Russia “After Etnos”: An Evaluation of Etnos Theory in Contemporary Russian Ethnology

Abstract

In 2022, prominent Russian anthropologists debated the status of the term etnos (этнос, ethnos) in contemporary Russian society in the journal Ethnographic Review (Этнографическое Обозрение). Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the concept of etnos has been regarded as a symbol of the primordialist soviet approach to ethnic groups, and has been criticized by the constructivists, including V. A. Tishkov, the former director of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of Russian Academy of Sciences, who wrote a sensational book named Requiem to etnos in the early 2000s. However, in the discussion of Ethnographic Review, D. V. Verkhovtsev showed that the term etnos is frequently used in contemporary Russia, based on Internet statistics, and in response to his article, Tishkov and other leading scholars contributed articles to the journal. According to Verkhovtsev, the constructivist position did not necessarily become dominant, and the use of the term etnos, associated with the primordialist theories formed by Iu. V. Bromlei and L. N. Gumilev during the Soviet era, was expanding in the public sphere and in official documents outside ethnology.

It can be said that the commentators who participated in the controversy of the Ethnographic Review basically agreed with Verkhovtsev’s argument, and they also followed the factors he identified as the causes for the popularity of the term etnos. In particular, there was a consensus among all the participants that the public support for the primordialist understanding of ethnic groups represented by etnos theories is rooted in an institutional foundation, which has been working since the Soviet era. Moreover, the conflict between “constructivism and primordialism” or “ethnicity and etnos” in the contemporary Russian academic sphere does not necessarily reflect a purely academic aspect. Rather, the very composition of “ethnicity vs etnos” itself reflects the divergent ways of recognizing and adapting to the new conditions and the degree of adaptation to the reorganized academic hierarchy after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the debate of the Ethnographic Review, even if the Soviet style of ethnic theory was scientifically rejected by the constructivist enlightenment, it was not denied that there existed a reality in which people needed Soviet etnos theory at a level different from academic recognition, namely, in their daily educational and institutional practices. Today, almost 30 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, its etnos theory remains alive and well in daily life, although the theory itself is already dead academically.