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Bromley Yu.V. History of primitive society. The era of the primitive tribal community (Document)

Coursework - Assessment of the impact of large industrial enterprises on the ecological systems of the city (Coursework)

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002 - parameters at the beginning of the book - publishers

kom -Comments.

kons1 - Synopsis

lit - List of references.

page - Page data

pril - Application.

pril2 - Additional application.

prim - note

PU - Subject index.

Slov - Dictionary

UI - Index of names.

za - Typography data, at the end of the book.

zz - Annotation

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Yu.V. Bromley R G Podolny

From the Authors Second Nature» The son of culture Journey around oneself Definition of culture Culture as a system Humanity is made up of peoples The diversity of culture is inexhaustible Tasks and solutions "In the sweat of his face..." food seekers By nature and economy Do not take, but produce Domestic - from the wild Our food power over distances Trade is the world Man defends himself Settlement Third line of defense Research reflex Signs and Meanings Myth and its legacy Gods are born on earth What is art? path of science "Taming" space and time

build life On the edge of history for the sake of order custom and law "Own" and "strangers" Rules simple and complex We need each other Love and family Hymn woman Love, marriage, family To know and be able But once. The appearance of the problem The instrument of culture is the school people need rest The struggle for leisure How we relax Man playing Culture and ecology Double exposure Global problem Is there a way out? Ecology and demography cultural ecology Is our general treasure Cultural heroes history makers More and more united, more and more multifaceted Traditions are for the future

HUMANITY

Publishing house of political literature

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FROM THE AUTHORS

This book will deal with culture, uniform, diverse and contradictory, about her development in space and in time. And culture - in the broad sense of the word - everything that has been created and is being created by mankind, from tools to household items, from habits, customs, the very way of life of people to science and art, religion and atheism, morality and philosophy.

Culture is enriched, multiplied in the field, at the easel, behind machine tool, behind a typewriter; everyday work merges in it with the exploits of heroes and the insights of geniuses.

This is the ladder by which our distant ancestors climbed from animal to Man. The staircase that humanity tirelessly builds is difficult, passionate, in sorrow and joy. And culture lives, breathes, improves with us and improves us.

People, therefore, are the creators of culture and at the same time - its creations. That is why we have chosen for the book the highly binding title "Created by Mankind".

Of course considering

culture as a special phenomenon in the life of society, we should not forget that it is ultimately determined by socio-economic factors. The most important features of culture (primarily the ideological content) are determined by its belonging to one or another socio-economic formation. Accordingly, culture in a class society has a class character. This is especially clear in class-antagonistic societies, in particular at the stage of capitalism, when the class struggle reaches its climax. In every bourgeois nation, according to V. I. Lenin, two national cultures arise and develop - a culture that serves the interests of the ruling class, and a culture of democracy, the proletariat (see: Lenin. IN AND. Full coll. cit., vol. 24, p. 129-130).

The authors understand that the question of the functions of culture, the origin and distribution on the planet of everything created by mankind is a truly inexhaustible topic and its systematic coverage could amount to hundreds, if not thousands, of volumes. Preparing this book; we saw it as our task, first of all, to show with concrete living and convincing examples that, despite all its diversity, the culture of mankind is united and develops according to general laws.

The reader should not expect that he will find in this book at least summary all related issues; we want to show him the image of a culture that is made up of the actions and knowledge of millions of people - in hundreds of countries and over many thousands of years,

help him feel his involvement in world culture, realize his place in the common cause of all mankind, the common constantly growing result of the work and struggle of all the peoples of the earth.

Such a real idea of ​​world culture in the past and present is opposed to religious concepts that depict the cultural-historical process in a perverted form, linking it with divine providence. The affirmation of scientific views on culture plays an important role in the formation of an integral materialistic worldview. And of course, in our days, when the culture of mankind, its civilization is under the threat of complete disappearance in the fire of a global thermonuclear fire, it seems especially important that all people realize its unity and uniqueness.

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"SECOND NATURE"

In order to exist, human society exchanges matter, energy and information with the natural environment. This exchange has two main types. The first of these is characterized by direct human use. natural resources: air, water, various kinds plants and animals, minerals, etc. This type of material relationship with nature is based on the physiological needs inherent in the human body. The second type of material relations of a person with the natural environment is entirely mediated by his purposeful activity - labor. The essence of these relations is that people create something that is not in nature in finished form, “through a special, expedient productive activity that adapts various substances of nature to certain human needs” (Marx K... Engels F. Works, vol. 23, p. 51). Such a purposeful way of active relationship with nature is inherent only to man, or rather, to human society.

The result of this influence is the appearance of "humanized" nature, including the nature of man himself. This "second nature", created by labor and knowledge, is, as the great proletarian writer M. Gorky believed, "culture in the exact and true sense of the word."

And the scale of this "second nature" with the course of human history is constantly and steadily increasing.

There is a concept in archeology - a cultural layer. So scientists call the layer of the earth containing traces of human activity. In the caves where primitive people lived, at the site of the most ancient human sites, researchers find stone tools, ash, animal bones, shards of dishes, jewelry, etc. These finds allow us to reconstruct the picture of the industrial and spiritual life of human groups in ancient times.

Now the cultural layer covers almost the entire planet. At any point the globe, up to Antarctica, you can find traces of human activity, and, unfortunately, not always those that we can be proud of.

Culture goes into space: man-made extraterrestrial stations, rockets flying to Mars, Venus, Jupiter, instruments that explore these planets, radio waves rushing to the distant outskirts solar system and to the stars.

Let us now leave aside the damage that people often do to nature through their activities. Mankind, apparently, has already come to its senses and declared a fight against its own wrong attitude towards the environment.

The creative possibilities of mankind are growing every day. The human mind is the only force capable of knowing and controlling all the other forces of nature. To them humanity opposes its heritage, its offspring - culture.

Man has two worlds: One, which created us, The other, which we have been creating from time immemorial to the best of our ability.

N. ZABOLOTSKY

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son of culture

Man interacts with the natural environment Not in isolation, not as a solitary Robinson, but as a social being bound by certain, primarily production, relations with other members of the community. “In order to produce,” emphasized K. Marx, “people enter into certain connections and relationships, and only within the framework of these public relations and relations there is their relation to nature ... " (Marx K. Engels F. Works, vol. 6, p. 441). Therefore, the nature of people's relationship to nature is ultimately determined by the mode of production that dominates in a given society.

The formation of mankind did not take place in greenhouse conditions. and ancient ancestors modern people could exist only relying on each other, uniting first into a primitive herd, then into a clan and tribe. It was very difficult for them, but not lonely.

History of formation human society was and remains not only fascinating

area of ​​knowledge, but also the arena of acute ideological struggle. How did the jump from the biological to the social happen: spontaneously, spontaneously, as a result of internal evolution, or due to some external, higher power? Are such institutions of class society as private property, the monogamous family, classes and states, original and enduring, or, having arisen at a certain stage? historical development by completing your social function will die out along with the conditions that gave birth to them? It is quite obvious that all these questions are of paramount ideological significance. That is why the founders of scientific communism paid considerable attention to the creation of holistic concept the history of primitive society, which is an integral part of the Marxist theory of the world-historical process. Marxism discovered the main condition that ensured the overcoming of the line that separates man from the animal. This basic condition human life is labor.

When did the jump happen? from animal to human?

