83-100 p.

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doi.org: https://doi.org/10.22378/he.2026-11-1.83-100
EDN: https://elibrary.ru/RTGGOM

Abstract. The article presents a philosophical and methodological analysis of the crisis in contemporary studies of the ethnic phenomenon, with the purpose to advance towards the development of a new descriptive language. It demonstrates that the key reason for the theoretical dead end in ethnology is not a lack of empirical data but the inheritance of an outdated Aristotelian ontology and classical category theory. These foundations underlie the European scientific paradigm and manifest in both primordialism and constructivism. The author draws on both philosophical critique and the modern findings of cognitive science, which have shown that human thinking operates not through rigid categories with clear boundaries but through prototypes and metaphors. It is argued that these insights from cognitive research should be applied not only to everyday knowledge but also to the epistemology of scientific knowledge. To form a new vision, it is possible to use new realism concepts proposed within the ontological turn, which are consistent with cognitive research data. Within the described ontological model, the cultural-historical layer of being is singled out, where concepts exist intersubjectively as “condensations of meaning” extracted from practice. This approach allows for overcoming the subject-object dualism. In this paradigm, “ethnos” is neither an objective essence nor an arbitrary construct but an objective phenomenon within the reality of culture. Overcoming the crisis in describing the ethnic phenomenon requires not the accumulation of facts but a radical restructuring of the epistemology and ontology of the social sciences. Only such a turn will allow for the adequate description of systemic and meaningful realities without succumbing to either hypostatisation or relativistic constructivism.

Keywords: ethnic phenomenon; category; objectivism; epistemology; reality; ontological turn

For citation: Vasileva O.V. (2026) The descriptive language for the ethnic phenomenon: the turn from empiricism to the reconsideration of ontology. Istoricheskaya etnologiya [Historical Ethnology]. Vol. 11. No. 1: 83–100. https://doi.org/10.22378/he.2026-11-1.83-100 (In Russ.)

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About the author: Olga V. Vasileva, Cand. Sc. (Political Science), Senior Researcher, Institute for Humanities Research and Indigenous Studies of the North of Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (1 Petrovskiy St., Yakutsk 677027, Russian Federation); https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9992-4163; e-mail: Ovasileva.igi@mail.ru

Received 24.10.2025 Revised 08.12.2025   Accepted for publication 22.12.2025

Published Online 02.03.2026