Part of the preparatory work for writing a generalizing history of Kabardino-Balkaria is the summing up of the scientific study of its key problems. This article is intended to discuss the experience of conceptualizing the traditional system of inter-social interactions in the Central Caucasus in the social and scientific thought of Russia and the region from the late 18th to the early 20th century. During this time, the contexts and texts in which the corresponding issues were interpreted have substantially changed. In the late 18th - early 19th century, the interpretation of the system of inter-social interactions in the region was included in the general geographical paradigm of cognition of the Caucasus informed by the enlightenment world vision. In the first half of the 19th century, a kind of political-ethnographic paradigm of regional studies emerged represented by extensive literature. In the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries, in the context of the integration of local societies into the judicial and administrative system, economic life and the estate structure of the empire, a kind of local discursive space arose in which the discussion of the estate and land issues turned out to be closely connected with the interpretation of the nature of inter-social interactions on Central Caucasus. A direct or indirect exchange of assessments and judgments was between the academic socio-historical approach, government reformism and enlightened representatives of local elites. The material considered in the article recalls the importance of historiographical and methodological reflection for scientific and historical knowledge. The fundamental problem for the historical study of the traditional system of inter-social interactions in the Central Caucasus is the problem of combining the categorical apparatus of socio-historical and ethno-historical approaches to the problem. A significant problem is the generalization of the totality of historical data on the system of inter-social relationships in the region's space, as well as on their reproduction and evolution over time. It seems that any unambiguous formula here will carry elements of simplification and subjectivity. These issues require further careful study at the theoretical and methodological level.