Kuz'min S.B., Dan'ko L.V. Paleoecological Models of Ethnogenesis

Abstract: The subject of this study is the interrelation between ethnic communities and their surrounding natural environment during the process of ethnogenisis. The specific research object is the paleoecological models of ethnogenisis on the model territory of the Baikal and Olkhonsky region. The author examines in detail such aspects as the traditional adaptive natural resource management, the ties of domestic technologies and culture with changes in natural habitat and climate, and an ethnic group's passionary energetic renewal. Particular attention is paid to the synergetic modelling of ethnonatural systems in order to reveal the particularities that cannot be identified through the standard methods of ethnology, geography, history, anthropology, and ecology. The author uses the methodological approach of the general theory of systems, synergetic modelling, systematic-statistical, historical-genetical, ethnosociocultural, comparative-geographical, and other methods. The study's novelty lies in its use of the general theory of systems for the paleoecological modelling of ethnonatural interactions, which resulted in the obtainment of original information. Also, on the basis of this modelling, the author describes in detail the history of the Baikal region's settlement. The modelling of ethnonatural systems depends on the theory of constructing models of the past, on the examination of societies and cultures from different historical periods in their dynamic development, on space and time conjugation, on revealing their ties with environmental conditions, and on the evolution and dynamics of the surrounding natural environment. The posed questions and derived results will help to stimulate regional studies of the historical experience of man interacting with nature. The historical experience of ethnonatural relations and their paleoecological models allow us to recognise the most important moments for an economic territorial and landscape planning in the region today. Its subsequent execution will allow to identify and substantiate the functioning mechanisms of sustainable ethnonatural systems, which will serve as a basis for the development and approbation of promising strategies in natural resource management in the administrative units of the Russian Federation. It will also ensure cohesion, orderliness and subordination in all the administrative-territorial, social-economic and political structures of society.

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