'Ajno dusha yeleyem pokryvaetsya': ethnos as a social community, pre-modern self-identification, and the Peace of Westphalia (08.12.2021)

A dialogue between Vitaliy Dribnytsya and a Russian opponent about the nature of the ethnos and pre-modern identity. Key theses: an ethnos is not a genetic or biological but a social community, formed out of members of different haplogroups and peoples through a shared self-consciousness and self-designation; before the early modern period (roughly before the 16th–17th centuries) people defined themselves not ethnically but geographically, by occupation, and by family descent; after the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 the West of Europe undertakes the building of nation-states, while the East remains a sphere of influence of great empires, and a mass national consciousness emerges only in the era of modernization (the mid-19th century). A source for the article on the formation of pre-modern identity.