The genus and the category of configuration spaces

In this paper configuration spaces of smooth manifolds are considered. The accent is made on actions of certain groups (mostly $p$-tori) on this spaces by permuting their points. For such spaces the cohomological index, the genus in the sense of Krasnosel'skii-Schwarz, and the equivariant Lyusternik-Schnirelmann category are estimated from below, and some corollaries for functions on configuration spaces are deduced.