Culture and components of culture.
culture(lat. cultura - cultivation, farming, education, veneration) - the area of human activity associated with the self-expression (cult, imitation) of a person, the manifestation of his subjectivity (subjectivity, character, skills, abilities and knowledge). That is why every culture has additional characteristics, because. is connected both with human creativity and everyday practice, communication, reflection, generalization and his daily life. Any culture must necessarily include three main components: values, norms and means of transmission of cultural patterns. Cultural values are the properties of a social object to satisfy certain needs of individuals. Each individual has his own value system, which can be dominated by both spiritual and material values. In accordance with this system of values, the individual seeks to realize his individual needs. At the same time, in every society there is some generalized, fairly stable or crystallized system of values that characterizes the basic needs of individual groups of the population.
social norms- these are generally recognized rules, patterns of behavior, standards of activity that ensure orderliness, stability and stability of social interaction between individuals and groups. Means of transmission of cultural patterns through which cultural patterns can be passed on to other people or even to other generations. It is important to single out two main means of transmitting cultural patterns that are used by members of society: language and symbolic communications. By language we will understand such a main means of transmitting cultural samples, in which each material or spiritual object of the environment must be assigned a certain set of sounds, in respect of which there is an agreement in a given society. People call absolutely all objects of the surrounding reality with certain words, whether it be a mood, an idea, a feeling, a belief, or a material object.
Cultural geography as a science
Cultural geography- the direction of socio-economic geography, which studies spatial cultural differences and the territorial distribution of cultures.
As a scientific direction created by Karl Sauer in the 1930s, for a long time it developed mainly in the USA. After Sauer, the greatest contribution to the development of cultural geography was made by Richard Hartshorne and Wilbur Zelinsky. Sauer mainly applies the methodology of qualitative and descriptive analysis, the limitations of which in the 1930s Richard Hartshorne, and later the supporters of the revolution of quantitative analysis, sought to overcome in regional geography. In the 1970s there was increasing criticism of positivism in geography and an over-enthusiasm for quantitative methods.
Since the 1980s, such a trend as "new cultural geography" has become known. It draws on the critical theories of Michel de Certo and Gilles Deleuze, which reject the traditional notion of a static space. These ideas were developed in the non-representational theory.
The two main branches of cultural geography are behavioral and cognitive geography.
Areas of study
Globalization, explained as cultural convergence,
Westernization or similar processes of modernization, Americanization, Islamization and others,
theories of cultural hegemony or cultural assimilation through cultural imperialism,
cultural regional differentiation - the study of differences in lifestyle including ideas, social attitudes, language, social practices, institutions and power structures and the full range of cultural practices in a geographical region,
study of the cultural landscape,
· other areas including spirit of place, colonialism, post-colonialism, internationalism, immigration and emigration, eco-tourism.
the place of cultural geography in the system of sciences.
lifestyle geography, which gained its scientific independence (as a branch of public geography) in the 1980s. (Reitviir, 1983), has now become a traditional discipline with fairly well-established approaches and methods, and only a noticeably updated empirical base. For cultural geography, the most significant direction of research is in the geography of lifestyle, which studies the social preferences and interests of the population (including the system of priorities and the specifics of the mentality of people who form territorial communities of different hierarchical levels). A fairly common method of research in this area are sociological surveys of the population. At the same time, the most interesting methods for studying people's value systems, their preferences, as well as identity, are developed in ethnosociology (Arutyunyan, 1995; Sikevich, 1994; Drobizheva, 1995; Arutyunyan et al., 1998; Gudkov, 1995, 1996, 1999, etc. .).
Geography of cultural infrastructure can be considered as a branch of the geography of culture and, at the same time, the geography of the service sector. The number of studies in this area increased markedly in the 1980s–1990s. First, the issues of development and placement of cultural infrastructure occupy a prominent place in comprehensive geographical studies of the service sector (Alekseev, Zubarevich, 1987; Alekseev, Kovalev, Tkachenko, 1991). Secondly, more attention has been paid to the study of the role of cities in the formation of cultural infrastructure (Patsirkovsky, 1985) and the territorial organization of the network of cultural institutions (Darinsky, 1985), museums (Seredina, 1991), institutions that train specialists with higher and vocational education ( Katrovsky, 1988, 1997).
