CONSTRUCTION OF THE CONCEPTS OF «ETHNIC THING», «ETHNIC OBJECT» AND «ETHNIC IMAGE» IN ETHNOPHILOSOPHY

Abstract

Categorization plays an important role in the everyday life of the ethnos, being the object of research of ethnophilosophy. Ethnophilosophy deals with the problem of categorization and the definition of patterns, which attribute the object “ethnic reality” to a certain category. Categorizing takes into account the objects that are grouped together and form the main category of “ethnic”. Inclusion of ethnophilosophical knowledge in culture involves the substantiation of its conceptual grounds, which is realized with the help of the ideas and principles of ethnology and philosophy; for example, the substantiation of the material status of ethnic experience and the objective principles of ethnic philosophizing, practical philosophy by reference to the principle of unity of the material and the ideal, the empirical and the theoretical. Based on the conceptual ideas of objectivism and primordialism, ethnophilosophy adheres to the position of the impossibility of the existence of a theory and constructs of ethnic consciousness in isolation from objective prior knowledge and its material foundations. Based on this assumption, the author connects the ethnic object, closest to the empirical and material ethnos in the hierarchy of the conceptual apparatus of ethnophilosophy, with the ideal, for example, ethnic image of the object or the ethnic as the most abstract of the concepts, including in its totality all the things, phenomena and constructs of the ethnos.