The Traditional System of Inter-Social Interactions in the Central Caucasus in the XVI–XVIII centuries: Problems of Conceptualizing

The article is intended to discuss the experience of conceptualizing the traditional system of inter-social interactions in the Central Caucasus in the social and scientific thought of Russia and the region from the late 18th to the early 20th century. Determined that in the late 18th – early 19th century, the interpretation of the system of inter-social interactions in the region was included in the general geographical paradigm of cognition of the Caucasus informed by the enlightenment world vision. In the first half of the 19th century, a kind of political-ethnographic paradigm of regional studies emerged represented by extensive literature. In the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries a kind of local discursive space arose in which the discussion of the estate and land issues turned out to be closely connected with the interpretation of the nature of inter-social interactions on Central Caucasus.
Contemporary historiography explicitly or implicitly places the social interactions of the owners and societies of the region in an interethnic and/or ethnopolitical context. A significantly greater potential for generalization is carried by a historical narrative based on source data, reconstructing the course of events, taking into account all the facts of the functioning of the traditional system of intersocial interactions. It is concluded that the concept capable of expressing the most general characteristic of the system of inter-social interactions in the Central Caucasus during the 16th–18th centuries is “order”. This less strict concept contains in itself the variety of forms of inter-social interactions in the space of the region and their evolution in time under the influence of mainly external factors.