Materials of the first session of educational, scientific and methodological seminar «Theory and practice of applied culture studies» on the basis of art history and Theory and culture studies Department, Institute of Humanities, Siberian Federal University, Krasnoyarsk. June 2nd, 2009 Текст научной статьи по специальности «Языкознание и литературоведение»

Materials of the First Session of Educational, Scientific

and Methodological Seminar

«Theory and Practice of Applied Culture Studies»

on the Basis of Art History and Theory

and Culture Studies Department,

Institute of Humanities, Siberian Federal University, Krasnoyarsk. June 2nd, 20091.

Received 9.04.2010, received in revised form 16.04.2010, accepted 23.04.2010

The educational, scientific and methodological seminar «Theory and practice of applied culture studies» has been opened according to the decree of rector of SFU № 562, dated 24.04.2009. The purpose of the seminar is to make Russian science of culture actual and put it in the context of international problematics, conceptualization, development of new methods, and training of educators and scientists of a new generation oriented to solution of the problem of application in the sphere of culture and social life.

The subject of the first session is «Culture studies in Russia: pro et contra (topical methods and actual subjects of culture studies)». There have been discussed the problems of modern culture studies in Russia, their correspondence to the standards of the world scientific community, and perspectives of development and acquirement of concrete methods of culture studies in Russia.

The result of the first session of educational, scientific and methodological seminar held as a roundtable is a very interesting discussion; the essential moments are represented here.

Scientific and Methodical Seminar «Theory and Practice of Applied Culture Studies»

Koptzeva Natalia Petrovna, Doctor of Philosophy, Chair of Culture Studies, Department of Art History and Theory and Culture Studies, Siberian Federal University

Introduction

Dear colleagues, I am very glad to see all the participants of the first session of the seminar. My name is Koptzeva Natalia Petrovna and I am a coordinator of the seminar which hasn’t got its special title yet. It can be neither of university status nor of the city or the region level. But the fact of the presence of these people here makes this first session be of the «city level». Perhaps, it will be the seminar of the region level or its status will be changed in the future. The organizers of the seminar didn’t give any status to the seminar intentionally, for they didn’t know if this event would arouse interest

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of the city scientific community. Meanwhile, it is designated as educational, scientific and methodological seminar «Theory and practice of applied culture studies». Its normative base is the innovative educational program of development of the Department of Art History and Theory and Culture Studies including this scheduled seminar; the inner grant of SFU was taken for this program to be carried out in 2008. Since we set such a task for ourselves, we are to carry out this program. That is the first reason.

The rector of SFU has sanctioned «The regulation of the seminar «Theory and practice of applied culture studies»» in connection with the implementation of the innovative educational program. There has been enacted an appropriate sanction that the seminar could function at Siberian Federal University. There has been also included a thesis that the materials of the seminar as roundtable sessions would be published in the scientific journal of Siberian Federal University «Humanities and Social Sciences». I am sure that the presence of the participants shows that the seminar is going to be very interesting.

The subject of the first session is the main content of the seminar, and this subject will be developed in several lines. And those lines are encoded in the titles of the reports. After two reports are heard out, all the participants of the session are to be given the floor today.

The first question for discussion is «Correspondence of Russian culture studies with the international standards». A subtitle «Russian culture studies - disputation about terms or applied science?» is suggested for discussion. I have undertaken the responsibility of such a report to be made and I give a partial answer to this question. Culture studies are «applied science». It would be better to demonstrate capacities of culture studies right away and above all things - potential of applied culture studies, so there will be made the second report

by Alexandra Alexandrovna Semyonova, a graduate student of the chair of culture studies, titled «Concrete methods of culture studies. Consideration of potentials». She is going to propose her own point of view on this problem and simultaneously tell about concrete methods of culture studies, which seem to be promising in science and very necessary for contemporary educational practice.

It is essential to understand the notion «training» in the title of the seminar. We started realization of the license of «culture studies» speciality two years ago. This year we have started training bachelor-students at culture studies speciality and we are going to give them education. The first students of this speciality are present here. I am very glad to see them. From the very first course a lot of problems appear; they are connected with the fact that university education is impossible without powerful inflow of contemporary scientific investigations. So, from the very first year within the frames of «Introduction to speciality» discipline, we show our students the ways of scientific activity at culture studies as one of the most important components of their future professional activity. We hope that scientific investigations will be the most attractive thing for them in the chosen speciality. So we have an entirely practical object: to fill the curriculum both of bachelors and specialists with the content of contemporary scientific investigations carried out at culture and to work out ideology of this new education. Formation of new ideology is a very complicated problem, and I regret to say that culture studies will suffer some crisis moments in their development.

Report

Honorable academic assembly, I beg your pardon for the trivial things I am going to tell but it is necessary for comprehension of the situation we have found ourselves in.

First and foremost, some kind of peculiar existence of «culture studies» term makes itself conspicuous. On the one hand, we have authentic information that today American colleges and universities indispensably offer either «social studies» or «cultural anthropology» to the students of almost all the departments for their choice. The world has been already going through the boom of cultural studies for 150 years. But the term «culturology» has a very local application in foreign science. There are such terms as «cultural anthropology» and «culture studies», but the term «culturology» doesn’t exist. So, unconsciously, I am starting with the discussion of the term right away but, still, it seems important to me in this case.

In the Russian scientific and educational space, «culturology» (culture studies) term was brought into use by an outstanding scientist Edward Sergeevich Makaryan, who made reference to Leslie White (a head of one of many cultural and anthropological schools). Leslie White proved the thesis as a priori that present culture was always a precondition of all social interrelations since culture was always superior to all the rest kinds of social interrelations. Culture stipulates human existence. This approach was called «culture science» (culturology) by Leslie White in his research works. Due to the reference to Leslie White and thanks to Edward Makaryan’s good graces, the term triumphantly came to Russian science and Education in the end of 1980s and at the beginning of 1990s. When we were being fundamentally educated at department of philosophy in 1980s, we didn’t study any science of culture, but we had a course named «World history of culture», and the word «culturology» didn’t exist at all. Some special sphere, scientific and educational activity and environment arising around culturology (culture studies) have been formed for the last twenty years.

Curiously enough, the term became a rather tender spot of many discussions because at once

there appeared a lot of research works, articles, and textbooks where very different and various things were denoted as «culturology», «culture studies», «science of culture», etc. But still, there wasn’t any clear explanation both for us and for everyone what such science as «culture studies» meant.

If we look through the encyclopedia «Culture studies» published in 2007, we will still find a lot of wishes addressed to culture studies, indications of some special system approach to culture which is supposed to be «developed» more. «Culture studies» will apparently maturate inside that system approach.

Nevertheless, many scientists optimistically claim that «certainly, there is such special science with its specific object and methods». Moreover, it is sad that there is such overconfident statement as «it is unique science, it exists only in Russia, and it has such and such Old Russian and new Russian traditions». The other intellectuals remark in response that specific science is some kind of specific multiplication table for every country, and «culturology» (culture studies) term is not recognized in foreign science though a vast amount of investigations of culture really exists here.

Still there are scientists and ideologists of education who claim that culture studies are «specific science with its specific object and methods». In any bookshop and publishing office, we can find a lot of books titled «Culturology» («Culture studies») brilliantly published, and it seems that the men, who write those books, believe that they know the subject they write about. They write about science with specific object and methods.

I think that the other point of view seems to be more adequate for scientific reality today. In our country, culture studies are «a complex of completely different sciences concerning culture»; those are human and social sciences. Those are almost all human and social sciences in their

certain aspects and application of their methods to some kind of an interesting complicated phenomenon designated as «culture» really existing and drawing our attention. I suppose that this approach is more perspective if it is a question of profound scientific research works and if those research works could be something real, not scholasticism and debates on terms in dissertations and what meaning a scientist gives to one or another term. I am going to assert the other point of view; definitely, there is some third point of view, and we will speak about it today. You have your own ideas of culture studies, otherwise you wouldn’t come.

The following arguments belong to the point of view I would like to assert today.

1. To call oneself a specialist in culture is as good as to be called a specialist in nature on the whole. But it shouldn’t be done in the 21st century. There are physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, ecology, and many their branches. There is absolutely concrete scientific objectivity, there are very interesting methods corroborated by application of excellent scientific instruments. The scientists achieve magnificent results here. Today there is no any possibility to tell that «I am a specialist in nature on the whole». We can say by analogy that, perhaps, we shouldn’t do the same thing in relation to something we conditionally call «culture» while we haven’t agreed upon the term yet.

The situation connected with «culture» term is very interesting and it hasn’t been reflected yet. The discipline «culture studies» has appeared in national standards and curricula rather suddenly. The initiative belonged to the Ministry of education. Suddenly, due to the act of volition, there has appeared a discipline with a very attractive denomination «culture studies» in the complex «general human and social and economic disciplines». There were philosophy of Marxism-Leninism, scientific

communism, political economics, history of

C.P.S.U., and suddenly the officials dealing with education thought that «culture studies» would be a very interesting and modern discipline in that block and standards. The innovation brought about some kind of shock, and scientific and educational community reacted in different ways. The nomenclature of speciality of research officers was elaborated at once, «candidate and doctor of culture studies» degrees were brought into use, and several theses were defended. Then degrees of candidate and doctor of culture studies were abrogated. The public was made indignant once more since there had already appeared such people with the degrees at culture studies. And the academic degree was put into force again. And only then everybody started thinking what «culture studies», «doctor of culture studies», «candidate of culture studies», and this new speciality meant. But the scientists actively engaged in public life perceived the political signal quite adequately, and, in point of fact, if we look in the textbooks published in 1990s and 2000s, we will see that everything is hidden behind culture studies. There are some philosophy, social science, history, art history, and something «about Nietzsche». Culture studies turned out to be some kind of a bay for de-ideologization of human and social sciences. In this sense, the courses of «culture studies» and textbooks published in 1990s were justified as a «place» and a bay where that de-ideologization was very actively carried out by the people who were able to do it. It is necessary to mention Ikonnikova Svetlana Nickolaevna, an outstanding professor and an author of very interesting textbooks on special culture studies. She was an active initiator of appearance of such science, course, many textbooks, standards, and nomenclatures at «culture studies». As you can see, «culture studies» has appeared to be a very interesting word-formation.

2. The word «culturologist» (a researcher in culture studies) wouldn’t be comprehended in the broad scientific and educational spheres in the foreign world. This term denotes a very particular scientific school, which had rather short existence in history. That is the American anthropological school or rather one of its branches worked out by professor Leslie White and his disciples in 1940s-1950s. There was a well-known approach called «neo-evolutionism» at culture studies. It had its certain time limits, and it ceased its existence in the beginning of 1990s when human and social sciences of the modern epoch were keenly criticized, which we call «post modernistic critique» now. The word «culture studies» exists in this local sense in foreign science. But we use another meaning of this word.

3. If we try to restore the Russian meaning of the word «culture studies», we will find out that culture studies are the subject of someone who carries out scientific research and work applying the word «culture» as a term for the object of study.

If we begin to analyze the methods of culture studies (first and foremost, science is tools, methods of its specification), there will be the methods of history, art history, social studies, linguistics, social psychology, etc. In this sense, we have culturologist as a term denoting a person, who specifies his object as «culture» by means of concrete methods. But adequate analytics of scientific investigations and articles displays that those investigations are of multi-disciplinary nature. Concrete methods distinctly defined by science are quite clearly observed in those investigations. Let me give an example. When we began to train students in «culture studies» speciality, we had a particularly pragmatic aim - to form courses in «Theory of culture». A lot of textbooks titled «Theory of culture» were examined. And we were disappointed because we didn’t find any theory of culture, but I don’t

assert that it doesn’t exist at all. There are a lot of essays on various scientific problems: a little bit about culture and language, a little bit about culture and ethnos, a little bit about Spengler’s comprehension of culture and its difference from civilization, etc. We couldn’t rest on anything, but then we realized that we didn’t have to do it. Either theory of culture was only about to be formed either it was absolutely impossible by some sorts of reasons. The term «culture studies» was mentioned as the name of a very particular American anthropological school in Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1961.

4. Such a definition of culture is given in many so-called investigations on culture: «Culture is everything produced by human hands and mind in history of the humankind». As far as I can see, serious investigations on culture start with this thesis being thoroughly falsified. They begin to disprove it, and the reason of that disproof is clear: there appears quite reasonable question -why a bird’s nest, honeycomb produced by a bee are not culture; why bees’ language is not culture and why nature created by God in its substance is not culture. Shouldn’t we apply Ockham’s razor? Why is it necessary to redouble terms? Why does the term «culture» appear when the word «nature» exists? Why shouldn’t we take the word «nature» if God is to be called a creator of the human world? There are many questions. As a rule, research on culture appears with falsification of this definition.

