About some initial concepts – 2

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Patriotism V archeology . Patriotism, by its simplest definition, is a feeling of love for the fatherland, for the homeland. In the public consciousness, attitudes towards patriotism vary widely - from recognizing it as the most noble and beneficent of feelings to Johnson’s maxim “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” (Samuel Johnson - English writer of the 18th century. - Approx . ed . )

Since a positive assessment of love for the motherland is as natural as love for parents, it is obvious that a negative attitude is not caused by patriotism in itself, but by its unworthy use to cover up selfish and career interests and suck up to superiors. Saltykov-Shchedrin wrote about those who confuse their homeland with “Your Excellency,” and that patriotic talk makes him suspicious of theft. Those who want to send soldiers to defend not their homeland, but their wealth, also speculate on patriotic feelings. It also seems to me pseudo-patriotic to replace the struggle for serious goals with the struggle for victories in games and empty competitions. That is, pseudo -patriotism often takes the place of patriotism.

How is patriotism manifested in archeology ? In love “for the coffins of the fathers”, for the monuments of native antiquity, in the primary responsibility for their preservation. As with any science, we care about ensuring that domestic archeology is at its best. At the same time, it is necessary to distinguish pseudo-patriotic motives from patriotic motives, of which there are also many in archeology.

It was and is now often considered a patriotic duty to defend the antiquity of the people’s residence on their current territory, since antiquity is supposedly the justification for their right to this land ( historical law ), whereas in fact the right of residence rests on a living tradition and a system of international treaties.

Let us remember who and why Koenigsberg and St. Petersburg belong to. Demonstrative fights with “outsiders” for insignificant and petty reasons seem to me to be pseudo-patriotic. Pseudo-patriotic motives are used to hide behind those who try in every possible way to exaggerate domestic achievements only because “their” ones who gloss over shortcomings under the pretext of fighting “black stuff” (both in ancient times and in modern science) clamp down on their criticism - and thereby prevent them correction. Meanwhile, fighting for their correction and improvement of domestic science, as well as the whole society, is patriotism.

Ancestral home - territory (country) where the ancestral people who spoke the ancestral language once lived some linguistic families . The concept was introduced by linguists of the comparative school (which emerged at the beginning of the 19th century) as a derivative of the concept of proto-language. Then it was mastered by archaeologists, mainly German. In English, the term for it was even used as a German loanword (Urheimat), without translation, or designated descriptively (original homeland). Area ancestral homelands are found either by agreement of the ancestral language dictionary with the natural environment of a certain region (names of plants, animals, landscape features), or by agreement with a certain archaeological culture (names of things, customs, neighbors).

The importance of the ancestral homeland for modern times is often exaggerated, in particular by nationalists : it is attributed the importance of an argument in territorial disputes. Allegedly, the discovery of the ancestral home of a certain people at the place of its current residence or outside this territory gives it special rights ( historical right ) to own the territory of the ancestral home. These claims are unfounded. The territory declared as the ancestral home does not provide any rights, just as an apartment once abandoned by a tenant from which he was evicted or moved himself does not provide them. If the eviction was violent or unfair, you can make claims not against the current tenants, but against the one who committed the violence, and only if it was recently. If several generations have changed, then everything has to be left behind for years.

In relation to individual individuals - “foreigners”, that is, those who do not belong to the indigenous nationality in a given country, to a national minority, the problem of the ancestral home turns into a problem of historical homeland

Ethnos - a very controversial concept of the social life of mankind, associated with acute and often bloody ethnic conflicts. The word “ethnos” comes from the ancient Greek word meaning “tribe”, “nationality” (mostly non-Greek, for the ancient Greeks - barbarian). In science, they began to use it to refer to the people in order to avoid the ambiguity of the word “people” (the people as the population of the country, as the lower layer of society, etc.) and to distract from political connotations. But it quickly penetrated both history and sociocultural anthropology , and archaeology . To ensure the advantages or condemnation of a particular ethnic group, the definition was made according to one or another characteristic or a set of characteristics. There turned out to be many signs capable of distinguishing ethnic groups, and so were definitions of ethnicity.

A significant part of researchers ( essentialists , primordialists ) saw in ethnic groups strictly demarcated objective communities - real, primary entities - and tried to define them according to real characteristics (common language, religion, territory , culture ), including biological ones (racial community and race-determined psychology ) and even geographical (landscape).

Another part, more modern ( constructivists ), came to the conclusion that not a single sign is reliable, because all are changeable, optional, and ethnic groups are fictitious - they are constructed by politicians according to their needs, invented, and the population is led to this propaganda.

There is a small group of researchers (I belong to it) who believe that ethnicity is not a category of hard reality (historical or natural), but also not a fiction, but a category of social psychology . That is, a spontaneous unification of people. This category is based on the idea of ​​community historical fate , mainly community origin , it doesn’t matter whether it’s true or false, but supported by very real signs, different each time. That is why there are no common characteristics for all ethnic groups. Ethnic solidarity flows from this community of consciousness.

Thus, an ethnos is a stable grouping of people that has a commonality of some real characteristics, reflected in the public consciousness (not only of these people themselves, but also of their neighbors) as a community of historical destinies within the framework of a single social body or in connection with it.

Language, religion, race can be unifiers and identifying features. etc., but in demographic practice the determining factor is ethnicity self-awareness , formally expressed in self-name and actually objectified in social relations, political actions, cultural preferences, ideological declarations, etc. Ethnic consciousness (and self-awareness) reflects the correlation of an individual’s cultural characteristics with his social status, connections and capabilities. Public consciousness puts forward the role of ethnic signs sometimes one of the objective unifiers, sometimes another, and interprets this community, usually in the form of a belief in a common origin. That is why various objective factors can act - sometimes one, sometimes the other, separately and in different combinations - as diagnostic signs of an ethnos. What is important is what kind of real solidarity society expects from people covered by a given characteristic or characteristics.

This does not mean any kind of solidarity (there are also class, professional, age, etc.), but one that is aimed at creating, maintaining, reviving (or preserving the possibility of revival) of a social organism - a separate society capable of existing independently but, ensuring constant production at a certain level, self-defense from natural disasters and its reproduction.

Ethnicity is, on the one hand, the imprint of a social organism (existing or disappeared) in the culture (including language and consciousness) and somatics of people, and on the other hand, it is a social organism in tendency and in potential, in the limit. Until the imprint (ethnos) was formed, the social organism had not yet become ethnosocial; when the social organism has disappeared, its imprint (ethnos) is already only ethnikos (according to Yu.V. Bromley); with the disappearance of the tendency and potential for the formation of a social organism, there is no ethnos.

The connection of an ethnic group with certain features of material culture is not mandatory and regular.