The problem of ethnocultural identity as a person’s idea of oneself, formed when a person realizes one’s own involvement in a particular ethnic group according to certain parameters of ethnogenesis: racial-biological (ancestral roots), climatic-geographical (historical territory) and sociocultural (the history of one’s people, ethnic symbols of culture and religion, etc.) – is directly related to the problem of studying cultural and historical features of individual countries and regions development in the context of a civilizational approach. The purpose of this work is a theoretical analysis of the civilizational approach, the possibility of its application in the study of the problem of young people’s ethnocultural identity formation based on folk traditions, customs and rituals. The source of the material was articles published in periodicals (Identities-Global Studies in Culture and Power, Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development, European Journal of Social Theory, etc., as well as publications of famous researchers (Vengerov A.B., Kornetov G.B., Panarin A.S., Toynbee A.J., Spengler, O., Huntington S.P., etc.). The following general scientific research methods are used to achieve the goal: analysis of scientific sources and synthesis of various theories and concepts on the research problem, their comparison, generalization of research results, identification of features of the civilizational approach in terms of studying possible ways of ethnocultural identity formation were used. The application of dialectical analysis of the designated problem allowed the authors to study ethnocultural identity phenomenon in the universal interrelation of philosophical, sociological and pedagogical sciences, to identify patterns and trends inherent in the process of ethnocultural identity formation, which combined all the versatile aspects into a single integrity and revealed on the basis of this a general holistic picture of the process of ethnocultural identity formation. Possible directions in the work on this phenomenon formation are identified: reliance on mankind’s cumulative experience, on the achievements of all sciences and culture in general; the study of ethnoculture and all its structural elements; the study of the world historical and pedagogical process in the center of which is a person who masters the culture created by previous generations and transforms this culture and oneself in the course of this development. The significance of the obtained results is that the civilizational approach allows, firstly, to carry out a retrospective analysis of the problem of young people’s ethnocultural identity formation based on folk traditions, customs and rituals in the context of the dynamics of the past, present and future; secondly, to justify the need to form young people’s ethnocultural identity formation based on folk traditions, customs and rituals as one of the significant components in the system of individual’s self-image; thirdly, to substantiate the possibility of using ethnoculture, the core of which are traditions, customs and rituals as the basic values of each nation, in the process of young people’s ethnocultural identity formation in modern sociocultural conditions.