The concept of the ethnic identity

Currently the ethnic revival is considered as one of the main features of mankind’s development.

«Individuals and entire nations show interest in their roots in a variety of forms: from attempts to revive ancient customs and rituals, folklorization of professional culture, searches for a «mysterious people’s soul» to the desire to create or restore their national statehood» [32, p. 7].

Awareness of one's belonging to a certain nation, searching its features  become of great importance nowadays and have a serious impact on people’s relations (from interpersonal to interstate). All this leads to the need to study the psychological aspect of the ethnic factor.

The ethnic identity is the result of an emotional-cognitive process of awareness of the ethnicity, identification by an individual with his ethnic group’s representatives and isolation from other ethnic groups, as well as a deeply personally significant experience of his ethnicity. The concept of the ethnic identity is not equivalent to the concepts of the «ethnicity», ethnic self-awareness, «ethnic identity», «ethnic identification».

The ethnicity is a category attributed by society based on objective criteria, as for the  «ethnic identity» is the result of self-categorization achieved by an individual as a result of constructing an image of the world around him and his place in it» [32, p. 240]. But sometimes the true ethnic identity of a person may not coincide with the officially claimed or attributed ethnicity.

The ethnic identity is not identical to the ethnic self-awareness, since it is not limited to the awareness of the ethnicity, because  contains a layer of the ethnic unconscious (V.S. Lurie, G.U. Soldatova, A.V. Sukharev, etc.), and also because, according to T.G. Stefanenko, the emotional value  significance attached by a person to his ethnicity.

The ethnic identity is an integral part of a person's social identity, a psychological category that refers to the awareness of one's belonging to a certain ethnic community. The ethnic identity includes not only the identification by the individual of himself as a representative of his ethnic group, but, above all, a deeply significant experience of this belonging, as one of the most important components in the system of ideas of the individual about himself.

Social identity is «that part of the individual's self-concept that arises from the awareness of one's membership in a social group (or groups) along with the value and emotional significance attached to this membership» [34, p. 255]. Broadly speaking, social identity is the result of the process of comparing one's group with other social communities». [34, p. 239]. However, one should not consider the ethnic identity solely as the result of a single cognitive process of identification/differentiation.

The ethnic identity is the result of the cognitive-emotional process of an individual’s self-determination in the social space in relation to many ethnic groups. This is not only awareness, but also evaluation, the experience of one's belonging to an ethnic group.

According to T.G. Stefanenko, the meaning of this concept best reflects the term experience, which was used by prominent Russian thinkers G. G. Shpet  and L. S. Vygotsky in their conceptual constructions.

Thus, Shpet introduces the concept of collective experiences, not reducing them only to emotions or only to cognitions [35, p. 231]. At another level of psychological analysis, the concept of experience was proposed by Vygotsky, who considered it as a unit for studying personality in the environment.

Both scholars give similar definitions: for example, for Shpet, collective experiences are an attitude towards the products of culture of its members, while for Vygotsky, experience is «... the inner attitude of a child as a person to this or that moment of reality» [36, p. 382].

Therefore, the ethnic identity of an individual should be considered not only from the point of view of his awareness of belonging to an ethnic group, but also as a category located at the junction of the individual and the situation in the broadest sense of the word. That is why it is fruitful to consider the ethnic identity as an experience of relations between the self and the ethnic environment - one's identity with an ethnic community and separation from others.