Towards the Integration of Ethnicity Studies and Kinship Studies in the Context of Four-Field and Multiparadigmatic Anthropology

Abstract

The theory of the ethnos is currently experiencing an intriguing phase. On the one hand, the ongoing critique of positivism/primordialism in ethnicity studies from a constructivist perspective has led to a crisis of this theory. On the other hand, the flourishing of population genetics in the 21st century and its growing integration with historical linguistics and archaeology into a unified system of knowledge (for example, in the study of the prehistory and homeland of Indo-European populations, languages, and cultures), in fact, demonstrate the resilience, vitality, and effectiveness of positivist/primordialist approaches to various dimensions of the ethnos. This paradox finds a parallel in the study of kinship in anthropology and related disciplines: a “requiem for kinship” proclaimed in American anthropology in the early 1970s was accompanied by a flourishing of kinship studies in other fields and led to an overlap of “old” and “new” approaches to this phenomenon within anthropology itself. The article examines the ideological underpinnings of constructivism and its historical relationship to Marxism as a source of its epistemological weakness. The article highlights the additional potential of the theory of the ethnos/people as revealed through its integration with kinship theory in multiparadigmatic anthropology/ethnology/ethnography. At the same time, it demonstrates the possibility – within a general concept of deictic units of language (i.e., linguistic forms that reflect the mutual self-awareness of participants in a speech act) – of unifying ethnonyms, personal names, and kinship terms, analyzed at the intersection of (ethno)linguistics, ethnology, and logic. I advance the thesis that it is necessary to rigorously and systematically distinguish between the level of expression and the level of content both in constructing such theories as the theory of the ethnos and in their critique.