The climax was the announcement cultural geography as an independent discipline of social geography along with social and economic geography (Gokhman, 1984). It happened in the first half of the 1980s. and was associated with the formation of the concept of social geography as a counterbalance to the outdated concepts of economic and socio-economic geography (Reitviir, 1983). From this moment, the formation of the theoretical direction of cultural geography begins, a great contribution to the development of which was made by B.B. Rodoman (1980, 1990), Yu.A. Vedenin (1988, 1990), Yu.D. Dmitrevsky (1990 in collaboration with N.F. Dmitrevskaya, 2000), D.V. Nikolaenko (1999a) and, finally, A.G. Druzhinin (1989, 1990, 1991, 1995 and others).
Having finished the review of the history of the development of a number of scientific disciplines that prepared the basis for the formation and development of domestic cultural geography, let us return to the question of the object and subject of research in this branch of scientific knowledge. So, A.G. Druzhinin defines as the most common object cultural geography territorial organization of culture (TOK). At the same time, the object of study of this scientific discipline turns out to be practically identical to the integral object of social geography - the territorial organization of society. As subject cultural geography, the same author calls the spatial patterns of the TOK, including "all the diversity and hierarchy of its geographically determined and differentiated forms" (Existing, Druzhinin, 1994, p. 10). Raising the question of the object and subject of cultural geography is important not only in itself, but from the point of view of analyzing its internal structure. This will be discussed in the next section of the book.
The concept of "Cultural geography"
Remark 1
Cultural geography, as one of the branches of geography, considers culture in geographical space and is often defined as the geography of a person.
Cultural geography is one of the leading branches of social geography in foreign countries along with economic, social and political geography.
In Russia, cultural geography is a set of scientific areas that are close in terms of the object of study, but it has not yet taken shape as an integral scientific discipline.
In the 1920s, a school of cultural landscape was created in the United States, so K. Sauer, who founded this school, is considered to be the founder of cultural geography.
At that time, in Russian geographical science, the culture of different regions and its description were part of anthropogeography. The development of cultural geography in the country began in the 80s, and was associated with the study of the cultural landscape and ethnology.
In cultural geography, sections are distinguished depending on the subject of study:
- ethnic geography;
- geography of languages;
- geography of religions;
- geography of art;
- geography of mass culture;
- geography of cultural infrastructure.
Currently, cultural geography has practical significance in more specialized areas, for example, feminist geography, children's geography, tourism, gender geography, urban geography, political geography.
Cultural geography has its own object, which is geocultural space - a product of the interaction of spaces, cultural and geographical.
The object of study of cultural geography in the foreign world, especially in the United States in the second half of the 20th century, was local areas. In their borders, they rarely coincide with the boundaries of the administrative-territorial division, but the population perceives them as culturally integral territories.
The purpose of the development of cultural geography is the study of cultural practices and human activities to the extent that they are spatially related to each other.
Globalization, which began in the 21st century, is associated with such processes as the unification of culture, the loss of local cultural traditions, and the loss of cultural values. Distinctive ethno-cultural territorial communities were blurred and disappeared, therefore, research conducted in the field of cultural geography began to be of great practical importance.
Studies of cultural geography and their results are important in the development of strategies for the socio-economic development of countries and regions. The nature of the economic development of a country is influenced by the accepted system of values, norms of behavior, type of mentality, traditions of economic ethics, economic and environmental culture.
Specialists working in the field of cultural geography are involved in the development of both national and international government programs for the protection of cultural heritage.
In Soviet post-war geography, only anthropogenic landscape science really developed. Cultural geography was a project of the future, and today its status has remained almost unchanged.
Even N. N. Baransky said that the formation of cultural geography would be desirable. Cultural geography was part of the social, on which social needs were concentrated.
