The Main Directions of Research into Culinary Traditions in the Works of Foreign Scientists in the 19th – 21st Century: Culturological Dimension

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to highlight the main directions of research into culinary traditions, which was based on the works of foreign scientists in the 19th – the beginning of the 21st century. The research methodology consisted in the combination of the following methods: historical-comparative, biographical, logical-analytical, diachronic, and the method of synthesis. The scientific novelty of the work lies in distinguishing different approaches to understanding culinary traditions in the context of culturological analysis, which provided an opportunity to monitor the changes of accents in the consideration of the subject matter on the way from historical, cultural and ethnographic researches to its modern culturological studying. Conclusions. It was revealed that in the second half of the 19th century food was considered as a component of a certain investigated national culture mainly in a historical and cultural or ethnographic context. In the first third of the 20th century the gastronomic code started to be investigated by scientists as an important part of new problematics of scientific interest – everyday culture. In the second half of the 20th century, with culturology obtaining the status of the field with pretense for being a metascience, the works appeared in which the achievements of other sciences were synthesized. In particular, the food phenomenon went beyond household or everyday culture, gaining common cultural value and symbolic content. In the works of the beginning of the 21st century scientists have focused their attention on the new level of culturological generalization and interpretation of the food phenomenon in the field of globalization, semiological or local and cultural research.