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It is thoughtthat a dialog of civilizations will make it possible to draw up a common foundation for protecting human dignity on which the system of human rights protection can rely. Recognizing cultural diversity should not cast aspersions on the universal nature of human rights. On the other hand, there is an interrelationship between cultural values and universal human rights in different societies. In this sense, the thought expressed at one time by Secretary General of the Council of Europe Catherine Lalumiere is interesting: “Universality is not uniformity, and it can entirely tolerably be related to the fact that, depending on societies and cultures, special accents are placed more on some rights than on others. I would even say that if human rights want to be truly universal, they should be rooted in different cultures. Only under this condition will people, no matter where they live, be able to know and understand human rights, for they are capable of carrying this out only proceeding from their own culture.”16
For example, freedom of speech guarantees each person the right to freely express his/her own opinion. But whereas one culture believes that caricature is a form of freedom of speech, another does not accept that way of expressing one’s thoughts. Some accept single-sex marriages to be a component of personal life, others are against such marriages.
The experience of drawing up international covenants on human rights shows that consent can be reached regarding principles that are common for different cultures and religions, in so doing reaching a consensus on the contents of human rights. So it is not necessary for cultures to be opposed to each other, for in today’s world they are not self-contained in a specific space, but touch upon and influence each other.
The different problems of human rights can be resolved on the basis of human unity, which means on the principle of universality, while preserving national and cultural diversity.
16 C. Lalumiere, Conference mondiale sur les droits de I’homme, disciurs de Secretaire General du Conseil de L’Europe, Vienne, 14-25 juin, 1993, p. 3.
Lela YAKOBISHVILI-PIRALISHVILI
D.Sc. (Philos.), professor at the Academy of Arts of Tbilisi, head of the Caucasian Institute of Social Strategies Foundation
(Tbilisi, Georgia).
GLOBALIZATION MYTH AND TRADITIONAL CULTURE IN GEORGIA AND THE CAUCASUS
Abstract
T
he geocultural orientation of the Caucasus, and Georgia as its part, is growing more and more important in
the age of globalization. This process has already offered Caucasian geoculture new possibilities; the Caucasus has been given
the chance of becoming the only cultural transit region where many different cultures meet. Cultural diffusion will not be its only function: it stands a good chance of becoming a topos of the dialogue of cultures.
As part of the topos of the Georgian geoculture, each of the cultures becomes open and transparent. This global tendency has shifted the Georgian culture to con-
flict conditions: on the one hand, it is conserved, on the other, it is transit. This is the new reality of our culture. Indeed, all cultures operate under conflict conditions; this should alleviate our fears that our culture might lose its self-identity. Today the process of mastering globalization in the information sphere is underway. This is the culturological concept of the last decade of Georgian culture.
I n t r o d u c t i o n
Until recently the traditions of culturological studies never put the Caucasian region in the context of a topos with a competitive geocultural identity in relation to other cultures.
If a post-culture and its epoch lend themselves to any description, it can be put in a nutshell in the following way:
1. Transpolitical (territorial integration).
2. Transeconomic (common economic expanse; common equivalent of money).
3. Transaesthetic (relieved of national forms).
4. Transreligious (ecumenism).
5. Trans-scholarly (integrated information field and information age).
6. Transpersonal (here we can mention Stanislav Grof and his Beyond the Brain).
7. Transethical (cloning).
8. Transsexual.
This can hardly be described as a new paradigm of culture: it looks more like an antichronoto-pic description of culture’s proto-state (Epstein’s term).1 What terms can be used to describe Georgia’s contemporary culture in the context of the Caucasus and the global processes now underway in the world?
Georgia at the Geocultural Crossroads of Epochs
Culturological tradition, on the whole, never looked at the Caucasian region as a specific and self-identified geocultural topos in relation to other cultural regions. Its specific, eclectic, and far from uniform nature has not permitted it to fit, so far, into the scientifically determined limits of Eastern or Western civilizations. The following questions have not yet been answered:
■ What cultural orientation is typical of the Caucasus?
■ Can we speak of its unification into a single cultural field in the presence of its highly nonuniform fabric?
■ What are the prospects of the conserved Caucasian cultures in the planetary strategy of current global integration?
1 See: M. Epstein, De’but de sciecle, ili Otpost- kproto-. Manifest novogo veka, Aleteya, St. Petersburg, 2001.
THE CAUCASUS & GLOBALIZATION
Against the background of the social, political, economic, and cultural processes, the Caucasus, and Georgia as its part, will have to choose between the real prospects of integration and marginalization. It is highly important to compare the entire range of cultural information and to rely on our cultural experience to choose the least painless road toward integration and adaptation.
