Vol 2, No 4 (2016)
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7-17 3
Abstract
The paper discusses theoretical grounds for the search of mechanisms underlying the transmission of “cultural memory,” a problem posed in S. Yu. Nekliudov's paper. Several studies in sociology, anthropology, history and cognitive psychology serve as the basis for considering such facets of investigating “collective memory” as the constructed nature of group memory and the interaction between numerous groupdefned memories, the “historical accuracy” of memory and its narrative organization. We consider the results of research in neuropsychology that allow as to view the methods and limits of experimental investigation into the way memory transforms in communication. Based on D. Rubin's study, the prospects of studying mnemonic mechanisms in folklore texts are discussed. “Collective memory” research appears to be limited communicatively to studying memory in several generations at most, while it is appears that the investigation of the purportedly deeper “cultural memory” would involve a joint application of text analysis and socio-anthropological methods of collective (“communicative”, following J. Assman) memory research.
18-29 1
Abstract
This article investigates possibilities of approaching mechanisms of transmission of sacred literature in Ancient Egypt through concepts of copying and regulated variation. On the example of four utterances from the Pyramid Texts and their “copies” from later periods, the author shows how the structure and substance of a sacred text can vary depending on the evolution of theological thought and ritual decontextualization.
30-59 3
Abstract
This paper is an attempt at ascertaining the evolution of poetical fragments in two recensions of Táin bó Cúailnge, a medieval Irish epic. Contemporary theories of its development postulate that this process was driven by conscious efforts of several editors working in succession and that it took place in an exclusively written milieu. However, analysis of the discrepancies between poetic fragments in the frst and second recensions of TBC shows that most probably they have been separated by a period of oral transmission.
60-95 4
Abstract
This paper looks at the image of the Polish aristocratic woman and the crowned Queen of Moscow Marina Mniszek (Marianna / Maryna Mniszchówna / Mniszek) in the writings of the key Russian historians of the 17th — early 20th century: Tatishchev, Shcherbatov, Karamzin, Buturlin, Solov'ev, Kostomarov, Ilovaisky, Kliuchevsky, Platonov. Methodologically, the article builds on the deconstructivist epistemology of history. At the same time, it also deploys the approach and the terminology of cognitive ethnolinguistics (particularly, the idea of the so-called “profling of concepts”). The text describing historical events is seen as a type of discourse, as a kind of literary genre, and as a representation of a certain ideological system with its inherent axiology and conventional stereotypes. The article describes different types of historical narratives about Marina Mniszek submitted by these historians and different profles of her image presented in these versions: the patriarchal-rationalist, the sentimentalist, the romantic, the fundamentalist Orthodox. It also provides succinct explanations for the virtual absence of Marina Mniszek's image in the writings of positivist historians.
96-113 1
Abstract
In this article, we analyze the contents of entries made by Soviet citizens in visitors' books of the three largest memorial complexes in East Germany devoted to the events of World War II: the National Museum Buchenwald, the Seelow Heights Memorial Site and Museum, and the Museum of the History of the Unconditional Capitulation of Fascist Germany at Berlin-Karlshorst. On the basis of these sources the author draws conclusions regarding Soviet memorial culture of the postwar period and the interrelationship between the memorial practices of Soviet citizens abroad and cultural diplomacy. The most important distinctive features of these samples of memorial discourse were publicity, ritualism, performativity, emotional saturation, and the displacement of the historical context by topical issues of the present and the future.
114-149
Abstract
In this article we use ethnographic feld records to analyse the structure of historical memory of Russian Old Believers (Lipovans) in the Danube region. The feld records are compare to written data and documentary evidence, and historical plots of Old Believer legends are analysed as part of the folk world view.
