Eliade devoted a number of books to the study of the mythologies of different narods; his book on the phenomenon of shamanism is widely recognized as a classic.194 , 195
Eliade’s key theme consists of the concept of the “sacred” (in his late period, Durkheim also studied this theme as a priority).196 It is precisely this factor that comprises the uniqueness of simple societies, of ethnoses. Sacredness is the fundamental mark of antiquity and tradition, while secularity, the banishing of sacredness, or the “disenchanted world” (Weber), on the other hand, makes up the essence of modernity. At the same time, Weber insists that for the correct understanding of archaic societies and ethnoses it is necessary for the researcher to recognize and become familiar with the “experience of the sacred,” without which his observations of institutions, rites, attitudes, statuses, roles, and values of the “primitive” society will not be valid. Eliade himself, like Boas, openly sympathized with archaic ethnoses, believing the experience of the sacred to be that very core pivot whose presence does not simply balance archaic societies with contemporary ones, but makes them more worthy, vital, and well off than the latter.
If, at the start of his scientific career, Eliade was interested above all in sophisticated mystical theology — such as that of the Middle Ages, Hinduism, Buddhism, Hermeticism, etc. — then in his later years he focused all of his attention on the study of the most “primitive” societies, expecting to find in precisely them the keys to the nature of the sacred, which in more complex religious systems is overgrown with a massive quantity of rational and philosophical details. He devoted his last work, The Religions of Australia, to the aborigines of that continent and the description of the structure of sacredness in their societies.197
Harold Garfinkel: Ethnomethodology & Ethnosociology
Of significant interest is the sociological theory of the contemporary sociologist Harold Garfinkel, which has received the name “Ethnomethodology” but which bears no relation to either the ethnos or to Ethnosociology, although it is extremely interesting in its own right and deserves attention from the point of view of its philosophical phenomenological method.
Garfinkel put before himself a fundamental philosophical and sociological question: where is the rational element of the socium concentrated — in impersonal, common rules and norms or in the particular interests of separate citizens? What is social reason: a pubic dogma or an algorithm for the behavior of separate individuals?
Two main traditions in Sociology answer this question in directly opposite ways. Durkheim and his school (and also classical Sociology on the whole) say that the “collective consciousness” is primary and that society is itself the carrier of rationality, while Weber and “understanding sociology” (including the classic American sociologist, Talcott Parsons) insist that the source of society’s rationality is the individual, who seeks the maximum benefit in his egoistic living of the allotted time of life.198
Garfinkel passes no ultimate judgement on these questions, but he proposes to approach society from the side of the common person (in the spirit of the sociological Phenomenology of Schutz) and to trace the chain of the rational actions, evaluations, steps, and conclusions of the separate individual or separate group in a concrete situation. From his point of view, rationality is that which is developed by a concrete individual in the process of his search for the optimal paths of solving his short-term problems. Each member of a society wants something in each concrete moment of time. Garfinkel asserts that social rationality is formed from these desires and the actions corresponding to them. He calls this approach “Ethnomethodology.”199
The question arises: why did Garfinkel select such a term? The answer is as follows. Classical Sociology, both Durkheim’s and Weber’s, thinks that the rationality which dominates in society is quite differentiated and “scientific.” This means that societies with a developed scientific culture, a high reflection of the correspondence of the subject (proposition) and object (verification), are taken as models. That is to say, by “rationality” is understood, in one way or another, the “scientific rationality” of the Modern Era. But Garfinkel wanted to draw attention to a different rationality, to the “small rationality” of the average man, who does not feel the slightest need for a “scientific” analysis of his relation to the world and is supplied with the possessing possibilities of consciousness, focused on the realization of intended tasks in a concrete context.200 Such a society, consisting of empirical individuals, acting rationally in relation to a concrete situation for the sole purpose of satisfying their direct wishes and ambitions is what he called an “ethnos.” For Garfinkel, “ethnos” is a synonym of the quality of being unscientific. The study of the small rationalities of concrete individuals (e.g., the sociological analysis of the decisions of jurors, in which Garfinkel engaged during his youth) is the essence of “Ethno”-methodology.
Garfinkel, who named his method of sociological studies (in the spirit of the phenomenological Sociology of Schutz) Ethnomethodology, equated the ethnos to the unscientific and prescientific type of society. In itself this assertion is entirely correct, since it is precisely the ethnos which is that simple society, untouched by the scientific, rationalistic paradigm of the Modern Era. But the adequacy of this assertion ends here, since the ethnos, besides the fact that it has no scientifically rational dimension, has many other dimensions, none of which Garfinkel was concerned about. He simply dumped into the concept “ethnos,” as one would into a garbage bin, all that did not possess the quality of scientific, “subject-object” reflection, and occupied himself intensely with this “garbage,” sociologically constructed according to the “residual” principle.