Potential subjects can be formulated in the following way within the framework of the formulated tasks:
1. Historical identity of Caucasian cultures and subcultures (the degree to which they are integrated into their own history).
2. Temporal and spatial orientations in Caucasian cultures.
3. Religious identity and the temporal-spatial continuum.
4. Ethnic identity and ethnic tolerance.
5. Traditional forms of gender stereotypes in Caucasian cultures.
6. Adaptation of the traditional forms of religious, ethnic, and gender identity in the Caucasus.
7. People’s diplomacy and identification of potential vectors of conflicts.
8. New forms and types of descriptions of the subjects of ethnos and culture in the culturological paradigm.
9. The regime of cultural and economic functionality and the degree of their determination in the general cultural context.
In view of the extreme complexity of these tasks, I have selected three basic key paradigms in which I shall discuss Georgian culture as part of the Caucasian cultures and subcultures:
—classical proto-state of culture;
—culture’s dynamics and its historical chronotop;
—post-cultural state and the mechanisms of cultural adaptation.
The classical proto-state of culture is a divine taboo, its violation being the first ever culturally creative act. The proto-state of culture is verbalized according to the cosmogonic and cosmological principles of narration.
Description of the temporal-spatial continuum replaces the violation of the taboo and the cosmogonic narrative; this is enough to transfer us into a new paradigm of culture. This is the epoch of culture’s historical dynamics, in which ethnos comes forward as a subject of aesthetic transcendence; in this capacity it begins to identify and realize unified ritual forms. This makes possible the following forms of Caucasian cosmogony and cosmology:
1. Uniformity of everyday life of the Caucasian population.
2. Poly-religious and polyethnic dimensions of the Caucasus and a system of uniform values.
3. Uniform aesthetic structure of the Caucasian population.
4. Uniform ethnic and axiological structure of the Caucasian population.
The irrational axis that inevitably pulls the Caucasian geographic expanse into a uniform cultural paradigm is not a recent phenomenon. The Caucasus, which looks uniform is, in fact, a kaleidoscope of ethnic and religious patterns. Throughout its history, however, the Caucasus looked unified within the key axiological system shared by the highland and lowland populations. I do not intend to put the problem into a historical discourse—this task belongs to historians. I have posed myself the task of providing a systemic interpretation of some of the basic issues enumerated above and, as far as possible, outlining the prospects for the Caucasian culture in the post-historic epoch.
THE CAUCASUS & GLOBALIZATION
This adds importance to the fact that the Caucasian expanse will in a very natural way become the unified topos of the four cosmogonic elements (the earth, water, air and fire). There are several such places on the planet; however in the Caucasian region the archaic cosmogonic scheme is still alive. In fact, the Caucasian culture owes its high degree of conservation to this archetypical model of the aboriginal population. The mythological cultural figures well conserved in Caucasian cosmogony are responsible for the unified ritual rule and rely on the non-topological principle of transfer from cosmogony to cosmology.
In the Caucasus, the universal mysterious, ritualistic, and symbolic schemes, the backbone of world mythology, function as the sum-total of uniform graphic and ritualistic symbols. The entire range and panorama of the identity of the images of deities, which look like symbolic graphic signs, allow us to say that the universal nature of the cosmogonic schemes in this specific topos is realized through a system of unique images. This means that the Caucasian cosmogonic expanse can be represented as a uniform Caucasian cosmology only through a formal uniformity of images. Cosmogony cannot be described as an autonomous culture, while culture per se presupposes a certain expanse of power. This means that cosmogony develops into cosmology and is transformed into morals, habits, and traditions. This is a space of creation in which creative forms come to the fore and are shaped into morals. Morals are, in fact, a creative form.
At first, cultural expansion, as a civilizational element indispensable to geoculture, had no hegemon in the Caucasus; its conventional comprehension was possible only through an economic element. This role belonged to the so-called Great Silk Caravan Road that crossed Georgia, among other countries. It should be said, however, that from this point of view the territory of Tbilisi and its environs functioned as a Caucasian regional center. This explains the importance of the fact that Svetit-skhoveli, the main symbol of new Christian cosmology, was placed next to Tbilisi. By the same token, Christianity acquired a centric and centripetal intention in relation to the rest of the Caucasus.
The general picture of cosmological ideas is best reflected in architecture, the earliest art of the nomadic, and sometimes not nomadic, ethnic groups living on the southern and northern slopes of the Caucasian mountains. The tower, in itself an architectural scheme of ritual importance, is based on the cosmological principle. A typical Caucasian tower (in Tusheti, for example) that has five stories provides an idea of the cosmological model of the Caucasian world.