The anthropological sensation of the middle of the 20th century - the discovery in Tanzania, in the Aldoway Gorge, by the English archaeologist Louis Leakey of the remains of the so-called homo habilis - a skilled man - truly revolutionized the idea of ​​the time of the emergence of the human race. Now that the materials collected in the Oldowey Gorge have already been studied quite well by dozens of specialists, it can be considered established that

the oldest being who made tools with the help of tools was not Pithecanthropus, but "homo habilis". And this means that the age of mankind has lengthened, and very significantly. However, around the characteristics of "skillful people" so far since there are disputes, and some experts see them as prehumans, starting the human race with Pithecanthropes. But the 70s brought new anthropological discoveries, including the finds of pithecanthropes, which, apparently, make it possible to make their age significantly older - up to about two million years. In short, there are sufficient grounds for believing that humanity is much older than was assumed until recently.

On the great importance of labor activity in the development of mankind from "Homo habilis" and Pithecanthropus to Homo sapiens - man modern look clearly evidenced by the fact that this process was accompanied by a gradual improvement of tools and techniques for their manufacture. And the morphological (physical) changes of our ancestors themselves were inextricably linked with the development of labor activity: the hand improved, the volume increased and the brain structures became more complicated. The latter is of particular importance in the development of modern man. After all, material production requires a special form of reflection of reality, which is absent in animals - the preliminary creation of mental models, images of things to be manufactured.

Man does not inherit from his ancestors nor the ability to build

Houses, How a bee, nor the ability to dig holes like a badger. People have a strikingly small stock of congenital, unconditioned reflexes compared to any mammal. But a person is endowed with a fantastic ability to acquire conditional reflexes, to accumulate information. human brain has an unlimited ability to cognize the surrounding world and the person himself; it helps people realize how they can use nature and adapt it to their needs. Nothing is given to a person easily, of course, without difficulty. It was thanks to labor that he became what he is - a Homo sapiens, the creator of civilization, culture.

For several million years, the development of the human brain has continued and the tools of its labor have been improved. Which of these two inextricably linked processes went faster?

As far as one can judge from anthropological and archaeological data, at the beginning the rates of development of the brain and tools were approximately the same. Sometimes, at certain time intervals, the improvement of the brain even seemed to go faster than the improvement of the tools that the prehuman created. It is known that "for hundreds of millennia, in the vast regions, stone technology has changed very little, the qualitative improvement of tools is insignificant, but the brain of the creators of tools has by no means stood still. Such brain development may not have been required to make primitive tools, but to expand their use in complex natural the conditions it was

obviously, necessary. However, evolution Not knows the goals, and the expression "for what" in this case is only a convenient turn of speech.

The brain did not develop because its owners wanted it to. And not because someone (say, God) cared about such a development of man. It's just that people with more perfect brains got better food and in more, avoided dangers more easily, etc.

After the emergence of Homo sapiens (about forty thousand years ago), the brain ceases to change in any significant way, but tools improve at a rate never seen before, which continues to grow even today. Man had to increasingly adapt not only to nature, but also to the work of his own hands, to his creation - culture, including the new norms of social life that it sets. And culture, and not only nature, put before him a categorical requirement: become smarter, more attentive and collected, learn and remember, otherwise you will not survive. In this sense, it can be said of humanity that it has made itself the crown of evolution.

There are many great forces in the world, But stronger than a man There is nothing in nature.

SOPHOCLE

Having turned into a true king of nature, man began to change the conditions of his existence faster than nature changed them around him. But now it has become especially necessary for mankind to adapt not only to nature, but also to itself. And one of the most important

achievements of mankind was the emergence of mutual assistance, friendship and camaraderie. During excavations, the remains of primitive people are found, who were once crippled and after that lived for decades. Among animals such a cripple would be doomed. And people saved him, went out, took care of him. Natural selection now played less and less of a role, touching mainly on such things as resistance to this or that disease, ability to endure direct sunlight or cold, etc.

The question may arise: why did a Cro-Magnon, who lived tens of thousands of years ago, need a brain that was no different from the brain of a modern person living in a complex world, owning writing, creating science that reached the stars?

And the point here is that any adult member of a primitive society had to remember literally everything that his community knew about the plants and animals of a given area, everything or almost everything that he was told from childhood about the past clan and tribe, about spirits and totems, about the surrounding lands and the tribes inhabiting them, etc. Not the last place in this huge body of information was occupied by information about the most complex family ties with relatives - after all, almost all relations of a social and production nature between people take the form of such ties in the genus.

A modern person, on the other hand, must store in memory only an extremely small fraction of the total information stock.

of their society, and every year, as this stock grows, less and less. According to experts, a significant part of the cells of the cerebral cortex responsible for thinking is not used by modern man. Maybe this is a reserve for emergencies, or maybe these neurons are somehow involved in thinking and the reserve inherited from the Cro-Magnon man will still be useful in the future. Nevertheless mental development humanity and, accordingly, each individual as a member of a developing society continues. Because "the mind of man developed in accordance with how man learned to change nature," Engels wrote. (Marx K-, Engels F. Works, vol. 20, p. 545). And our ability to change nature continues to grow. And man learns to increasingly use his mind, relying on a growing cultural heritage.

In a story about culture, we turn to materials primarily from historical disciplines and want readers to be aware not only of the versatility of these sciences, but But and in their depth and breadth.

Behind each of us is the past of humanity and our native people, history permeates our actions and thoughts, dictates many habits and passions, sets a way of life, profession, perception of the world, history stands behind the name of each from U.S.

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Travel around yourself

Suppose, reader and reader, your names are Pavel Alexandrovich Kuznetsov and Lidia Vladimirovna Merkulova.

Simple, familiar to Russian names and patronymics, common surnames. But the name Paul came to many languages ​​​​of the world from ancient and now dead Latin, where it meant "small." Alexander is a Greek name, translated as "protector of husbands."

Alexandrovich - patronymic. By patronymic it is customary to call people far from everywhere. The British, French, Germans and many others do without patronymics. And there are peoples who not only call their son after his father, but also his father after his son.

Kuznetsov is one of the most popular surnames not only in Russia. The typical English surname Smith, the typical German surname Schmidt, the Estonian Sepp - all this is translated into Russian as the Kuznetsovs. The profession of a blacksmith was very important, often inherited (and among many peoples in antiquity, and in some places even now, blacksmiths form real clans, only members of certain families are allowed to such a necessary, difficult, and often considered sacred craft), so it’s understandable , where did so many Kuznetsovs from hundreds of peoples.

However, the very appearance of a person's surname is a matter of not very ancient times. Representatives of noble families were the first to acquire surnames, later and all rest.

In the name of Lydia, the name has survived to this day ancient country located in what is now western Turkey. Two and a half thousand years ago Persian king Cyrus crushed the kingdom of Lydia - but the name lives on. It can be added that girls in Russia began to be called Lydia only in the 19th century. After all, there is a fashion for names. However, the coming and going of such fashion (as well as fashion in clothing) has its own reasons. The great attention of Russian society to history, including ancient history, is one of the reasons for the appearance and spread of the name Lydia in Russia.

But your father was named after Vladimir (own the world) - one of the first ancient Russian princes. As for your last name, Lydia Vladimirovna, having looked into Yuri Fedosyuk’s book “Russian Surnames”, we learn the following about it: “These purely Russian surnames, oddly enough, go back to the ancient Roman god, the patron of trade, Mercury, depicted with wings on the legs. The ancient Romans often called their sons Mercury. One of these Mercury suffered in the III century for the Christian faith and was declared a great martyr by the church. In honor of him, a monk was named Mercury, who became a bishop of Smolensk in the 13th century, "and in memory of the latter, thousands of ordinary Russian peasant children were baptized Mercury; colloquially they were changed into Merkulov, sometimes they were called Merkush."

Everything that we eat and drink, that we constantly use in everyday life, also, of course, has my history.

For example, you, Lidia Vladimirovna, prepare breakfast in the morning: brew coffee, butter bread, cut tomatoes, make a salad, pour mayonnaise on it, put it on the table ...

