Passionarity and its Variations
The main sense of Gumilev’s theory of ethnogenesis in its broad outlines is as follows.
At the basis of all ethnic processes lies “passionarity.” This is Gumilev’s term, formed from the Latin passio, which means “passion” and also “affect,” “suffering,” etc. Gumilev himself underscores the first meaning. “Passionarity” is passion, fervor, abundance of inner energies, the presence of which exceeds the minimum that is necessary for man to support his existence in usual circumstances. Gumilev divides all people into three types: passionate, harmonious personalities, and sub-passionate, on the basis of which he explains the logic of the development of ethnic processes, which he generalizes under the category of “ethnogenesis,” i.e., the process of the emergence and disappearance of the ethnos.
“Passionate” according to Gumilev is one with increased passionarity, whose inner energy, whose “passion,” is excessive in relation to the expenditures that are necessary for the collective’s usual way of life. The hero, chief, pioneer, and preacher can all be passionate, but so too can the robber, thief, maniac, and destroyer. Passionarity is life energy, taken as a unit: it can be expended towards good, but also towards evil ends. At the same time, it is important that the passionate person is able to challenge death; he does not fear it, since his life energy is excessive, and he himself is ready to project it beyond earthly existence. As a result, the passionate person easily becomes a fanatic and goes first into the battle, not only not avoiding war and risk, but, on the contrary, searching them out, striving for them. According to Gumilev, the level of ethnogenesis depends on the percent of passionarity that accumulates in society.
The harmonious person also possesses passionarity, but in limited amount. He does not challenge death and he is not prepared to undertake feats, but he has enough energy to support some level of existence. A society in which this type prevails is in a steady condition. It doesn’t develop, but it doesn’t degenerate. It is stationary and static.
According to Gumilev, sub-passionarity is a deviant type possessing low passionarity, which is not enough for even the support of the usual life cycle. But this deficit of life energy pushes the sub-passionate towards those sources of energy that are excessive, i.e., towards passionate energies. The sub-passionate are often the “retinue” of the passionate, nourishing themselves on borrowed life energy. They increase in periods of the decline and decay of the ethnos. The sub-passionate are cowardly, but mean and resourceful. They are often able to establish control over the harmonic type “in the name of” the passionate. They are nourished on the energies of decay and death. Their prevalence in society is a sign of its collapse and passage out of history.
In his works, Gumilev discusses numerous historical examples of these types, of which every ethnos consists in various proportions.
The Phases of Ethnogenesis
Gumilev’s theory of the cycles of ethnogenesis is a major contribution to Ethnosociology. Gumilev thought of the ethnos as a living entity, which runs the whole gamut of life cycles — from birth to maturity, old age, and death. This is an extremely important point, since it directly opposes progress and orthogenesis and introduces nuances into Gumilev’s view of evolution. In the history of ethnoses, according to Gumilev, there is no evolution, but there are cycles. Ascent is replaced by decline, and these phases alternate.
At the same time, Gumilev thought that the ethnos’ full life-cycle is complete after a period of about 1200 years, although many ethnoses (like people) die earlier to the effect of external factors. Ethnoses that die scatter into their raw constituents, which later become new elements in the process of ethnogenesis. This process continues without end.
Gumilev distinguished the following phases of ethnogenesis: homeostasis, impetus, ascent, overheating, fissure or the inertial phase, obscuration, and the memorial stage.
The process of ethnogenesis begins from a condition of homeostasis, i.e., of a complete and steady balance of the ethnos and its surrounding environment. In this condition, the harmonious type prevails, having just the necessary reserve of life forces required for the support of life in the given natural environment.
