The Foundations
Page 20
At the same time, Gellner demonstrates that at the basis of the “nation” and “nationalism” lies the knowingly-false idea of the establishment of a fictive genealogy of contemporary European bourgeois nations and ancient ethnoses and narods, belonging to other sociological models. Nations have no relation to ethnoses; they are created under different social and historical conditions and according to a different algorithm.
The difference between nations and rural communities, representing the majority of the population in the Middle Ages, i.e., between “Industria” and “Agraria,” consists of the relationship to written culture and language. In “Agraria,” book-literacy is the prerogative only of the higher strata, while the masses live in a condition of oral knowledge transmission. For this reason, in “Agraria” there exists a universal language of the nobility, a “koine” (for instance, Latin in the Western Europe of the Middle Ages) and a plurality of ethnic languages and dialects, intrinsic to village areas. In “Industria,” on the other hand, education becomes all-national and an artificial language is created, knowledge of which is indispensable for all members of society. Gellner calls this language an “idiom.”237
Gellner’s analysis of the formation of nations on the basis of poly-ethnic class governments is very important. In these governments, there existed two types of social barriers: inter-class (between the nobility and the commoners) and territorial (between settlements). At the same time the division of labor according to the economic factor was insignificant. In the transition to “Industria,” society simultaneously becomes uniform while also dividing itself according to occupations, which, in their turn, are tied to the economic factor, giving rise to the beginning of class differentiation (i.e., social stratification, based on the economic principle). It is precisely at this point that the nation and the phenomenon of nationalism arise.238 Moreover, Gellner reconstructs the process of the decay and reconfiguration of society in this phase transition as the discovery within the old limits of the government of two types of nationalism, which he calls “Megalomania” and “Ruritania.”
Megalomania is the formation of a nation founded on the culture that dominated in the pre-industrial government. In it, the culture and language of the elite are taken as the foundation and reworked in the interests of the third estate. But the formalization of the nation and the nationalism that accompanies it strike a blow to the peripheral regions of the pre-industrial type, which often differ socially and ethnically from the core culture. Thus, the phenomenon of Ruritania emerges, i.e., of the “rural” periphery that actively forms national states, which can advance a counter-project and try to create a counter-nation (for instance, selected from the composition of the new national state). Thus emerges “small nationalism,” Ruritania, opposing “big nationalism,” Megalomania. This is evident in many examples — in particular, in the fate of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which fell apart along precisely these lines: Austria became a nation of Megalomania, and Hungary, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Romania were the reciprocal counter-projects of Ruritania. Both nationalisms, “big” and “small,” have a place only in the transition to “Industria.” That is, they are connected with bourgeois reforms, changes of the basic paradigm of society, and are artificial processes, directed by an intellectual and economic elite. In all cases, the “nation” is an artificial construct, created “conceptually” in an empty space.
In its basic features, this analysis is accepted by Ethnosociology and is the main conceptual instrument for the analysis of the nation and nationalism, and of phenomena corresponding to them.
Benedict Anderson: The Nation as an Imagined Community
The ethnosociologist Benedict Anderson continued the use of the constructivist method in the interpretation of the phenomenon of the nation. His book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism became an authoritative work, summarizing (even in its title) the basic provisions of the constructivist approach.239
As an ethnographic example, Anderson relies on the ethnoses of Indonesia, which he studied thoroughly from an ethnosociological point of view.240
Like Gellner and all other constructivists (“modernists”), Anderson looks at the phenomenon of nations and nationalism as a bourgeois invention and connects this directly with book printing, which created the technological prerequisites for the inculcation of an “idiom” (a national language) on the scale of the whole society. Anderson introduces the term “print capitalism,” which emphasizes the central significance of book printing for the execution of the phase transition from an agrarian and class-based way of life to a national one.
Anderson calls nations “imagined communities” and sets himself the question: “What first imagined them?” He gives a historical answer. From his point of view, nations first arise not in Europe itself, but in European colonies, in the US and a few governments of South America. And only then does the type of organization of society along the model of the nation occur in the Old World, which imitates the social-political processes of its trans-Atlantic colonies.241
John Breuilly: The Autonomy of the Nation
A follower of Gellner, the historian and ethnosociologist John Breuilly of the London School of Economics also adheres to the constructivist approach. Breuilly thinks that nationalism started to develop in the first phase of the Modern Era and was called upon from the beginning to compensate for the growing alienation between the absolute monarchy (who increasingly began to rely on the third estate) and the peripheral masses, brought out of their customary agrarian life cycle by economic and technological modernization.242
Alienation arose as a result of a change of the traditional way of life, and the collapse of Christian values and the class-based order. Absolutism lost its sacred significance and ceased to be seen as legitimate in the eyes of the agrarian masses. At the time of the French Revolution, this circumstance received extreme forms, since social innovations demanded compensating, mobilizing strategies, due to which arose the extreme nationalism of the Jacobins.
