From the EditorsThe Hybrid Nature of Pure Forms

Since ancient times, "purity" and "difference" have been the basic categories of social structuring. The very notion of difference implies a comparison of some clear types. Objects of comparison should be unambiguously "pure," whether it is gender, kinship, religion, legal estate, social class, race, or ideology. Modern social sciences, in principle, acknowledge the artificial nature of functionally one-sided and internally homogeneous objects. Over a hundred years ago, Max Weber coined the term "ideal type" in order to differentiate between categories of practice and categories of analysis, reality, and abstraction "formed by the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view… In its conceptual purity, this mental construct cannot be found empirically anywhere in reality. It is a utopia."¹ Nevertheless, the cult of pure forms dominates not just in everyday life and politics, but in scholarship too. In many societies, deconstruction of the archaic ideals of sexual, caste, or racial purity is still perceived as subversive, while the archetypes of "pure food" or "sacral territory" get new life thanks to ultramodern dietary and environmental doctrines. In social sciences, even today scholars need to argue that categories such as "nation," "empire," "identity," and "modernity" are but abstract ideal types, not real phenomena.² What changes is the attitude to "mixture." Whereas in the past this real state of things that is experienced and observed daily by everyone was perceived as a threat to the social order ("contamination" and "pollution") and tabooed, in recent decades we have observed a cautious normalization of "hybridity."³ Still, even among radical theoreticians and human rights activists the old cult of pure forms remains more popular. Today "pure forms" persist, for example, in simplified scenarios of emancipation, when gender or ethnocultural differences are perceived as a rigid (even if very broad) spectrum of identities.

This thematic issue of Ab Imperio, "The Cult of Pure Forms," is not aimed at deconstructing or, moreover, discrediting this influential type of social thinking. The essentialization of empire, nation, gender, and other categories of groupness has become a matter of personal political choice and belief that is no longer predetermined by the current state of epistemology of social sciences. The editors have found it more productive to focus this issue within the annual theme, "Rethinking Hybridity and Purity in a Global Perspective," on the problem of the various functions that the ideal of "pure forms" have performed over time.

The issue opens with Marina Mogilner's article, "Three Roads to Modernity at the Turn of the 'Jewish Century': Boasian Revolution, Imperial Revolution, and Bolshevik Revolution," which presents some key topics of her new book project. The title of the article refers to the main "ideal-typical" categories of chronology, groupness, and social processes: modernity (which is usually contrasted to the epoch of "traditional society"), Jews (clearly differentiating themselves from Gentiles), and revolution (as the direct opposite of evolution). Mogilner shows how these and related notions of "pure forms" are produced in the situation of the actual mixture and fragmentation (discreteness) of any society that imagines itself as a single community. At the turn of the twentieth century and especially during the interwar period, Jews served as an important litmus test for projects aimed at restoring pure forms (through unification and standardization) as part of modernizing mass societies. The "Boasian revolution" took place in the Progressive Era in the United States, in the context of rising anti-immigrant sentiment and panic about the "pollution" of American society by the influx of East Europeans. The study of Jewish immigrants by anthropologist Franz Boas in 1911 relativized the notion of race in order to rehabilitate the idea of America as a melting pot and prove that Jews could assimilate into a modern society. In the language of racial anthropology that was shaping the academic discourse on group purity and hierarchical inequality at that time, Boas upheld the values of complexity and hybridity as cornerstones of American modernity. In Eastern Europe and particularly in the Russian Empire during the inter-revolutionary period and in the early USSR, Boas's ideas and methods were used to prove the...