Coffee was first cultivated in Ethiopia, butter began to be produced in Ancient Egypt, the first yeast bread was kneaded there. Tomatoes are aliens from South America. Mayonnaise has spread almost all over the world from France.

And everything around us that was created by people appeared for the first time in different eras - and in different countries.

The prefabricated “wall” for books is made of wood, which has been serving man as a material for various products for millions of years. Printed books have existed since the 15th century, when the first printing press appeared in Germany.

Paper made from crushed wood is over two thousand years old. For the first time such paper was made in China. The alphabet in which Russian books are printed is about a thousand years old (it is believed that it was invented by the educators Cyril and Methodius, subjects of Byzantium, and Slavs by origin). This alphabet underwent the last major reforms in 1918, already very minor amendments to Russian spelling introduced just a few years ago.

The Russian alphabet was created using the ancient Greek, the ancient Greek (almost three thousand years ago) - based on the even more ancient Phoenician, and to that, in turn, led a long road from syllabic writing and hieroglyphics

fics created in a vast area ancient civilizations especially in Egypt and Sumer.

The "wall" has lockable compartments. The key, turning in the lock, makes the bracket extend... The inhabitants of ancient Greek cities closed their houses with similar devices.

The closet came to European cities quite recently from Japan, where it is traditional furniture.

The water faucet crowns a whole string of pipes of different thickness, connecting the apartment with a source of drinking water. Water supply was used already in the third millennium BC in Crete, then - in Ancient Rome, in medieval Novgorod.

The table is almost as many millennia old as human civilization. And basically, he has not changed: he always, as a rule, had four legs and was made He almost always and everywhere made of wood.

The chair is much younger than the table. In Russia, it became widespread quite recently (peasants preferred shops until the 20th century), in Central Asia even later (in recent decades).

Until now, for many Arabs, Japanese, Indians, sitting on the floor, on mats, cushions or carpets, is much more comfortable than on a chair.

The throne chair was obviously an honorary seat. Maybe that's why, and not just because of the amenities it provides, the chair made a triumphal procession through many countries of the world, defeating both shops and

darlings, though not defeated them before

The fire over the gas stove in the kitchen is a direct descendant of the flame of the ancient hearth.

Television is only about half a century old; the radio is older, over eighty. But the kitchen shelf is many thousands of years old.

The ceramic flower vase on this shelf is her age; porcelain cups - twenty centuries, transparent faceted glasses - three hundred years, faience cups - many hundreds of years; and the word "faience" itself comes from the name of the Italian city, famous for the production of high-quality ceramic products.

In a word, traveling around our own apartment, we can visit different countries and different eras, because much in our everyday culture is connected with the past of our own country and other lands. Studying world history, getting acquainted with the life of Egypt during the time of the pharaohs, Greek myths, the course of the Roman conquests, we learn not only the history of mankind, but, in essence, our own past and present - the result of the history of all mankind.

Whoever wants to understand the present must understand the past that feeds it.

You do not consider yourself standing Only here, in the existing, in the present, But imagine yourself walking Along the border of the past with the future.

L. MARTYNOV

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Definition of culture

Today we undoubtedly know and can do more than our ancestors. And above all, because we are constantly building up floors on a building of culture that has already been erected before us. It is no coincidence that the special importance of mastering cultural heritage of the past indicated in the early years Soviet power Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

But what should be understood by the word "culture"? Scientists have not been able to agree on this to the end and on all points so far. One hundred and sixty-four definitions of the concept of "culture" were counted a quarter of a century ago in scientific papers American scientists A. Kroeber and K. Klakhohn! (Note, however, that this count is by no means exhaustive.)

In an attempt to bring order to such a great variety of formulations, Kroeber and Kluckhohn divided them into ten groups. Get to know some from them, as it seems to us, both instructive and curious.

The first group included All descriptive definitions (here is one of them, for example: culture is the sum of all activities, customs, beliefs).

Secondly, those definitions that declare culture to be connected primarily with traditions, with the social heritage of society (culture is a socially inherited complex of practices and beliefs that determines the foundations of our life).

The definitions of the third group emphasize the importance for culture of the rules that organize a certain way of life.

IN special group includes those definitions according to which culture is a way of adapting society to the natural environment and economic needs.

A separate group consists of definitions that focus on the fact that culture is a product of human activity. For some scientists, the main thing in culture is the way it is transmitted (“non-biological inheritance”) or that it is received during training and education. For others, culture is a stream of ideas passing from individual to individual through symbolic words, actions, and imitations. For the third - the meaning of culture is that it opposes nature, fights with it, subjugates it to itself ...

Here is the range of interpretations of the term! But almost each of the definitions includes the activities of people as a basis, while highlighting not random, but really objectively important and necessary features of culture.

We are talking in this book about culture in the broadest sense of the word. Here is one of its interpretations, given in the collective monograph “Fundamentals of the Marxist-Leninist theory of culture” (M., 1976): “Culture is carried out in the spheres of material and spiritual production active creative activity people (individuals, social groups, classes, nations, society as a whole) for the development of the world, in the process of which socially significant material and spiritual values ​​are produced, stored, exchanged and consumed, as well as the totality of these values ​​themselves, objectifying the creative

people's activities." Or, as one of the authors of this book suggests, even more broadly: culture is all the conditions, means and mechanisms of their life created by the mind and hands of people. This refers to the artificial environment for the existence of people, the tools of their activity, as well as skills, knowledge, ideas about life values, expressed in purposeful actions.

Note the epithet "targeted". Man is the only creature on earth capable of realizing the goals of his actions. Recall K. Marx’s remark that even “the worst architect differs from the best bee from the very beginning in that, before building a cell from wax, he has already built it in his head” (Marx K., Engels F. Works, vol. 23, p. 189).

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Culture as a system

So, what is not included in the concept of "culture"! Clothes and books, cigarettes and rolling mills, a symphony and railway bridges - all this is created by mankind and, therefore, all this is culture. But this fantastically sized "collection" is by no means a chaotic heap of random products. human activity. Its constituent elements are interconnected.

With a wide variety of cultures different peoples on our planet, it is often possible to recreate a fairly complete picture of the culture of a particular people as a whole from individual small details. Here is le

there is, say, only one object behind a museum showcase - a bone harpoon with a hole at the handle. What can be said about a society whose members it once served as the main hunting tool? Since bone served as the material for its creation, it seems that they still did not know how to mine and process metals here. And if so, then we can roughly determine the stage of social development of this society - it was pre-class or early class, with pronounced features of the tribal system. They knew here, in addition to harpoons, knives and spears, and maybe even bows and arrows. Marine animals accounted for a significant share in hunting prey: a hole in the handle of a harpoon usually serves to thread a long belt into it, and such a belt is needed when even a wounded prey is able to move faster than a hunter.

Archaeologists who discover and study traces of societies that have long disappeared from the face of the earth are often engaged in restoring the entire culture from the few objects that have come down to us. Found a burnt clay shard? This means that the people who used this vessel overcame one of the important historical barriers: ceramics, that is, objects made of clay, begin to be made, as a rule, after the development of agriculture. By the time ceramics appeared, the bow was usually the main weapon in hunting and in inter-tribal clashes; it is possible, although not at all necessary, that an object made of metal will be next to the ceramics.

This relationship between the components of culture is especially evident in the case of

changes to one of them. Here is an example from the history of New Guinea. As soon as an iron ax appeared there, the locals, the Papuans, appreciated its advantages over the stone ax. Now the men of one family could cope with such a difficult task as cutting down a forest plot for a future field, and earlier this required the efforts of an entire community. But such a change in the productive forces very soon led to a crisis in the community, since the direct interest of all members of the community in its existence disappeared.

