Ktsoeva, Sultana G.
Kavkaz Forum. 2020. Issue 4.

Abstract:
The ethnic religion of the Ossetians is a difficult subject and a number of
reasons make its study complex. The relevance of its research is increasing every
day. Despite the fact that in the last decade it has been experiencing some revival,
the modern ethno-religious worldview of the Ossetians differs significantly from
the pre-revolutionary one, the aspects of which we can judge, in particular, thanks
to the array of narrative sources that record folk legends, traditions, travel logs
of travelers with descriptions of elements of traditional culture of the people.
Therefore, it is necessary to concretize the time period within which we study
the ethno-religious worldview. It is no less important to take into account the
social environment, since social and group differences (primarily, territorial and
population ones) determined the difference in religious worldview. We study the
religious ideas that existed among the mountainous part of the Ossetian ethnos in
the late 19th and early 20th centuries, since it was these people who were carriers
of what can be considered the quintessence of the traditional Ossetian religion.
The ethnic religion of Ossetians is undoubtedly original, which makes it
difficult for a researcher who logically needs to develop a unique research tool to
match the object under study. In this article, for the first time, the approbation
of the structural methodology of Claude Levi-Strauss is presented as the most
optimal for the study of traditional cultures, in particular, the religious culture of
the Ossetian highlanders during this period. This is the novelty of this study. Our
goal is to demonstrate how the Levi-Strauss method of structural anthropology
contributes to the search for scientific truth in the field of reconstruction of
aspects of religious worldview in traditional Ossetian society. To this end, within
the framework of the article, we solved a number of research problems, which,
in addition to stating the essence of the Levi-Strauss methodology, include the
search for structural universals within the traditional religion of the Ossetians and
their analysis by analogy with similar objects in other cultures.

Keywords: Claude Levi-Strauss, ethnic religion of Ossetians, structural anthropology, research methodology, approbation of the method of structural methodology

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