ИСТИНА

The paper is devoted to the relationship between ethnic identity of the modern Mari population of the Mari-El Republic and religious consciousness.The author of the paper scrutinizes several aspects of the problem: 1) interrelation between the civil, ethnic, ethno-local and religious identities of the Mari pagans and syncretists; 2) the attitude of the "unbaptized" Mari people to the politics of religious transformations; 3) the role of ritual practices in the Mari traditional religion as repeaters of ethnicity. The paper is based on the field materials. collected in the Mari El Republic and Bashkortostan during 2019 - 2022.