In a word, all components of culture are interconnected. There is, for example, a relationship between the type of economy and the nature of religious beliefs. Also associated with the type of farm are some character traits raising children. So, according to the observations of individual researchers, the more important the role of hunting in the culture of unliterate peoples, the less rigor in the upbringing of children.

Emphasizing the connection between the nature of the means of production and the prevailing social relations, K. Marx wrote: “A hand mill gives you a society with an overlord at the head, a steam mill gives you a society with an industrial capitalist” (Marx K., Engels F. Works, vol. 4, p. 133).

The presence of various internal relationships between the parts and elements of culture allows us to consider it as complete system. However, it should be borne in mind that such connections are for the most part very flexible and leave many even the most important features

culture significant freedom. Speaking about the phenomena of spiritual culture, it should be emphasized that in their development they form complex indirect connections with the material foundations of life and at the same time are characterized in relation to the latter by relative independence. Because of this, the characteristic features of the main stages of the spiritual history of mankind do not appear to be entirely determined by material production - they are the result of a complex interaction of numerous factors. But the independence of spiritual culture still has limits, which are determined social relations existing in society, traditions, recognized life and moral values, political principles, etc.

In the sphere of the political superstructure, such relative independence is manifested in the fact that, say, a slave-owning state could be politically a monarchy, an aristocratic or democratic republic, just like a feudal and capitalist state.

Related to the same side of the matter is the variety of religions that "serve" exploitative societies. In the era of the development of the slave system in the East, in India, Buddhism won, and it acted as the religion of a large part of the population on the Hindustan Peninsula for a relatively short time - only a few centuries, and then was supplanted by other beliefs, primarily Hinduism and Islam. In Europe, under similar conditions, triumphed

Christianity - and dominates there until now. It is worth noting that from India from the III century BC. e. sent a mass of Buddhist missionaries to the Eastern Mediterranean - but they were not successful there. Similarly, Christian missionaries failed to convert any significant number of Indians. And most of the Japanese retained during the slaveholding and feudal periods and until the era of capitalism, inclusive, the ancient national religion - Shinto, however, at times combining it to one degree or another with Buddhism and other religions of foreign origin.

We also see a wide range of forms in the ways in which the ruling class secures its dominance.

In India, the caste structure of society played a huge role; in Europe, under slavery and feudalism, they attached particular importance to the nobility of origin, that is, the antiquity of the family, first of all, and land ownership usually served as the key to power; there were no developed castes in China, the aristocracy had less power, and all land was considered to belong to the supreme sovereign - the emperor.

However, with all the richness of specific forms, each of the class societies goes through the same main stages in its development - slave-owning, feudal, capitalist (sometimes "skipping" one or another of them due to the influence of historical experience of those standing at a higher level). community development neighbors). But this kind of common in the historical development of countries and peoples - a natural sme

Well, socio-economic formations are far from always easy to discern. These general laws of the development of mankind were, as is known, discovered by K. Marx and F. Engels, who created the materialist theory of history on the basis of an analysis of vast concrete material that had been collected by researchers over many centuries.

The systemic nature of individual peoples, cultures, which together make up the general culture of mankind, is clearly visible not only when comparing societies located at the same stages of social development ”It is extremely interesting and useful to consider within individual cultures those features that are associated with specific natural, natural conditions and are repeated almost everywhere where these conditions are similar.

The interdependence of cultural features and their general connection with the environment is especially clearly visible among peoples living in complex natural conditions- in the tundra or high in the mountains.

Switzerland and Nepal lie far apart. Their stories never crossed. The inhabitants of Switzerland and Nepal belong to different races, speak completely dissimilar languages, are on different levels development. But both of these countries are mountainous. And in the life of the inhabitants of the high-mountainous regions of both states, researchers see many common features.

And here and there, from the shepherd's houses in the high mountain meadows, winding paths lead to

2 Yu. V. Bromley, R. G. Podolny

ravines located on gentle slopes. Here and there the gardens adjoin two-story houses with gabled timber roofs, in which people live on the second floor, and the first floor is for livestock. Here and there, window frames are covered with complex carved patterns. Both the Swiss highlanders and the Nepalese spend most of their lives in the kitchen, where there are massive tables and open fires smoke.

The way of doing business is very similar. Each family has small fields and mowing near the village itself, and in addition, more remote plots of land on the mountain slopes. But the alpine forests and alpine meadows themselves are in Nepal, and partly in Switzerland, owned by the village. This similarity is easy to understand. Similar lands - similar ways of land use. But the similarities in lifestyle go much further.

The Sherpas of Nepal have decisions on everything critical issues are accepted at the general meeting of the village, and the Swiss used to do so until relatively recently. Such questions include, for example, when, how many livestock and what pastures to drive, when and what to sow, where to harvest timber.

And, like almost all mountain peoples, there is a particularly emphasized respect for elders and the strictest discipline.

A striking series of coincidences is shown to us by the holidays and weekdays, the art and life of the highlanders from different parts of the world. For example, many common features in the economy and everyday life can be found among the inhabitants of not only the Himalayas and the Alps, but also the Andes in America, Tibet and the Pamirs in Asia, the Pyrenees and the Caucasus in Europe.

The similarity of the cultures of various mountain peoples is largely due to the fact that there are not so many options for cultural adaptation to the harsh conditions of existence in the mountains and these options do not differ too much from each other.

The interrelation of elements of culture in mountainous regions is relatively rigid, but it, albeit in a milder form, also exists in societies that have arisen in any other territories.

In a word, a fairly clear sequence is obtained: people of different nations, belonging to different races, often cultivating different agricultural crops and caring for different domestic animals, despite this, create the same type of economy and life systems, and more broadly - cultures, if they live in the same type of natural environment. conditions; this is especially noticeable when peoples are at approximately the same stages of social development.

In general, the common features that exist in the culture of different peoples can be due to a wide variety of factors: the common level of their socio-economic development, the similarity natural environment, traditions, etc. At the same time, culture is extremely diverse, in its own way, each nation has its own identity.

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Humanity is made up of nations

Humanity is made up of nations. Or, more precisely, humanity is made up of peoples. Russians and Japanese, Cubans and Egyptians, Gypsies and Quechua and many, many

other. Humanity is ethnically so rich that it does not even know the exact number of its constituent nations, nationalities and tribes. It is only known that there are thousands of them - large and small, multi-million and numbering only a few hundred people. Peoples whose development is subject, for all their differences, to the same historical laws.

So what unites people into a single nation? Or let's put it differently: what features should be common among people who make up one people? As such, scientists rightly call a common language and a common territory, the unity of economic life, a single culture, a special national character and so on.

All this is true, each of the listed signs of a people is extremely important ... And for each of them you can find an exception people.

We named the common language first. But the British and Anglo-Australians, for example, speak the same language - English. It is also spoken by the inhabitants of the United States of America and most of the Canadians, and the population of the island of Jamaica in Central America, and New Zealanders, and the vast majority of Irish and Scots.

In our country, separate groups of a single Mordovian people now speak, in essence, three different languages: part in the Moksha language, part in the Erzya language, the rest, remaining Mordvins, are now developing their own national culture, using the Russian language, which has become their only and native language. Many Karelians also speak and write Russian.

And there are even more amazing situations. Today's Irish speak English language, and only a few of them continue to use the Gaelic language that all Irish people spoke three hundred years ago. And yet they are the same people!

Despite all the exceptions, language, according to the vast majority of experts, occupies the most important place among the main features of the people. After all, it is not at all necessary that it be unique for a particular people. It is much more important that the language ensures the free exchange of information between all representatives of the people. And this can be done not only with the help of one, but also with several languages ​​(provided that in the latter case at least part of the population is at least bilingual).