S. B. Lavrov at that time noted that specialists in social geography should not switch to cultural and geographical aspects, because social geography itself is far from perfect.
Remark 2
Thus, it turns out that at this time, cultural geography, not yet restored, suffered from a close connection with social geography. It never went beyond social geography and did not become a science of the way of life of local communities.
Nevertheless, in the late 80s of the last century, cultural geography emerged as a narrow applied field of knowledge. At first, she studied the distribution of cultural artifacts on the territory of the country and was associated with the works of A. G. Druzhinin, who considered the concept of the noosphere to be the methodological basis for the geography of culture.
A. G. Druzhinin introduces the concept of a geocultural situation as its property, and not as a special territorial system. He believes that it is geocultural situations that form geoethnocultural systems, so the study of the geography of a particular culture is reduced to their selection.
He very clearly defines the distinctive facet of cultural and social geography and at the same time their inseparability. According to him, this continuity is as follows:
- cultural infrastructure, being an important component of the territorial organization of culture, is subject to social infrastructure;
- the territorial community of people and geocultural situations are connected as varieties of territorial social systems.
In his monograph, A. G. Druzhinin points out that cultural geography is a kind of integral approach in the system of geographical sciences, it permeates all subsystems of socio-economic geography.
A. G. Druzhinin was the first theorist and creator of cultural geography in the country. He names the prerequisites for the formation of cultural geography:
- the availability of research in the field of socio-cultural geography of the population among domestic geographers;
- new disciplines related to geography - lifestyle geography;
- geography of education;
- geography of consumption, science;
- formation of the conceptual apparatus of socio-economic geography.
After a long break, cultural geography in the country was formed in the last years of the existence of the USSR as a special branch of social geography, and its subject matter concerns the territorial organization of cultural objects.
And, at the same time, it must be said that the formation of cultural geography in the country is proceeding independently of Western cultural geography, and without relying on the Russian anthropogeographic school.
Cultural and geographical zoning
Cultural-geographical regions are divided into two types - real regions, mental regions.
Real areas, in turn, are divided into homogeneous and heterogeneous. They can be homogeneous both culturally and culturally-naturally.
In mental cultural-geographic regions, mythological and vernacular regions are distinguished.
The law of geographical zonality, discovered by V.V. Dokuchaev at the beginning of the 20th century, is subject to zonal regions, and the author himself considered his discovery as the law of natural and cultural zonality, i.e. considered much broader.
The law of zonality, V. V. Dokuchaev believed, not only applies to nature, it applies to cultural phenomena, the economic life of the population, to ongoing social processes and phenomena of spiritual life.
According to L. N. Gumilyov, nature and traditional economic activity are interconnected in the zonal enclosing landscape.
Within Russia, the following zonal natural and cultural regions successively replace each other from north to south: the region of the Arctic deserts, the region of the tundra, the forest tundra, the taiga region, the region of mixed and broad-leaved forests, the forest-steppe region, the steppe region, the region of semi-deserts, the region of deserts, the Mediterranean region.
According to Gumilyov, the zonal enclosing landscape of Russian culture includes the zone of mixed and broad-leaved forests of the East European (Russian) plain.
Most of the ancient Russian cities are located within these limits. If we take into account ethnic borders with neighbors, then it is necessary to single out the Central region of traditional Russian culture.
In the north of the Russian Plain, during the Novgorod and Rostov-Suzdal colonization, a northern Russian region was formed with a traditional northern housing complex and a "surrounding" dialect. The taiga has become the ecological niche of this region.
In the southern part of the Russian Plain, the South Russian region was formed, stretching from the Kursk region to the Krasnodar Territory. The steppe and forest-steppe enclosing landscapes have become an ecological niche of the South Russian region.
Remark 3
Nature and traditional culture, especially in the European part of Russia, have changed significantly in the course of globalization processes, and the features of a particular natural and cultural region in a purer form can now be found in museum reserves and in national parks.