The gender scheme—the tower expresses the specific functional role of the woman and man in the cosmos—is significant. The first floor was occupied by cattle; and the second by women engaged in everyday female tasks. It should be said here that sheep (sacral animals) were shepherded only by men, while cows were entrusted to the women’s care. Men and women met on the third floor. Men occupied the fourth floor, while gods were believed to live on the fifth floor. Women were banned from the fifth floor and were not supposed even to see it.
There was also a horizontal topological system that resembled a similar or nearly similar scheme of sacral-ritual behavior in the horizontal expanse. The abode of the Mother of the place or other deities was similarly structured. The deities’ sacral place was isolated: women were banned from it. This suggests that the expanses of the deities were similarly structuralized.
In the traditional Caucasian society, the family was the central topos, which has preserved its axio-logical meaning. According to recent sociological studies, the family remains one of the central values.
The archaic family model is still one of the priorities, even though the Caucasian cultural region has covered a long historical road and its religious identity is varied; it has survived the hardships of the industrial age and has entered the period of informational adaptation. This family model might possibly retreat from its leading position in the globalization process.
This uniform archetypical model can be used to describe uniform and formally acceptable from the moral point of view norms of behavior; at the same time, it offers those general forms and principles of aesthetics that build up culture. This, and this alone, shapes the uniform axiological system that, despite the poly-ethnic and late poly-confessional system, is responsible for the region’s common kindred self-awareness.
THE CAUCASUS & GLOBALIZATION
A New Myth—A Myth of Information Globalization
The geocultural orientation of the Caucasus is coming to the fore in the age of globalization. Is the Caucasus a vehicle of uniform cultural orientation? The question is suggested by the fact that its cultural fabric cannot be described as ethnically, anthropologically, or religiously homogenous. In the context of a morphologically highly complicated culture, Georgia has immense economic and political advantages. This is confirmed not only by the transnational economic projects, but also by the transpolitical revolution of November 2003 that can be described as virtual because of its widely televised events.
Georgia is a meeting place of numerous cultures: Asian, European, Christian, and Muslim, as well as traditional and post-cultural values. We should admit, however, that Georgia is a country of conserved (not conservative) culture.
We all know that conservation of culture is a mechanism of self-protection (or even the only one) against historical cataclysms the country has experienced throughout its millennia-long history. It seems that conservation was the only way to protect the national cultural forms.
National and state identity allows one to ponder on one’s own personal cultural identity. Clearly a citizen of a free country does not need any ensured return to traditional forms as the only means of protection against alien cultural expansion. For this reason he is more concerned with his social identity, which destroys the traditional social stereotypes.
Globalization offers new horizons to Caucasian geoculture: the region stands the chance of becoming the only cultural transit center as a meeting place among many different cultures. Cultural diffusion will not be its only function—it may become a real topos in the dialog of civilizations and cultures.
In the topos of the Georgian geoculture, each culture becomes open and transparent. This global trend transfers Caucasian culture to conflict conditions. On the one hand, it is conserved, on the other, transit. This creates our culture’s new reality.
Since all cultures operate under conflict conditions, there is no reason to fear for the Georgian culture’s self-identity. The task is different:
■ Our ideas about the Caucasus’ cultural strategy should be revised and a new strategic orientation of cultural policy should be established;
■ The role of Georgia as a trans-expanse between the East and the West and between the Northern and Southern Caucasus should be clearly identified;
■ The new relations between ethnic, religious, and everyday cultures and subcultures of the north and the south of the Caucasus under globalization conditions should be established.
The above suggests that we should describe Georgian culture as mythologically-ritual and belonging to the European cultural paradigm.
Contemporary Georgian culture, and Caucasian culture as a whole, can be described as a mosaic. This means that, on the one hand, it can be studied as an urban culture with its center in Tbilisi and, on the other, as a pseudo-ritual one reflected in concentrated form in the traditions and mentality.
Urbanization creates great problems for a mind unfamiliar with the realities of industrialization. This is even more correct in the event of information flows that permeate the social organism of the Caucasian ethnic groups. The Georgian social milieu has passed through two difficult adaptation periods:
—industrialization of the early 1920s;
—incorporation into the current global processes through total informational support.
THE CAUCASUS & GLOBALIZATION
The restored statehood that spurred on the reshuffling of the social structures contributed to the second adaptation stage. So far, the traditional social roles are not being discussed in relation to the new social and economic policies.
