MENTALITY AS ONE OF THE MOST
SIGNIFICANT ATTRIBUTES OF NATION:
HISTORICAL AND METODOLOGICAL
ASPECTS
Liliya Radikovna Sakaeva
Kazan Federal University, Institute of International Relations.
Irina Germanovna Kondrateva
Kazan Federal University, Institute of International Relations.
Marat Aidarovich Yahin
Kazan Federal University, Institute of International Relations.
Evgeniya Vladimirovna Kuznetsova
University of Management “TISBI”
E-mail: liliyasakaeva@rambler.ru
Recepción: 05/08/2019 Aceptación: 09/09/2019 Publicación: 23/10/2019
Citación sugerida:
Sakaeva, L.R., Kondrateva, I.G., Yahin, M.A. y Kuznetsova, E.V. (2019). Mentality as
one of the most signicant attributes of nation: historical and metodological aspects. 3C
TIC. Cuadernos de desarrollo aplicados a las TIC. Edición Especial, Octubre 2019, 30-43. doi:
https://doi.org/10.17993/3ctic.2019.83-2.30-43
Suggested citation:
Sakaeva, L.R., Kondrateva, I.G., Yahin, M.A. & Kuznetsova, E.V. (2019). Mentality as
one of the most signicant attributes of nation: historical and metodological aspects.
3C TIC. Cuadernos de desarrollo aplicados a las TIC. Special Issue, October 2019, 30-43. doi:
https://doi.org/10.17993/3ctic.2019.83-2.30-43
3C TIC. Cuadernos de desarrollo aplicados a las TIC. ISSN: 2254-6529
32
ABSTRACT
The authors prove their thinking as the most important issue for any nation in
their writing. Scholars have not reached any agreement on the nature of matter,
nature, and personality. It deals with these issues. Every person in a community
has a part of a place in the community (a class, a church community, an ethnicity,
a state, etc.). That comes from a friend or foe that shows an ancient dichotomy.
In a national entity, there is always a prevailing stable thing We call it mentality. A
popular individuality cannot be qualied by sole property but by social trait, why.
And today, in the visage of a date of the procedure of globalization integration,
it is signicant to citation this reality.
KEYWORDS
Language, Mentality, Nations, Tatar, Greek, Character, Community, Culture,
Archetype, Globalization.
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1. INTRODUCTION
Ethnocultural and ethnonational revival of self-consciousness of population
in the secondary mid of the 20th centenary is one of the main features of
the development of mankind at the present stage. This is due to the subject’s
desire to identify himself as a part of a social community adequately to form
his identity in modern conditions complicated by processes of globalization and
integration. Any social community, whether ethnic, cultural, religious or linguistic
has a complicated structure and complex content dened by the history of its
development and interaction. The nature of one or another social community
depends on the nature of the identity of its agents (Kalegina et al., 2015; Kashisaz
& Mobarak, 2018). Social communities change from time to time, their earliest
type is tribes. Tribes originally consisted of several social “cells” connected with
blood ties. Nowadays the term “tribe” represents ethnic groups on dierent levels
of social, economic and cultural development. Some of these tribes are small
(include hundreds of people), others are more numerous (number thousands,
tens of thousands). Now only nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples have features
of tribal organization. Gradually, the communal operation decayed, tribes united
in unions, such as the League of the Iroquois in North America or Tatar-Mongols
in Eurasia, they replaced blood links and formed a new type of ethno-social
community – peoples (Baykalova et al, 2018; Kheirabadi & Mirzaei, 2019).
The rst peoples were formed in the slave era. There were ancient Egyptians,
ancient Greeks and Romans. Later drevlyane, krivichi, vyatichi formed ancient
Russian people. As ethnic processes taking place during the whole period of
existence of humanity, are quite complicated and varied, there is nothing
surprising in the fact that many scientists appeal to their investigation. With the
beginning of the formation of states a new type of ethno-social collectivity -
nation - begins to form itself. Nation as a product of era of modern times has
become a completely new form of social community. Understanding of nation in
dierent countries has been always dierent. In France, nation is a state, part of
the civilization and it’s distributed by urban bourgeois values. In Germany, nation
is a community united by language and culture. In England the notion of nation
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relates to the notion of Anglican Church”. In the 16th century, the national
consciousness had bright religious overtones when the Pope seemed to be the
enemy of the nation. Another feature of the national consciousness of Britons is
imperialism, formed due to the large number of British colonies. We can agree
here that era of worldwide victory of capitalism over feudalism was associated
with national movements. The formation of national states is the tendency of any
national movement.