Figure 13. The phases of ethnogenesis, according to Gumilev.385
The impulse is provoked by a burst of passionarity in the ethnos. In this period, in the ethnic collective existing in equilibrium with the surrounding environment, the quantity of passionate people suddenly increases. Gumilev explained the cause of this mysterious phenomenon through rather extravagant hypotheses — in particular, changes in the cycles of solar activity. He was also amazed by the geometric orderliness of synchronous outbreaks of passionarity among different ethnoses at the same time and on the same spatial axis. The impulse gives a start to the process of ethnogenesis, as the ethnos comes to movement and the number of the passionate grows, and it is precisely them who impart to the ethnos its heroic impulse, urging towards armed conquests, migrations, and an intensive and active way of life.
In this way, the overheating phase is reached. It is the peak of ethnogenesis, when the ethnos reaches the heights of its historical actions — conquests, the acquisition of new territories, and the creation of empires.
At some point, overheating occurs, since the number of the passionate and the style of ethnic life dictated by them begins to undermine the stability of the social system. A fissure occurs and decline begins.
For a while, the ethnos still preserves its viability, which is realized in the more peaceful spheres of art, culture, and technical development. This is the inertial phase. In this period, the sub-passionate type begins to prevail in society, actively corrupting the ethnic system. Slippage downward during this phase leads to the decay of the ethnos and its return to the homeostatic phase. Gumilev called this “obscuration.” At this point, memories of the ethnos’ excellent achievements remain only on the cultural level. This is the memorial phase. In some cases, the ethnos disappears altogether, if instead of a new domination of the harmonious type a critical quantity of the sub-passionate is preserved in it from the previous phase.
The Scaling of the Ethnos
Gumilev proposed his own segmentation of the ethnos, an original taxonomy. The ethnos consists of: consortium, convicinities, the subethnos, the ethnos, and the superethnos.
“A consortium is a group of people united by one historical fate; it either disintegrates or becomes a convicinity.”386
“A convicinity is a group of people united by a similar way of life and family ties. Sometimes it becomes a subethnos. It is fixed not by history, but by ethnography.”387
“The subethnos is an element of the structure of the ethnos, interacting with other elements. During simplification of the ethno-system in its final phase, the number of subethnoses is reduced to one, which becomes a relic.”388
“The superethnos is a group of ethnoses that has arisen simultaneously in one region and that manifests itself in history as a mosaic totality.”389
Gumilev thinks of these taxonomic units as incremental stages in the formation of an ethnos. At the basis lies the consortium, a simple group of people united in the name of the solution of some task. The majority of consortia disintegrate without a trace. Only some prove persistent and gradually transform into convicinities, in which the general group project is supplemented by family relations. Next, the convicinities can remain at one level, combining with other convicinities. In certain cases, however, they form into a more organic and steady community, called a subethnos. Subethnoses can unite among themselves without forming another ethnos. In this case, a few subethnoses, preserving their differences, form a kind of cohabitation that Gumilev called symbiosis.
From symbiosis, an ethnos is formed. Some ethnoses can live with one another in relative proximity and interdependence without becoming a superethnos. Gumilev calls this xenia (from the Greek word for “guest,” “foreigner”). They remain “foreign” to one another.
In certain
cases, a particular combination of some ethnoses is formed and united in a superethnos. If the combination is harmonious and the ethnoses are complementary (that is, mutually supplementary), then the superethnos can be stable; if the ethnoses are weakly complementary, then they form a “chimera,” a political structure tending towards decay and degradation.
The Unknown History of Eurasia
Gumilev deserves great credit for his historical reconstruction of many forgotten and poorly studied episodes in the history of the ethnoses of Eurasia. If the ethnic world of the Mediterranean, Near East, Europe, China, India, Iran, and other places was studied thoroughly, for a long time, the narods of the Great Steppe remained on the periphery of ethnographic and historical interest and were generally classified as barbarian societies or nomadic empires. In his numerous works dedicated to these ethnoses, Gumilev shows that in Eurasia we have a wealth of material concerning the history of the most diverse ethnic groups, which displayed epochs of greatness and decline, were fascinated by world religions and returned to forms of archaic polytheism and shamanism, developed originally political and social systems, produced varied forms of statehood, warred against one another, suffered dynastic overthrows, exhibited wonders of heroism and sacrifice as well as the abysses of decline and betrayal.390 In other words, the ethnic history of Eurasia, to which world history allots a paragraph or two, is no less substantial, varied, and saturated with historical events, unexpected turns, take-offs, falls, dramas and worries than the history of all other far better studied cultures and ethnoses of the world.