We might assume that the origin of culture studies as a spectrum of investigations on culture is the discoveries made by the Renaissance humanists. Being honest scientists, they had to state that there is the world as a creation of God and there is the world as a creation of nature as a consequence of some natural principles of development. But we can reveal a creation of God in everything existing in the world and we can deduce things taking place under the influence of

principles of nature; besides, the content remains, which can be reduced neither to the former nor to the latter. That is what we call «culture». At once, it’s not without reason that we say that it is humanism; reflection of a human being and his attitude were put in this field and difference obtained. If we spoke about the point of origination of culture studies as science and if we denoted the point of origin of a specific European mode of existence and philosophy of culture, it would seem to me that those points are one and the same thing. This point is the point of European philosophy of individual liberty, and our internal and external need is to find and nurse it, and the sphere we call «culture» was fixed, and right away, there appeared scientific and educational reflection for it.

From my point of view, it’s a fact connected with the study of history of science. I mean the shock experienced by the European missionaries, philosophers, and historians when they discovered non-European religions, civilizations, conceptual approaches to the world (later all of them would be called «culture»), holistic, secluded, all-sufficient, and completely autonomous. That was the shock experienced by the honest scientists, who saw the wholeness, independence, autonomy, and selfidentification of non-European cultures. Culture studies began when there happened rejection of Kipling’s «burden of the white man» and when it became clear that non-European civilizations not only less successful, but, on the contrary, in some respects they were more successful than European and Christian civilizations. The beginning of culture studies is connected with the loss of Eurocentrism.

Culture studies as science were developed in the logic of denial of Eurocentrism because the beginning was in 1912 when Bronislaw Kasper Malinowski won grant of the British government; the aim was a concrete solution of one of the political problems arisen in the British colonies.

He received grant for scientific research so that afterwards he could give recommendations to the British government how to rule the British colonies successfully. The research he carried out in the British colonies became the beginning of contemporary culture studies as science, and the conclusions he drew and proposed as recommendations to the British government were that, properly speaking, it was necessary to leave the local (non-British) nations alone. It was also essential that the British government should rule the colonies very prudently and cautiously, and the way of ruling should be quite different than that one in the heart of the British United Kingdom, in the islands, in London, etc.

That was the beginning of contemporary culture studies when there were perceived the plurality and wholeness of autonomous and independent cultures in full measure. A real boom of culture studies took place in the first half of the 20th century; it was connected with Malinowski’s line of cultural anthropology. The scientific world was proposed the proofs that preliterate cultures weren’t more primitive than scriptory ones. Sapir-Whorf’s famous hypothesis of linguistic relativity of a model of the world was enunciated, there was presented a very interesting demonstration of the fact that preliterate language has more complicated structure than writing language and that literature made simplification of a language. That was a scientific boom connected with anthropological and ethnological researches when a lot of the most interesting results were achieved.

We must say that there was a little deceit committed by the scientists since, having studied and proposed theses about so called nonliterate primitive traditional cultures, they actually represented the deepest grounds of the so called civilized world, though they did it obliquely. They cannot tell about those cultural things straightly as something existing here and now

in the modern society. Discoveries in culture were made supposedly by use of materials of the primitive traditional cultures. But people understood very well that the discoveries were made not only for the local cultures, but they also concerned the fundamental roots of the humankind in general.

A few weeks ago, our graduating students defended their degree works on social and cultural activity connected with «family» notion. That is always an immense theme: «Family as an object of culture studies», the materials were so called traditional cultures. But the conclusions were drawn concerning the fundamental nature of family relationship. For example, the conclusions were connected with the fact that the foundation of any social interaction of a man is based on family denomination of kin relations. In point of fact, there is no any question of genesis, not genesis, but origin of family in science because a social man in his extra-individual nature reflects himself as a member of a certain family with appropriate family and kin designations straightway. The main economics of the world is economics of family, etc. It means that the conclusions drawn from researches on nonliterate traditional cultures (at first, we called them «primitive», then they were designated as «traditional») are actually conclusions concerning foundation of the very humanity. Those are very interesting conclusions and very interesting things.

Regarding scriptory cultures, we should inquire: what are they? Philology, linguistics, history, and art history are the sciences studying scriptory culture. Those sciences have to do with different kinds of text.

As an editor, I have had to deal with a very serious problem when a lot of authors-historians fell into some sort of hysterics and didn’t want to mention methods of their researches. «What methods?!» In their articles, they just reported that there had happened this event or another.

The authors’ personal shock was brought about by the editor’s requirement to tell which methods they used for reconstruction of history. In point of fact, we can see so called method of «fictitious stories» which was repudiated by the civilized scientific world long ago. It was realized that every historical knowledge indispensably demands reflection of the point of view of the scientist, who presents that knowledge to us; there is no any objective history, but there is actualization of some historical documents and accentuation of something important for a situation «here and now» in those documents.

Clearly, history studies documents apart from philological and linguistic sciences. Here appears audiovisual culture, an offspring of the recent period. It’s like a wave seizing us and it changes the foundation of social relations. It changes even sex-age groups and their nature. The teenagers of the 2000s are not the same as those ones of 1990s and 1980s. The managerial technologies are changed here, rather drastically. The elite socially posits itself quite differently in audiovisual culture, etc. The dynamics of development of audiovisual culture is unprecedented. Very often, we can only fix something. But we cannot ignore that qualitative change of contemporary culture. That is a special problem domain for scientific analysis.

If we mention culture studies as an integral science, they are not something cosmic, but the wholeness of comprehension of culture studies is always provided by philosophy. In this case, that is philosophy of culture.

University is a community of men of science who carry out very interesting investigations. They apply some concrete methods and they can call their investigations as they like. If they wish to call an investigation «culture studies», they are absolutely entitled to do so since they are academic professionals. We are enabled to give any titles for our investigations. Why shouldn’t

we call them culture studies if we present methods and content derived by means of those methods? If we present methods of students’ training corresponding to that content, why shouldn’t we call all these things culture studies? The point is that there would be a subject of study and people, who could understand the subject well enough. And there is a possibility to create such system things as culture studies by means of methods we have invented.

There are prognosis and very interesting researches where postindustrial society is not the subject but things coming «after it». There is also foreknowledge of changes taken place in social stratification! It is mentioned about fundamental changes and the ideal found by economy. The vectors of qualitative development of technique are quite clear. Very interesting futurology congresses are held where they give quite correct prognosis of what the world should expect twenty and thirty years hence. The changes in science and technique are under special control. But some sudden and fundamental things happen only in culture, and we should expect a lot of social surprises. That’s why we must deal with these studies very seriously to carry out one of the most important functions of science - foreknowledge.

Let us review a point of view of Alexander Lyvovich Dobrohotov, a reputable scientist and philosopher. The question is about some historical and social values we call various cultures. Culture studies might be concerned with formation of a scientific portrait of those values - that could be called «culture studies». Properly speaking, culture studies are identified with social studies here. Culture is indication of specificity of a man in every social interaction. We deal with culture studies when we constantly point at specific nature of social relations of people (as distinct from social relations of animals).

Another scientific position is that culture exists only as plurality; therefore the field

of subject matter is so formal. A very rapid development of culture studies is happening now. This kind of knowledge is being structured in an absolutely special way for science. It isn’t subjected to any classification. A classification requires single basis. But there is no any single basis of culture for Australian aborigines and citizens of industrial Chicago. There is a real gulf between them. They just can’t see each other. There are no such words and scientific terms, which could mean one single basis for the both types of culture.

But it is possible to make typology of knowledge about culture and I would like to remark it. I think that it is vital to take that step towards scientific logic. It is important to study all procedures of logical induction, its advantages and disadvantages, risks and priorities. It seems to me that such expansion of logical induction will provide us with very interesting results.

Here is one of the variants of study of typology of culture based on the language of culture.

We can fix two revolutions taken place in the languages of culture: a transition from spoken language to writing, and a transition we can see today - «the end of Guttenberg’s universe». This fact we can fix with regret, sometimes with relief, sometimes with fright, sometimes with hope. We can fix it in our children, students, and in ourselves. We fix it in our relatives. Nevertheless, there is something we can fix positively, negatively, or neutrally - that is a transition from writing speech to audiovisual mass communication; and this is a very serious revolution. Objective science is studying such absolutely different types of culture by means of completely different methods because we have to do with three entirely different realities: spoken language, written texts, and video and audio communication.

The first nonliterate type of culture is studied by cultural anthropology. There are a lot of most interesting investigations carried out by many cultural anthropological schools and researchers. There are a lot of very interesting points of view in cultural anthropology. We have a lot of things to work with.

Social science today and in the past is investigations of scriptory culture. The subject of study is national cultures. We can expect a lot of most interesting discoveries, and the future of social science is quite large here.

The term «masscult» is very widespread. We can propose a special definition of this term according to the type of language of culture. Audiovisual language is natural for mass culture, whether we like it or not. That is our objective cultural entity. Everything is very flexible and dynamic in masscult. Sociologic method is main here; it fixes (snapshots) a certain condition of culture.

Philosophy gives an integral idea of culture. In some degree, philosophy of culture was worked out quite thoroughly in history of European philosophy. Baden and Marburg schools of Neo-Kantianism gave comprehensive answers to human intellect what philosophy of culture is. Philosophy is generally characteristic of European (North American) civilizations. While studying Indian culture, we usually stipulate that Indian philosophy is designated by such and such words but, in point of fact, we tell about religious schools. And we cannot find out something what we call philosophy in other non-European civilizations. Philosophy appears for solution of a quite distinct problem of civilization in Europe; it actualizes its aims in one of sphere of human life we have defined as «culture» in the beginning of our seminar. European philosophy of culture has a very concrete form. I mean Neo-Kantian investigations of H. Rickert, E. Cassirer, W. Windelband, and others.

Conclusion

Culture is an object of different sciences. Whether we like it or not, we will have to change ourselves as scientists and train our students by means of applied research and methods of concrete sciences. We have already faced it. Specificity of culture studies appears when we begin to interpret those studies or when we give ourselves a clear task for research. Theory of culture is formed here. Theory of culture is chiefly formed by inductive methodology. A lot of concrete operations and procedures of induction have been worked out in logics.

Thank you and we continue our seminar.

Specific Methods of Culture Studies: Consideration of Potentialities

Semyonova Alexandra Alexandrovna, Assistant, Chair of Culture Studies, Department of Art History and Theory and Culture Studies, Siberian Federal University

The purpose of this paper is to represent the spectrum of methodological approaches to culture studies and describe the strategy of conceptual method of culture studies.

Modern culture studies propose synthetic approach to culture studies. Synthetic approach means combination of applied methods of culture studies and theoretical conceptualization of the results obtained in practice. The aim of synthetic culture studies is to achieve non-trivial knowledge about present cultural situation by analysis of cultural heritage of the past.

Synthetic methods of cultural studies are:

A) Practical «field» study of cultural communities (traditional, subcultural, etc.) and conceptualization of the results of cultural

«expeditions» in functionalism, structuralism and other theories.

B) Practical study of texts of some culture by hermeneutics method and theoretical comprehension of the meaning of those texts as cultural heritage represented in the present cultural situation.

C) Lingo-cultural studies oriented to research into national cultural codes by methods of study of national languages.

Conceptual culture studies fall into the section of lingo-cultural studies. The aim of these studies is comprehension of national cultural concepts externalized in the key words of a national language.

Cultural concepts are typical ideas about cultural phenomena formed in national culture and externalized in a national language; they exist in the mental world of representatives of cultural communities. Concept is always a triunity: mentality - language - culture.

Due to the dual meaning of concepts, conceptual studies allow us to make discoveries in two trends:

A) On the one hand, concept is a concrete word in a national language: study of etymology of a word and the meanings connected with the origin of a word promotes comprehension of the original essence of phenomena in culture. An example of such comprehension of concept is conceptual art oriented to cognition of «art» concept and search for the answer to the question what art is. The topicality of this course of conceptual studies is stipulated by the fact that primary and true senses of cultural phenomena have been forgotten in the present situation.

B) Philosophical comprehension of concept is connected with the fact that concept is a substitute for reality; for his convenient being in the world, a man forms his own idea of reality existing chaotically. From this point of view, the study of cultural concepts allows us to understand which

ideas substitute reality in national culture. There can be given such example as the Old Russian concept «state» as social and political unity of the land actualizing the necessity for a sovereign as a mediator, who is authorized to do justice over the people of the whole land to achieve social unity. It is known that law unity of society and law status of a state are of urgent necessity for social and political unity of the people in European culture. In Oriental cultures, first and foremost, social and political unity of the people is determined by the place of the state in the whole universe.

So let us refer to concrete methods, which allow us to study national concepts. There can be suggested methods as follows: etymological analysis, cross-cultural studies, historical analysis, content analysis, philosophical and art historical analysis, sociological research or psycholinguistic experiment. Let us expose the core of each method.

