A lecture on ethnology: pre-modern identity, the 'city-states' of Rus', and the Charlemagne analogy (26.11.2021)

A lecture by Vitaliy Dribnytsya on ethnology about the formation of pre-modern identity in the lands of Rus’. Key theses: language and religion are not defining criteria of a people (the example of the Irish and the Scots); Rus’ of the 9th–13th centuries was a multi-tribal entity that, according to the concept of Igor Froyanov and Andrei Dvornichenko, consisted of separate “city-states”; the closest European analogue of Rus’ is the multi-tribal early-medieval empire of Charlemagne, whose inhabitants did not yet see themselves as “the French” or “the Germans.” A source for the article on the formation of pre-modern identity.