The people are certainly formed in a certain territory. But the lands occupied by one or another people, over time, sometimes expand, and sometimes narrow. Russians now inhabit an area much larger than five hundred years ago. A people can even change territory throughout its history. Kalmyks lived in Central Asia just four centuries ago, and now they live in the Lower Volga region. The Hungarian people over the past one and a half thousand years have changed three, four, and possibly five territories of settlement.

Sometimes, as the main factor that unites people, they point to the commonality of their culture and way of life. But quite often among completely different peoples there is a similarity in everyday culture and way of life.

Karelians build the same houses as the Russian northerners, wear the same clothes, cultivate the land with the same tools, but they are a separate people.

All these "exceptions", representing, as a rule, the result of the interaction of peoples, do not give reason to deny the significance of all the above signs. The fact is that a people, an ethnos, is characterized not by any one of these signs - only by language, only by a common territory, only by a common culture, etc., but by their combination.

The people are just one of the forms of ethnic communities. One, but, in general, the main one, this is the main link in the ethnic hierarchy. Within itself, groups of people can be distinguished, differing in some features of the language, spiritual culture and way of life. Pomors live on the shores of the White Sea, Don Cossacks live on the Don. Both of them are undeniably Russian, but they have their own characteristics both in dialect and in everyday life (remember, for example, “Quiet Flows the Don” by M. Sholokhov, wonderful northern stories and fairy tales by B. Shergin). Both the Pomors themselves and the Cossacks are aware of their peculiarities, they are aware of themselves as special communities within the Russian people.

Konstantin Paustovsky sang of Meshchera and her people. And the Russian Meshchera is also an ethnic group of the Russian people; differences in housing, clothing, and dialect have long been kept here.

Scientists call such groups sub-ethnic groups; their members themselves see their differences, remember them, have their own, "special" name. But it happens that ethnographers clearly see the characteristics of the population of several

some areas, but this population itself is not aware of them. Such groups are usually called ethnographic.

In recent decades, many such differences among Russians, as well as among other peoples, have almost disappeared.

The peoples themselves are part of larger ethnic communities. The Russian people are one of the East Slavic. Eastern Slavs are part of Slavs as a whole. In addition, the Russian people became an inalienable integral part into a new historical community that has formed on the territory of our country in the years that have passed since the October Revolution - the Soviet people, which is characterized primarily by ideological and political unity, a common economy, social class structure, lifestyle, culture.

Every ethnic group is a historical and cultural community. But not every cultural and historical community is an ethnos. There are common historical and cultural features in the way of life of the followers of each of the three world religions, that is, separately Christians, Buddhists, Muslims. Clearly visible on the "cultural map of the world", for example, Latin American or East Indochinese historical and cultural communities, each covering many peoples.

Often they speak specifically about European or European-North American culture, about the culture of Africa "south of the Sahara", etc. And, of course, each time they mean precisely certain historical and cultural communities. In such cases, both the roots of the relationship and the degree of closeness of the culture of peoples are different, but the relationship itself

and the commonality is quite palpable.

At each moment of history, the intersection of a huge number of cultural communities forms a complex network.

And this complexity also provides earthly culture with unity and diversity.

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The diversity of culture is inexhaustible

The cultures of individual peoples - to be more precise, ethnic cultures - differ from each other insofar as different peoples often perform actions aimed at satisfying the same needs in different ways.

You and I sit on a chair and at the table, use a knife and fork while eating, go to bed, put our heads on the pillow ... All this is so familiar and natural for us that it seems that it cannot be otherwise. But until recently, the Japanese, for example, in everyday life squatted while eating, and among many other Eastern peoples it is customary to sit on the carpet while eating; a Japanese man eats with two chopsticks. A Malay, for example, when going to bed puts a wooden bench of a peculiar shape under his neck, and some Indians put a soft cushion under their knees; South American Indian sleeps in a hammock...

Eat, sleep, relax your muscles in order to rest - all this is purely biological, as if

actions common to all mammals, not just humans. Building its culture on the foundation of biology, a person has found many ways to perform actions that seem to be essentially the same. The satisfaction of biological needs has acquired a socio-cultural form. Or rather, not the form, but the form.

Let's go back for a moment to what posture people take when eating or talking. It is difficult for a European without the habit of sitting in Turkish for more than a few minutes, as well as squatting in Japanese. It will seem absurd and uncomfortable for a resident of Europe to kneel for a long time - a Japanese woman is used to this. Conversely, in Japan, the European custom of sitting on a chair took root with difficulty. However, to squat down, or kneel, or sit down like a Turkish, even if not for long, can, probably, a representative of any nation. But the English missionary and traveler Bryant could not take the “sitting position” characteristic of the South African Zulu. Meanwhile, in the most stout and clumsy Zulu woman, such a pose looked natural and unconstrained.

And the British, Russians or French are no less surprised at the habit of the Zulu to rest, standing on one leg and resting on her knee with the heel of the other leg.

Ethnic identity is manifested, as already mentioned, in particular, in the way people work, what tools they use, what dwellings, clothes, food they prefer.

Polish and Russian blacksmiths gave different shapes to an ordinary ax in the old days. Shovel, and that may have ethnic differences.

Russian peasants in the past, in almost any conditions, traditionally built log houses from wood. This was sought even when resettling in areas where there is no forest. In the tundra, log cabins were built from driftwood - logs nailed to the shore of the sea or river. Settlers from Central Russia in southern Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and the Kuban, at first they lived for a long time in dugouts in order to save money for the construction of a dwelling made of wood, which had to be brought from the Urals. In the south of Ukraine, Russian migrant peasants gradually and far from everywhere switched under the influence of Ukrainians to a new building material - clay.

Before the revolution in the Caucasus, many peoples, living in very similar conditions, built houses from different material and different architecture. Balkars, for example, built one-story stone houses, Ossetians, Chechens and Ingush - two- and three-story houses, Karachays and Balkars of the Baksan Gorge - wooden houses. This is despite the fact that, generally speaking, the dwellings of people living in similar natural conditions usually have many common features.

Russian northerners in the villages traditionally put the house to the street end; Russian southerners place it along the street.

The Ukrainian cart, which is mostly harnessed to oxen, is very different from the Russian cart, which is driven by a horse. And the traditional Latvian cart, which is also harnessed to a horse, nevertheless differs in some ways from the Russian one.

Once upon a time, among the Uzbeks, it was possible to almost unmistakably tell from which locality the

Human. According to the clothes of a Russian peasant woman early XIX centuries, it was often possible to determine its homeland with an accuracy of a specific village. Until now, some peoples of Indochina women's clothing you can find out where its owner comes from. Now the clothes of different peoples are becoming more and more of the same type, losing their ethnic character. A jacket and trousers for men, a skirt, a blouse, a dress, a trouser suit for women are now common clothes in the vast majority of countries of the world. However, national costumes are often preserved as clothing for traditional holidays.

National features are expressed both in food and in the way it is prepared.

In Moldova, bread is baked from corn. In Abkhazia, the role of bread is played by steeply boiled corn porridge - abysta. Russian jelly - a specially cooled dish - becomes a hot khashi dish in the Caucasus.

Only from the end of the 17th century did tea and coffee begin to penetrate Europe. But the preparation and method of consumption of these drinks among residents of different European countries have their own characteristics. In France and Yugoslavia, say, they drink relatively little tea. In Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Armenia, coffee "per capita" is drunk much more than in other union republics of our country. The British drink tea, usually with milk...