The definition of a key word of national culture is the first stage of conceptual study. There are no any strict rules for selection of key words: first and foremost, that is a speculative perception and assumption of the importance of a concrete word for national culture; they can be corroborated with the data of content dictionaries and the prevalence of a word in phraseological expressions or some other data.

Etymological analysis of a concept is aimed at comprehension of verbal and original meaning of a concept. It also promotes an answer to the question what phenomenon obtained a certain name and why such lingual form of a name was «approved».

The aim of cross-cultural study is not only comparative analysis of national concepts but also revelation of relativity of the content of a national concept; this method allows us to discern specificity of national features of a concept in comparison with its characteristics in other cultures.

Historical analysis (historical and genetic research) allows us to realize historical determinants of formation of a concept and answer to the question which historical events predetermined formation of a concept in national culture. Then historical analysis allows us to understand how the content of a concept has been changed for the whole period of historical evolution and which meanings of a concept remain unchangeable and which ones have changeable nature.

Content analysis of a concept implies selection of a text, where the name of a concept is a key word and study of specific features of comprehension of a concept in that verbal text.

Philosophical and art historical analysis allows us to comprehend visual texts of culture and draw conclusions on specific features of externalization of concepts in visual concepts in works of art.

The important stage of conceptual analysis is elaboration of method of the study of idea of concept in modern culture. Social and cultural research can become such method; it involves questionnaire survey on a certain subject or psycholinguistic experiments. We suggest that we should dwell upon method of associative experiment in the context of this study. Associative experiment can be defined as follows: a group of people is suggested that they should put down the associations caused by a word-stimulus (name of a concept). In modern science, association is perceived as firm human knowledge, not as a reaction spontaneously appearing to a certain stimulus. Therefore stereotyped human knowledge about a phenomenon of culture fixed in a concept-word can be found out by means of association test. Association test allows us to specify current comprehension of a cultural concept. Interpretation of the results of association test implies detection of the spectrum of the strongest

(widespread) associations and formation of the definition of present cultural concept based on those associations.

The result of conceptual culture studies can be represented as a dictionary entry indicating the content of a cultural concept. The definition of concept contains an idea about the process of genesis of concept from its literal and original meaning of a cultural phenomenon to the present comprehension of a cultural phenomenon; there are also conclusions of how the original meaning of a name of concept predetermined the existence of concept in national culture today.

Conceptual culture studies are of practical value. Firstly, they are applied on social level for organization of prosperous cultural interrelations and, secondly, on individual level for development of a person, who might possess qualified bilingual and poly-lingual knowledge and cognize various ways of thinking and perception of the world.

Ontological Structure of Epistemology of Culture of Individual And Society

Bochkaryov Valeryi Petrovich, Candidate in history, assistant professor, Chair of Advertising and Culture Studies, Siberian State Aerospace University named after academician M.F. Reshetnyov

The classical philosophical view on ontological structure of cognition for subsequent cultural self-formation of a human being and his conscience, nature, and society proceeds from the formula based only on the stage of rational thinking (conscience) of a subject of culture: from abstract contemplation to theoretical thinking and then to practice (AC - TT - P).

Meanwhile, as practice of cognition and the current achievements in many particular sciences (including the sphere of philosophical and cultural

analysis of theory of cognition (epistemology) and synthesis of interdisciplinary problems of integrative scientific knowledge) show, the traditional essential (ontological) structure of epistemology is very narrow and defective, and it is just a part of the whole system.

For instance, it doesn’t consider and, consequently, it doesn’t reveal the influence of objective laws of cause and effect factors on the organization of activity of subjects of culture at the level of sensations and feelings as reflection of relations; it also doesn’t display the place, role, efficiency, and quality of influence of subconscious mechanism of memory of «reason» on the process of subject cognition of the world and on prediction of results of formation of subjects of culture and the outward world.

Thus, the traditional formula of the essential structure of epistemology of culture doesn’t give any answer to the very important questions of culture studies: «What is the cause and effect of cultural activity of a subject (individual and society) of culture? How does the fact of accomplished deeds of a subject of culture influence on promotion of his further cognition, behaviour, and other activity and on improvement or degradation of its quality or value results?»

Therefore the traditional ontological structure of epistemology dominating today doesn’t belong to the system: it doesn’t have cause and effect circularity of its structure and it is graphically rectilinear, i.e. it is exogenous, without origin and end. That is the reason why the classical essential (ontological) structure of epistemology doesn’t effectively «operate» for an individual or collective subject of culture cognizing cause and effect factors and dependence of his activity and that one of other people, namely cognition of himself, nature, and society. It also forms an erroneous thought in conscience of a subject of culture that they are allegedly impossible to be objectively cognized:

and as far as it is impossible to accomplish, consequently, there is no need in it, and it is pointless; it brings about the fact brightly characterized with the famous aphorism: we wanted everything to be as best as possible, but it has come out as it always does.

The core of the ontological system and method of epistemology of culture suggested by the author is represented in the diagram as follows:

Ощ - sensations: б - biological; с - social; Ч - feelings as relations; Р - reason (С - conscience (thinking) + П/С (subconsciousness); Д - activity: + (plus) - active; ethical; - (minus) - passive; immoral. Объективная реальность - objective reality

Thus, firstly, every kind of cognition of an individual and society always begins with the influence of objective reality (external and internal - factors of subconsciousness) on formation of perception of oneself, the world, senses, and relations of subjects of culture as reflection; only then there is an activation of «reason» as a projective, estimative, technologically controlling, and prognostic mechanism of realization and precognition of consequences. That’s why we mustn’t ignore any objective law and structural element; moreover, they are not to be contraposed or separated in the process of cognition of objects and subjects of culture, cultural activity, its value, and forecasting of its results.

Secondly, the traditional formula of essential (ontological) structure of cognition is represented in the author’s scheme; but it exists only as a part of the one whole complex: it is engendered and determined by the complex and depends on it as

«realized» conscience at the level of «abstract» and «irrational» contemplation as well as at the level of «theoretical» and «rational» thinking and at the level of realization in practice. For this reason, it is untrue and dangerous to represent a part as a whole.

Thirdly, due to its complex and integral nature, the represented structure of epistemology of culture is a closed system with its own structure, all-sufficiency for self-reproduction, and broad unification of its application for cognition and upgrading of efficiency of educational and administrative processes, social stabilization in society, prognostication of after-effects of cultural activity, and development of artificial intelligence.

References:

1. Bochkaryov, V.P. Culture studies. -Krasnoyarsk, 2007, (in Russian).

2. Bochkaryov, V.P. On the problem of structure of epistemology. Conference material. All-Russian scientific and practical conference, September, 2003. - Krasnoyarsk, 2003, (in Russian).

Publicity as an Instrument of Ideal-Formative Mechanism of Culture

Natalia Alexandrovna Moskalyova, Five-year student, «Advertising» speciality, Department of Art History and Theory and

Culture Studies, Institute of Humanities, Siberian Federal University

Tarasova Maria Vladimirovna, Candidate of philosophy, assistant professor, Chair of Art History and Theory, Department of Art History and Theory and Culture Studies, Institute of Humanities, Siberian Federal University

Existence and development of modern society are under the influence of the system of mass communications with publicity as its essential part. Idealized images of objects of reality are modelled in publicity, which influences on formation of the field of values, will, and motivations of a consumer or the process of ideal-formation.

In this context, an ideal is to be comprehended as some accomplished model represented as a way of human exploration of the world. An ideal can be neither purely material nor only spiritual; it always has both material and spiritual aspects. Culture is a sphere of formation of ideals necessary for human life activity: ideal-formation as the inward substance of culture implies function of some set of ideals when their production and consumption are one of the characteristic features of development of social relations.

Achievement of an ideal and sense of harmonious being are obstructed in immediate experience but they can exist in an image formed with various kinds of signs by a human being. Publicity functions as a guide among signs of «ideal images» for people motivating its addressee to choose the object he considers the most necessary, attractive, and helpful in satisfaction of his needs and wants.

The problem field of public communications studies appears between accumulated empirical experience of advertisement production and theoretical substantiation of publicity as a significant tool of ideal-formative mechanism of culture.

Publicity, able to form an image, actualizes the function of representation, i.e. formation and translation of ideal models and ways of human operations in relation to a certain object proclaimed as an ideal in advertisement. Publicity as an ideal-formative mechanism is an instrument of addresser’s intended communicative influence on an addressee by translation of the mentioned models to motivate an addressee to a certain action or a way of thinking in his choice.

The product of publicity communications is production of advertisement, a communicative message endowed with ideal-formative power and a sign of ideal model of behaviour or a way of thinking, which offers an advertised object to an addressee as a way of approach to the translated ideal. Advertising ideals are formed for the purposes of stimulation of an addressee’s desire to follow the ideal model of action suggested by an advertiser through an advertised object.

Capacities of publicity as an instrument of ideal-formative mechanism can be applied in order to model social ideals in the sphere of culture and social and cultural life. Consideration of production of publicity as a product of ideal-formative modeling requires identification of ideal-formative potentials of publicity:

- formation of ideals in educational aspect, i.e. modeling of an idea about space of acquirement of knowledge by means of publicity;

- formation of ideals in psychological aspect, i.e. modeling of an idea about an advertised object as a way of search for the solution of the world-view problem;

- formation of ideals in the aspect of revelation of an addressee’s creative potential, i.e. modeling of ideals of search for new ideas and forms of their realization, revelation of an addressee’s creative potential, etc.

There has been worked out the models of advertising of artistic communication between a spectator and an artwork based on the mentioned principles of ideal-formation in publicity; that is an obvious substantiation of the possibility to apply publicity as an instrument of ideal-formative mechanism of culture.

The correct use of publicity communications for the purposes of ideal-formative modeling provides the possibilities of formation of substantial connections between an ideal formed by publicity and an advertised object.

The products of publicity produced on the basis of conception of ideal-formative modeling suggest that publicity is to be considered as a cultural phenomenon forming the system of ideas about ideal model of «consumption» of a product in society and formation of a «consumer» model, a person as an addressee of a product of publicity.

Koptzeva N.P.: Natasha, there appears one question, many may ask this question now: if we remove the word «advertising» and put in «work of art» instead, will anything be changed? If it is possible, would you underscore specific character of advertising in a nutshell? We would like to specify if advertising has several forms of existence, including such form as a work of art (and you have accentuated it)?

Moskalyova N.A.: I consider advertising as mechanism and a model offering us an expected aim. But, from the present point of view, advertising is a mediator of that aim through an object; we can housel to that object and thereby we can achieve an ideal image advertising transmits to us. That’s the point.

Koptzeva N.P.: Any questions?

Bochkaryov V.P.: What is the most effective advertising influencing on perception, process of thinking, and consciousness?

Moskalyova N.A.: If you mean advertising in its informational meaning, i.e. information

in public relations, I must say that every kind of advertising solves its own specific problems. If we mention modeling of an ideal we want to keep to, here I consider advertising more as social advertising than commercial one. This subject is being actively worked out in advertising now. Rational and emotional reasons are obviously significant, but emotional aspect is of the greatest importance for modeling of an image. If I, being a consumer, need some certain information and I want to have it, I don’t need any emotional inflow for that message. But if we want to model an ideal, a social ideal, for solution of social problems, including problems of family, we won’t be able to manage only by means of rational reasons.

Koptzeva N.P.: The subject of advertising is very provocative. Thanks a lot.

Grigoryeva L.I.: May I improvise?

Koptzeva N.P.: Yes, please, Ludmila Ilyinichna. Ludmila Ilyinichna Grigoryeva is a doctor of philosophy, professor, head of the chair of religion studies, Krasnoyarsk State Training University.