150-161 4
Abstract
Sacred landscape is a dynamic phenomenon. That is why buildings or natural objects situated in one location can be lost due to various circumstances, including the passage of time. Nevertheless, a confessional group usually continues visiting such places despite churches or holly springs being ruined. History and certain beliefs regarding the place must be preserved for the sake of maintaining group identity. That is why different mechanisms of transmission of cultural memory are used to support the process. We call one of these mechanisms “ritual narration” a narrative about a lost sacred landscape, its history and the miracles that happened there, which is reproduced orally during the pilgrimage. This article considers such a mechanism, using as an example Siberian Old-Believers.
162-172 3
Abstract
In this article, the author refects on the interaction between food and memory, tries to trace the development of an individual gastronomical experience into a collective one, and to determine how this process affects the recollection of a food. It is well known that physical characteristics of food can trigger remembrances; at the same, food itself can be a subject of recollections. However, we usually remember not only the food, but the entire situation of its consumption. Apparently, the exceptional role that food plays in the memory processes is due to the emotional load of the gastronomical experience. Emotional experience of food can interact with the attendant event which results either in the superimposition of remembrances or in the displacement of one of them by the other. The so-called “gustatory nostalgia” is a particular case of such memory aberrations. It involves longing for a certain food tasted some time in the past. Gustatory nostalgia often becomes the common property of a group of people that share the same past; thus, quite paradoxically, the individual experience of food consumption turns out to be shareable. Acting as a marker of group membership, at the next stage gustatory nostalgia ceases to actually require the personal experience of a member of the group, since in fact it is the idea of such experience that is now shareable. Having turned into an inner stereotype, food becomes an effective instrument for constructing the cultural past of social and ethnic groups, and thereby such groups themselves.
173-203
Abstract
The article presents a diachronic study of the concept of turgenevskaia devushka “Turgenevian girl” (a female whose behavior, character or style seems similar to that of a lady from Turgenev's novels), which has become frmly rooted in the phraseological fund of modern Russian language and culture. However, we are not interested in its meaning in the language, but in the process of how it was formed and the reasons for changes in how it was interpreted. To show how the perception of heroines from the novels of Turgenev, which are part of the “golden treasury” of classical Russian literature, has changed during the XXth century, we examine training texts and the surrounding media context. From our observation of the rises and the falls in popularity of images of Turgenevian girls outside the bounds of of the original literary texts, their social acceptance or rejection, their inclusion or exclusion in school curricula, and their being marked the characters as a part of an obsolete past, or, conversely, as being vitally relevant, we conclude that the dynamics of how this collective image and the social memory of it has been affected by the rhythm of alternation of “Culture-1” and “Culture-2” (V. Paperny).
204-220 3
Abstract
In this article, I discuss the song “It's long since I have been in the Donbass...” (lyrics by N. K. Dorizo, music by N. V. Bogoslovsky), which was popular in the Soviet Union in the 1970s. I analyse how the song refects its “source” text: the memoirs of the actor S. V. Luk'yanov, the prototype of the protagonist of the song, in which he described an actual episode from his biography that made a very strong impression on him. I attempt to reconstruct the events in Luk'yanov's life that were reinterpreted in a very specifc way in his memorate. I also consider the literary context of motifs present both in the song and in the memorate and uncover the text-producing models that lie at the source of both narratives.
221-239 1
Abstract
The article contains a comparative analysis of the Soviet song “It's been a long time since I've been in Donbass…” and actor S. Lukyanov's memoirs, on which the song is presumably based. A full-scale analysis of the text includes not only uncovering its structure, but also a systemic description of all the important language stereotypes it contains. The texts, which derive from common structural folkloric model, differ to a considerable extent in their semantics and are interpreted be an addressee in different ways, depending on the context. Semantic analysis of the description of the heroine reveals different language stereotypes in Lukyanov's memoirs and in the song. In the frst case, she is presented as an old woman with an unhappy fate, in the second case she is a dignifed aged woman who found her own place in life independently of the one who had abandoned her.
