Divination by Eggshells, or How to Study Ethnicity in Past Epochs

Abstract

The article examines the history of the study of ethnicity in pre-modern and early modern periods as developed in Western and Russian historiography, identifies the major influences that shaped this field, and highlights the theoretical differences between the respective scholarly traditions. By the mid-twentieth century, historians had already been influenced by anthropology and sociology, which enabled them to approach questions of ethnicity and nationhood from new perspectives. First, the Barthian turn, named after Fredrik Barth, prompted scholars to view ethnicity as a phenomenon determined not so much by culture and language as by processes of a cognitive nature. Later, in the early 1980s, a series of works by the so-called “modernists” established the understanding of the nation as a product of the modern era, thereby challenging the national-romantic paradigm that had dominated for a century and a half. At the same time, in the Soviet Union, the latter paradigm was instead transformed into a more scientific-looking form, rationalized and systematized as a “theory of ethnos.” As a result, the influential concept of the “Old Russian nationality” was based primarily on linguistic and cultural criteria. Although this approach has been criticized in Englishlanguage scholarship for more than half a century, it has undergone no theoretical development in the post-Soviet space since the 1980s, while continuing to be applied by default in historical research. The article examines case studies from the work of post-Soviet historians in which cognitive approaches to ethnicity help to provide a better explanation of the past and reveal complex processes of external categorization and self-identification. In conclusion, the article suggests ways of overcoming the inertia of applying national-romantic and cultural-primordialist frameworks by rejecting “conceptual imperialism” and the projection onto the past of understandings of ethnicity characteristic of contemporary societies, and by shifting attention toward the cognitive dimensions of social categorization in line with the concepts of Fredrik Barth and Rogers Brubaker.