To any specialist familiar with the complex structure of the ethnos, its dynamics, transformations, and inner collisions, such an approach will seem immensely inadequate. But if we take into consideration the historical situation in which Garfinkel was working, everything changes. In the American society of Garfinkel’s time, scientific rationality, or more precisely its ideological and propagandistic derivatives, had prevailed so strongly that it seemed self-evident. The authoritative works of cultural anthropologists, available only to the US intellectual elite, remain accessible only to closed academic circles. Any American (or European) commoner, whom Garfinkel would enlist in the “ethnos” in the spirit of his “ethno”-methodology (i.e., into a community of not entirely rational individuals), would have considered himself entirely “scientific,” even if he had only read two or three popular science brochures. For this reason, “Ethnomethodology” became a cliché in a society in which the word “ethnos” signified “simplicity” — not something organic and primordial, but “residual” and representing the refuse of a highly differentiated society — its fragments — unable to cope with its high level of differentiation.
In other words, as a contemporary sociologist studying the phenomenon on the society of Modernity and Postmodernity, Garfinkel is extremely interesting and relevant, but his “ethno”-methodology has absolutely no relationship to Ethnosociology.
McKim Marriott: American Ethnosociology Today
The most adequate contemporary representative of Ethnosociology in the US is the student and follower of Robert Redfield, the present-day American anthropologist and sociologist McKim Marriott. He himself readily calls his orientation “Ethnosociology,” and in this case this designation is entirely justified, since he studies ethnoses (as simple societies, Redfield’s “folk society”) with sociological methods, relying on Boas’ school of Cultural Anthropology (only such an approach should be referred to as “Ethnosociology”).
Marriott applied Boas’ concept of cultural pluralism to concrete studies of the society of India, starting from the “ethnic” level of separate villages. In the course of meticulous field work he came to the conclusion that to understand the structure of Indian society we must reject European criteria and transition to those formulae, concepts, and categories that the local
residents themselves use in their everyday lives. In other words, he proclaimed that Indian society can be adequately described only by Indian categories — and that too by beginning with the lowest level (of concrete identity), concrete Indian ethnic villages and settlements.201 , 202
In his works, Marriott also puts even more serious tasks before himself: he proposes to subject to critical philosophical analysis those methods, with the help of which, Western researchers study non-Western societies as a whole. He traces the dual dichotomies, characteristic of the European consciousness, to which anthropologists and sociologists try in their models to reduce the social categories of studied ethnoses down to and shows that in the majority of archaic cultures, these oppositions are not known, and that the very “map” of society and the world within which they operate are built on other, more complex and “analog” (and not digital) constructs. Marriott insists that anthropology and ethnosociology should actually become multipolar, and Western researchers should voluntarily cease to claim the status of the sole and prioritized subject-observer, subjecting their own culture to an impartial analysis from the position of other societies or from the special “meta-comparative” position, in which, during the study of a culture, the researcher and his own culture are necessarily also subjected to analysis.203
Marriott’s meta-comparative initiative for the philosophical revision of the basic instruments of Anthropology on a new stage and in new conditions brings the fundamental attitudes of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnosociology to their logical limits, going back not only to Boas, but also to Herder.
Ronald Inden: For the Destruction of Colonial Clichés in Ethnosociology
Ronald Inden, another contemporary American ethnosociologist from the University of Chicago, works in this same spirit. Inden specializes in India and, in particular, in those ethnic groups that speak Bengali.204 After starting with field studies of certain tribes of India, Inden came to a series of general theoretical conclusions concerning the method that the Anthropology and Ethnosociology of the West use when studying other, non-Western societies. From his point of view, up until now, a colonial approach, based on clichés that bear little relation to reality, has dominated the study of India. In his book Imagining India, Inden systematizes the most widespread Western clichés and demonstrates their unsoundness.205
Thus, he shows that:
• In the eyes of Western researchers, the image of Indian society appears “feminine”;
• The social structure is strictly “caste” based;
• The typical landscape is taken to be a “jungle”;
• The typical settlement is associated with a “small village”;
• The collective consciousness is imagined as purely irrational;
• The religious cult is thought of as dominant;
• India as a whole is presented as the antithesis of the West.
