Зараждане на политическата етнология/антропология
The Genesis of Political Ethnology/Anthropology

Summary/Abstract: The author traces the origins of a subsidiary discipline in ethnology and anthropology which, in the West, is known as political anthropology while in the countries of the former Soviet block it is better known aspotestas political ethnology. The first contributions to this new field were made in the USA as early as the latter half of the 19th century by some representatives of the American school of linear evolutionism: L.H. Morgan, H.S. Maine, W. MacLeod and others. Despite their continuous effort to define the new subdiscipline of "science of politics", the ethnologists and the anthropologists-politists (in the words of G. Balandier) failed to do so until the 1940s. It was in 1940 that E. Evans-Pritchard and M. Fortes - both of them representing the English school of social anthropology and, more specifically, the British functionalism - succeeded in defining the new field. They are rightly considered to be the founders of this comparatively new discipline. For this reason, the author has cited, toward the end of the present article, passages from the works of the two scholars. The cited passages are borrowed from Evans-Pritchard's monograph The Nuer and his African Political Systems (co-authored with M. Fortes). The publication of these two works helped scholars define the subject of the new subdiscipline and, at the same time, gave an impetus to the further development of political anthropology by equipping it with research methods of its own.

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