Ethnic psychology as a science

The development of human society was accompanied by the expansion of people's knowledge about the world, the accumulation of information about neighboring and distant peoples. Already in antiquity along with ethnographic observations, which were based on natural human curiosity, military, political and economic necessity, attempts were made to theoretically generalize ethnopsychological data.

The presence of psychological characteristics of the stock of nations was mentioned in the treatises of Caesar, Herodotus, Xenophon, Pliny, Strabo. Hippocrates tried to connect the peculiarities of national characters with differences in climate and geographical conditions of the territory of residence. Similar thoughts can be found in Montesquieu, who varied the notion of “people’s spirit” depending on the environment and climate in which people live. However, geographically similar countries — Canada and Russia, for example — are inhabited by representatives of completely different nations, and the “river” civilizations of Ni¬la and Yangtze differ so much from one another, like the island’s civilizations - Minoan, Japanese, Hellenic.

Despite the fact that the scientific approach to understanding the problem was formed only in the works of such classics of philosophy as Locke, Rousseau, Hegel, Herder, one of the first researchers in the field of ethnopsychology remains Guy Julius Tsezar, who wrote several books about the peculiarities of the behavior of different nations. So, “The morals of the Gauls” and “The morals of the Germans” have reached our time, in which Caesar not only describes the life of these peoples, but also tries to draw conclusions about the specifics of their character.

The creation of a special discipline - the psychology of the people - was proclaimed in 1860 by M. Latsarus and X. Steinthal, who interpreted the “national spirit” as a special, closed education, expressing the mental similarity of individuals belonging to a particular nation, as well as their self-consciousness. Its content was to be revealed through a comparative study of language, mythology, morality and culture.
From the second half of the XIX century, ethnopsychology began to study the problems of folk art in its most diverse manifestations. From this point on, such directions of ethnopsychology as:

• problems of folk art;
• problems of marriage and family among different nations (L. Morgan, V. Zombart, F. Engels);
• specifics of the law, the social system of different countries and peoples (V. Lipinsky, N. Kovalevsky).

In the 19th century, idealistic theories of the “national spirit” were widely used, according to which each people initially possessed certain spiritual qualities that once and for all determine their capabilities. These theories ideologically justified the historically established division of nations into dominant and subordinate. Once the inconsistency of these theories came to light, they were replaced by a biological interpretation of the national character, regarding it as something genetically determined and inherited. At the same time allowed the misuse of national characteristics with racial. In contrast to the socio-historical community that a nation is, a race is a natural-historical formation, and the individuals belonging to it are indeed distinguished by a relative community of genes.

These genetic differences are manifested not only in certain external signs (skin color, hair shape, etc.), but also in the peculiarities of the protec- tion of certain physiological processes, of course, within the limits of the human norm. On this basis, some scholars have argued that different races have genetically determined (and therefore fundamentally inevitable by upbringing) psychological characteristics. However, a careful study showed that the maintenance of mental processes, the specific direction of abilities, the structure of needs and interests, etc. depend not so much on biogenetic, but on social and cultural factors. Particularly heated debates were caused by the mental abilities of representatives of various ethnic groups, who played an important role in shaping the racist views of some foreign authors of the late 19th century.