ИСТИНА

The paper deals with the analysis of the processes that follow the formation of an ethnic group, that is constructed in three discourses: legal, political and scientific. Legal discourse recognizes or does not recognize an ethnic group as an independent unit, eliminates “wrong” identities, separates “non-ethnic” identities from ethnic ones. Political discourse obligatory takes part in ethnic group formation as political benefits and political risks in formation of official lists of ethnic groups and official categories of ethnoses are always taken into account. Scientific discourse creates the categorization of languages and cultures. In what way this ethnicity construction mechanism works there will be considered in the paper on example of the Taz people, the Chinese-speaking ethnic group that lives in the Primorsky Kray of the Russian Federation. The history of the formation of this ethnic group reflects the milestones of the Russian national policy in the Far East, as well as the peculiarities of Russian-Chinese relations in different historical periods. The Taz people are still poorly investigated, it can be explained by the fact that officially statistics did not consider some ethnic groups of the Far East of Russia (ex. Negidals, Chuvans, Kamchadals, etc.), they were parts of the Udege people. Just in 2000 the Taz people first appeared in the official register of the indigenous peoples of the North of the Russian Federation as a separate ethnic minority group of Russia. The Taz people is an indigenous ethnic group of Primorsky Krai of the Russian Federation, formed in 1880th in the result of the mixation of the Udege and Nanai with the Manchus and Chinese seasonal workers in Russia. According to 2010 Russian population Census, there are 274 Taz people in Russia. The Taz language is diagnosed as language death case, there are only 2 elderly Taz speakers left nowadays in Russia.