Geographical knowledge is a universal element of the general culture of mankind and the foundation of modern civilization. Geography is one of the oldest areas of human knowledge, studying all phenomena and processes that have a spatial component, these are objects of the world around us - material and ideal. In each object, phenomenon, process, geography considers their internal territorial structure and external territorial relations. Among them there is such a concept as "culture", in various and numerous forms, associated with nature and human economy: "the space of the Earth organizes culture, and culture - space" (Baburin, Mazurov, 2000).
The concept of "culture" means cultivation, education, development, reverence. The whole scope of this concept is grandiose - it is everything that is created by people, the whole set of products of human activity. Culture is a phenomenon that cannot be understood without relating it to nature. That is, culture is a set of material and spiritual values created and accumulated by mankind, it is a variety of forms of human life, it is the cultivation of life, nature, its humanization.
By geographic culture, we understand the social and individual quality of a person, reflecting the value and personal attitude to wildlife, a healthy lifestyle and the environment and manifested in the process of participation in spiritual and practical activities for their knowledge, development, transformation and preservation. The geographical culture of the individual is a system of life values based on knowledge about the nature of the Earth, the causes of its diversity, about the population and its economic activity, which regulates the behavior of a student in the process of the relationship "man - nature - society - culture".
V.P. Maksakovsky, highlighting the concept of "culture", called its four important components:
I. Geographical picture of the world.
II. geographical thinking.
III. Methods of geography.
IV. The language of geography.
The geographical picture of the world helps to comprehend the laws of interaction between society and nature in various aspects. It makes it possible to determine both the general culture of a person and his personal position in the present and future of the planet. Geographic culture also implies the mastery of specific geographical thinking - complex thinking.
It is also important to note the methods of geography - comparative descriptive, statistical, historical, economic and mathematical, the method of geographical zoning, etc. But, in my opinion, one of the most important methods of the science of geography, which distinguishes a geographer from a specialist in another field of knowledge, is cartographic method. The map gives an idea of the relative position of objects, their size, the degree of distribution of a particular phenomenon, and much more. N. N. Baransky emphasized that “the map, along with the text, is, as it were, the “second language” of geography, just as the drawing is the second language of geometry” and that “any geographical research comes from the map and comes to the map, it begins with the map and ends with a map.
It is especially important to note that N. N. Baransky directly connected the mastery of the language of the map with geographical thinking, for those who are accustomed to “putting their judgments on the map” think geographically. He assigned the role of the object language of geography to the map. (Maksakovsky, 1998)
The language of geography, in addition to the language of maps, includes the language of concepts and terms, the language of dates and numbers, the language of scientific facts and the language of geographical names.
Ssustainable development- Sustainable Development or Supportive Development? In English, the concept of "sustainable development" is equivalent to the expression: sustainable development. Word Sustainable literally means "Life-Supporting" or "Life-Sustaining". The word development, in addition to "development" in the root means "manifestation". It is the term sustainable development was specifically introduced by the United Nations International Commission on Environment and Development (ICED) in 1987. In the Brundtland Report, to denote a development in which "the satisfaction of the needs of the present does not undermine the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." The main functional concepts of this concept are the needs of people in natural resources and environmental benefits and the limitations of the environment to meet the current and future needs of people.
At the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro (1992), a detailed analysis of the environmental situation in the world was presented. The conference was attended by the heads of states and governments, who for the first time had to make a difficult decision to change the ideological strategy of mankind.
Every action you take has an impact on tomorrow. Sustainable development is a long-term vision that requires a thoughtful, systematic approach that takes into account all the factors influencing the formation of a secure and prosperous future. This is a creative process, and it is based on a balance between one's own interests and the interests of society, the awareness of responsibility to new generations. The concept of sustainable development was a logical transition from the greening of scientific knowledge and socio-economic development, which began rapidly in the 1970s, when humanity faced the manifestation of global environmental problems. The reaction to this concern was the creation of international non-governmental scientific organizations for the study of global processes on Earth, such as the International Federation of Institutes for Advanced Study (IFIAS), the Club of Rome (with its famous report “Limits to Growth”), the International Institute for Systems Analysis, etc.
