Cultural and legal subjectivity of the ethnic group: the historical and theoretical relationship between the concepts in the XIX century
The article on the example of the legislation and the scientific literature of the XIX century shows that ethnic subjective quality of an ethnos in the legal life and legislation are manifested with its specific historical characteristics. Being permanently a subject in the cultural sense, ethnos was not clearly marked with the properties of legal subject in all historical periods. At the same time, ethnic status, as well as the one of gender and age, for the XIX century should be regarded as descriptive, since the fact of the separation of legislative subjects for Russians and foreigners reveals the presence of specific rights and obligations correlated with their «natural origin». In the presence of ethno-political hierarchy inherent to Russia not to a greater extent than to other empires, legal personality of ethnic groups manifested latently, more often in the management practice than in the legislation, and syncreticly as the ethno-confessional subjectivity. This dissimilarity stemmed from the nature of a «symphony of power»: in order to maintain a stable rule of law, the Russian monarchy based on the principles of the Orthodox paternalism. It is in this way should be interpreted such an important concept for the legislator as «tolerance». The research is based on the method of Pierre Bourdieu, i.e. use of discursive meanings of terms in order to understand the stadiality of the process of creating a legal code of ethnic groups inhabiting the Russian Empire in the XIX century. Conventionally, there are two stages of formation of legal ethnic groups in the legislation of the XIX century. It is proved that the discursive legitimation of the ethnic legal personality through the maintenance and use of traditional public institutions of various ethnic groups, as well as through the recognition of customary legal systems of the peoples of Russia.