Третий путь, или попытка объяснения в разделенном сообществе

Аннотация

Traditional explanations of interethnic conflicts as manifestations of political clashes between competing interest groups, striving for power in the newly created post-Soviet political space is viewed as too narrow for an approach, to which one more dimension — the interplay between symbolic elite's constructions and mass consciousness dynamics should be added to make this approach more realistic.Communities specialised in knowledge production (the focus of the article is on specialists in ethnicity and social conflict research) are held responsible for the 'quality' of the scientific worldview, which is 'consumed' by mass consciousness; thus scientific knowledge as a part of articulated worldview is shown to play a significant role in the modern mass perception of social reality: to see the neighboring ethnic group as an enemy one should assimilate into one's worldview not only the politically constructed images of 'friends' and 'enemies', but the idea of ethnicity as well. Here the Soviet theory of ethnos as primordial community based on common ties of history, territory, language and culture proved to be especially instrumental in mobilizing masses along ethnic line divisions.The proclaimed attempt at clarifying and explaining 'interethnic' conflicts presupposes and implies some basic consensus within the scientific community, for instance, as to the kind of conflict, the forms of its normalization etc. Different theoretical explanations of the conflict are used instead; they are "normal" for the social knowledge production, but become a major obstacle on the way of knowledge application.Two major quasi-paradigmatic constructions, prevalent in the post-Soviet ethnological thought are assessed: the theory of ethnos and that of ethnicity. The latter is recently imported from the western social thought, while the former is viewed as "home-made", though it has common roots with the German neoromantic concept of the Volk. As to the ethnic reality, two basic propositions might be derived from these approaches: the first, "realistic", claims that ethnos exist; the second, or 'nominalistic' might be reduced to the proposition of their non-existence. To assess the relevance of both approaches as means of social reality understanding, they are put in broader perspective of inductive and deductive styles of thought analysis and social construction of facts within these styles. The space of factualization is depicted as intersubjective bargaining of multiple subjects, involved in "thematization" of metalinguistic communicative space in which facts are emerging as a result of meeting between researcher's hypothesis and subjects' articulation of the elements of reality.Finally, a tentative solution for the problem of the two quasi-paradigms synthesis is proposed, based on delimitation of the 'types of reality', in which these theoretical constructions might be viewed as adequate.