Sustainable development as a worldview model attempts to bring together the ecological, social and economic dimensions of the environment in a global perspective. The task of society is not only to reduce the consumption of resources, but also to change the structure of consumption. The goal of sustainable development is the survival of mankind as a whole and the improvement of the quality of life for each person individually. The result should be a world in which:
in the social sphere - power is decentralized, citizens and governments are able to resolve conflicts without the use of violence, justice and fairness are the highest values, material prosperity and social security are provided to everyone, the media objectively reflect what is happening and bind people and cultures together;
in the ecological sphere - a stable population, the preservation of ecosystems in diversity and the coexistence of nature and human cultures in mutual harmony, environmentally friendly food;
in the economic sphere - minimal environmental pollution and the minimum amount of waste, labor that elevates people and worthy remuneration, intellectual activity, social and technical innovations, the expansion of human knowledge, and the creative self-realization of man.
Stop rampant consumerism, reconsider the barbaric attitude to resources, reduce production and life waste to the minimum possible, completely reorganize the education system, provide a rational new approach to building and housing, subordinate development, planning and management to strict mathematical models, introduce a new control system, based on certification - these are the tasks of sustainable development for the near future, on the fulfillment of which the very possibility of the future for future generations depends.
Geographic culture as a factor of sustainable development. One cannot but agree with the words of Yu. G. Simonov: “Humanity had to go through all this and spend trillions of dollars so that environmental problems quietly step aside and give way to “sustainable development” programs. Professionally, neither physicians nor biologists were able to create a system of integral scientific knowledge in this area, as it is now clear. They knew man and partly nature. But they did not know the laws of economic development. Didn't know a lot. After all, before that they did not even come close to the problems of interaction between nature, economy and population. An analysis of such a system could only be found in the books of geographers. But it sounded more like a slogan or like a dream. Geography, one of the oldest areas of knowledge, for a number of reasons, belatedly joined in the solution of these problems. Paradox"
It is geographers who play an important role in implementing the concept of sustainable development in the real world. And in order for this realization to be possible, it is important what level of geographical culture the society has reached. The level of geographical culture of modern society is becoming an important indicator of the general culture of the population, a measure and criterion of human development. A sign of the geographical culture of modern man is a stable, established idea of the Earth, of his state, of his small Motherland. This is an individual experience and impressions from travels, expeditions, recreation. The development of geographical thinking is an important task for the development of geographical culture on the way to sustainable development.
The originality of geography follows from the main approach of this science to the world around. The question "where?" is the key to this approach. But geographers also study the important concept of "territoriality," which includes categories such as location, location, environment: natural, social, economic.
Geographical thinking of people, its scale, must become today the cornerstone of our entire house called "Earth - Biosphere". This is the global nature of this thinking.
A significant place in culture is occupied by its game moment, which is recorded in the field of European culture. Plato spoke about the game space, I. Kant - about the theory of the aesthetic "state of the game", Schiller emphasized that a person only "is a person when he plays", I. Huizinga put forward the position that culture is the product of a "playing person". In his book “The Playing Man”, he identifies the game and culture in the early stages of history, the game nature is clearly manifested in many areas of culture during their genesis, primarily in poetry, rituals, myths, etc. a constitutive value (at the later stages of the development of culture, the game is "woven" into it).
In more developed cultures, archaic positions are preserved for a long time, due to which the poetic form is by no means perceived only as the satisfaction of an aesthetic need, but expresses everything that has meaning or vital value in the existence of a collective. Game behavior of a person is most often realized in various kinds of orgies, mysteries, holidays, carnivals, festivals, spectacles, etc. The concept of I. Huizinga captures quite real aspects of the functioning of culture. After all, the game or only the elements of the game are essential in shaping a person as a social being, in reducing the socio-psychological tension in society, in humanizing the person himself by “spilling out” the destructive forces and tendencies dormant in him. That is why in the most diverse civilizations great importance was attached to various phenomena of the gaming sphere of culture.