In his ethnographic and historical works Gumilev altered the image of Eurasia, returning to humanity a massive and practically unknown fragment of ethnic history. This is Gumilev’s fundamental contribution to ethnology.
At the same time, being a follower of the first Eurasianists, Lev Gumilev consciously strove to demonstrate the prejudiced and selective approach of Western historical science, which considers worthy of mention only those events, social forms, and economic systems that resemble and agree with the history of the West itself. Western historical science is “ethnocentric” and racist at its foundations, and the works of Lev Gumilev, introducing readers to a gigantic field of ethnological and cultural history absolutely unknown to the West, illustrate this fact. In this way, the official (Western) version of history is relativized, and undeservedly forgotten non-Western cultures and ethnoses receive the right to full-fledged historical being in the general context of the history of humanity.
Gumilev’s Terminology and the Taxonomy of Ethnosociology: Corrections and Correspondences
Lev Gumilev’s ethnology is diverse, multidimensional, and very important for Ethnosociology. At the same time, his methods and terms, the interpretation of certain concepts, and the systematizations and classifications are utterly original and differ substantially from the corresponding terms and classifications of Ethnosociology and Cultural Anthropology. As a result, in studying Gumilev’s works there is a risk of confusing, rather than clarifying many ethnosociological models.
Therefore, it makes sense to establish certain connections and bring to light the differences between Gumilev’s terminology and the taxonomies of Ethnosociology. Then Gumilev’s theories will be able to enrich ethnosociological knowledge, methods, and instruments substantially.
Gumilev’s taxonomy of “consortium, convicinity, subethnos, ethnos, superethnos” is highly problematic. The transition from the consortium as a group of citizens to the convicinity as a community connected with family ties and customs is not fixed, since any group whatsoever is produced on the basis of some. The consortium, like the convicinity and subethnos, can be distinguished as a social unit within the ethnos or in the course of ethnic transformations; for instance, as components of the interaction of a few ethnoses or as a result of certain ethnosociological processes (for example, the exclusion from the ethnos of deviants, the autonomization of certain professional groups, etc.). But neither a subethnos nor an ethnos is formed from these groups in result. Every group is obliged to associate in some language and not to think up its own; but this means that any group on the level of the consortium or convicinity already has an ethnic nature. The ethnos precedes it, and is not composed of it.
Doubtful, too, is the fragmentation of the ethnos into the taxa of subethnoses, convicinities, and consortia as an a posteriori scaling of the ethnos, since the convicinity as a group of individuals is not the ethnos’ basic social group. The minimal inner element of the ethnos is the family and the lineage. The consortium is a very specific phenomenon, which can in no way be regarded as the basic taxon of the ethnos. We will see later why Gumilev isolated precisely the consortium as this basic unit. For now, we should merely note the inapplicability of the structure of Gumilev’s scaling of the ethnos as general and accurate model for all cases. It is applicable only to separate historical situations, which we will consider separately.
