Нации и этничность в гуманитарных науках

In the article the author investigates the scholarly validity of the practice of appeals to the concepts of «peoples»,» ethnicity» and «nationality» in the narratives of national history of Tatarstan dedicated to pre-Modern epochs. The author distinguishes between the family-clan (tribal), territorial, religious, and ethnic identity per se and raises the question of whether it was possible that the perceptions of «peoples» in the modern («Russian») sense of this term existed in traditional societies. Based on the materials of medieval sources, the mechanism of classification of the population is investigated. A greater part of the analysis is dedicated to the classifiers (from an ordinary member of the community, travelers, intellectuals to chroniclers, etc.), who divided larger groups of population according to the criteria important for them. As a result, the author concludes that these groups cannot be considered ethnic in conventional terms. Then the author examines the mechanism of «ethnization» of the names of various groups encountered in the sources and their conversion into «ethnonyms» in the academic and journalistic texts of national histories. The references to a specific «medieval ethnic group» are regarded as attempts to find ethnicity where it does not exist. The author draws particular attention to the phenomenon of religious identity in pre-modern societies and reveals a fundamental difference between «religiousity» and ethnicity. Dogmas are not the most important part in traditional religions, but rather the consent about the performance of rituals, which maintains primarily political unity. Being not systematized and controlled by the state, cultural implications of fragile and short-lived political union took the second place in the traditional worldview. Consequently, common religion did not engender perceptions about shared culture. The very idea of religion as «ethnic marker», apparently, has origins in the intellectual structures of the modern epoch, in which nationalism not only won religion, but also included it in its orbit of influence, thus giving rise to the phenomenon of «national religions». In conclusion, the article carries the idea that continuous attempts of the researchers to seek «a black cat in a dark room» (ethnicity in pre-modern societies) are determined not only by political factors, but also by their own ideological views stemming from family backgrounds and school lessons.

Keywords: pre-modern societies; identity; nationalism; national history; religion; ethnicity.

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