Modeling the paths of ethno-political traditions and building cultural routes by means of ethnodesign and GIS

Abstract

The growing value of distinctive culture in the context of modern global civilisation makes it important to study the possibilities of ethnodesign to identify identity attributes and, at the same time, to search for integration meanings. In this sense, it is of great unifying cultural significance and relevance to identify by means of ethnodesign the sustainable visual features of ethno-political traditions of the past on the paths of their ancient movements, which were often migratory and as of the beginning of the 21st century can be modelled within several modern states with the subsequent construction of relevant international cultural routes by means of geographic information systems. The purpose of this work was to develop a methodology for modeling the paths of movement of ethnopolitical traditions – geospiritual modeling with the approbation of scientific and research possibilities of ethnodesign for the construction of cultural routes with the use of geographical information systems on the example of the location field of the ancient ruthenians, or rus/rug/ros – of the annalistic “rus family” and the ancestors. The author’s methodology of inheritance of culture is applied – a complex of methods for the developing processing of a unique cultural space based on the methods of complex source studies, comparative stylistic analysis and interdisciplinary semantic synthesis according to the general theory of systems. The results of the research were the confirmation of the continental polycentricity of the rus’ ethnopolitical tradition thanks to the clarification of its essential content and the main visual and graphic representation based on archaeological and heraldic artifacts, sacred ethnonymy and onomastics with the identification of the main locations, proposals for the construction of relevant international cultural routes. On this example, the methodological foundations of geospiritual modelling and terminological definitions on ethnocultural dynamics were formulated, which have scientific novelty, ideological content and practical value for the formation of databases and algorithms in relevant geographic information systems, and in general for international cultural cooperation in this area