Varshaver, E. (2026). How to “Make” Cognitive Turn in Ethnicity Research: Recording and Explaining of Ethnicity-Based Cultural Cognitive Schemas. Preprint. [in Russian]

The article presents a set of solutions for empirical research “after the cognitive turn” in ethnicity studies. To date, despite a significant implicit cognitivization of the field, the cognitive turn—understood as an explicit orientation toward integrating the methods and findings of the social sciences on the one hand and psychology/cognitive science on the other—has not been fully realized. Announced in the early 2000s by Rogers Brubaker, it has remained a declaration rather than becoming a research program, not least because tools and methods for empirical fieldwork have not been developed. The article first provides a historical-sociological reconstruction of the cognitivization of ethnicity studies. It then proposes, as a key empirical object, the concept of “ethnic cultural cognitive schema”, borrowed from contemporary cognitive sociology and adapted for ethnicity research. Drawing on studies conducted by the author between 2022 and 2026, the article demonstrates how ethnic schemas can be identified, described, and explained. It shows that ethnic schemas can be studied using classical interviews, elicitation methods, various types of associative tests, and other approaches, while the proposed explanatory models link schemas to different elements of social structure (primarily institutions). The conclusion outlines the limitations of the study and specifies what is required for further advancement within the framework of the cognitive turn.