2. METHODS
As the history of nations is complex and controversial, the concepts of nation,
ethnos, mentality are also complex and controversial, and the processes of
globalization and integration make the problem of national identity serve as a
key in dening of identity. Today, most oppositions in the reality of our people’s
social lives turn into a lack of awareness of social history, a misunderstanding
of their conscious and subconscious ways that is usually hidden in the ethnic
mindset of society. The dierence between one nation and another lies in their
thinking. This characteristic is understood from the generality of personality
traits and behavioral traits. Philosophical research in society reveals many ways
to teach and dierentiate between clear principles and analysis, which in our
view is the goal of philosophy in the unied theoretical analysis of the nature
of thinking. We have said before that there is no dierence knowledge and the
nature of national personality from the point of view of scientists, but through
various studies we address the problem of national personality and the cultural
and historical signicance of subjectivity. Due to the dierent approaches in the
historical process we use the following historical and systematic comparative
method. At the same time, the systematic approach helps to analyze the problem
from dierent perspectives.
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3. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
We must believe that the inner properties of dierent nations are not the same,
and simply because of the old dichotomy (enemy, friend) this happens in dierent
nations and people. Even in those primeval times, there were many descriptions of
the way of life, personality traits and moral values of dierent nations. In ancient
times, however, knowledge of the individual traits of each nation was studied in a
descriptive, stored fashion, with only a practical focus, but has changed over time.
At that time, the sciences were growing rapidly, leading to a comparative study
of nations (history, geography, anthropology and linguistics), a profound and
complete inference of acquired ethnological information. A modern theoretical
model emerges that focuses on learning the facts about human behavior, but
there are numerous variations in the activity of the masses of nations: for the
rst time they have made decisions about the historical destiny of their lands. In
addition, the process of the creation of the European nations was accelerated.
Since then, all these issues have prompted dierences of opinion between dierent
ethnicities to shift the issue of unpleasant interest and scientic analysis to many
scholars. In the course of the twentieth century, educational questions about the
character of a nation, its subjectivity, and the form of their historic substantiation
are transforming into a research linking a national mind set and nature. Gimilf
thinks that a national plural character is no more than a legend.
According to Gimilf in Year 5, while preserving the ethnological phase sequence
for each new era, the personality traits of each nation always change according
to a real situation, so a national character should not be regarded as a sustainable
and liberal learning. A Gimblef illustrator cites the moving forces of a Russian
national popular character, traits that have been traced back to dierent historical
periods. In his work, Tromov calls this methodological relativism. It shows
Russian idea, roots, nature, and social cultural revelations, so the explanation of
the national character means a period of historical sways, but the durability of
some traits is declined. Some prevailing exegesis of the complexity of national
character and subjectivity in modern scientic literature lead to the form of
research studies.
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The new scientic literature of the national personality is described as follows:
A. Psychological attribute that exists in all peoples of one nation that makes
the dierence between each person and another.
B. Pack of psychological characters that most people in that country have.
C. A kind of character which is indicates arbitrary, classical for the people.
D. Generic traits of conducts and mentality, which typescripts diverge from a
countrywide art.
E. A preferable method of intelligent, which is articulated in structures of a
countrywide character.
F. A set of values, standards, inducement which regulates the lifestyle of states.
Such explanations imitate two kinds of organizational sets in deance of a state
personality, which are ethno psychological and ethno cultural. Both of types are
subjected to a realistic reproach for its narrow-mindedness. From the point of
ethno-psychologists a countrywide character is a historically industrialized set of
constant psychological behaviors of executives for other ethnic clusters, which
regulates their usual routine in attitude to a social medium, external things and
to its and other ethnic communities. A national character is described by the
totality of the characteristics and traits of a community whose only character is in
its culture. In the works of the largest American sociology of Russian character,
to understand a national character, the ethnic psychological approach has been
heavily criticized. Sorokin paid attention to the secondary choice of individual and
unique characteristics. they are not undistinguishable to characteristic landscapes
of a prepared group and vice versa (Sorokin, 2010; Hasbullah & Wibawa, 2017;
Eslami & Ahmadi, 2019).
Sorokin (2010) thought that attitude to a personality and nation is an individual
case of a single and general dialectic, individual and origin. Certainly, a person
has traits, which characterize the nation overall. Of a great number of individuals
have specic national character traits.
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Fromm (1989) tried to understand a dynamic nature of a national character, its
relationship with characteristics of a socio-cultural existence in his works. He
explained many changes in a social transformation through discovery of a social
potential of a national character. Particularly, he used the concept of a national
character in a process of understanding the reasons of Nazism coming to a
power in Germany. From his point of view, for German nation is inherent such
qualities as love to a strong and hatred to a weak, limitation, stinginess in feelings
and moneys. These qualities have formed that «social and human foundations»,
which became a favorable condition to an increase position of Nazism. But
national character cannot be only reduced to the ways of behavior; it’s a complex,
common mechanism of a nation adaptation to one or another natural, social
condition of its existence.
