Djinn in Turkish and Tatar Culture: The Invisible Neighborhood

The jinn as a mythological character, whose roots go back to the Muslim tradition, is widely spread in the culture of the peoples professing Islam, and does not lose its relevance to this day. This article examines the models of the relationship between jinn and humans in Turkish and Tatar culture in the aspect of the neighborhood category. Main tasks: to summarize the available representative material about jinn in Turkish and Tatar folklore, to compare a set of ideas about the main characteristics of the jinn in both cultures, to consider the practice of relationships between jinn and humans. As a result of the conducted research, it was revealed that the models of relationships between representatives of people and their invisible neighbors in Turkish and Tatar culture are largely based on similar semantic elements: jinns are omnipresent, easily violate borders and penetrate into the human world, harm people, which leads to the emergence of a system of prohibitions and ritual practices that echo sociocultural models of communication in society. However, the degree of regulation of behavior between djinn and humans has its own national specifics in each culture under consideration.