Ethnology and sociology in the analysis of rural collectivities

Abstract

The article nas three main targets: 1) to try and reproduce the main theoretical directions in ethnology with reflex in the research about rural collectivities; 2) to try and place the relations between sociology and ethnology what implies the reference to the relationship they keep with history, both of them; 3) to think of a theoretical-techno-methodological strategy for the concrete analysis of the agro-peasant question supported by the objects of sociology and ethnology. One takes as a starting-point the affirmation that there is no fundamental difference between the methodology mainly used in the monographic studies of rural sociology and that existing as their principal feature in a large part of the ethnological analyses. As a matter of fact, the perspective traditionally adopted by ethnology in the analysis of «primitive» societies - which, after the surpassing of evolutionism, has privileged the concepts of function and structure - has been used, without sensible changes, as a prevailing support in the concrete analyses (institutionally designed as sociological) of «rural communities». The ethnologists themselves - from Evans-Pritchard up to Herskovits, including R. Redfield and E. Wolf - that have accepted this transposition either in principle declarations or in empirical research works. An appreciation of the legitimity of this practice depends, in the end, on the theoretical model one may adopt to caracterize the rural societies, a question that lies beyond the target of this article. Nevertheless this does not prevent the author from trying to place some principles, obstacles and omissions concerning what is the ethnological approach in the version more usually adopted in local studies of rural sociology.