Many scientists point out that a national character is a “set of some traits of
a spiritual character of a nation, which appears in its own traditional forms
of a behavior and the perception of the environment” (Bloom, 1993). In the
interpretation of Boas (1930), a national character is a common and personal
elements and structures of any cultural traditions, which provide common or (its
dominant) forms of a worldview, behavior and mentality. A national character
is the most complex socio-cultural phenomenon, which is developed in dierent
kinds of cultural activities. But for the last ten years, the term a “national character
“is substituted for “mentality” (Boas, 1930). Representatives of a historical school
in France have made a signicant contribution to the research of mentality
category. Jacques Le Go distinguishes two kinds of reality as a material reality
and the idea of this reality (mentality). Mentality is an independent and very
important part of a historical process, but it is interpreted ambiguously: as a
group view and manners; as modes of thought and sensation; as ethical codes
and symbols.
For Gurevich (1999) mentality is a “live, changeable and for all that a detecting
stable constants of life directions and manners, which depends on deep zones,
inherent in that community and cultural traditions”. Mentality reects and
realizes the picture of the nation’s world, inherited from the previous generation
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and its life aspects which underlie them. The variety of mentality is a national
mentality, original, modern equivalent of the term “soul of nation”. In social
philosophy there is a term «national mentality», as well as the terms “soul of
nation”, “national spirit”, they are synonymic and used for description of cognate
to its own inner world of spiritual and social aspects of ethnos and nations’ life.
4. SUMMARY
The analysis that we have made, let us draw a conclusion that the concept of
mentality is close to its meaning as an archetype and ideology. By comparing
mentality and archetype, it should be pointed out what have in common is that
they represent a group idea of people, an unconscious level of conscience. But
archetypes, inherited by people from their ancestors are all same of individuals
and social groups. Mentality is more dynamic and has a dierentiated character.
Like ideology, mentality relates to the interests of special social groups and has
an inuence on conceptualization of events of a political, economic and socio-
cultural character. But if in ideology, the social community realizes its interests and
can formulate them as a theoretical contraction, but mentality is an unconscious
level of a spiritual life and cannot be entirely expressed in rationally theoretical
forms.
Dierent determinants can be pointed out during interpretation. Naturocentrism
orientations appear in exaggeration of natural climatic causes in the formation
of a mentality. For example, the theory of C. Montesquieu can be related to it;
who is a representative of the geographical determinism about a decisive climate
inuence on people’s character or O. Bauer’s views on an inherited mechanism
of essence of a nation. Theocentrism is in an acceptance of a dominant role of
a religion. Chaadaev (2014) explains some traits, which are inherent in Russian
nation as a (submission, incapacity to persistence, indierence to kindness and evil,
truth and lie) by the inuence of Orthodoxy. Sociocentrism overemphasizes socio-
economic determinants in formation of the mentality. There is a methodological
basis of this approach in Marxism. As regard this, Engels (1955) writes that English
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workers and bourgeoisie was completely dierent people. Anthropocentrism
notes that there is a meaning of upbringing in the understanding of a mentality.
E. Erikson calls Russian soul as «a twisted soul». He notices that in Russia a tight
child diapering relates to an unconscious need to convey the feeling of “a tight
hand” (Erikson, 2009).
5. CONCLUSIONS
Man as a person always develops under a powerful inuence of many social
groups, in which he is a part of it and who takes part in achievement of his “inner
self ”. Sigmund Freud pointed out several times, that every person is a component
part of some social community. He and some other scientists noted that every
person is a part of a class, church’s community, ethnos, state, etc. (Freuds, 2011).
In the process of socialization, a person forms socio-cultural (including ethno-
national) norms, importance and values, as a result of it he gains a national identity,
allowing him to consider as a bearer of a certain national mentality. Mentality
is a dominant constant of a national existence, and today, against a background
of globalization integration processes, it’s important to dene correctly mental
traits each of nations and determine the reasons, that have caused specic traits
to avoid possible cross-cultural conicts. We should remember that the mentality
of each nation is a unique and there are no good and bad nations. According
to conditions, the same mental nature can be strong, weak and weak points of
ethnos conscience. A modern socio-cultural situation makes its demands to learn
the mentality issues, and today it’s very important how a mental trait or set of
traits can dene behavior of people and have an inuence on acts its separate
representatives, what is role of the mentality of an ethno- national community in
its today’s interaction with other ethno- national communities.
6. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The work is performed according to the Russian Government Program of
Competitive Growth of Kazan Federal University.
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