The North Caucasus in Search of Identities: Historical and Sociological Discourse

Based on the content analysis of social networks, the article examines the structure and dynamics of identities (civil, ethnic and confessional) in the subjects of the North Caucasus Federal District. The modern identification structure is a system of multiple mechanisms that allow an individual to build his own identification matrix in the modern social space. The multiplicity of identification mechanisms poses to any society, however, as well as to any state, the intractable task of forming and defining the collective identity of community members, therefore, scientific analysis and systematization of the identification matrices of Russian society are relevant and justi-fied. The data obtained during the content analysis make it possible to fix the presence of a system of multi-layered identities among the North Caucasian respondents, among which ethnic, confessional or civil identity is just one of the components of the identity multilayering. All this indicates that against the background of the growth of ethnic and confessional self-awareness, the understanding of the “national” in the Caucasian worldview is becoming more complicated.