Cultural Area and the Beginning of Ethnogenesis

Author

Balushok Vasyl

a Ph.D. in History, a senior research fellow at the Ukrainian Ethnological Center Department of M. Rylskyi Institute of Art Studies, Folkloristics and Ethnology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (Kyiv, Ukraine).

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1362-8270

Cultural Area and the Beginning of Ethnogenesis

Abstract

The article is an attempt to determine the objective basis of ethnogenesis, relying on the concept of cultural areas, formulated by American anthropologists C. Wissler and A. Kroeber in the 20th century. Soon, the same theory was actually expressed in slightly different terms by Russian-Soviet ethnographers M. Levin and N. Cheboksarov (scientists from Ukraine also participated in the development – F. Vovk, D. Zelenin, Ye. Kaharov). This is the concept of economic-cultural types and historical-ethnographic regions. Their essence is practically the same - the isolation of a certain natural area, which, due to its natural and geographical characteristics, determines the formation of precisely such a culture among the local population, and not another. In particular, this is material culture (economy, tools, food, housing, transportation, clothing, etc.), normative (social life, customary law, forms of marriage, etc.) and spiritual (rituals, folklore, beliefs, folk art). Based on the concept of cultural areas, the author believes that the indicated macro-areas, when divided into smaller areas, provide grounds for distinguishing among them those that determine the emergence of ethnic cultures. After all, A. Kroeber proves that the local configuration of culture always has a unique, unrepeatable style («handwriting»). And here we already see a tendency towards the emergence of a distinct ethnicity, based on the uniqueness of the regional configuration of culture. By the way, the emergence of such cultural areas (and for specific ethnic communities, micro-areas) does not make the formation of peoples associated with them mandatory at all. (It is this false thesis that the author has tried to prove earlier in his somewhat precocious and too primordialist position on «еthnogenetic niches».) One of these cultural micro-areas arose on the basis of the forest and forest-steppe zones of Ukraine at the turn of the 3rd and 4th quarters of the 1st millennium AD. Its cultural and linguistic features have been shaped largely by the pre-Slavic substrate population – mainly steppe Iranian, and to a lesser extent, Thracian, Baltic, Germanic, Celtic, and Turkic groups, all of whom were superimposed by the superstratum of ancient Slavs. In general terms, the author shows the formation of this area, as well as the emergence of the Ukrainian proto-ethnic massif on its basis. It has consisted of groups of Slavic tribes known from the chronicles, on the basis of which the Ruthenian-Ukrainian people should be formed in the future.

Keywords

cultural area, culture, people, substratum, superstratum, Slavs.

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