240-250 1
Abstract
The article considers the narrative that destalinization resulted from Khrushchev's revenge for his son, who was executed during Stalin's rule. This rumor appeared in the mid1960s and today remains current among Stalin's followers. This plot is analyzed within the framework of Katerina Clark's conception of the Stalin period “big family myth”, according to which the Soviet people as a whole was imagined like a “big family”. We put forward the hypothesis that the persistence of the plot involving Khrushchev's son is related to the opposition between the “big family” and a “little family”, an opposition that underpins the ideas about the proper organization of society.
251-264
Abstract
In 2014–2016, the State Procuracy conducted several trials of Russian citizens who spread visual political folklore on current topics through social networks. This paper reveals the logic behind these prosecutions and compares current cases with the Soviet system of repression from 1928 to 1985.
265-291 1
Abstract
Actualization of “traditional” forms has for decades been characteristic for Soviet and post-Soviet public festivities. Among them is the burning of modernized Maslenitsa (Shrovetide) effgies, which allows one both to preserve the semantics of destroying evil and to develop a comical playful effect of the activity. For years, burning the Maslenitsa has been an institutionally organized event. In the 2010s, however, the practice signifcantly changed: Shrovetide becomes a more private family or small group holiday, in which activities are not limited to feasting but include burning the effgy. These vernacular festivities quite often turn into ironic political performances, when people burn effgies of crisis or of an external enemy. In 2015/2016 this was US president Barack Obama, who was presumably responsible for anti-Russian economic sanctions. In this paper we discuss the history of such developments in this festive practice and problematize the message and the addressing of it as a political statement.
292-311 1
Abstract
The article considers nodal points of territory representation in mass-media texts dealing with cultural thematics. Our analysis is based on texts from both Moldovan media sources (self-presentation) and from Russian ones (representation of the “other”), published from January 2011 through December 2015. Representations of cities (the cities of Gagauzia are taken as an example), countries (Moldova in the Russian media), regions (conventional “East” and “West”) are analyzed in this article. Within representations of territories in mass-media we identifed such nodal points as historical memory, preservation of culture and language, multiethnic character of spaces. We also identifed nodal points common to two of the three levels: sports and religious themes for the cities and the country, the borders of the “West” and the “East” for the levels of the country and the regions).
312-338 1
Abstract
The article examines Tyumen Internet memes that correlated with offine urban beliefs. The study is based mainly on the material of the network group “Parallel Tyumen” and other additional data of Tyumen groups in the social network “VKontakte”. The author identifes three groups of the most common plots of visual Tyumen texts, as well as specifc mechanisms of their creation: metaphorical transfer (based on the objects' signifcance or on their accidental similarity), exaggeration, destruction and animation. We show how through the creation and distribution of local memes not only the cultural identity of members of the Tyumen community (authors and readers of visual texts) is constructed, but also the history of places and events they deem signifcant. In addition, through the visualization of a complex of urban stereotypes in the form of ironic popular local memes, there takes place, on the one hand, their incorporation into cultural memory, and, on the other, a reduction of social tensions that they had caused.
340-345
Abstract
The paper reviews two conferences which took place almost simultaneously in 2016: the “Virtual Zones of Peace and Confict. Digitisation of Memories of Confict” workshop, organized by Copenhagen University in cooperation with Lund University (March 3–4), and the conference “Places of Amnesia: Interdisciplinary Perspectives On Forgotten Pasts”, organized by Cambridge University (April 5–6). Both events were centered on practical implications of memory studies — from organizing online archives and the ethics of archaeological feld work to transitional justice.
346-356
Abstract
The paper presents a review of the annual MiklouhoMaclay Conference organized by theDepartment of Anthropology of Australia, Oceania and Indonesia, Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera), Russian Academy of Sciences (St Petersburg), on April 18–19, 2016. Various issues involving the culture, history and languages of South and Southeast Asia, Australia and Oceania as well as the intellectual heritage of N.N.Miklouho-Maclay in connection with his 170th anniversary were discussed during the conference.
ISSN 2412-9410 (Print)
ISSN 2782-1765 (Online)
ISSN 2782-1765 (Online)