Grigoryeva L.I.: I can afford a small improvisation in my speech because the respectable people, who are present here, are properly prepared for this seminar. The reason I come to such meetings with pleasure is the birth of new ideas; new feelings, emotions or thoughts are set on fire when I listen to clever and interesting people. This is a raw improvisation produced half an hour ago, but it is a consequence of the contemplation of many years; sometimes I have such points of adjustment, still rather relative. The fact is that my acquaintance with culture studies started by chance, at the chair of Alyokhin; the university chair was proudly titled «Culture Studies», but it doesn’t exist now. I taught my discipline, religion studies, when I was asked to substitute my colleague, who was ill. I agreed willingly and took text-books. In the middle of 1990s, the discipline was unknown

to me and I was taken aback a little because an army of authors gave a vast variety of culture studies - I won’t repeat what Natalia Petrovna has already mentioned. And I just stared at those textbooks as a person brought up in the Soviet times. Do you remember the anecdote? A professor asks two questions during exam: «What is my name?» and «What colour is the text-book»? It means that we got used to some definite textbooks and distinct methodology; there were some limits within which we could be oriented: an object, a subject, and a method. That is what happened: it was an improvisation; I understood that I could improvise using my knowledge, but that was a long break of my acquaintance with culture studies and I didn’t have any feeling of something serious and fundamental about culture studies then. But I’d like to remark that, while reading books on specialized subjects, scientific periodicals especially, you cannot help noticing that the moments of induction can be seen more often now - we can see collocations of certain character: «artistic culture», «social culture», «culture of management», «models of civilization», «national culture». In the typology, these collocations don’t orient you to the original variants given in the dictionary. We have overpassed culture defined as «to elaborate», «to change», «to structure», and «everything created by man» - it’s in the past. Culture is being under consideration without any definition now because culture is comprehended very restrictedly, and its formulations restrict culture as everything created by a man in all spheres of life, in contrast to life in nature. That’s why culture cannot be an object of study like all forms and aspects of human life in time and space cannot be an object of study. Today we know that specialists at physics and chemistry came to such notion as conventionalism nearly in the end of the 20th century. Why? When we try to define anything and cannot do it, we are not able to work with it because we can have a lot of versions

of meanings of one and the same object of study. So I suppose that there must be some frame in technical and methodological aspects; and if we accept it and it is suitable as an object of study for us (conventionalism implies «convention» and «agreement») in order we could move on within certain methodology, we will be able to speak about science here.

This is one of the most interesting problems, and we have a discussion now since the domain of culture studies has already been specified quite clearly and vividly. So when we talk about a typology, it is good that today we could hear such collocations as «national cultures» and types of culture in advertising activities, i.e. different variations of culture. What does it mean? For, instance, I am engaged in studying of marginal cultures of irreligious communities. We can see a specific type of youth subcultures, i.e. it is always a certain community of people distinguished by certain features which, in my opinion, could be unified. If we take the old scheme, it will turn out that culture is something unified proceeding from human nature. The statement of the problem of an object of study at culture studies implies that the notion «culture» in its anthropological aspect is determined by a certain frame and model giving content and course of study.

In particular, culture studies can be comprehended as science investigating on the aspects of social existence connected with a special type of activity and intended for maintenance of social identity. That is science studying everything originally based on nonmaterial values of civilization, which are formed as concrete symbolic systems transmitting values and senses of a concrete society as some psycho-mental basis of existence and development of society. I mean, culture studies is science investigating on aspects of social existence connected with a special type of activity intended for maintenance of social identity. Let us give an example - the Russian

Krishnaists. They can be explored as a specific social group, which forms a new type of cultural and religious indentity in Russia; and eventually it is formed in a specific marginal culture of Russian Krishnaism. All its activity can be considered as a cultural complex with the purpose of distinction from non-Krishnaist traditional Russian culture. The most important thing for those people is to feel and experience consciously or unconsciously that they are Krishnaists, but special Krishnaists, not like the others.

Some models of social identity are formed spontaneously in history. For example, everything, which spontaneously sprang up in the Trobian islands and was formed as native culture of the aborigines, is supported by some social things: beliefs, traditions, sanctions - in other words, by different forms and kinds of cultural activity. On the one hand, all of those things are organized and controlled spontaneously in society, and on the other hand, they have a functional aspect modeled in its objectivity, for society quite consciously maintains and transmits actual models of social identity. We can recall Durkheim’s pointing at totem as a stem of social consolidation and cultural self-identification. The other example is youth subculture of so-called «Emo». Having considered that micro-society as a separate cultural community, we should research just on certain sides of activity of its members, not all. We shouldn’t consider the kinds of activity when emo, if he or she is a student, goes to the university appropriately dressed. And it is not the situation when a boy from vocational school comes to his machine-tool and masters his trade. «Emo» means normal and everyday life for many people but that life is just a preface of the other side of their life: he or she lives their day to become «emo» for his or her social group in the evening where they can display their specific cultural identity. That identity forms some psycho-mental space for a person; it is transmitted through the group and

kept for creation of some special cultural type and way of being and existence. If we speak about traditional cultures, we can consider some certain forms of activity aimed at maintenance of social identity, which we call «culture». Those forms of activity interfusing social being determine its psycho-social health of some integrity and gives vectors directing and making structure of its activities and existence. So, from this angle, we can easily consider national cultures, civilized cultures, and religious cultures, which have a dynamic development, changes, and evolution. But what can we call lack of culture? If a man went to work and after that he didn’t know where to go, he just returned home, ate, drank vodka and flopped, the elements of culture would be evident only providing that he puts on his pair of bags, not kilt, that he drinks vodka, not sake.

Thus, «culture» could be comprehended as activity intended for maintenance of social identity. Then «culture studies» could be defined as science studying originally nonmaterial values formed as concrete symbolic systems. According to Mead’s theory of symbolic interactionism, the original symbolic systems are linguistic and lingual systems structuring and forming certain models of world view. Those models as cultural matrixes of value nature are transmitted by language. That is fixed and developed in religion, a way and style of existence co-opting all the aspects of individual and social being characteristic of a community. Having been enrooted, these values began to make structure and form of psycho-mental basis of existence and development of society. So every such «social matrix» forms a unique type of specific human culture. Only psycho-mental matrix (symbolic systems are given and senses are generated and formed within its bounds) makes culture group of a social group.

Thus, psycho-mental matrixes are not abstract. They determine a certain style of life

in an ethnic community, preliterate society or a developed civilization; that is a dynamic process in spatiotemporal forms (there is dynamics here), and a type of culture displays its adaptability and survival rate for a rather long period, then we can see a certain traditional type of society. The other way - it doesn’t survive. Then such a type of culture is conserved as museum and archival artifacts. And, by the way, Spengler might be disputed here. According to his theory, a social complex can exist for about a thousand years. It flares up, bursts into blossom, shrivels, and falls. But if we scrutinize thoroughly, we will point out certain «conserved» types of culture in the world today; having been dynamically transformed exteriorly in time, they are hardly changed at the level of «psycho-mental matrixes». The age of such remarkable cultures amounts from three to four thousand years. There can be observed clear logic of the inner structure of psycho-mental parameters under the exterior superposition in traditional culture of those nationalities. Language, religion, value system, life style, national mind remain as a firm and stable «cultural matrix», and times don’t destruct its heart. At least, it still withstands the inrush of postmodern cultural eclecticism of globalization.

I am going to mention three such cultures, and you can argue with me. One of them is Judaic culture, one of the oldest in the modern world. It’s almost four thousand years of existence -from the most ancient times up today. The spirit of this powerful culture, being thoroughgoing in its core, makes such psycho-mental condition of the people that it is maintained and concentrated through all the millennia of vagrancy, struggle, victories, and defeats. Even if it is small, that’s its unicity; it has always been small, so it will be. There is such body, which concentrates the core of that mental matrix; all the rest is sloughed off, assimilated, and passes away in course of centuries. Only the heart of that matrix is

safe as one whole and it projects powerful and invariable models of being. This culture displays adaptability, durability, and strong resistance to dynamics of social and cultural processes, dynamics of mobile existence.

The other culture I would like to mention is traditional Chinese culture. I think that the point of reference remounts to Lego when the traditions of Confucianism and Taoism were formed, not to Shan culture. Though, holding the modest role of keepers of wisdom of the antecedent generations, the founders of Confucianism and Taoism appealed to the past. Traditional Chinese culture is absolutely unlike any of the models of outlook and attitude to the world familiar and clear for the Europeans. In other words, a Chinese doesn’t have anything in common with the aspects of psycho-mental model of the world of European culture. This culture has specific hieroglyphic comprehension of the world: all things obvious to us don’t function at all in its light. For instance, many cultures we know comprehend the notion «soul» as immortal essence put in a caducous body of a human being. Soul has requital in the eternity in some cultures. The other cultures can see that soul changes its shells (the variants of metempsychosis and reincarnation); theory of dharma completely abolishes reality of this notion in other kinds of culture. As you remember, the existence of soul Hun and Po is real and... temporal in the Chinese tradition. The former perishes simultaneously with the death of body, the latter doesn’t die at once but it is dissolved in the ether in course of time. There is no any perspective after death there like we have it in Abraham cultures where it is the most essential element of support of psycho-mental perception of the world and the stimulus influencing on behaviour and life of an individual and society as a whole. I must remark that, though there is confession of immortality of a human soul in Judaic culture, still, according to this psycho-mental matrix, it is considered

unseemly to live and act awaiting requital after death. There is another attitude there - it’s some kind of absolutized idea of religious duty applied not in the hope of reward but because it must be so. Thus, there can be discovered and identified very original and peculiar models of existence in every culture.

What have we got today? As a consequence of the aforesaid, we can study various types of social cultures within the bounds of «culture studies» science. There are macro-social and historically traditional cultures. There are microsocial, marginal, and more or less conservative cultures. There are cultures being dynamically developed now, first of all, I mean Euro-Christian culture. At last, there are a lot of cultures of the modern world.

Koptzeva N.P.: And what might be the subject of the students’ research works?

Grigoryeva L.I.: There can be given a great number of subjects within the limits of this paradigm. For example: «The problem of conservation and transformation of traditional cultures in the globalizing world» or «The Asian type of culture and Russia: diffusive penetrations». By the way, we have an interesting moment here when many philosophers and researchers in culture tell about the «death of culture» to start with Ortega y Gasset’s «Rebelion de las Masas» up to the discussions about postmodernism today. What is the «death of culture»? It is a dispersion of the initial matrix transmitted during centuries and a substitution of some patchwork without any value for the whole and integrated matrix (for example, Huizinga’s game forms of existence, etc.). Perhaps, it is just a total barbarization of those people who have only one form of being merely called «consumption». Sociologic inquiries (I have read the book of Michail Petrovich Mchedlov deceased recently) demonstrate that the Russians, who identify themselves as «an orthodox Christian», are much

greater in number than those ones, who really believe in God. It means that we take the orthodox matrix for a cultural and psycho-mental one. And still it doesn’t matter any more if I believe in God or not, whether I go to the church or not.

Panteleeva I.A.: Ludmila Ilyinichna, as far as I am concerned, you meant cross-culture studies, didn’t you?

Grigoryeva L.I.: Yes, I did, when I told about research on these cultural concepts, i.e. «matrixes of original cultural identity», their interactions and appearance of new concepts, their stability or instability, local or global nature, dynamism or conservation.

Value Problems of Intercultural Adaptation in Ibero-American and Russian Context

Medvedeva Helena Stanislavovna, Assistant professor,

Chair of Foreign Languages 2, Department of Foreign languages, Institute of Fundamental Training, Siberian Federal University

Philosophical axiology. Values of intercultural adaptation are the problems the reporter is dealing with. Due to the fact that «value» notion is still rather blurred at such sciences as philosophy, social culture studies, social studies, psychology, and pedagogy, the author guided by practicability criterion tries to observe logic of appliance of the concept to philosophical axiology in the first place and substantiate the necessity for its constriction and specification at this field of knowledge. It is stipulated by the fact that only philosophical axiology as science eventually determines the meaning of the notion at application areas of study.

Intercultural communication. The problems of intercultural adaptation are one

of the fields of intercultural communication theory leading to lingual didactics and then to pedagogics; for this reason, not only bare pragmatic results of application of this science in practice (if it was adapted or wasn’t) but also such aspects as influence of the way of adaptation on the individuality enduring that process are of importance. Thus, the reporter thinks that the approach called cultural and ethical relativism, which is popular at applied culture studies today, is rather dangerous for development of society and individuality. In particular, the author proceeding from these positions contests the adaptive effectiveness of the model of adaptation of a foreign culture proposed by M. Bennett, a contemporary American researcher, and suggests her own model based on correction of «value» notion at philosophical axiology1.

Ibero-Americanistics. The reporter as a member of «Association of Researchers in Ibero-American World» (at Latin America Institute, RAS) investigates the problems of intercultural adaptation of representatives of Ibero-American culture among the more specific aspects of intercultural communication; and as far as the author teaches Spanish at SFU, she also deals with the problems of adequate comprehension of Spanish-speaking culture by the Russian students, both by those, who learn the language, and those who doesn’t. We can surmise that this subject is about to be quite topical in our university very soon due to the contracts made with Santander Bank and Alcala de Henares University intending development of tripartite partnership between SFU, Spanish, and Latin America universities; it is also connected the expansion of educational services market oriented to Latin America,

The author summarises this conception in report «Valu-able aspect of American-and-Mexican biculture: where is the boundary between biculture and marginality?»; the theses were published in the materials of ILA RAS

«Iberia-American world in the beginning of XXI century: young scientists’ viewpoints» (April, 2009).

which is evident from working-out of the Spanish version of SFU site. We propose all the colleagues interested in Ibero-American subject at culture studies to team up in creation of a group working on this branch.

