Geographical and economic factors as the conditions of «immunity» in the life of the peoples of the North Сaucasus in the first half of the 19th century

The geographical environment in all its diversity often determined the forms of social existence of the North Caucasus highlanders in the first half of the 19th century. Society and landscape were closely intertwined through a long practice of interaction and were inherited from generation to generation through the transmission of tradition. This circumstance largely determined the persistent rejection of all other variants of sociocultural paradigms that invaded the living space of the mountaineers of the North Caucasus.

The connection of mountain societies with the landscape environment was also determined by the role that local landscapes played in mountain everyday life, being, for example, indispensable participants in local sacred cults.

The foreign cultural agents that were brought in destroyed the previously established harmony in the interactions of mountain societies with their geographical environment, and therefore were rejected by them, since they attempted to cancel the very foundations of mountain traditional existence. Ethnic Caucasian societies did not actively accept foreign innovations that disrupted the course of their usual life and contradicted their mentality.

The removal of the existing prohibitions, which were various mechanisms of self-defense in the Caucasian environment, was hindered by the very environment of their habitat, its natural foundations, the destruction or abandonment of which led to the degradation of not only the environment itself, but the mountain societies associated with it.

Defending their identity, the mountain peoples realized using both real and ritual actions. Modifications associated, for example, with a change in the nature and purpose of labor, which went beyond the framework of a pre- existing tradition, could have devastating consequences, which, if introduced into mountain life, were the result of insurmountable external influence.

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