Ilya Ehrenburg, who traveled to many countries of the world, vigilantly noticed the manifestations of national characteristics in the customs and behavior of representatives of different peoples. “Europeans,” he wrote, “hello, extend their hand to shake,

which can not only surprise, but also repel a Chinese, Japanese or Indian (shake the hand of a stranger!). A resident of Vienna says “I kiss your hand”, without thinking about the meaning of his words, and a resident of Warsaw, when he is introduced to a lady, actually kisses her hand. The Englishman begins the letter with the words "dear sir", even if in the letter he reproaches his competitor for fraud. Christian men, entering a church, church or church, take off their hats, and a Jew, entering the synagogue, covers his head. In Catholic countries, women should not enter the temple with their heads uncovered. In Europe, the color of mourning is black, while in China it is white.

When a Chinese man sees for the first time how a European or an American goes hand in hand with a woman, sometimes even kissing her, it seems to him extremely shameless. In a Beijing hotel, the furniture was European, but the entrance to the room was traditionally Chinese - a screen did not allow you to enter directly, in China this is due to the legend that the devil goes straight ahead. The Russian devil, on the contrary, is crafty and always comes in from the side, along a curve (“crafty” and is derived from “bow”, “bend”, “arc”). We tell the children that nothing can be left on the plate when visiting, but in China, no one touches the cup of dry rice served at the end of dinner - the rules of politeness require you to show that you are full.

Every nation's inherent features of culture are ordinary, natural, often even the only correct ones. But its representatives are the features of behavior and life, the most common actions of people of another nation

can be perceived as strange, in fact, sometimes even incredible.

The Indian is surprised how it is among Europeans that a wife calls her husband by name in the presence of his mother and dares to address him without her permission. Bulgarians shake their heads from side to side in agreement, and nod in denial. Among the Ashanti people in Ghana, a son-in-law is not allowed to talk to his mother-in-law.

One day, Swedish traveler Eric Lundqvist was having dinner with a Papuan chief in New Guinea after a hunt. Having gnawed half the next game bone, the Swede passes it to the Papuan, and he gnaws it clean. The European, a friend of Lundqvist, is indignant to the core: “You treat him like a dog! Throw him bones! This is humiliating for him. And you yourself constantly preach that we should treat black people as human beings, as if they were white ... "

But Lundqvist just observed the customs of the Papuans, behaved with the leader, as it was appropriate to behave with a friend in this tribe: he shared his food. A different manner of behavior could, with all the integrity of an ignorant European, anger the Papuans.

How can one not recall the judgments of Michel Montaigne, a 16th-century humanist philosopher, who, reflecting on the life of the peoples of America recently discovered by Europeans, wrote: “... in these peoples, according to what I was told about them, there is nothing barbaric and wild, unless we consider barbarism what we are not accustomed to. For, to tell the truth, we seem to have no other


the truth of the true and reasonable, as serving us as examples and models of the opinion and customs of our country.

Peoples even have different ideas about the distance at which a conversation should be conducted. Hispanics often find that the North American they are talking to is cold and aloof. This notion often arises only because the North American does not like to be touched and steps back just when Hispanics think they are close enough to speak. For a North American, a comfortable speaking distance is 75 cm, whereas for a Hispanic it is too far.

The practice of religious rites very often also becomes ethnically unique, and it is not at all necessary that this originality be perceived as a manifestation of sectarianism.

The peoples of the world have different ideas about beauty. The ancient Sarmatians, the inhabitants of our southern steppes, strongly disliked, for example, the natural shape of the head. And they changed it in accordance with their ideas of beauty. During excavations in this area, scientists find amazing skulls that do not have an almost vertical forehead that every person should have. Instead, the profile line here "lays down" almost horizontally and the head takes on an absolutely fantastic shape.

The Sarmatians were not the only ones of their kind. The Incas, whose powerful civilization was destroyed in Peru by the conquistadors of the Spaniard Pizarro, have heads like

divided into two parts connected by a jumper.

How was it done? The fact is that in a child the bones of the skull are so soft that they obediently take any shape that they want to give. The Incas tied the baby's head with a special bandage.

It surprises us What somewhere else there is (or until recently) the custom of making a hole in the nose in order to pass an ornament through it. But we take it for granted when women pierce their earlobes.

ears to wear earrings.

In some Bushmen, Malay, Maori tribes in the past, parents tried to make their children's noses as flattened as possible by artificially pressing them. Something opposite to this custom, namely nose-pulling, was very popular in France as early as the 16th century. A large aquiline nose seemed ideal there, mothers and nannies considered it their duty to take care that their pupils had it “obvious”.

Sometimes ideas about beauty are closely related to social factors. Long fingernails, for example, even among civilized peoples, often serve as a sign that their owner is not engaged in physical labor. In China and its neighboring countries, in the past, nails were allowed to grow to monstrous lengths, and this served as a sign of noble birth, and sometimes aristocrats wore special silver cases to protect their nails, or perhaps to show how long they were. In other cases, nails were grown as a sign that the bearer devoted his life to religion and was not engaged in any secular work.

In many places, it was believed that a short neck was ugly. In Georgia, for a long time, the custom was to put the child in the cradle so that the head was somewhat lower than the shoulders. This made the neck longer. In East Africa, there are tribes in which the neck of women is artificially brought to a fantastic length of several tens of centimeters with the help of special rings that are put on the neck of a child and the number of which is increasing every year.

Very many customs of such artificial influence on the forms of the human body depend on the way of life of the people.

The ancient Greeks' idea of ​​beauty was reflected in the monuments of ancient art.

Straight legs, for example, are not considered beautiful everywhere. The people of nomadic pastoral tribes seem to be much more attractive with crooked legs, more densely covering the horse. And in the old Kalmyk cradle there is a special detail in the form of a funnel, pushing the child's knees apart. For a long time, the Buryats put clods of skin or just rags in the cradle between the legs of the child, at the knees, for the same purpose.

What will a mother not do to make her child grow up beautiful!

The ancient Greeks, who, on the contrary, preferred straight legs, invented a special device that allegedly maintained this straightness.

The custom tells the natives of New Zealand, Maori, to beat children on the knees. It is believed that from this the legs will be straighter. The natives of Australia and many other peoples take care of this.

You can also recall the ancient Chinese custom of bandaging the feet of girls so that they do not grow longer than 8-10 cm, and the knocking out of part of the teeth in childhood or on coming of age in some tribes of Oceania.

And here is what the ethnographer R.V. Kinzhalov writes about some of the customs of the Mayan people in ancient Mexico: “A young mother, wanting her daughter to grow up beautiful, with the help of other more experienced women, tied two flat boards to the forehead and nape of the newborn for several days. Due to this, the forehead of the child takes on the appearance of a flat, receding surface, which is considered very beautiful. For the same purpose, a small ball of rubber is suspended from the girl's hair at eye level. The eyes of the child will follow the bouncing ball with every movement, and the girl will grow up cross-eyed. And strabismus is also one of the most necessary, according to the concepts of the ancient Maya, signs of beauty ”(Ethnographers tell. Collection. M., 1978, p. 56.).

Europeans and Africans, residents of Western and South Asia consider big eyes to be beautiful, which were and are sung by poets. But among the peoples of East Asia on this score there is my own opinion.

nie. The Chinese ambassadors at the court of the Russian Empress Anna Ioannovna were especially delighted with the appearance of Princess Elizabeth, the future Empress. And they said in a flowery oriental style that she would simply ruin people with her beauty if her eyes were smaller and narrower.

The features that characterize this or that people find a particularly vivid expression in folk art. Some nations have unique art forms. As an example, we can cite here the extrusion of patterns on birch bark by the teeth of the Khanty and Mansi.

Not only folk, but also regional features are expressed in songs and dances, in musical instruments. And how original and bright is the applied art of different peoples!

Ethnic originality is also manifested in the professional art of different countries. Moreover, in the 19th and especially in the 20th century, as the proportion of professional art its role as an area of ​​manifestation of ethnic characteristics is increasingly growing. But national art is only a part of the original culture of the peoples of the world. Ethnically special is also inherent in other spheres of their life.