Vasiyiev Vladimir Kirillovich,

Candidate of philology, assistant professor, Department of Philology and Journalism, Siberian Federal University

The main course I lecture on at university is «History of native literature» - from the Old Russia times up to the 20th century. This subject (and entire philology as well) has been transformed mainly into another subject for the last two decades - cultural anthropology and culturology (culture studies). The latter term is usually used in the Russian tradition. It seems to me that it is ineffectual mainly because it is inexact. It is a rather serious reason to decline the term. We often found ourselves in the situation when the concrete content of the courses of culture studies was reduced to history of the world culture and art. And it is impossible to agree with such comprehension of this discipline and substitution of its subject and content. That’s why I have a preference for «cultural anthropology» term. The central problem is not culture, but a human being in culture. And the difference is fundamental: the subject, approaches, methods, and results, i.e. all things, are changed cardinally. But since «culturology» (culture studies) is a dominant term in Russian science, we’ll have to use it. (You can object to me that «culture studies» and «cultural anthropology» are different disciplines and they are not to be mixed up. If the development of science proves that it is really true, we’ll just have to agree with it. There is a mess today, i.e. confluence of terms, disciplines, and their subject domains).

What are «culture studies» in the coordinate system I have to work in? When it is the subject matter of a lecture, I tell the students that there are various approaches to the problem of definition of culture studies and their subject domains. We can give a broad and simultaneously quite exact definition: culture studies are science about a man (!) in the system of culture (here culture is to be understood as activity, i.e. very broadly). It is an operating definition but, in my opinion, it is suitable for it allows us to move further without any delay. We can formulate it otherwise: there is no such science as culturology because it doesn’t have its definition, subject, problems, and aims (the authors, who write textbooks at culturology (culture studies), are rather bold as far as they are sure in what they set forth and offer the readers). The formulation will be valid for it means that everything is in formation and becoming, and everybody comprehends it in his own way and is ready to give his own definition. The result is thus: culturology (culture studies) is science being formed before our very eyes.

In my opinion, formation of culture studies is a sign of breakdown of the borders between disciplines. It is absolutely clear that the epoch of subspeciality has gone by when, to speak figuratively, one doctor cured the left ear, the other dealt with the right one, and they gathered together to discuss and they didn’t understand each other because they spoke of different things in different languages. The borders were being destroyed and they are still being destroyed, so culture studies are science of synthesis and subject field where very different disciplines, theories, methods, and, certainly, representatives of those scientific disciplines are gathered together. They say to each other: «Hello! How strange that we’ve met. Well, perhaps, there will be some results from it.».

In this way, studying texts of literature, one day I discovered Carl Gustav Jung. Besides

Jung, I managed to find out some archetype, a very tough crystal and structure; the identical (!) texts have been produced within its frames for more than thousand years (that is the period of historical and literal process).

There has been discovered a work of exquisitely amazing mechanism. It has been constantly and systematically reproducing texts identical in structure for the whole historical and literary process. They can be separated by ten hundred and thousand years. The author of a text can be a scribe, a coenobite living in the period of Kievan Russia, the other one is a writer with the Party card in his pocket, actually our contemporary. But those texts are identical from the point of structure (and I ask to note that it’s the point of stable elements and general, not variable and specificity). They should be defined as intertexts or quotations in relation to each other. For example, it damps that F.M. Dostoevskyi’s novel «The Brothers Karamazovs» (remember its size!) is just an unconscious quotation in this system and we can exactly display many things cited in it. Obviously you have to face the fact that some matrix (I can’t find another term for it) operates rather rigidly and mechanically. It spreads eternity, it is like beyond time for epochs and names are unimportant for it and it always reproduces one and the same thing.

When I had to puzzle out the function of that mechanism, I needed linguistics and its methods, folklore data, deep (analytical) psychology and its theoretical theses, history, its facts and investigations (thus, for instance, literary texts of the Middle Ages are also historical sources), icon, and book miniature. I can’t count all the things I needed. At last, I didn’t expect that I would have to take the role of a theologian besides all things. If someone had told me of it earlier. Everything has turned out to be so sudden and strange. I must admit that the feeling of astonishment hasn’t passed off (and it is unlikely that it will),

the astonishment caused by encounter with new discovered reality and obtained results.

The inter-scientific space described here is space of synthesis. And, concerning culture studies, it is impossible to say: «I am a linguist and none other but linguist» or «I am a historian and that’s all». But there is nothing like that. Pure linguists, specialists in study of literature, historians, social scientists, art historians have been left in the past (even if it is the recent past). A scientist studying culture (not speaking in vain) is of higher status with some kind of pretension with its own grounds. And we shouldn’t be afraid of that status or attach importance it doesn’t have and mythologize it. We should just choose a proper course of work, enter the space of culture studies and take part in formation of new knowledge.

Culture studies made human sciences rise on a level of not only qualitatively new but surprising positions and made them be strikingly interesting. In this regard, we can even hear that the 21st century becomes humanitarian. But I am not going to discuss it here. I’d like to tell about something different. Modern scientific technologies are more promising and fantastic than those ones in any science fiction. The danger is not the fact that they are absolutely out of the prior models and images but that they threaten us with transformation of a human being and the whole humankind which can be turned into something unknown. Cloning resources, creation of artificial intellect, splicing of a man and computer, the expected immortality based on nanotechnologies, etc. have brought the humankind to the brink of a tangible disaster. In this situation, human science (in its aspects at culture studies) poses a question about human being in the way it hasn’t done it before and it penetrates into the depths which anybody scarcely could think of recently. It seems that cognition of a human being has just started only at the door of anthropological crisis (and we will

be able to find out what we are going to lose).

In this regard, the state of affairs is depressing at our own university. It seems like the choice concerning the human problem has already been made - it’s a wayside. If it is so, there is no any doubt that system breakthrough will never happen because of only one thing: a university cannot be visible on the scientific map of the world and it cannot even be of any particular interest as well if it doesn’t have a spectrum of fundamental and perspective trends of world science. I say it sincerely, with conviction and more than regret.

Now we have to deal with exterior diagnosis of the situation connected with human disciplines at Siberian Federal University made out by the leading Russian scientists. The softest thing in this estimation is perplexity. It is obvious that such state of affairs needs to be mended.

The study of mentality is one of the most interesting trends at culture studies. Here there are a lot of things worked out by representatives of different disciplines but still many things are not clear. The investigations carried out in the aspect of nationality in this sphere allow us to formulate answers to the questions in a new way: who are we? What are the specific features of our historical way? etc. For instance, it is clear that erasure of mental matrix (a many-sided process variously called, for example, «globalization», «technocracy», «primitivization») is a very dreadful thing; it is more effective than any conquest because it inevitably brings about dissolution of a nation and culture.

Semyonova A.A.: May I ask a question? Could you name the texts of Old Russian literature being repeated and cited today?

Vasilyev V.K.: There have been published articles and study guides on this subject. I could mention the last textbook published in KSU: Vasilyev V.K. «Subject typology of Russian literature of XI-XX centuries (Archetypes of Russian culture)» (Krasnoyarsk, 2006). By the

way, this year the textbook has passed a serious formal and independent examination and got the diploma of the Russian communicative association «The best book at communicative science and education in 2008-2009 academic year», competitive nomenclature «Cultural anthropology, language and communication in the context of culture». It means for me that my desk-work of many years wasn’t in vain.

Gender Approach at Culture Studies

Libakova Natalia Michailovna, Assistant, Chair of Culture Studies, Department of Art History and Theory and Culture Studies, Siberian Federal University

Gender studies were formed on the basis of «women’s studies» as one of the results of the powerful social movement of the women for their rights, equality with the men, free choice, and capability to active display of creativity of feminine spirituality.

Distinction of «gender»1 category and appearance of gender studies discovered new capacities for research on society and culture. Gender is constructed and conceived as a category of stratification correlated with such categories as race, ethnos, class, and age.

The prime opposition of male and female natures determining the strategy of research at feminist theory ceased being the fundamental principle. The trend of gender studies is not determined by a mere intention to oppose feminine view against traditional male approach

1 «Gender» term was applied in science by R. Stoller. His conception was based on differentiation of «biological» and «cultural» elements: research carried out on sex is a field of biology and physiology while analysis of gender is a problematic area of psychology, social studies, and analysis of cultural and historical phenomena.

to study of reality; the object of gender studies is many-sided form of integral academic knowledge.

«Cultural studies» being developed within the frameworks of gender studies are to be distinguished particularly. The basis of «cultural studies» is the principle called «multiculturalism»,

i.e. the idea that the modern world is the total plurality (class, racial, ethnic, cultural, etc.). This trend of research at culture studies deals with many objects and phenomena unstudied earlier and considered to be marginal. Those are such phenomena of culture as ethnic and sexual minority groups, pop music, different types of sexual behavior and identity, etc.

The existence of such phenomena of reality is fixed in gender studies; the research carried out on them brings to the necessity for correction of scientific language. There is critique of traditionally prevailing male discourse (the conceptions of Y. Kristeva, E. Cixous, L. Irigaray)1 where all the phenomena studied are fixed in language and converted into exact logic and rationally conceived systems. The feminine style of scientific research and language of expression are formed in response to it. Scientific style of statement representing the point of world view not accepting statics and simple definitions is formed. In contrast to the traditional male discourse based on strict logic, where all phenomena have fixed assessments represented in simple categories such as «black» or «white», there is an adoption of a new active multicolored female language free from rigid schemes of strict logic.

Gender approach to culture studies generally requires research on variety of real phenomena of culture (the idea of culture as «the oneness of equal» is stated); as well as it offers concrete

methods for study and a new scientific language conveying revealed True (gained knowledge).

Koptzeva N.P.: Could you tell us what indecent and tabooed implies?

Libakova N.M.: Taboo and the word «indecent» are connected with identification of a man in society; it’s not only race and age but also sexual identification of a person. As the investigations show, there are five kinds of sex at least, not two, taking into consideration various sexual orientations. Sex is not defined with biological characteristics. We have everything in our culture, so why do we have to consider it marginal and impermissible for study?

Koptzeva N.P.: And the title of the book «Epistemology of the closet» is representative, isn’t it?

Libakova N.M.: Yes, the book I am working with and analyzing now is Sedgwick Eve Kosofsky’s «Epistemology of the closet». She studies contemporary culture as homophobic one. And it is a problem of contemporary culture that homophobic people dread those who identify themselves as gays. Kosovsky draws a very interesting conclusion: for example, those people, who clamour against gay parades, actually they are homosexuals inwardly and latently, which proceeds from their behavior and character. The chief principle of culture studies is multiculturalism. We should mean the following here: the modern world seems to be multiform firstly and equal secondly in the study of the world and real culture. It means that there are a lot of elements in modern culture and they are all equal. There is no any evaluation like «this is good» and «that is bad». There is everything being equal, i.e. different classes, religions, ethnoses; for example, here there is no such principle as Eurocentrism of the 18th century when Europe considered to be civilization and culture while all the rest beside Europe is savagery and barbarity.

1 Gertrude Postl. With Freud and without Freud: Sex. Gender. Culture. German and Russian studies. - Moscow, 2003, (in Russian).

Turning to the research on new phenomena, we have to face the following problem: language, scientific discourse, which has existed before, doesn’t give traditional means of expression to express knowledge gained. Criticizing discourse, we can see that it fell out so much that it was male traditionally and the representatives of gender studies create and form a new scientific language and style of scientific thinking which could reflect this view of the world. They are opposed to the traditional male logical discourse where everything is to be clearly distinguished: this is black and that is white. A living dynamic language is offered which could reflect all the multicolour and multiform nature of the world. And one mustn’t restrict real phenomena within some inflexible schemes if those phenomena cannot be schematic, rigid, and logical.

Thus, gender approach to the study of culture provides possibility to enlarge the field of subjects of research widely. Here there is maintenance of comprehension of culture as the unity of equal aspects according to the multiculturalism principle. Gender studies consider and affirm difference, not adequation at all. There is also formation of a new language able to fix and reflect knowledge obtained without distortion of the essence of the phenomena studied.

Pimenova N.N.: I am very interested. Gender studies are topical now and there are a lot of them. Surely, there must be some concrete methods of gender studies. Is there any difference between them? Are the approaches completely different, according to the number of sexes, or universal?

Libakova N.M.: The specific feature of gender studies is that every author is unrestricted in suggestions of his own methods and he is free to create his own special language. For instance, the author of «Epistemology of the closet», the research work I am studying now, takes a concept

«closet», analyzes it, and offers us the ways it could function, what it could mean, and how it can help to solve the problems. The author proposes a notion and then explores a phenomenon, which brings about an appearance of a new notion, but not on the contrary.

