Dmitri Bondarenko
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| Dmitri Bondarenko | |
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| Born | 1968 Moscow, Russia |
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| Residence |  Russia |
| Nationality | Russia |
| Fields | Theory of cultural evolution, political anthropology, African Studies |
| Institutions | Institute for African Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences; Russian State University for the Humanities |
| Alma mater | Moscow State University |
| Known for | contributions to theory of cultural evolution, African Studies |
Dmitri Bondarenko (born 1968 in Moscow) is a Russian anthropologist, historian, and africanist. He is the Chair of the Center of History and Cultural Anthropology of the Institute for African Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, Vice-Director of this institute, Professor of the Center of Social Anthropology, Russian State University for the Humanities, Senior Research Fellow of the Department of Political and Ethnic Anthropology, Institute for Innovative Education Strategies, a co-editor of the Social Evolution & History journal, and the Chairperson of the Africanist Network of the European Association of Social Anthropologists. He was a Visiting Scholar with the Program of African Studies, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA (1993 - 1994), Max Planck Institute of History, Goettingen, Germany (2003, 2006), and Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris, France (2005). He has conducted field research in a number of African countries (particularly, Tanzania and Nigeria) and in Russia, has read lectures at universities of the USA, Egypt, Tanzania, Slovenia, and Angola.
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[edit] Education
Bondarenko graduated with the M.A. degree in 1990 from the Moscow State University, Department of Ethnography, School of History. He completed his Ph.D. in 1993 from Russian Academy of Sciences. He also holds Doctor of Sciences degree (2000) from the Russian Academy of Sciences.
[edit] Research Interests
Theory of cultural evolution, political anthropology, pre-industrial societies, intercultural interaction in contemporary world (ethnic, racial, and religious aspects), culture and history of Africa south of the Sahara. He has introduced (together with Leonid Grinin and Andrey Korotayev) the notion of homoarchy to be coupled with the one of heterarchy, noting that the heterarchy (defined as "the relation of elements to one another when they are unranked or when they possess the potential for being ranked in a number of different ways") is not the opposite of any hierarchy all together, but is rather the opposite of "homoarchy", defined as "the relation of elements to one another when they are rigidly ranked one way only, and thus possess no (or not more than very limited) potential for being unranked or ranked in another or a number of different ways at least without cardinal reshaping of the whole socio-political order". Basing primarily on the precolonial Benin Kingdom evidence, he has elaborated the conception of "megacommunity" as a specific type of the non-state supercomplex society, integration of a supercomplex (exceeding the complex chiefdom level) society on community (and hence non-state) basis being its main distinctive feature.
[edit] Publications
Bondarenko has authored 5 monographs and more than 200 other scholarly publications, including 2 monographs in English:
- A Popular History of Benin. The Rise and Fall of a Mighty Forest Kingdom. Frankfurt am Main etc.: Peter Lang, 2003 (with P.M. Roese).
- Homoarchy as a Principle of Culture's Organization. The 13th-19th Centuries Benin Kingdom as a Non-State Supercomplex Society. Moscow: URSS, 2006.
Among his more important articles in English are:
- Homoarchy as a Principle of Sociopolitical Organization: An Introduction. (Anthropos. 2007. Vol. 102, № 1. P. 187–199)
- What Is There in a Word? Heterarchy, Homoarchy and the Difference in Understanding Complexity in the Social Sciences and Complexity Studies (K.A. Richardson and P. Cilliers, eds. Explorations in Complexity Thinking: Pre-Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Complexity and Philosophy. Mansfield, MA: ISCE Publishing, 2007)
- Ethnographic Atlas XXXI: Peoples of Easternmost Eurasia (Ethnology. 2005. Vol. 44, No 3. P. 261–289 (with A. Kazankov, D. Khaltourina, and A. Korotayev)
- A Homoarchic Alternative to the Homoarchic State: Benin Kingdom of the 13th - 19th Centuries. Social Evolution & History. 2005. Vol. 4, No 2. P. 18-88.
- The “Fruit of Enlightenment”: Education, Politics, and Muslim-Christian Relations in Contemporary Tanzania (Islam and Muslim-Christian Relations. 2004. Vol. 15, No 4. P. 443-468)
- A Historical-anthropological Look at Some Sociopolitical Problems of Second and Third World Countries (M. Gammer, ed., Community, Identity and the State. Comparing Africa, Eurasia, Latin America and the Middle East. London – New York: Routledge, 2004. P. 14-41, with A. Korotayev)
- Advent of the Second (Oba) Dynasty: Another Assessment of a Benin History Key-Point (History in Africa. 2003. Vol. 30. P. 63-85)
- “Early State” in Cross-Cultural Perspective: A Statistical Reanalysis of Henri J. M. Claessen’s Database (Cross-Cultural Research. 2003. Vol. 37, № 2. P. 105-132, with A.V. Korotayev)
- In Search of a New Academic Profile: Teaching Anthropology in Contemporary Russia (D. Drackle, I.R. Edgar, T.K. Schippers, eds., Learning Fields. Vol. 1. Educational Histories of European Social Anthropology. New York; Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2003. P. 230-246, with A.V. Korotayev)
