,” distinguishing them from those processes occurring outside the group, “out-group.”
Sumner dedicates his foundational study to “folk [narodni] customs,” though he himself uses the specific term “folkways.” He considers this phenomenon entirely unconscious and primordial, built not on philosophy and science, but on the direct process of life. One can say that folkways are a basic social phenomenon, characteristic of simple and archaic societies, in which social institutions, classes, legal systems, etc. are absent. Folkways differ among different ethnoses and can vary even in the small social groups of one ethnos, but it is precisely these folkways, the fact of whose presence and whose automatic (unconscious) is recognised by all, which form society as a unity.
The first form of a more determinate structuring of unconscious folkways is that which Sumner calls by the Latin term mores, from which is formed the adjective moralis, and from that the word “morals.” Sumner dedicates the central place in his work to this phenomenon, giving an extensive panorama of the “mores” of the most diverse societies and narods, from archaic to contemporary. “Mores” grow out of folkways — their nature is unconscious and is not given to rational explanation, but they themselves are connected with historical, material, climatic, social, and other conditions, which gradually give them an increasingly rational form. The rationalization of mores, according to Sumner, is progress.
Even more formalized constructions are built over mores: social institutions, political and legal systems, religious and economic structures. As a rule, they are rational and pragmatic — they serve concrete aims and express the conscious interests of some social group. But the roots of these rational structures should be sought in the half-rational or weakly rational mores, and those, in turn, take shape on the basis of already irrational folkways, which reflect the archaic structures of an ethnic “we-group.”
Sumner made one very serious observation, which influenced the philosophy of the following generations of anthropologists and become the center of passionate arguments about the essence of man and society. He titles one of his chapters in the form of an aphorism: “Mores can make anything right and prevent the condemnation of anything.”142 If we separate this assertion from the context of Social Darwinism and evolutionism, we get a ready-made law of the plurality of human societies: the culture and morals of one society will prove to be incomparable with that of another, and any form of evaluation of one society by another will be nothing other than that same “ethnocentrism” and a knowingly incorrect heterostereotype, the we-group’s biased (and therefore false) opinion of the they-group.
If we correlate Sumner’s model with the ethnosociological series of societies, then we can relate folkways to the ethnos, and social institutions, legal systems, and political structures to the narod (and further, to the nation and civil society). Mores represent something intermediate. In the ethnos, there are only folkways and the rudiments of mores. In the narod mores reside at the bottom (in the masses), while social institutions are above them (in the elites); folkways here recede into the unconscious. In the nation, mores are abolished (i.e., they also recede into the unconscious, to the folkways) and only institutions and structures remain. Having acknowledged the reversibility of historical progress, it becomes possible through such a correspondence to resolve a multitude of sociological and ethnosociological problems — for instance, to clarify the correspondence between rights and morality, laws and customs, etc.
William Thomas: The Ethnography of Civilizational Societies with a Developed Culture
Two major figures in American sociology, William Thomas (1863–1947) and his co-author, the ethnic Pole Florian Znaniecki (1882–1958), also made the majority of their methodological and conceptual discoveries on the basis of the study of ethnic phenomena. Their fundamental five-volume work, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, in which they elaborated the majority of their sociological conceptions (including the famous theory of “social attitudes”), is devoted to an analysis of the behavior of immigrants in different social and ethnic environments.143 With good reason, this book is considered by many to be the best sociological work written in the USA in the course of the history of American Sociology. William Thomas, for his part, is the author of a fundamental law of sociology as such: “It is
not important whether some interpretation or other is right or not: if people define their situations as real, they are real in their consequences.”144
Thomas, after receiving a grant to study the problem of immigration into the US, left for Europe to study those societies from which the majority of immigrants to America hailed. At this time, according to his own admission, he surprisingly (at least, by the norms of highly differentiated and civilized European societies) decided to apply to them the same method used by ethnographers for the study of the culture of nonliterate, archaic narods. It happened that he focused on the Polish segment, both in Europe and in the US, having previously learnt Polish, and undertook a detailed analysis of the social particularities of the behavior of Polish peasants in their homeland, as well as those who had immigrated to the US. In Poland, he met his future co-author Florian Znaniecki. Thomas started to pin down and systematize the daily details, everyday observations, and themes of day-to-day communication, and on this material he built the majority of his sociological generalizations.
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