The Internal Regularity Of Ethnogenesis (Landscape and Ethnos,XIV)

The author, a Leningrad University ethnologist, completes a series of 14 articles on the relationship between landscape and ethnic communities, and on the forces that account for the rise and decline of ethnic groups through history. After having discussed in the first few articles the relationship between shifts in storm tracks and the fortunes of the steppe peoples of Central Asia, Gumilev developed a theory that attributes the rise, development and decline of an ethnos to the initial burst and gradual waning of an innate ethnic energy or drive. Ethnoses may be grouped into superethnic systems that are identifiable with major culture areas through time and through space (Hellenistic culture, Moslem world, European civilization, Eurasian nomad culture). The author attempts to relate the different phases in the evolution of an ethnos to changing relationships between the group and the individual, as expressed in a series of imperatives, but further analysis of what generates innate ethnic drive is left to other disciplines.