Reduction of ethnic nepotism to amoral familism: Once again on the defects of primordialist thinking

The article attempts to criticize the primordialist (sociobiological) approach to understanding ethnic conflicts. Despite the decline of academic attention towards such methodology in sociological and political ethnicity studies in the second half of the last century, the growing interest in the social sciences in evolutionary biology discoveries, cognitive science and genetics contributes to the renewal of previous discussions. Therefore, the search for additional heuristic resources by sociologists and political scientists to justify their autonomy and independence on the research path, for example, in the study of ethnic conflicts, remains relevant and significant. Next, we will select T. Vanhanen’s concept of ethnic nepotism as an example of the primordialist approach and consider its modern applications in the social sciences. Then we will introduce the concept of amoral familism by E. Banfield and discuss its usage in economics and sociology up to the present day, after which we will provide justification for the possibility of a comparative analysis of the two presented theoretical constructs in a general context. As a result, we will show a number of specific examples of interethnic interactions that cannot be interpreted in the spirit of T. Vanhanen’s primordialism and generally sociobiological reasoning about social processes and phenomena. Thus, a comparison of the concepts of ethnic nepotism and amoral familism as specific forms of individual’s rationalization and collective behavior using empirical (historical) material displays that these and other behavioral models are determined by qualitative factors and sociocultural conditions, more productively explained with the help of constructivist rather than primordialist methodologies.