A second important point: what Ethnosociology regards as the ethnos (koineme, the simplest social form) corresponds in Gumilev’s terminology to merely one phase: homeostasis. Ethnosociology conceives of the ethnos as the minimal form of society, found in a static condition and in balance with its environment. In this way, the ethnos as ethnosociology understands it excludes ethnogenesis, leaps of passionarity, and the process of complication and kinetic expansion. The start of ethnogenesis, the impulse of passionarity, is in ethnosociology the transition from the ethnos to its first derivative, the narod, or laos. Hence, what Gumilev himself calls “ethnogenesis” should be called “laogenesis,” i.e., the process of the formation of the narod from the ethnos. Gumilev himself does not make this distinction, since his approach is a generalized primordial and biological approach, and the fundamental sociological distinction between the ethnos and the narod escapes his attention. The narod and the ethnos are for Gumilev two different phases of the historical existence of one and the same subject, which he calls “ethnos.” This is what makes his theory vulnerable to criticism by sociologists. The ethnos in its overheating phase (as Gumilev understands it) and the ethnos in homeostasis (i.e., the ethnos proper, as the simplest society) are entirely different sociological phenomena. There is a connection between them, but it is like the connection between an argument and its function.
The phenomenon of passionarity is the moment of transformation, clearly identified by Gumilev, from the ethnos to the laos. It is an extremely important factor, but its meaning will be fully revealed to us if we specify it in strictly ethnosociological terms. The presence of a critical mass of passionate persons is a characteristic sign of the narod (laos) and, accordingly, the driving force of laogenesis. At the same time, the ethnos should be regarded as the minimal association of people of the harmonic type, i.e., as homeostasis.
As for the superethnos, it recalls in many ways the “big narod,” which produces grandiose empires, civilizations, and religious cultures; i.e., it is not a qualitatively new derivation from the ethnos, but the maximum scale of a historical construction created by the narod. The narod is by definition always polyethnic to a certain extent.
The nation is an entirely unique historical case, which must be distinguished, as we repeatedly emphasized, from the narod, and all the more so from the ethnos.
So, we should use Gumilev’s models in Ethnosociology with great caution, each time checking its terminological and conceptual constructions against the corresponding set of ethnosociological concepts and theories.
Structuralism in the USSR: Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp
The works of the structuralist school, founded by the eminent Russian scientist, historian, and specialist of the Russian folklore tradition Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp (1895–1970), was another important source of ethnosociological knowledge in the Russian-language context. Propp was influenced by the ideas of the German ethnographer and publisher Émile Nourry (1870–1935), who wrote under the pen name “Pierre Saintyves.” Nourry proposed to interpret fairy tales as ancient rituals of initiatio
n, experienced in the imagination. Following Nourry, Propp thought of fairy tales as narratives about ancient, archaic cultures and economic practices and he suggested using the structural method to study them.391 , 392
The method requires separating a limited number of functional combinations, which reflect the historical content of the corresponding economic and magical rituals, embedded in the strata of much later periods, from the many plots and characters of the tales.
Propp thought that the ancient core of fairy tales was the combination of plots and situations connected with hunting, gathering, and the rites associated with them. He carefully analyzed a voluminous amount of material to separate out this ancient functional core.
The plots of this ancient material are based on the prime rite of death, the resurrection of the hero, and exchange with animals (monsters, fabulous antagonists) of vitally important attributes. According to Propp, the monster must swallow the hero to give him new life and restore the balance between hunters, who kill animals, and animals, symbolically killing the hunters.
Propp also studied other archaic social institutions, the memory of which is captured in fables: male unions (Männerbunden) and houses, puberty rites, specific rituals for the children of the tribe’s chiefs, the structures and rites of the marriage cycle, and so forth.
A later kind of fairy tale consists of agrarian plots, characteristic of societies less dependent on hunting and gathering, producing food products through agriculture and livestock. In an agrarian context, many old hunters’ rites and magic rituals lose their sense and change their significance. Plots, functions, and characters are interpreted in another context, reflecting a new, agrarian social order. For instance, the exchange between culture (man) and nature through the symbolic animal (fish, dragon, monster) eating the hunter, and his later resurrection, in which the animal acts as a complementary partner, is transformed in the agrarian phase into a battle against the monster (snake, dragon), which loses its complementary dimension and becomes a radical antagonist, which must be defeated and destroyed.
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