ИНЕРЦИЯ ПАРАДИГМЫ НА ПРИМЕРЕ ПОСТСОВЕТСКОГО ВОСТОКОВЕДЕНИЯ

Abstract

In 1962, Thomas Kuhn’s classic work “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” was published, and while it was an established practice to study history as a series of successive academic paradigms, Thomas Kuhn himself was cautious about the use of his theory in the humanities: He initially envisioned the scheme of history as a change of academic paradigms, some sort of framework studies for use firstly in relation to the natural sciences. Kuhn questioned the aptness of the very term ‘paradigm’, believing its content to be extremely vague. Paradigms, albeit more and more as metaphors, are figure in the historical writing of the development of the humanities. Speaking about the Russian humanities, in the 20th century it went through the two episodes of paradigm change: After 1917 and 1991, respectively (in both cases, contrary to the original model). It is the instability of the humanities to external ideological influences that does not allow Kuhn to fully equate them with the natural sciences. In this article, we nevertheless use the term ‘academic paradigms’ in relation to the humanities. We show that the ideological and political factors that trigger the process of a lightning-fast paradigm shift in the Russian social sciences are the launch and a kind of process of inertia in the development of the social sciences. Using some examples that are relevant for Russian oriental studies, we show that the change of paradigm after 1991 did not lead to a change of discourse in Russian oriental studies. The paradigm shift meant a fundamental transformation of the broad consensus of interpretations of the facts, but it did not change in the same decisive way the range of issues studied.