Breuilly rejects any connection of nationalism and the nation with the ethno-cultural type and thinks that these phenomena are entirely constructed for the political demands of the government and the intellectuals that serve it.243
Elie Kedourie: The Eradication of Nationalism
Among contemporary constructivists, it is worth singling out Elie Kedourie (1926–1992). Born in Iraq to a family of Indian traditionalists, he differed radically by his critical views concerning nationalism. He thought that nationalism was the product of disappointed marginals, who elaborated utopian projects on the basis of philosophical research and the study of folklore, recreating an ideal picture of “narodni life,” which should have been taken as a model for the construction of a better (more “enlightened”) society.
Kedourie thought that Great Britain, which had, in its time, placed its bets on Arab nationalism, had in fact lain a slow-acting landmine in the region, and that rather than controlling the area on the basis of Enlightened and humanistic values, under the aegis of imperial control, it had instead given way for dark fundamentalist passions to devour.
Considering nationalism an artificial phenomenon, Kedourie called for its complete eradication.
Anthony D. Smith: Ethnosymbolism
Among contemporary ethnosociologists, we should highlight especially Anthony D. Smith, professor at the London School of Economics. Smith was Gellner’s student, but he somewhat reconsidered Gellner’s explanatory model of the phenomenon of the nation. Agreeing with the constructivists that the nation is a contemporary phenomenon of the industrial society of the Modern era, Smith emphasized that at the basis of the nation lies both the technology of the bourgeoisie which has come to power, and an appeal to the “ethnos,” on the basis of which the nation is created.244 If Gellner, Anderson, Breuilly or Kedourie assert that the nation is created in an empty space, Smith retorts that it is not entirely empty: the ethnos participates in this process, even if only partia
lly. The nation has a preceding form, the “pre-nation,” which has ethnic features.245
This is the foundation of Smith’s “Ethnosymbolism,” which he shared by such contemporary ethnosociologists as Montserrat Guibernau, John Armstrong, John Hutchinson, etc.246 , 247 , 248
Smith defines the ethnosymbolic approach as follows: “For Ethnosymbolism, nationalism draws its force from the myths, memories, traditions, and symbols of an ethnic legacy and ethnic heritage; and this popular “living past” (Smith’s emphasis) becomes and can become in the future a basis for its invention and reinterpretation by the modern intelligentsia.”
Anthony Giddens: Ethnosociology is a Double Hermeneutic
The well-known English sociologist Anthony Giddens is sometimes mentioned as a representative of Ethnosociology. Giddens’ works are mainly devoted to theoretical problems of contemporary Sociology, and in this sphere he is an acknowledged authority. But they have an indirect relationship to the problem of the ethnos or to Social Anthropology, since Giddens was not engaged with this set of problems as a first priority and has no works devoted to archaic societies, ethnoses, or the genesis of the modern nation. Where these themes are considered, they are part of his general sociological approach.249
Giddens’ acceptance into “Ethnosociology” is based on a paper by the Spanish sociologist Pablo Santoro.250 Giddens refers only to the Ethnomethodology of Garfinkel, which proposes to combine the sociological interpretation of society from below, from simple individual units (like Garfinkel and phenomenology), and from above, from the position of the general research structures of classical sociology. He calls this a “double hermeneutic.” He uses this approach for the study of the problem of self-identity in the societies of Modernity.251
Since, as we showed, Ethnomethodology, in itself a productive and important sociological method, has no relation at all to the problem of ethnicity or to the ethnos and its derivatives, the double hermeneutic, in Giddens’ understanding, can in no way act as a synonym of Ethnosociology.
Summary of English Social Anthropology, Nation Studies, and Ethnosociology
The anthropological research of the English school, especially beginning with Malinowski and Radcliffe-Browne, when they linked up closely with the functionalist tradition of Durkheim with an attentiveness towards social structures, represents a broad conceptual and domain-specific field, and also a developed scientific program of ethnosociological studies, the fundamental style of which, despite the variety of positions, schools, and authors, corresponds on the whole to the general line of American Cultural Anthropology and German Ethnosociology.
Of special significance is the constructivist approach, started by Ernst Gellner, which introduces into the study of societies a substantial correction, connected with the artificial and pragmatic function of the phenomena of the nation and nationalism as political instruments of class, state, elites, and society.
Smith’s Ethnosymbolism extends the zone of the study of the nation with reference to those ethnic elements on which historical nations were artificially constructed.
Thanks to the English school of social anthropologists and ethnosociologists, Ethnosociology as a whole has access to a broad set of methods, approaches, instruments, conceptions, terms, and theories, as well as a wealth of material in the form of field research into the most diverse ethnic societies and nations, both in Europe and in other parts of the world.
