Oriental Studies (May 2018)
The Mongolian Civilization: on the Scales of History
Abstract
The article is a summary of the report made at the Days of Institute of Oriental Studies (RAS) at Kalmyk State University on 26 April 2017. It deals with the issues and trends related to the topic of civilizational world order poorly understood in modern science. The paper analyzes the place assigned to nomadic peoples within the conceptions developed by N. Danilevsky, P. Sorokin, A. J. Toynbee and O. Spengler. According to N. Danilevsky, nomads of Innermost Asia are a long-extinct community that had once acted as a 'negative history maker'. P. Sorokin refutes the priority of microcategories for dividing humanity into monotypic social communities and stresses that the number of 'minor cultural systems is virtually unlimited'; enclosing the term 'civilization' in quotation marks he thus applies it to any communities, including disorganized populations, i.e. unlike Danilevsky with his theory of 'historical-cultural types', - attaches the term not only to 'positive history makers', but also to those referred to as 'negative' and 'passive'. As for A. J. Toynbee, he divides all civilizations into three types, the civilization of Innermost Asia being designated as a long-extinct civilization of Type Three (nomads) and further as that of Type Two (Far Eastern Christian civilization). So, he suggests that present-day inhabitants of Innermost Asia are just remnants of the past. And just like Danilevsky and Toynbee, Spengler considered the Mongolian vector to be long-obsolete. Thus, world order schemes established by classic researchers of civiliography do not mention the contemporary Mongolian civilization. The paper suggests that the classics of civiliography should be thoroughly revisited with due regard of the reshaped historical conditions, new experiences and knowledge accumuated by humanity. Nowadays when it necessary to evaluate a generalized image, activities, and mututal relations of diverse peoples, any attempts to maintain the idea of differences between nations by the criteria of 'cultural development' shall result in ethnic collisions The discovery of Mongolian civilization in the classical civilizational picture of the modern world liberated from nomadophobia by Pitirim Sorokin has actual value. It seems this can help the theorists of civiliography and geopolitics cope with the trend of combining the two incompatible notions - on the one hand, the concept of 'chosen' and 'exceptional' nations and, on the other hand, that of a diverse and multipolar world.
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