Koptzeva N.P.: I wonder, whether Natalia Michailovna agrees with me or not, but I think that we can take the methods of different concrete sciences, for example, social psychology, linguistics, etc. But there are also some interesting things taking place here: there must a few positions in order we could have Gender studies. For example, my dear colleagues, I am just about to represent a certain point of view, any social stratification is inequality anyway. Therefore, gender stratification always involves gender inequality. We have to educe it. So we have a clear orienting point: we have gender inequality where gender specific features are suppressed. Then the aim of the study is to point out that inequality. And there is a constant requirement of a very profound gender expertise and original documents especially: a researcher in gender studies should admit that inequality and take feminine part. Natalia Michailovna would agree that this requirement is an indispensable and compulsory moment in etiquette of a contemporary researcher in human and social studies. This requirement is necessary. If you don’t bring it out one way or another, you would be treated as a pseudo-scientist.

Libakova N.M.: Ludmila Ilyinichna has said that there are so called «men studies», which signifies that not only women are infringed. There is no such aim as to change the situation and turn androcracy into matriarchy. The goal is the principle of multiculturalism when we have relations without infringements and oppression of anybody according to any characteristics: race, religion, age, etc. Everything can be the grounds for inequality and suppression.

Grigoryeva L.I.: Doesn’t it seem to you that there are dozens of parallel studies because it’s not difficult to select the texts, which postulate initial and objective inequality at different levels (physiological, genetic, cultural, ambience, etc.)? Society initially gives inequality, which makes a certain structure of society. Some cultural models prove that sometimes they are more effective in the moments of rigid or transit conservation such as caste. Such cultural models fix that inequality within social and cultural frames as if they infringe and determine.

Koptzeva N.P.: It’s the subject matter of multicultural studies. It’s very interesting. Natalia Michailovna, thank you very much.

Culture in the Context of Modern Society

Khudonogova Helena Yuryevna, Candidate of Art History, professor Head of Chair of History of the World Culture, Krasnoyarsk State Institute of Arts

The Basic Propositions of

«Culture» Constant

1. Culture is a subject matter of the system of human sciences. Culture as natural whole has appropriate processes of genesis: its formation in traditions, sign system, formation of stable structures and their representation in extraneous surroundings. Methods of interpretation and value of the world are important in culture (model of the world, its connection with nature, religious idea, comprehension of the world, world view, mythological aspects, «Collective unconscious», and tradition).

2. One of the fundamental features of individuality is its correlation with culture. Culture is also important for self-determination of society: from community to civilization.

3. Culture is diversity of basic elements of material and spiritual life of one or another ethnos determining its existence and place in the historical process.

4. O. Spengler (a famous German philosopher and historian, an author of «Der Untergang des Abendlandes») thought that, along with the formed cultural and historical types, a new type of culture is going to appear in the 20th century: Russian-Siberian (he already foresaw its features in the beginning of the 20th century).

5. The creative process, fading away during transition from culture to civilization, is important for culture. Every culture in its unique peculiarity is developed according to its inner laws.

6. The mover of culture is a creative minority group (passionaries) characterized by «life dash» and, consequently, able to carry the passive masses with them.

7. Culture can be considered as sphere of development (individuality and personality) as well as a state of development of society and general context of sciences and arts giving life value both to an individual and society.

8. Culture is spiritual existence of society where a human being is «humanized», i.e. keeps himself in his non-natural («human») state.

9. Culture is a synthesis of human creative activity in its social and objective spaces. Culture is integrated and united in its intention of objective and subjective organization of the world. It is an inextricable connection between social phenomena: a man, his individual nature, activity, and culture. Culture is also a system of keeping and transfer of social experience (system of values).

10. Absence of «Human Being» as a notion, idea, image, and ideal brings about degradation of culture.

«Case Study» Method Applied to Educational And Professional Practice at Human Sciences Sphere

Chistohina Anna Valeryevna, Candidate of bioscience, assistant professor,

Chair of General Pedagogics, Siberian Federal University

«Case study» method as a method of research and education has been widely recognized at Harvard Business School and it has brought to strikingly effective results in training of experts at economics. Unfortunately, this approach hasn’t been properly applied to such spheres as pedagogy and psychology yet. Meanwhile, analysis of a concrete single event is the most adequate research methodology in the context of the tendency of general humanization of social processes and their orientation to the aims of increasing concentration on the interests of every person.

The point of the research carried out by «case study» method is study of one or a few events for the purposes of detailed disclosure of the content of the deepest processes proceeding at the level of a single person, a family, and a group of people or a community.

The movement of scientific thought towards «case study» methodology was started by Carl Rogers, a founder of phenomenological theory of individual. The essential propositions of this theory are that reality is considered as everything an individual comprehends at the moment, i.e. everything existing within his inner coordinate system. Rodgers stated that subjective comprehension and experience was not only individual reality of a human being but also the basis for his actions. Thus, we should conceive the inner human world in order we could explain why a human being thinks, feels, and acts in one or another manner. Only subjective experience is a clue to understanding of human behaviour.

According to Robert Yin’s words, «case study» is an empirical investigation studying a current phenomenon in its really existing context when the boundaries between phenomenon and context are not obvious, and a lot of various sources of information are used here. Thereat influence on what was happening in the previous history of interrelations and interactions appears to be very important, as well as individual impressions, views, and experience of people, including the person analyzing a concrete event, do their considerable bit to the result of analysis.

Application of «case study» method could essentially enrich many spheres of practice at human sciences and approximate the experts’ work to realization of purposes on personalization of maintenance, help or only understanding of single phenomena.

The problem of vocational training, where specialists are apt to promote modern humanistic ideas in humane practice, is that there is no anyone personally experienced in the systems oriented to individuality in Russia. This fact results in individually alienated models of pedagogical, psychological, and social activity realized by specialists in their own professional practice. The problem is especially acute concerning training of specialists working with children with their specific educational needs. In our opinion, it is important to analyse the strategic competences of a specialist whose mission is realization of new educational and philosophical ideas and organization of the processes oriented to individuality in humane practice.

Besides, it is obvious that it is necessary to work out and adopt adequate methods and principles of training of specialists. There are such principles as:

• personal involvement;

• professional responsibility (including distinctive comprehension of the limits of that professional responsibility);

• critical attitude towards one’s own professional experience.

Case study method provides maximal possibilities for formation of attitude of professional responsibility of the future specialists within the mentioned approaches.

Then we can discuss the appliance of various genres of case study method at different disciplines (general pedagogics and psychology taught for the students of non-profile specialities, corrective pedagogics for the students specializing in social pedagogy and social pedagogics in itself as well as for lecturers and social educators, school and professional consulting of psychologists, etc.). Moreover, there is interesting experience in appliance of case study method as a mechanism of formation of professional reflection (for example, operation of rehabilitation centre dealing with groups of educators and psychologists).

Some Aspects of Computer Technologies Application to Culture Studies Course for Students Specializing in Technics

Kurolenko Helena Michaylovna, Candidate of pedagogical science, assistant professor, Chair of Ethics, Aesthetics and Culture, Institute of Fundamental Training, Siberian Federal University

Education rapidly increases potential at new information technologies today. Computerization became one of the main courses at acquirement of profound knowledge at different domains. Computer systems and multimedia devices both can support extension of informative aspect of culture disciplines and help a lecturer to solve the most important problems connected with aesthetic education and training of students specializing in technics.

Technology of training with the use of computer techniques applied in lectures of culture studies course is very perspective. To start with, it conduces to «reactivation» of the entire flow of information, concentrates students’ attention, makes their learning of the subject and its units connected with theory and history of art more active and interesting, and advances creative and active skills in the forms of training for themselves.

It is known that the process of profound cognition of culture proceeds due to intensive involvement of students into active and practical learning of the subject. Hence computer is the most powerful and effective instrument directed to formation of aesthetic activity and interest in art, which has influence on the further entire cultural development of personal traits of students specializing in technics.

The efficient thing here is practical realization of some concrete information and art modules as an actively practical basis of the lessons carried out both at the stages of reinforcement of learning and in the process of acquirement of a new subject matter. In this case, students are suggested that they should learn an additional material and carry out an investigation or a presentation. Such forms of work can satisfy students increased interest in computer technologies and be of assistance to a lecture purposefully revealing students’ creativity and, thus, filling every lesson with new dynamic and informative potential. In this context, the most appropriate thing here is a seminar, i.e. presentations, speeches, reports on subjects executed by means of presentation editor programs, etc.

Among different culture subjects, students are especially interested in those ones, which are directly connected with the current realias. For example, «Cultural life in Krasnoyarsk» topic at seminar-presentation, held for the first-course students on the 26th and 30th of March, 2009, was

developed in different aspects: «Opera House», «Krasnoyarsk Artists», «Organ Hall», «Drama Theatre», «Youth Subcultures», etc.

As practice shows, educational resources of the new generation allow us to discover many aspects of the content of «culture studies» subject with the use of various methods and ways:

- demonstration of highly artistic video materials bringing to prompt and emotional immersion into the subject of a lesson;

- visualization of concrete artifacts of literature, history, culture, and other kinds of art, etc.;

- application of video and audio forms of presentation of materials in the context of elaborated informative modules, which favours integrity, dynamism, and emotional saturation of educational materials;

- studying of text and illustrative resources both on the Internet and any other electronic carrier;

- involving in the process of active studying of new materials as a result of independent realization of projects;

- presentation of author’s works at competitions and conferences on different levels.

Knowledge of digital educational resources discovers new possibilities for «culture studies» course, and that conditions both educators’ creativity, and activity level of student’s individual works, and flexible organization of educational process. Interactive functions of a computer allows us to consider it as an important informative source of artistic and aesthetic subjects, and multimedia means discover the vast amplitude of communication of the students with highly artistic works of art; that favours development of imaginative thought and formation of traits and features of a creative person. Referring to

such sphere of scientific knowledge as «culture studies», an educator is able to teach students specializing in technics embracive perception of the world, form aesthetic style, and also motivate a student to identify his culture values with the panhuman aesthetic ideals.

Koptzeva N.P.: We can see that a lot of chairs and departments instinctively oriented to the very word «culture studies» offers their students, trained in non-human scientific specialities, that course as an elective one. Anastasiya Victorovna works with the students of other specialities unconnected with art history and culture studies. Her lectures, scientific investigations and discoveries are of great importance: it is necessary to hear out the results of her educational experience.

Educational Potential of Applied Culture Studies

Klykova Anastasiya Victorovna, Head lecturer, Chair of Art History and Theory, Department of Art History and Theory and Culture Studies, Siberian Federal University

I have some kind of continuation of your report on educational technologies connecting culture studies, ethics, and art; those technologies are an object of interest for the students of different specialities. I think that carrying out of applied culture studies would be a very effective method for a large audience. For the last few years, our team (besides me, Natalia Nickolaevna Pimenova, Maria Vladimirovna Tarasova, Alexandra Alexandrovna Semyonova, and Julia Sergeevna Zamaraeva, who are present here) has been carrying out investigations connected with diagnostics of visual thinking. They are followed

by the second research dealing with capacities of formation of the students’ model of the world by means of artistic dialogue of the students with works of art. The third research logically accomplishing these studies is a project «SFU TV is a territory of education» as a product and educational factor. There have been shot two films such as educational products discovering educational potential of works of painting «The Last Supper» by Andrei Pozdeev and architectural work CHC (Cultural and Historical Centre in the embouchement) designed by Arag Sarkisovich Demirhanov. There is a question: how has comprehension of the students taking part in those researches changed (the students were mainly of different specialities, who attended general courses in the history of fine arts)? Here is my answer: the students, who take part in applied researches and realize the purport of every operation, acquire skills. Having carried out the investigation on diagnostics of a student’s model of the world, we obtained not only information on the competence or incompetence of the students of different specialities, but we also taught them specific operations. We taught them how to find out concrete ways and means of intercommunication with classic models of culture by identification of their idea of the world or potential of a work of art. At the same time, the students acquired skills in research work as far as they were testifiers and participants of the main stages of the research. The educational potential of applied culture studies carried out by students together with professors consists in intense interest of a student both in subject matter of research and scientific research process. The result is obtained in the very moment we apply those studies. We can see the result in the final works the students do in the end of the course. It allows a lecturer to reorganize the course, to work out and apply some other technologies, for he obtains diagnostic results. We had to

reorganize curricula because of the transition to bilevel system of education. And we carried out that work basing on the results obtained in applied studies. It seems to me that the future of education is connected only with applied studies.

Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown’s Hypothetical And Functional Approaches to Culture Studies

Reznikova Ksenia Vyacheslavovna, Assistant, Chair of Culture Studies, Department of Art History and Theory and

Culture Studies, Siberian Federal University

The problem considered in cultural and anthropological field is that it is impossible to find out the definition of «culture studies» notion among those ones already existing; it is also impossible to enunciate a new definition corresponding to the academia views. Thereby there is no any definiteness until now: Are culture studies a new integral science or a conglomerate and integration of various cultural sciences previously existing? The discussion on this subject is very lively, and both of the ideas have their own supporters - their votaries and eager opponents. If we take the second idea about integration of sciences as the most appropriate one, there appears another problem: which culture studies can be included in culture group and which ones are out of its bounds and can be related to historical studies, for instance. This problem is the subject matter of many researchers but, perhaps, the most famous investigations carried out at this domain are of Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown, a British anthropologist and a founder of structural and functional approach at anthropology. He distinguishes such two sciences as ethnology and social anthropology in

his works. The latter can be also called cultural anthropology. According to Radcliffe-Brown, the main parameter of their distinction is the basic method applied to the investigations carried out by ethnologists and social anthropologists.

The British anthropologist considers the basic method applied by ethnologists to be appropriate to call historical method. Its core is that the application of this method allows a researcher to interpret some concrete institution of some society, observe its formation, and identify the factors influencing on the changes the considered institution underwent. It means that Radcliffe-Brown remarks that the ethnologist, applying historical method, retrace the causation of a concrete institution.

Radcliffe-Brown posits that the cardinal problem ethnologists have to deal with is complete or partial lack of the empirical data required for research. First and foremost, it is connected with the fact that the main subject of study of both ethnologists and anthropologists was «traditional societies» in the period of A.R. Radcliffe-Brown’s scientific activity; the research on traditional societies couldn’t be based on any veracious material concerning history of those societies. Hence there was no any word said about objectivity of the process of gradual determination of any institution reconstructed by researchers; the investigations were absolutely hypothetic. Having disclosed subjectivity of historical method, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown turns to social anthropology and its functional method based on induction. As is generally known, the core of inductive method is increasing generalization of particular facts and movement from particular ratiocinations to general ones. Thus, application of this method causes discovery of the general law with an institution considered as its particular case.

Having circumscribed the object of social anthropology, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown returns

to ethnology trying to attach importance to formation of hypothetic histories of genesis of many particular cultural phenomena, which seemed to be useless from scientific point of view. The pointless of application of purely historical method lies in two main aspects. Firstly, it is impossible to retrace the line of determinants of every particular cultural phenomenon because of infinite number of those phenomena. Secondly, it is uselessness of the established stages of development of some concrete institutions out of their connection with stages of development of the other ones; in point of fact, it is formation of hypothetic history for the sake of hypothetic history. Just functional method, promoting deduction of laws of functioning of culture and the whole society, is to have the cardinal function in ethnologic studies.

Thereby A.R. Radcliffe-Brown doesn’t deny ethnology, on the contrary, he sees the necessity for it, but only together with social anthropology; he states that correctness of every step to deduction of the general law by means of induction is to be tested empirically, namely, by means of historical method of ethnology. A.R. Radcliffe-Brown supposes that, from scientific point of view, the process of ideal research is a constant interchange of functional and historical methods for the purpose of mutual verification of the hypotheses advanced. According to A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, deduction of stadial development of a particular cultural phenomenon is not the end of science as well as discovery of general functional laws explaining a concrete element of one or another culture is not the ultimate goal of science. A.R. Radcliffe-Brown esteems practical application of the results of scientific research; in particular, he considers scientifically substantiated control over a group of phenomena in non-European societies to be the topical sphere of application of social and anthropological knowledge.

Eventually we can say that A.R. Radcliffe-Brown actually stated and fixed the methodological point about the division of the approaches to culture studies into hypothetic, or ethnologic, and functional, or social-and-anthropological ones. As far as ethnological method of culture studies is not always efficient due to the lack of the required historical material, social and anthropological method seems to be more important for A.R. Radcliffe-Brown because it makes possible deduction of general functional laws of existence of culture on the basis of the observed phenomena of social life. Topicality of discovery of those general laws lies in application of them for ruling over non-European societies. When the object of study had been changed at culture studies and the attention had been shifted from so called traditional cultures to study of subcultures of the society native for the researcher, topicality of the approach suggested by A.R. Radcliffe-Brown wasn’t lost; but now discovery of general laws became necessary for establishment of harmonious relations between concrete social groups, not between concrete nations.

Innovative Deffinition of Renaissance Period as Culture of Religious Regeneration

Bakhova Natalia Alexandrovna, Assistant, Chair of Art History and Theory, Department of Art History and Theory and Culture Studies, Siberian Federal University

The traditional definition of Renaissance culture of many European countries in the 15th and 16th centuries is:

a) restoration of the relations to antique culture (Greek and Roman);

b) restoration of human role in the structure of the universe;

c) restoration of significance of secular culture in individual and social life1.

Philosophical reflection on many investigations, carried out in culture of European Renaissance, allow us to posit the following: Renaissance is chrono-cultural sphere orientated to production and consumption of ideals (art, technical, scientific, etc.) intended to regenerate (restore) religious link between a human being and God2. The innovative definition of Renaissance culture is based on the following conceptual substructure:

a) the foundational definition is that one of D.V. Pivovarov where «culture is an ideal-formative aspect of human life»3;

b) the definition of religion in the spirit of Lactancius, Christian apologist, who lived in the 4th century, according to whom religio is a reconstruction or renovation of the link (unity, liga, conjunctio)4 between a finite human being and the eternal Absolute providing an individual and/or social groups with the wholeness needed. A lot of substantial aspects of innovative definition «Renaissance culture» can also be found out in the treatises of the leading thinkers of Renaissance (J. Pico Della Mirandola, N. Cusanus, and M. Ficino).

Having integrated the achievements of mathematics, geometry, optics, and philosophy, in their works of art, the artists and thinkers of Renaissance culture enunciate the basic theses of theory and practice of central perspective as a unique art and mathematical model of regeneration of religious link between a human

1 Burkheardt, J. Italian culture in Renaissance. - Moscow, 2001, (in Russian). Panovskyi, E. Renaissance and «re-naissances» in art of the West. - St. Petersburg, 2006, (in Russian). Bicilli, P.M. Significance of Renaissance in history of culture. - St. Petersburg, 1996, (in Russian).

2 Zhukovskyi, V.I. Renaissance art. - Krasnoyarsk, 2006, (in Russian).

3 Pivovarov, D.V., Medvedev, A.V. History and philosophy of religion. - Yekaterinburg, 2000, (in Russian).

4 Zhukovskyi, V.I., Koptzeva, N.P., Pivovarov, D.V. Visual essence of art. - Krasnoyarsk, 2006, (in Russian).

being and God. A man-spectator and God are the elements of the one universe geometrically represented, where perspective is an operative mechanism of their communication.

The suggested innovative definition of Renaissance culture is some kind of integrator of the spectrum of traditional ideas brought in the content of «Renaissance culture» notion:

a) the reviviscence of antique culture taking place in the 15th and 16th centuries appears to be a revival of potency of re-ligio between a human being and God, which was an urgent problem both of the ancient Hellenes and Romans;

b) the searches for the place of a human being in the structure of the universe are aimed at comprehension of the real capacity for religious communication of a finite human soul with the divine Spirit;

c) the reappearance of secular culture is brought about by the comprehension of the fact that only a man as a hu-man (a man in his entirety), who possesses the unity of his soul and body, is able to make religious ingress into the Absoluteness of Being.

Studies of Artistic Folk Culture in the Context of Modern Culture Studies

Pimenova Natalia Nickolaevna, Assistant, Chair of Art History and Theory, Department of Art History and Theory and Culture Studies, Siberian Federal University

The experience of system study of cultural heritage excites interest in the context of modern culture studies. «Artistic folk culture» discipline allows us to discover the basis for a global fundamental research on culture. Just this discipline can distinctively display the components of culture, which make possible going beyond its

scope. Those components can be distinguished as the ethnic past. Concerning Russian culture, that is Russian artistic folk culture. Artistic folk culture is to be represented as a system of its components with myth as its core. All forms of artistic culture are the components of artistic folk culture connected with myth as its heart:

• all forms of folk art: folk literature, folk music, literary-and-musical folk, and arts and crafts;

• celebratory and ritual culture: cultural acts related to a holiday, rite, namely certain events in human life.

These components identify the scope of artistic folk culture, i.e. the sphere connected with artistic creativity. If we speak about «folk culture» concept, everyday culture is to be indispensably included in the system besides the elements aforementioned. Thus, this system represents almost all phenomena worth to be researched in the context of culture studies. But only myth can be distinguished as a heart of this system. Here myth is not mere religious past such as some concrete mythological texts and so on. In this system, myth is rather a model of the world characterizing that culture; it is the very mental matrix we have spoken about today. And that model of the world is fixed in verbal, visual, and musical models of culture, as well as in some modes of action as certain models of action like ritual models conventionally adopted by the community or individual models of human actions. All these forms also depend on the representation of the world of a concrete carrier of culture. Myth is not only an enunciation of belief, but it is a real model of the world. That model of the world is an integral and multistage system of human knowledge and ideas about the world of a carrier of a concrete kind of culture. A model of the world as its integral definition and image describes the world as a system and fixes the following in it:

• the elements and phenomena of this world: concerning a carrier of culture, those are concrete elements of the world and reality existing irrespective of him and they are involved in his world and representation of the world;

• the laws of the world as laws of its special regulation, interrelations and correlations of its phenomena;

• the structure the wholeness of the world has according to the laws of interrelations between its phenomena.

Such description of the world allows us to educe the following specific features of the model of the world in the context of culture:

1) that model of the world as a system fixes the place of a human being in the multitude of phenomena of this world;

2) a model of the world fixes value orienting points, which allow a human being to act in this world. It means that a man actually cannot act out of culture. If a human being hadn’t a model of the world, in point of fact, it would be a lapse disabling his orientation in the world;

3) a model of the world traces possibilities of appearance of some new phenomena in the world, their relations, and new modes of action in the context of some concrete culture, i.e. it makes possible prognostication of some probable situation in culture.

The approach to the study of culture as a sphere based on a certain model of the world, fixing that culture, can be efficient for application to modern culture studies. In this case, some concrete methods of culture studies and methods of research on certain cultural forms and phenomena can be aimed at construction of the model of the world fixed by some concrete culture. Only systematized idea of that basis of culture makes it possible to give entire description of the

world, its image in the context of some concrete culture. Systematized knowledge would also allow us to predict chances of appearance of some phenomena in culture, reveal the essential content of them, and identify the lines of development of some concrete culture.

The methods of research on cultural phenomena are topical for the students in culture studies for they could give an integral model of the world of some concrete culture. Application methods promote effective investigations on concrete phenomena of culture. The most important thing in modern culture studies is to keep the scope of research carried out on culture, namely initially correct identification of the group of phenomena falling into some concrete cultural field. Due to the current cultural variety, it is necessary to see the power of its topicality clearly in construction of a model of the world, i.e. the features of a group of carriers of some concrete culture. Cultural groups are considered in a special way now. Ethnical relationship doesn’t really allow us to identify a group of carriers of one and the same culture and model of the world. There is a body of groups of carriers of absolutely different models of the world inside a nation. There can be groups united in one religion or people socially united in some common basis, such as subcultures or corporative cultures. At the same time, there can be groups socially integrated but they are not actually manifested as some communities and they don’t comprehend themselves as any group. But types of behaviour and lines of action of those people are general for a community. Culture, suitable to such a community, is also possible to be investigated by means of correct identification of the circle of carriers, events, and actions, determining those cultural phenomena as culture of a community.

In this sense, culture is to be comprehended as a basic category by every person, and a model of the world of that culture becomes means turning

the world into some unity special for different cultures. Specific features of a cultural model of the world are very important; for instance, not all the phenomena of the world are included into one’s personal model of the world, nevertheless, there can be found out some common features. Research carried out on culture is to identify carriers of certain culture from its very start: a group of carriers can be distinguished according to its common modes of action, certain results of activities (verbal, visual, etc.). Keeping the boundary of concrete culture, it is possible to achieve the essence, i.e. a model of the world, by means of applied research dealing with particular phenomena and theorizing all that material. The object of culture studies can be only the search for that integral model of the world and cultural matrix. The students should be engaged in applied research for they could prepare material for the following investigations. Culture study is a multistage system as far as the very phenomenon of «culture» has many elements and levels. A model of the world corresponding to culture being under study is the means of uniting of that plurality into one whole.

Koptzeva N.P.: Thank you very much. I should repeat once more: we are just in the very beginning. The word «culture studies» drew attention of the academic community of human sciences and all Russian intellectuals on one day. Having found out about culture studies as speciality for bachelors and specialists, we were licensed and we enlisted students. When we asked the enrollees what was the most attractive thing about the speciality, they answered that they were interested in the possibility to find some stem of comprehension, cognition, and the key of social and other phenomena. But we, lecturers, try to seek for it too like all the participants of human and non-human scientific educational process do. The first speciality is Art History and Theory opened at our department ten years ago. When

Irina Anatolyevna working out the content of such discipline as «Technics and technologies of fine arts» faced applied studies connected with psycho-diagnostic methods, we thought that culture studies would be impossible without turning to social psychology and its methodology. Therefore, Irina Anatolyevna is going to present a report on the potentialities of social psychology for carrying out of cross-cultural studies.