Public conscience, which had barely adjusted itself to industrialization, was presented with a new dilemma. The state-building going on against the background of widespread globalization brought new sociopolitical and cultural conflicts to the surface. The economic crisis, industrial stagnation, and highly negative social climate brought about radical re-assessments of the traditional values and provoked destruction of traditional roles and the structure of personal values.
Those traditional values that in the past formed a ritual or even pagan paradigmatic axis (this was especially true of the country’s mountainous regions) shed their mystical and religious content to be preserved in the form of traditions. In fact, orientation toward traditional values in the context of general globalization is the main cause of the social and political crisis. This explains the fact that state-building in Georgia turned out to be an extremely painful process. The ruling elite and the people, the regions and the center found themselves on the opposite sides of an abyss. The intelligentsia, the nation’s creative potential, is being pushed to the social margins; the popular, that is easily recognizable, actors of the nongovernmental sector perceived as carriers of imported ideologies lost much of former public confidence. On the one hand, while the circles oriented toward Western values are busy promoting democratic ideology and liberal values are accepted, to some extent, by the urbanized part of the Georgian population, most rural residents find this ideology absolutely alien to them. It is imposed on them contrary to their will in the same way as the communist ideology was imposed on them in the past. This explains why today, as in the past, they are living in conflict with their own identity.
The cultural identity and representation of Georgia and the Caucasus, for that matter, bring us back to the sphere of mythology, philosophy, literature, and art, where non-traditional and institutionalized systems coexist in very clear form; this coexistence is painful and harmonious at one and the same time.
An analysis of the processes that have taken place in Georgia in the last decade demonstrated the extent of globalization’s real threat in the virtual information expanse. The high degree of cultural conservation in Georgia did not permit it either in the 1990s or in the 2000s to sift through the information flow that caught the country unprepared.
At the same time, culture’s self-protection mechanism that recently started functioning indicates that the country is rapidly mastering informational globalization. The processes that recently took place in Georgia and the fact that several TV channels were closed during the latest political crisis and earlier (the opposition 202 TV channel) indicate that when mastering informational globalization the state structures trailed behind the population and the nongovernmental sector. There are over 10 TV channels in Tbilisi alone, there are also regional TV channels and press. Democracy was replaced with TV-cracy; what we see can be described as an information conflict.
The information concepts that describe globalization as a cultural rather than economic or political paradigm suggest that culture is a specific universal by means of which we can adapt to the new myth of globalization.
The new myth of informational globalization needs a new system of signs in which, strange as it may seem, in the system of traditional culture the main role will belong to the female gender role. The archetypical model of the classical myth explains why women have more chance of succeeding in the contemporary social sphere and why they are moving to the leading positions in politics. Two important circumstances deserve our attention in this connection.
1. Since new mythology brings us back to the proto-state, the future will inevitably restore the image of a female archetype saved by the conserved culture. The stronger role of women as social leaders will be predetermined by the patriarchal patterns based on the cultural conserves of societies currently described as traditional. The Caucasian peoples belong to this category.
2. The current process of informational globalization is another important factor. It looks strange at first glance that the future image of female power is created by irrational mechanisms (information images).
These two circumstances provide the coming female power in the irrational scheme with a so-called meta-basis to allow it to gain primacy over men.
It should be pointed out that since the contemporary image of a politician or a leader corresponds, on the whole, to the male image, woman has to build up her image according to the dominating image. In its development informational globalization will open up new horizons of forms of conduct and external visual signs. Woman as an image of the leader of the future will reject male behavioral strategies, which will inevitably predetermine the new trends of political adventurism created by the new (female) image of power. Today, this is amply demonstrated by the female power of political adventurism of female anchors on Georgian TV.
C o n c l u s i o n
The information concepts that describe globalization as a cultural (non-political and non-eco-nomic) paradigm suggest that culture is its main universal. Continued conservation of the traditional (local) cultural types against the wider background of growing globalization trends testify that the Caucasian peoples have concentrated their cultural efforts on ethnic-cultural self-preservation and a quest for uniform cultural morphology.
Gulfia BAZIEVA
Ph.D. (Philos.), senior researcher at the Department of Ethnology of the Kabardino-Balkarian Institute of Humanitarian Studies
(Russia, Nalchik).
GLOBALIZATION AND PROBLEMS OF DEVELOPING ETHNIC CULTURE (BASED ON INFORMATION OF THE KABARDINO-BALKARIAN REPUBLIC OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION)
Abstract
T
his article looks at the key aspects of the evolution of today’s global culture based on incorporation of the ethnic
culture of Kabardino-Balkaria into the general context of integration relations. According to the author, the practical, moral, and