I. Huizinga's opinion about culture as a game influenced cultural studies and brought a lot of research into its game aspects. In this regard, the model of culture as a game, put forward by S. Lem, one of the subtlest thinkers of the 20th century, deserves attention. Culture has a backlash (band of freedom) in relation to Nature, which explains the existence of purely culturally changeable forms and symbols. In this regard, S. Lem writes as follows: “The stochastic model of cultural genesis suggests that the strip of freedom that the world leaves at the disposal of an evolving society that has already fulfilled the duty of adaptation, that is, a set of indispensable tasks, is filled with behavioral complexes, at first random. However, over time, they freeze in the processes of self-organization and develop into such structures of norms that form an intracultural model of “human nature”, imposing schemes of duties and obligations on it. A person (especially at the beginning of his historical path) grows into accidents, which decide what he and his civilization will be like. The selection of behavioral alternatives is, in essence, a lottery, but this does not mean that the composition of what happens is just as lottery. In other words, a person at the starting point is an axiologically neutral being, and whether he becomes a “monstrous savage” or an “innocent simpleton” depends on the culture code, which is different in different civilizations. According to Lemov's model of culture as a game, the difference between the codes of cultures of different civilizations is due to the fact that culture and Nature "play" and in different situations this game is non-identical due to the fact that each culture is under the influence of one or another combination of its physical, biological and social determinant. In addition, it should be taken into account that Nature is an "arena" of perturbations and non-algorithmic (unpredictable) changes. It is the playful nature of culture that allows a person to develop strategies for his future behavior in order to survive in the world.
Recently, the cultural and historical concepts of Eurasianism, an original trend of Russian thought, which flourished in the first third of the 20th century, have also “revived”. After 1917, a group of Russian emigrant intellectuals (N.S. Trubetskoy, P.N. Sabitsky, V.N. Ilyin, M.M. Shakhmatov, G.V. Vernadsky, L.P. Karsavin, etc.) became call themselves “Eurasians” and declared themselves in the program collection “Exodus to the East. Premonitions and Accomplishments. Eurasian Statements". The new ideology they formulated was especially suited to the problems of culture, history and ethnology.
The Eurasianists minted a geopolitical doctrine that claims to be the only correct interpretation of the ethnic tradition. The main thesis of Eurasianism is as follows: "Eurasianism is a specific form, type of culture, thinking and state policy, rooted since ancient times precisely in the space of a huge Eurasian state - Russia." This thesis was substantiated with the help of many non-traditional arguments taken from the history of Eurasia.
All the reasoning of the Eurasians proceeds from the idea that Russia-Eurasia is a unique geographical and cultural world. “The whole meaning and pathos of our statements,” wrote N. Alekseev and P. Savitsky, “is reduced to the fact that we are aware of and proclaim the existence of a special Eurasian-Russian culture and its special subject, as a symphonic personality. We no longer have enough of that vague cultural self-awareness that the Slavophils had, although we honor them as those closest to us in spirit. But we resolutely reject the essence of Westernism, i.e. denial of identity and ... the very existence of our culture.
The core of the cultural and historical concepts of the Eurasians is the idea of Eurasia, which outlines the boundaries of thinking in its social, economic and political aspects and focuses on the originality and self-sufficiency of the national culture. According to Eurasian thinking, culture is an organic whole that has all the features of a mythologeme. This means that culture is very unusual - its geographical character is determined by: firstly, a subtle awareness of the organic connection of social life with nature; secondly, the continental scope (“Russian latitude”) in relations with the world; thirdly, any historically established forms of political life are considered as something relative. The Eurasian will discount the tradition, but he feels its relative nature and does not put up with its rigid limits. The Eurasian type of thinking is not tied (like the Western one) to any state and political framework, it allows for unpredictable social experiments and explosions of the people's element. The Eurasian cultural consciousness did not accept such characteristics of Western civilization as "German pedantry", "Polish arrogance", rationalism, crowded cities and environmental costs.