Inden carefully takes apart each of these assertions and demonstrates that:
• The gender scenarios in India are more accurately described as “patriarchal,” although the form of normative masculinity differs from the European one, and there exist numerous variants and nuances even between Indo-European groups, and all the more so among South Indian ethnoses;
• The caste principle does not operate on the level of official, governmental policy, and on the level of small social and ethnic groups, there exist various forms that mitigate and modify it, so to speak of the dominance of the “caste system” is an outright exaggeration;
• Indian landscapes are extremely diverse; furthermore, not only are jungles not the sole landscape, but not even the predominant one;
• Alongside villages, there exist huge modern megacities in India today;
• The manifold kinds of Indian philosophy are the peak of rationalism, although it differs qualitatively from Western European rationalism, and in contemporary Indian society it is possible to meet with the most diverse forms of thought, including modern and postmodern;
• India’s religious landscape is so diverse that it demands special consideration, inasmuch as it is possible to meet both systematized and theologically elaborate, as well as archaic forms, alongside secular thought within the context of one society;
• On the whole, India and its society differ significantly from Western societies. It is not a direct antithesis to them, but, on the contrary, in some of its details — such as its focus on the problem of the “higher I” (ātman) and critical attitude toward the surrounding world (as māyā– brings Indians philosophically quite close to European individualism (in its metaphysical presuppositions).
Inden proves that it is necessary to substantially change the attitude of Western researchers to non-Western societies, to reject the predominant standard patterns, and to learn to understand “others” as they understand themselves.
Everything said about India applies in full measure to all other non-Western societies. Thus, contemporary American Ethnosociology in its new phase turns toward the initial program of Boas and German Ethnosociology, which insisted on the rejection of Eurocentrism and called for the researcher to grow deeply accustomed to the studied Ethnosociological system.
Summary of American Cultural Anthropology
If we summarize the general trend of American Cultural Anthropology, we receive an almost finished scientific program of Ethnosociology, which isolates the fundamental moments of this discipline. The orientation that Boas lay in his works was and still is the groundwork for the scientific studies of his school.
Ethnosociology as a science is wholly and completely grounded on the fundamental principles of the scientific conceptions of Boas and his school, which shaped the look of all American anthropology in the 20th century.
Let us reiterate its main provisions:
• A radical rejection of all forms of racism (biological, evolutionary, technological, cultural, etc.);
• A recognition of the differential equality of all types of society (simple and complex, primitive and highly differentiated);
• The comprehension of society and an integral phenomenon, judgment about which can be rendered only from within it;
• The untranslatability of cultures, languages, ethnoses, and societies (meaning is preserved in a linguistic-semantic context).
III. The English School of Ethnosociology, Social Anthropology, Functionalism, Evolutionism
English Evolutionism
Like its American counterpart, English Anthropology first developed on the basis of rectilinear evolutionism. Specifically, it developed from an extreme form of evolutionism called “Orthogenesis” (from the Greek roots ὀρθός (ortho), “direct, straight, upright, erect,” and γένεσις (genesis), “origin”). Orthogenesis asserts that the evolution of living species has a clearly established goal and follows a direct path in its development, from the simple to the complex. Projecting orthogenesis on society, we get Social Darwinism as the idea that all societies move from archaic and primitive forms in the direction of the contemporary technological and industrial societies of Modernity, although this movement occurs at different speeds in different societies, despite the fact that the difference of speeds is determined only by the influence of barriers and impediments of a natural and social character.
An approach based on Orthogenesis has traditionally been characteristic of the majority of English anthropologists and sociologists.
Earlier we spoke of the theories of Herbert Spencer, who developed “Social Darwinism” on the basis of a radical understanding of evolution. The historical and sociological conceptions of other English anthropologists and sociologists of the end of the 19th century were established in the same spirit.
Edward Tylor: Evolutionary Series of Culture and Animism
Edward Tylor (1832–1917), founder of the evolutionary theory of culture and author of the classic work Primitive Culture was among those who take an evolutionary approach.206 Tylor thought that all societies develop through the “perfection
” of social institutions and systems of education. In his opinion, old institutions, customs, and religious beliefs die off in accordance with the degree of a society’s “progress” as they lose their functional significance in these societies. Thus, all forms of culture and, in particular, religion met with in archaic societies, which Tylor called “childish,” are either the embryos of corresponding instances in contemporary societies, or lack significance altogether.
Tylor drew up genetic series of different aspects of society — institutions, customs, rituals, etc.; at the basis of each were the simplest “primitive” forms, which gradually became more complex until they reached their contemporary variations. According to Tylor, the algorithm of evolution is embedded in the very structure of human behavior; for this reason, different ethnoses passed through the same stages in their development, independently of one another. Objective and entirely concrete group interests push society toward each subsequent stage.
Tylor tried to bring to light the minimal, simplest forms of religious, social, political, and economic institutions in archaic societies, the starting position of the historico-genetic series. Thus, in the area of religion he arrived at the theory of “animism,” i.e., of vague, primitive notions that the surrounding world is full of “spirits” or “souls,” which make it “alive.”207
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