Social-cultural features of the contemporary Tuvan society

Abstract

The article is a review of the monograph Essays on the Contemporary Tuvan Culture by the famous Tuvinian scholar C.K. Lamazhaa (Saint Petersburg: Nestor-History, 2021. 192 p.). The reviewed book considers the latest social-cultural processes in the Tuvan society and trends in the development of the Tuvinian studies. Each of the nine sections focuses on a separate feature of the social and cultural life of the contemporary ethnic Tuvans - the indigenous people of the Republic of Tuva, and all sections are logically and meaningfully related. In general, the study is a comprehensive description of the mutual influence and coexistence, of a kind of intertwining past and present in the social-cultural life of the Tuvan people. As a collection, the essays show the author’s confidence in the need to study internal differentiations of any society to produce new knowledge relevant to the reality and providing an adequate understanding of the political and socialcultural life of the multinational society. Lamazhaa believes that to overcome some stagnation, inertia in the Tuvinian studies, we need to combine various research positions and to update the theoretical-methodological basis. Lamazhaa suggests an approach which is based on the principles of the thesaurus approach developed by Val.A. and Vl.A. Lukovs (correlates with the indigenous methodology) and actualizes the subjectivity of indigenous researchers.