The Eurasian way of thinking and acting is based not on the rationalization of experience, but on faith in the Absolute, tradition, leader, etc.; they are always based on some unifying idea. Russian culture has absorbed the Orthodox faith from Byzantium (it is a specific synthesis of religious dogmas and rituals with Orthodox culture) and Turanian (or Turkic) ethics, the perception of statehood and human rights) based on unquestioning obedience. It was this fusion that gave the social whole the form of catholicity, spiritual unity, and not a mechanical totality. It is this synthesis that underlies the cultural and historical continuity and allows us to preserve the national potential that is necessary for the functioning of our society.
The central point of the Eurasian cultural and historical concepts is the idea of "place development", according to which the socio-historical environment and the geographical environment merge together. From this point of view, world history appears as a system of places of development; moreover, individual “places of development” have their own specific forms of culture, regardless of the national composition and racial origin of the peoples living there. In other words, separate "places of development" become "culturally permanent", become carriers of a special type of culture inherent only to them. According to the Eurasianists, all the great powers that existed on the Eurasian plains are characterized by the same type of military empire. Such were the states of the Scythians, Huns, Mongols, Tatars, the Moscow kingdom and the Russian Empire. They considered the Golden Horde and Byzantium to be the origins of Russian statehood and culture.
In our time, L. Gumilyov's research on the influence of the geographical environment on ethnogenesis and the development of culture has a certain consonance with the ideas of the Eurasianists. He considers ethnogenesis a biospheric and landscape phenomenon, a manifestation of the hereditary trait of "passionarity" - the organic ability of people to exert themselves, to sacrifice for the sake of a lofty goal. L. Gumilyov calls himself the last Eurasian, because he reinforced the arguments of his predecessors with his scientific research, introducing along with this a new word in science.
L. Gumilyov reinforces N.S. Trubetskoy that there is no universal culture, emphasizing the idea of Eurasianism about the development of national culture, referring to the theory of systems. It follows from this that only a fairly complex system survives and functions successfully. A universal human culture can exist only with the utmost simplification, when all national cultures are destroyed. But the ultimate simplification of the system means its death; on the contrary, a system that has a significant number of elements that have common functions is viable and promising in its development.
Such a system will correspond to the culture of a separate "national organism" (L. Gumilyov).
Agreeing with the historical and methodological conclusions of the Eurasians, L. Gumilyov noted: "But they did not know the main thing in the theory of ethnogenesis - the concept of passionarity." After all, unlike the Eurasian doctrine as a synthesis of history and geography, L. Gumilyov's theory fuses history, geography and natural science into one whole. From this he draws a number of conclusions, namely: 1) it is the passionary impulses that determine the rhythms of Eurasia; 2) Eurasia as a whole is one of the centers of the world, i.e. polycentrism of cultures and civilizations is recognized.
L. Gumilyov's theory is also aimed against nationalism while preserving national identity. In 1992, shortly before his death, he wrote the following in his book “From Rus' to Russia”: “Since we are 500 years younger, no matter how we study the European experience, we will not be able now to achieve prosperity and mores that are characteristic for Europe. Our age, our level of passionarity presupposes completely different imperatives of behavior. This does not mean at all that it is necessary to reject someone else's from the threshold. It is possible and necessary to study other experience, but it is worth remembering that this is precisely someone else's experience. In any case, there is no doubt that Eurasianism is such an “idea-force” in its Gumilev version that can save Russia as a Eurasian power; that is why politicians also pay attention to it.
Thus, game and geographic (geopolitical concepts) cultures involve the identification of new elements, factors that ensure cultural development. These concepts do not deny, but complement the above concepts of culture.
Cultural geography has historically emerged as
special direction within the framework of socio-economic geography. The subject of her research was the spatial and cultural differences between the regions of the Earth, based on the identification of geographical spaces in terms of their cultural identity.