IV. The French School of Ethnosociology, Classical Sociology, Structural Anthropology
Emile Durkheim: Social Facts and the Dichotomy of the Sacred & the Profane
We should count among the direct predecessors of Ethnosociology in France first and foremost that classic of sociology, Emile Durkheim (1858–1917), who transformed sociology into a strict academic science and won recognition for it in France and the rest of continental Europe. Durkheim founded the regularly published journal L’Année Sociologique, in which all of France’s prominent sociologists, ethnologists, and anthropologists published their works.
Durkheim first expounded on some fundamental theories of sociology: the “social fact,” interpreted by him in sociological concepts, rejects the explanation of society and its phenomena through other (physical, biological, etc.) layers of reality. Society is a total phenomenon and bears in itself to the keys to the knowledge both of itself and of everything having a direct and immediate relation to it. Just in the natural sciences there are strict criteria based on the laws of the physical world, so too in the social domain do there exist strict criteria and laws, which Durkheim called upon to discover and study.252
Thus, Durkheim advanced the basic sociological idea of the presence of a “collective consciousness,” which influences the individual consciousness of a member of society and is prior in relation to him. The concept of “collective representations,” introduced by Durkheim, became another very important term in Sociology.
Examining different types of society, Durkheim proposed to classify them according to their form of solidarity: in simple ethnoses this solidarity is “mechanical” (i.e., complete and automatic), while in complex ones it is “organic” (i.e., it requires the conscious, voluntary act of integration and socialization).
Durkheim’s ideas exerted a colossal influence on European science in the 20th century, influencing the establishment of Anthropology (especially English Anthropology), and becoming an integral part of Ethnosociology.
It is significant that in the last few years of his life, Durkheim focused his attention on the problem of “primitive” ethnoses, and although he himself did not participate in field research , his theoretical generalizations possess tremendous worth for Ethnology. Durkheim’s last work Elementary Forms of Religious Life can well be called a model of ethnosociological research.253 In this book, Durkheim bases his work on ethnographic studies of the societies of Australian aborigines.
Durkheim’s introduction of the dichotomy of the “sacred” and “profane” into models of the study of societies (especially archaic ones) has great significance.254 With the help of this pair of concepts, where “sacred” characterizes separate practices, rituals, institutions, and processes connected with the spiritual, mystical, irrational sides of life, and “profane” with the everyday, routine, practical, commonplace sides, it is possible to describe the structure of any society reliably.
It is important to note that within the sacred itself, Durkheim distinguishes two poles: the pure and impure or “right-hand sacred” and “left-hand sacred,” respectively. The right-hand pole of the sacred characterizes all that is good, light, beneficial, and filled with the highest positive connotations. This recalls the notion of “holiness.” However, there exists within the sacred the opposite dimension as well, that which embodies impurity, aggression, horror, and death. This dimension is also seen as something supernatural (in contrast with the profane), filled with higher powers and capabilities, only with a negative connotation. In archaic cultures, “good” and “evil” spirits are held as sacred in equal measure, although one group brings good and the other evil. Remnants of such ancient notions can be met with in the Christian religion, where the existence of both angels and demons is asserted, and where it is also explained that Satan and the demons were originally created by God as angels (belonging to the sacred as a whole), but later by their own will chose evil and became what they are since then (the left-hand pole of the sacred).
If we apply the dualism of the sacred and profane to the chain of societies with which Ethnosociology operates, then we can notice the following:
• In the ethnos, the sacred dominates;
• In the narod, there is a balance between the sacred and profane;
• In the nation, the profane dominates over the sacred;
• In civil society and global society, the sacred is entirely driven out and only the profane remains;
• It is not possible to say anything precise about post-society, but we can suggest hypothetically that in it we will be dealing wi
th the “pseudo-sacred,” a simulacrum of the sacred.
Marcel Mauss: Sociology of the Gift
Durkheim’s nephew Marcel Mauss (1872–1950) was a student and follower of Durkheim, developing his ideas, but on the whole continuing the orientation on which Durkheim himself focused during the last years of his life. Mauss devoted his research to primitive narods and ethnoses and specialized in the study of their rites, magical practices, social institutions, and economic practice. His works in the domain of Economic Anthropology, i.e., in the area of economics, exchange, production, and demand among archaic tribes, became classics of ethnology and laid the foundation for an entire school of economic thought.
His most famous works are The Gift and his study on the role of the procedures of gift-giving and return gift-giving in the social structure of primitive societies.255
Mauss continued and developed Durkheim’s sociological line especially in what concerns the understanding of social phenomena and facts as total. For Mauss, society and the “collective representations” present in it precede both the isolation of separate individuals and the relations between people and nature. Different societies understand status, nature, structure, functions, and even the attributes of a separate personality differently. This means that “personality” is not an empirical fact but a social construct. In the same way, it is inaccurate to consider the surrounding natural world an objective datum, independent of society. Each society understands nature in its own way, in relation to unique “collective representations.” Consequently, even the external world is a socially constructed object.