How glorious it is to touch and see what is new to you! Every difference in things and people makes life richer... But listen, because this versatility is created by peoples - well, of course, also nature, history ... but both are merged in the people ... any dissimilarity is worth falling in love with just because it makes life richer. Let us be united by everything that separates us!

K. CHAPEK

Each of us, as a representative of our people, is the bearer of a huge complex of cultural features characteristic of him. They are naturally not biologically inherited. We adopt them for the most part in childhood, from parents and other adults, from peers.

A person's belonging to one or another people is determined by the circumstances of his birth, origin, but most importantly - upbringing and education, during which the features of the ethnic environment in which he finds himself are instilled in a person.

American sociologists have established that, say, an English professor (that is, a person who speaks the same language as the Americans) can live in the USA for 5-10 years, or even more, and still not fully get used to many details of the local life, will not become an American. Meanwhile, the semi-literate son of Italian emigrants, who sometimes speaks with a strong Sicilian accent, usually manages to “learn to be an American” by the age of ten. The professor still behaves like an Englishman, and the boy - like an American.

In the US, a detailed ethnographic survey was conducted of a large group of Chinese Americans who have lived in the US for several generations. Since the survey was carried out by ethnographers, they naturally focused their attention on the characteristics of this ethnic group in American society. And yet the final conclusion was: these are just ordinary Americans.

The seemingly fantastic variety of human

customs, habits and characteristics of behavior in different countries - only the most noticeable manifestation of the diversity of human culture at the first acquaintance. Within the framework of the general laws of historical development common to the entire planet, people have created hundreds and thousands of varieties of lifestyle. Changing the world, people adapt both to it and to its changes, they seek and find their own ways to the future.

Each of the peoples of the world is a grandiose test of a special way of life, made up of habits and customs, of laws and morality, of art and everything that we call national culture.

The national, ethnic features of this way of life are the result of specific historical details of the development of each people, a reflection of the specifics of the interaction of this people with the surrounding geographical environment and with other peoples.

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Challenges and Solutions

In space and time, on five continents and over many millennia, the culture of mankind has developed - let's look at it now more closely, at what tasks it performs, what requirements it meets.

“Culture in all its diversity can be considered as a set of answers - successful and unsuccessful - to the fundamental needs of a person, human groups, individuals that arise in the sphere of social life of people and in

the sphere of their social consciousness generated by this being,” writes the Soviet philosopher E. V. Sokolov.

And the numerous functions of culture serve to satisfy these needs.

And what are our needs?

First of all, physical and biological, the simplest: eat, sleep, be healthy, continue your family. They are also found in animals. However, the satisfaction of these vital (vital) needs by a person has significant features due to the "second nature" - culture.

Man's transformation of the means of satisfying biological needs is so profound that it enabled Marx to remark: "Hunger is hunger, but the hunger that is quenched by boiled meat, eaten with a knife and fork, is a different hunger than that in which raw meat is swallowed." with hands, nails and teeth" (Marx K., Engels F. Works, vol. 46, part 1, p. 28).

Such a transformation of the ways of satisfying vital needs is also clearly manifested when the “second nature” performs protective functions: it warms a person in the most severe frost, covers him with a roof from rain, offers a warm stove or a hot battery radiator, dresses his body in a caftan, dressing gown, toga, dress, crowning the work of their hands with earflaps or a hat. All this can be called a culture of primary life support.

Culture has a significant and most important task - the transformation of the world. She answered


meets the needs of man, which no other creature has, embodied primarily in the production of material goods, tools and means of production.

People need to communicate with each other. And, accordingly, culture provides the means of communication inherent only to them.

Any society can exist only if its members observe certain rules of behavior and life. There is no collective without norms that regulate its life, there is no developed society without a system for managing society itself and its economic base - production. And the regulation of human relationships is also provided by culture.

The human race must go on! And, perhaps, the most striking manifestation of the degree of development of culture is the transformation that love has experienced throughout the history of mankind. The instinct of procreation, inherent in all living beings, has become a lofty feeling, permeated with spirituality, a feeling in which the highest, truly human properties of a person so clearly express themselves.

The reproduction of the human race is closely connected with the need to educate new generations of people. And education itself is the most important function of any society, since it is it that ensures continuity in the development of culture.

Rest is also a human need, biological in its basis, but to a significant extent it is provided by means of culture.

And there is still such a purely human need, we, people, acquired hundreds of thousands of years ago - the need to know the world, to explain it. The exploratory reflex of distant ancestors turned in people in the course of social development into a true passion for knowledge. We can say that science and art owe their emergence to this.

We have appeared and are developing at a rapid pace the need to listen to music, read books, look at pictures, sometimes depicting landscapes seen “in nature” hundreds of times, go to the theater and cinema, etc.

Man discovered mankind, cognized humanity, comprehended his place in history, began to fight for the creation of a just society, and all this was the satisfaction of the highest needs born of the development of culture.

The phenomena of culture are multifaceted, capable of turning to a person in different directions. Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin" can be read, re-learning the world of his heroes, or you can, probably, just to relax, distract from pressing worries. This novel in verse teaches love and educates, allows you to touch the history of life, the history of thoughts and feelings ... and get acquainted with a specific love story. Homeric hymns to the gods are religious works in their original function, but few will remember this, enjoying the "sound of the silent Hellenic speech." And now, for the most part, we do not perceive the compositions written by Bach for the church service as religious. Science has now become a mighty productive force, and yet

in the past, there are periods when the natural sciences were not so much associated with the solution of practical problems, but served for wealthy people as entertainment during their leisure hours.

In a word, it is easy to see how multifaceted each cultural phenomenon is, how often any of them can perform several tasks, serve to satisfy many needs, material and spiritual. At the same time, in culture, it turns out that it is possible to single out separate spheres, broad areas, in each of which, first of all, one or another specific group of human needs is satisfied. Accordingly, we divide our further story into chapters according to these areas.

According to Engels, in the process of any research, a person inevitably breaks the natural or historical connections of phenomena: “In order to cognize these particulars, we are forced to tear them out of their natural or historical connection and investigate each separately according to its properties, according to its special causes and consequences, etc. etc." (Marx K-, Engels F. Works, vol. 20, p. 20).

So we now have to, in order to continue the story of the culture of mankind, pull out the “particulars” of this great general problem and talk about each of them separately. True, these will be very large and broad “particulars”.

And we will start with how a person mastered the world, developed the economic side of culture - first of all, in order to satisfy the very first, simple and natural need of every living being - the need for food.

Yulian Vladimirovich Bromley(February 21, 1921, Moscow - June 4, 1990, Moscow) - Soviet historian and ethnographer. Doctor historical sciences(1965), professor. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (December 23, 1976, Corresponding Member 1966). Member of the Great Patriotic War

Laureate of the State Prize of the USSR (1979, 1987).

Biography

Yu. V. Bromley was born into the family of the historian V. S. Sergeev (1883-1941, bore his mother's surname). Grandson of the famous theatrical figure K. S. Stanislavsky. After graduating from school in 1939, he entered the Faculty of Physics of Moscow State University, but in the same year he was drafted into the army (the deferment for students was canceled). I met the beginning of the war as an aircraft mechanic at a military airfield near Brest.

At the front, he joined the CPSU (b) (1944).

Returning from the front in 1945, he entered the Faculty of History of Moscow State University, from which he graduated in 1950 and became a member of the Institute of Slavic Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Later he moved to work in the Department of History of the USSR Academy of Sciences. In 1956 he defended his Ph.D. thesis, and in 1965 - his doctorate. In January 1966 he was appointed director of the Institute of Ethnography of the USSR Academy of Sciences.

