Book
Политическая антропология традиционных и современных обществ: материалы международной конференции
The collection is devoted to important problems of political anthropology, such as state origins in antiquity or tribalism in contemporary Third World states, among many others.
With transition to the state kinship ceases the role of the central organizing principle of society. Nevertheless, the very social nature of kinship provides opportunities for manipulating it as ideology in states, both early and modern. However, exploitation of the ideology of kinship in states should not be confused with the situation in some supercomplex non-state societies in which kinship is not only ideology but also the real socio-political background. So, there is no direct conformity between the socio-political (transition to the state) and ideological (departure from the ideology of kinship) processes.
Issues of the origin and evolution of statehood are among those most important problems both for the analyses of cultural evolution and for political anthropology.
The key goal of the chapter is to summaries the most promising ideas and approaches to to the social organization of the people named the Rus’ of the 9th – 10th centuries and to the history of the Rurikid polity created by one of such groups around Kiev in the 10th century. This Rurikid local polity appeared circa 900. It was not a long process of “maturing” of its political structure from deep antiquity, but it was a fast outburst, that required risky experiments from this Rus’ Kiev’s community. This community in Kiev underwent rapid identical and cultural transformations. The Rurikid polity on the Dnieper in the middle of 10th century was a compact polity with the center in Kiev, around which other fortified settlements of the Rus’ people have been grouped along the radius. This basic territory around Kiev was surrounded on almost all sides by the territories of subordinated Slavic communities. It was a typical chiefdom with two (later three) levels of political control and the leading kin (lineage) of the princes (“chiefs”) Rurikids in the head of it. All attempts to prove that this polity was a “state” were inspired only by wishful thinking of different recearches and by their attempts of retrospective projection of the realities of the 11th century on the previous 10th century.
A traditional lifestyle with native Northern peoples is based on a relative social and age parity. Subject to consideration being reasons and specificity of social stratification with Russian Northern peoples. The article shows differences between processes in cities and settlements, as well as with people occupied in traditional and «modern» activities. In schools children come across harsh stratification contrasting their traditional lifestyle. Stratification of indigenous communities is regarded as a stressor due to modernization changes.
Polynesian Outliers represent several independent migrations from Western Polynesia into Melanesia and Micronesia, which developed in significant isolation under the pressure of severe ecological constraints. Their typical size is a few hundred persons and it is well documented that some reduced to less than twenty persons in the nineteenth century. Surprisingly, these societies were complex, typically, stratified into ‘nobles’, ‘commoners’ and ‘slaves’. There was a wide range of variation regarding how leadership and rules of succession were organised but we can speculate that their way of life was largely due to the ideas inherited from the great ancestors living on big islands.
Etymological analysis of socio-political terms in six Polynesian Outliers shows that the institutions of leadership and larger social groups were created and reinvented in the history of these islands many times, frequently, in accordance with the principle of growing conical clan. Interestingly enough, many new terms for larger social groups are derived from the words denoting places of residence indicating that they are constructed as landholding corporations. Expectedly, the words ‘chief’ and ‘noble person’ are more stable than ‘commoner’ and ‘slave’ in the history of Polynesian Outliers.
The results of cross-cultural research of implicit theories of innovativeness among students and teachers, representatives of three ethnocultural groups: Russians, the people of the North Caucasus (Chechens and Ingushs) and Tuvinians (N=804) are presented. Intergroup differences in implicit theories of innovativeness are revealed: the ‘individual’ theories of innovativeness prevail among Russians and among the students, the ‘social’ theories of innovativeness are more expressed among respondents from the North Caucasus, Tuva and among the teachers. Using the structural equations modeling the universal model of values impact on implicit theories of innovativeness and attitudes towards innovations is constructed. Values of the Openness to changes and individual theories of innovativeness promote the positive relation to innovations. Results of research have shown that implicit theories of innovativeness differ in different cultures, and values make different impact on the attitudes towards innovations and innovative experience in different cultures.