The scientific direction itself was founded by Karl Sauer in the early 30s of the XX century in
USA. A significant contribution to the development of cultural geography was made by Richard Hartshorne and Wilbur Zelinsky. In Russia, the problems of cultural geography still remain insufficiently studied, although for the past three decades there have been various directions of its study. Generally, cultural geography is interpreted as a branch of geographical studies. At the same time, the trend is obvious, according to which the most proven methods of the humanities, primarily semiotic and philosophical-culturological ones, penetrate into modern cultural geography.
cultural geography is one of the two main branches of geography (along with physical geography) and is often referred to as human geography.
Cultural geography is concerned with the study of the many facets of culture found throughout the world and how they relate to the geographic locations in which cultural events take place, while at the same time examining how people move in different directions. Some areas of cultural geography focus on the study of language, religion, various economic and government structures, art, music, and other cultural aspects that explain how and/or why people exist in the areas in which they live. In this sense, globalization becomes that important factor, based on which various cultural phenomena easily "travel" around the world. Today, cultural geography has practical implications in more specialized areas such as feminist geography, children's geography, tourism, urban geography, gender geography, and political geography. It is developed with the aim of studying a variety of cultural practices and human activities, to the extent that they are spatially interconnected.
13. Cultural and geographical zoning: basic concepts and principles. !!!notebook.
14. Zonal natural and cultural areas.
all cultural and geographical regions are divided into two main types - real and mental. In turn, according to the criterion of homogeneity of cultural space, real areas are divided into homogeneous and heterogeneous. At the same time, regions can be homogeneous both only in cultural terms, and in complex cultural and natural terms. Among the mental cultural-geographical regions, there are mythological and vernacular.
Zonal areas obey the law of geographic zoning. The discovery of this law by V.V. Dokuchaev at the beginning of the 20th century was perceived, first of all, by naturalists, therefore, in many works, including modern school textbooks on geography, it is interpreted as the law of natural zonality. Meanwhile, the researcher himself interpreted his discovery much more broadly - as law of natural and cultural zoning. V.V. Dokuchaev believed that the law of zoning extends not only to nature, but also to cultural phenomena, to the economic life of peoples, to social processes, and even to phenomena of the spiritual life of man.
From the cultural and geographical positions, the law of natural and cultural zoning can be formulated as follows: « Zonal-latitudinal distribution of natural conditions on surface of the Earth determines the zonal distribution of traditional cultures and their
individual properties» . In a zonal natural and cultural region - or, in the words of L.N. Gumilyov, the zonal enclosing landscape - nature (climate, surface and ground waters, vegetation, soils) and traditional economic activities (agriculture, cattle breeding, hunting, fishing and gathering) are interconnected.
Zonal natural and cultural areas - for example, tundra, forest or steppe - play the role of an ecological niche of the corresponding traditional cultures.
On the territory of modern Russia, the following zonal natural and cultural regions are distinguished, successively replacing each other from north to south (in the territories of the plains and lowlands): arctic deserts, tundra, forest-tundra, taiga, zone
mixed and broad-leaved forests, forest-steppe, steppe, semi-desert, desert
and mediterranean.
Zonal enclosing landscape Russian culture is a zone mixed and broad-leaved forests Russian Plain, within which most of the ancient Russian cities are located. Taking into account ethnic boundaries with neighbors, one can distinguish Central region of traditional Russian culture.
North Russian region(with a traditional northern Russian housing complex and a "surrounding" dialect) was formed in the northern half of the Russian Plain by two colonization flows - Novgorod and Rostov-Suzdal. Its ecological niche is the taiga.
South Russian region(with a traditional southern Russian housing complex and a specific dialect) arose in the southern half of the Russian Plain, from the Kursk region to the Krasnodar Territory within the steppe and forest-steppe enclosing landscapes.
Globalization processes have significantly changed traditional culture and nature (especially in the European territory of Russia), therefore, in the purest form, the characteristics of each natural and cultural region can only be found in national parks and museum reserves. At the same time, relic cultural and household complexes are strong both in cities and in metropolitan areas.