Scientific activity

Author of numerous articles and books in the field of ethnography and related sciences. The founder of the dualistic concept of ethnos, Yu. V. Bromley was an opponent of the passionary theory of L. N. Gumilyov. In particular, Bromley criticized Gumilyov's article "Biography scientific theory, or Auto Obituary"

If the fate of oligophrenics is indeed genetically predetermined to a large extent (although by no means completely), then the question of declassed elements is much more complicated. If we proceed from the fact that they are the result of a genetically inherited property to absorb less energy, then it will inevitably turn out that their social status is predetermined from birth. Meanwhile, such a "naturalistic" substantiation of class inequality has long since disappeared from the arsenal of even the most zealous foreign champions of this inequality.

Major writings

• Bromley Yu. V. Peasant uprising of 1573 in Croatia: from the history of agrarian relations and class struggle in Croatia in the 16th century. (1959)
• Bromley Yu. V. The formation of feudalism in Croatia: to the study of the processes of class formation among the Slavs (1963)
• Bromley Yu. V. On the characterization of the concept of "ethnos" // Races and peoples (1971)
• Bromley Yu. V. Ethnos and ethnography. - M.: Nauka, 1973
• Bromley Yu. V. On the subject of cultural and social anthropology and ethnography in the interpretation of Anglo-American and Soviet scientists (experiment comparative analysis) // Ethnography abroad. - M.: Nauka, 1979
• Bromley Yu. V., Kryukov M. V. Ethnography: a place in the system of sciences, schools, methods // Soviet Ethnography, 1987, No. 3.
• Bromley Yu. V. Modern problems of ethnography: essays on theory and history. - M., 1981
• Ethnography / ed. Yu. V. Bromley and G. E. Markov. - M., 1982
• Bromley Yu. V. Essays on the theory of ethnos. - M.: Nauka, 1983
• Bromley Yu. V. Ethnosocial processes: theory, history and modernity. - M.: Nauka, 1987
• Bromley Yu. V. National processes in the USSR: in search of new approaches. - M.: Nauka, 1988
• Bromley Yu. V. (responsible ed.) History of primitive society. General issues. Problems of anthroposociogenesis. - M.: Nauka, 1983. - 432 p.
• Bromley Yu. V. (responsible ed.) History of primitive society. The era of the primitive tribal community. - M.: Nauka, 1986. - 574 p.
• Bromley Yu. V. (responsible ed.) History of primitive society. The era of class formation. - M.: Nauka, 1988. - 568 p.

Under the editorship of Yu. V. Bromley, a twenty-volume encyclopedia "Countries and Peoples" (1978-1985) and a university textbook on ethnography (1982) were published. In collaboration with R. G. Podolny, the scientist wrote the popular science works “Created by Humanity” (1984) and “Humanity is Nations” (1990).

Yulian Vladimirovich Bromley was born in 1921 in Moscow. His father, V.S. Sergeev, was pretty famous historian, professor of ancient history.

After graduating from school in 1939, Julian entered the Faculty of Physics at Moscow University (MGU), but in the same year he was drafted into the army.

When the Great Patriotic War began, Bromley worked as a mechanic at a military airfield near Brest. Having gone through the whole war, having reached Soviet army to Berlin, and having managed during this time to become a communist, a member of the CPSU (b), Bromley received several military awards.

Returning, he continued his studies, but now he went to the history department of the same Moscow State University. Julian specialized in the history of the South Slavs.

After graduating in 1950, Yulian Vladimirovich began working at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences.

Later he became a member of the Department of History of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.

Bromley defended his PhD in 1956, and in 1965 he became a doctor of science.

A year later, in 1966, Bromley was appointed director of the Institute of Ethnography of the USSR Academy of Sciences.

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In 1966 he was elected a corresponding member, in 1976 he became a full member of the USSR Academy of Sciences.

The main subject of Bromley's scientific activity was ethnography and the history of European feudalism. Until now, his research in the field of the establishment and development of feudalism in Croatia is of great interest. Thus, Bromley made very serious and profound studies of the processes of ethnic development in the era of the primitive communal system. It was Bromley who gave a new definition to the concept of "ethnos". Despite the fact that the views of Academician Bromley are often criticized, he is still considered one of the most influential and respected specialists in the field of historical ethnography.

Under the direction of Bromley, a 20-volume encyclopedia "Countries and Peoples" was published.

Among other notable and significant works of the academician are "Ethnos and Ethnography" published in 1973; "Modern Problems of Ethnography", published in 1981; "Ethno-social processes: theory, history, modernity" and "Essays on the theory of ethnos" published in 1987.

Y. V Bromley - twice laureate of the State Prize of the USSR.

Bromley was also known outside the USSR, being vice president International Union anthropologists and ethnologists; vice-president of the International Society of Ethnology and Folklore of Europe; Member of the executive committee of the World Organization of Scientists. He was also elected a member of a number of foreign scientific societies - the Macedonian Academy of Sciences, the American Anthropological Association, the Hungarian Ethnographic Society.

Julian Vladimirovich Bromley died on June 5, 1990, the scientist was buried at the Novodevichy cemetery.

My "path to primitiveness" Semenov Yuri Ivanovich

3. Yu.V. Bromley and the historiology of primitiveness

The situation changed soon after Yu.V. Bromley. In 1967, a group for the study of primitive history headed by A.I. Pershits, which seven years later, in 1974, was transformed into the sector of the history of primitive society under the same leadership. It was extremely important event in the history of the development of problems of primitiveness. Prior to this, not a single scientific institution, not only in our country, but also in other countries, has ever had a special unit that would specifically deal with the history of primitiveness.

Perhaps the most interesting thing is that such an attitude to the historiology of primitiveness not only did not follow from the views that Yu.V. Bromley in his writings on the subject of ethnography, but, on the contrary, was in conflict with them. According to his point of view, ethnography is a science, first of all, about peoples, ethnic groups, and thus about that layer of culture, which he calls ethnic, meaning traditional everyday culture. But there is no doubt that ethnography has always, from the very moment of its inception, explored living primitive societies and created concepts of primitive history. Yu.V. Bromley finds a way out in recognizing that ethnography, along with the main subject area, also has an additional area of ​​research, which is the history of primitiveness.

But arguing that the study of primitiveness is just an additional subject area of ​​ethnography, Yu.V. Bromley at the same time contributed in every possible way to such research. And this is due to his undoubted interest in the problems of primitive history, which originated with him long before he took over as director of the Institute of Ethnography and began to deal with the problem of the subject of this science. Yu.V. Bromley began his scientific career as a specialist in the history of the South Slavs, especially the Croats. In the process of research, the earliest stages of the history of this people began to attract more and more of his attention. The result was the monograph "The Formation of Feudalism in Croatia" (M., 1964), in which he considers the transition of the Croats from a primitive society to a class one. It was impossible to do this without referring to primitive society and the problem of transition from it to a class society on a wider scale. The fact that this story has long been occupied by Yu.V. Bromley, says written by him seven years before, together with A.Ya. Gurevich's article "The emergence of a class society among the ancient Germans and Slavs" ("Teaching History at School", 1957. No. 5). Did not disappear from Yu.V. Bromley's interest in primitiveness also after he took over as director of the Institute of Ethnography. He wrote eight more papers on this issue.

But the main thing is not even that. It is important that throughout the entire period of his directorship, Yu.V. Bromley took care of the group, then the sector of the history of primitive society, provided this unit with all possible support, in every possible way contributed to the publication of his works. And the matter was not limited to administrative support of the sector's undertakings. Yu.V. Bromley contributed to the creation of such a general atmosphere in the sector that favored creative scientific work.

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