Principles and Metaphysics of Modernity: Towards Modernization in Yakutia

Abstract

In the 21st century, an urgent topic is the assessment of the dynamics of cultural development of ethnic groups living in the natural and climatic conditions of the North and the Arctic and bearing conservatism towards their traditional culture, which has become the basis for centuries of survival and adaptive flexibility. In the period of total relativization of postmodern values, the task of making a balanced choice in one’s spiritual heritage and historical practice remains important. The aim of the article is to identify the potential of modernity for ethnic cultures of the North-East of Russia, which experienced incomplete modernization on the wave of bourgeois transformations and Soviet socio-cultural modernization in the 19th—20th centuries, to determine the options for the development of modern culture against the background of the deadlock of postmodernity, which constrained the productive options for the development of “culture of traditions” by the phenomena of global mass culture.The general scientific methods and the method of symbolic ontologisation of culture, explicating the synthesis of interaction of symbolic constructs of metaphysical and mythological nature, underlying the regularities of ethno-cultural dynamics in the aesthetic sphere and organic modernization transformations in general, have been applied.It is shown that the metaphysics of modernity determines the dynamic stability of ethnoculture, allowing to realize its undiscovered potential through the principles of modernity, independently reproduce these principles, making the transition of ethnos from the culture of mimesis to the culture of the birth of primordiality. The quality of modernity gives the Sakha a sense of metaphysical continuity with the stages of evolution of European culture, freeing them from mythological predetermination of fate, including by intensive innovative knowledge-intensive economy. The synthetic synergy of “ethno” and “modern” reveals the potential for cultural growth institutionalized by the paradigm of ethnomodernity, which resolves the contradictions of modernity, bringing ethnoculture to the idea of socio-cultural and scientific-technological development, dignity and natural human rights.