Cross-Cultural Studies:

New Approaches and Methods (Survey)

Panteleeva Irina Anatolyevna, Candidate of philosophy, assistant professor, Chair of Art History and Theory, Department of Art History and Theory and Culture Studies, Siberian Federal University

The scientific investigations aimed at search for possibilities of interaction between different nations, cultures, and states with their own distinctive characters and independence become extremely topical in the situation of interstate, international, and intercultural relations in the modern globalizing world. Thereupon cross-cultural (comparative) approach is of great importance for modern culture studies. In general, it lies in comparison between several cultures; the goal is to reveal universal principles and orientations, on the one hand, and to find out distinctive features of originality of the considered traditions, on the other hand. Cross-cultural studies are synthetic research carried out on the border ofpsychology, culture studies, social science, anthropology, history, and ethnography. The present-day scientific community at human sciences has estimated the importance of such studies for the last decade. Alberto Martinelli’s Presidential Letter for XV World Social Sciences

Congress of the International Association of Social Science (Brisbane City, Australia, 2002) pointed only at the insufficient study of local and national phenomena and structures of culture without regard for the influence of globalization processes on them: «Social scientists. generally considered societies as particular units, each with their distinctive national bounds. Their attention was focused on knowledge of the internal dynamics of society and structures, its cultural code and specific mechanisms of integration, conflict, and mutations. Today globalization implies not only appearance of a new object of study, i.e. the world as it is, but also requires every concrete study to be put within the bounds of the global context, for every part of the world is more and more involved into interdependency between many other ones, and the world is represented in its parts more clearly».

There are two kinds of research generally applied in cross-cultural studies:

- comparative study of two and more groups-representatives of different cultures selected by method of sampling;

- comparative study of two and more groups-representatives, but it is carried out in a single step observing dynamics of the phenomena under study (so-called research «with longitude»).

Various approaches of comparative study are extensively applied in carrying out of research. Thus, cross-cultural studies can be divided into studies with limited selection of observed variables (distinctly determined and characteristic of all the cultures being under study) and studies dealing with observation of some cultural situation in complex and subsequent comparison of the attitudes of representatives of different cultural communities to a certain situation.

The typology of comparative study divided into binary, regional, global, cross-temporal, civil (inter-civil) and other aspects has become topical

for the last decades. There are other methods of ranking of comparative cross-cultural studies.

At present, the researchers (e.g. J.V. Irhin) point out several basic types of cross-cultural studies:

1) geographical descriptions of culture and policy;

2) analysis of similar cultural processes and institutions in the limited space of the countries;

3) application of typologies and other forms of classificatory schemes (value, institutional, dichotomous, etc.) both for comparison of a group of countries and for revelation of inner culture in concrete states;

4) statistic and descriptive analysis of a group of countries classified according to geographical, cultural or civilization factors in order some hypothesis of correlation of variables of the sampling considered to be verified;

5) statistic analysis on the world level aimed at detection of structures or testing of relations taking into account the whole massif of cultures and civilizations.

D. Matsumoto has suggested another classification of the types of cross-cultural studies:

1) Comparison of cultures according to some psychological variable evoking our interest is the most widespread kind of cross-cultural study. Such studies generally explore differences between cultures involved in the experiment according to that variable; very often they put forward a hypothesis that according to that variable one culture gains more points than the other.

2) The causes of differences. Those studies not only seek for differences between cultures but also carry out measurement of other variables, which can have some connections with the differences identified.

3) Ecological analysis and analysis of the level of culture are studies of testing of the hypothesis;

a country and culture are taken as the unit of the analysis. The data can be derived from people of that culture, but they are very often summarized and averaged for every culture; those averages are used as the basis of every culture. The examples of analysis of ecological level can be the studies of cultural values carried out more than in 50 cultures and research on connections between individualism and collectivism and frequency of heart attacks in 8 cultures.

4) Cross-cultural validizative study which estimates whether the dimension originated earlier could be applied in another culture and, consequently, be significant and equivalent to that culture. Such studies control equivalency of measurements and tests, which can be used in another cross-cultural comparative study.

5) Ethnographic study is carried out mainly by anthropologists and some cross-cultural psychologists. Researchers accomplish the major part of their work visiting people, the object of their interest and study, and very often they live among those people. Having taken roots in culture for a long period, those researchers firstly learn about customs, rites, traditions, beliefs, and modus vivendi of the representatives of culture they have to deal with. Comparisons with other cultures are based on researchers’ knowledge and experience and the data on their own and other cultures.

There can be pointed out three groups of problems, which appear in carrying out of cross-cultural studies:

- selection of the basis for comparison (i.e. parameters of the comparison carried out; language, religion, myths, and model of the world can be suggested as the most general parameters but they are questionable because they are too extensive for study);

- selection of the method of study (up to date there have been worked out a large number of methods which can be applied according to

the problems of a particular investigation (M. Rockich’s method, «A. Edwards’ list of personal preferences», and S. Swartz’s «Value inquirer» deal with value studies); there are no any universal methods of cross-cultural studies);

- maintenance of adequate communication of value of research during the work with representatives of different cultures (the problem of filling of some notion in culture with meaning in the moment of carrying out of research (e.g. «collectivism» obtains a negative nuance, etc); the problem of translation of method into another language (retroversion); the problem of consideration of specific meanings of notions of research in all cultures studies (engaging of experts-bilinguals)).

Koptzeva N.P.: Thanks a lot. In connection with the concrete educational requirements we have at training specialists at culture studies, it seems to me that the sphere of social psychology mentioned by Irina Anatolyevna has many interesting methods of applied research. And we have an immense field here. And, perhaps, I would like to devote a seminar to those possibilities, psycho-diagnostic capacities of social psychology at culture studies.

Semyonova A.A.: I’d like to add: there isn’t such problem as subject of study in the Western countries. There is a journal of cross-cultural psychology, which has been published since 1999. Each journal has 10 articles at the minimum: American and Norwegian teenagers, Norwegian and Swiss teenagers select a parameter for each culture and compare them by means of different methods. But another problem emerges: what should we do with the results?

Koptzeva N.P.: John Dewey enunciated a number of problems a hundred years ago, and I think that they are being solved successfully today. I mean that he said that we have such remarkable sciences as psychology, social studies,

culture studies, etc. We can rule society. Is this not the time of a new qualitative stage of history of the humankind when we could correctly control social processes on the basis of the results we obtain from these sciences? Don’t we have the same situation in Russia today? Yes, we have! Certainly, we have. But we have those results being used by political technologists. They are being thoroughly financed and they use all the achievements of human and social sciences in a concrete political sphere. That is a very important sphere and those things are most serious, it’s a great responsibility for social control and policy. All those things are being done. But politics is not the only sphere of human life. Human life is much more than politics. The city is much more that the celebrations held for us here, which we cannot see. Life will always break every frame. I wish that reality would come true in our department and university, in our honorable academic community. I suppose that, whatever we call culture studies today, they are very favoured grounds for science and investigations vital both for a researcher and various social groups trying to cognize themselves. There has been published a wonderful book with a funny title «The essays on communal life» written by Ilya Utekhin - it’s a monographic research on a communal flat. There are a lot of pictures raising a smile and phenomena evoking either sadness or joy. It’s a stunning research into semantic space of a communal flat; the monograph opens our eyes to ourselves and our nature as men. We transmit the fragments represented as a form of everyday life in a communal flat to all our national culture. Thus, we could cognize ourselves and predict what we would do and how we could correct ourselves. So I think that the question is largely about social control including ruling of ourselves. After the lectures on cultural anthropology, my postgraduate students told me that, like reading medicine guide and making

out one’s own diagnosis, they could actually make predictions about themselves at cultural anthropology. For example, in Russia, we have an extraordinary contradiction: on the one hand, there is a negative attitude towards the state expressed in the desire to go away to Siberia, to a villa, to a closet, anywhere far from the state; on the other hand, a form of social encouragement of the Russians is actual only when there is the seal of the state. For instance, the point of life is that an administrator makes a compliment, gives a certificate or a medal, mentions in an interview (I would remind the stepmother from the Russian film «Cinderella», who puts down the number of glances, mentions, handshakes with the statesman). The Russians cannot be encouraged by the state without such signs. But if you apply it to yourself and your activity, perhaps, there arises freedom we dream of, being Europeans and people speaking the Indo-European language. I don’t know if there is more important task than self-cognition, knowledge of our own national culture and our place in it, correction of us. I don’t know any loftiest aim than our release from us. So we have a pragmatic aim: culture studies will see a true boom. There appear the most interesting scientific investigations, and St. Petersburg proposes us a very interesting form of our community: Scientific and educational community of culture studies.

Medvedeva H.S.: We could carry out crossculture studies at the university. The university declares that it will have its own service market and technologies spread in large territories. If educational level is appropriate, there will be more students from different countries. We will be able to invite foreign students and carry out concrete cross-cultural studies and investigations on adaptability for foreign culture. If someone comes from America, perhaps, it will be easy to get accustomed to local culture but there are nationalities facing difficulties in adaptation.

Moskaluke Marina Valentinovna (Doctor of Art history, professor; Chair of Art History and Theory, Siberian Federal University): I would like to sum up some particular moments after all the reports presented. In my opinion, it is incorrect to suggest that culture studies are science when there are many doctors and candidates; it is also incorrect to state that culture studies is not science when we have many definitions of culture studies, and neither of them is considered to be established.

Research on interprocess proceedingbetween fine arts, philosophy, morals, religion, science, and policy is of current interest for me as an art historian entirely dealing with art critical and scientific problematics. Every sphere has its own creative instrumentation and forms autonomous theories and methodological concepts. It appears from this that human cultural values are obtained throughout rather isolated areas. But they are to interact and enrich each other. In my own practice at art history, I repeatedly have to deal with the theses carried out on culture studies for the last years. And I have derived a lot from them. From my point of view, culture studies promote correlation of interdisciplinary approaches in the general course of human sciences without damage of originality of every kind of spiritual creative work.

A unique example is Sergey Averintzev’s scientific creations, which raises objections neither from historians nor from culture historians. We can define his role in his works such as translations and comments on the Psalms: whether he is a translator, a historian as a restorer of the texts, an art critic as an analyst of artistic images or a theologian as an interpreter of religious implications. Just polyhistory of his knowledge of world culture allows him to find harmonious synthesis.

I would like to point out one more moment mentioned in the previous discussion. It is

obvious that culture studies are a science being under formation. Today a culture student, who is to be educated and trained by the department, finds himself in the complicated situation of absolute indefiniteness about what culture studies are. We have already mentioned that. But it is not perspective to accentuate culture studies of sociological trend only because methodological problems haven’t been solved yet. My answer to Natalia Petrovna’s question synthesising the whole seminar like some kind of refrain (how is a large number of academic hours to be arranged?), would be added up to the necessity to provide the students profound knowledge at general human disciplines; that would be a basis for creative freedom of two-year research work on concrete problems at culture studies.

Koptzeva N.P.: That is our destination.

Moskaluke M.V.: I would repeat once more that, in spite of indefiniteness of status of culture studies, I can see their further development as an autonomous science, not as some cross-disciplinary area of study. And they are to have their own methodology according to the laws of scientific knowledge, which doesn’t exclude the application of methods of other disciplines by a culture historian in the general integrative development of sciences. In my opinion, culture studies are the instrument allowing my concrete art history science to be advanced to higher levels of research. Today every science requires encyclopaedism.

Koptzeva N.P.: We need such seminars. In point of fact, this giant mega-university has destroyed some traditional forms of scientific life while the new ones should be developed as a scientific initiative. We believe this seminar is an initiative in organization of our scientific community and discovery of some interesting ideas, suggestions, etc. Then our attention has been drawn by scientific and educational community at culture studies in St. Petersburg. We could

join the community and open its branch here; we could be academically supported, supplied with materials; we could take part in conferences and internet-conferences and communicate with our colleagues. We would like to be involved in the Russian scientific community and satisfy the standards. In this connection, I would like to plan seminars titled more concretely. I think that our colleagues, the representatives of different sciences (from pedagogy to linguistics, from philosophy to social sciences, psychology, and art history), could find their own academic

interest here. We could make very interesting basic reports on methods existing in Russia today, topicality and development of those methods; we could discuss research into temporal perspectives. There are rich video materials, and there could be presented reports connected with philology, philosophy, art history, and pedagogy. Here we have some point of self-cognition and self-discipline: maybe, Philip Zimbardo is right saying that we have success when we keep our past, present, and future, if we can put them together. Goodbye!