Russian experience in building the materialist concept of ethnos and the prospect of its philosophical

In the second half of the 20th century, Soviet ethnography, built on materialistic foundations, encountered difficulties in defining an ethnos. Traditionally understanding it as a combination of various kinds of social communities (economic, territorial, linguistic, cultural, mental), it could not explain the discrepancies in their boundaries and identify their ethnic content as such. These difficulties were caused, first of all, by the heuristic limitations of the prevailing abstract-universal dialectical-materialist theory, capable of grasping in development only the general, neglecting the entire variety of the special and the individual. Ethnos is a concrete phenomenon, representing a unity of common, special, and individual aspects of social reality. The definition of its essence is possible only with the deepening of materialist theory, the transition to concrete-universal dialectic, which describes in development both the general and the compressed, generalized form of the entire diversity of the special and the individual. The most promising version of this deepening may be seen in the definition of ethnicity based on the dialectic of the generic and individual human essence. Given this essence, an ethnos can be defined as a separate society that produces itself as humanity for itself and others. This definition allows us to present ethnos as a unity of non-coinciding aspects of social life (various social communities) manifested in the unity of the main development trends (differentiation and internationalization) aimed at the production of common cultural values.