Transformation of Altai-Kizhi Dwelling Under Russian Cultural Influences and its Relevance in the Cultural Revitalization Process in Post-Soviet Period

What is Russia? Who are Russians? What is 'Russianness'? The question of national identity has long been a vexed one in Russia, and is particularly pertinent in the post-Soviet period. For a thousand years these questions have been central to the work of Russian writers, artists, musicians, film-makers, critics, politicians and philosophers. Questions of national self-identity permeate Russian cultural self-expression. This wide-ranging study, designed for students of Russian literature, culture, and history, explores aspects of national identity in Russian culture from medieval times to the present day. Written by an international team of scholars, the volume offers an accessible overview and a broad, multi-faceted introductory account of this central feature of Russian cultural history. The book is comprehensive and concise; it combines general surveys with a wide range of specific examples to convey the rich texture of Russian cultural expression over the past thousand years.

Modern Russian culture is very different from Soviet culture, but they have many similarities, too. In essence, this is the same country, only without national margins and the former allied national republics. But within the country, multinationality remains since Russia is a federal state with many peoples of diverse cultures. Russian culture is the culture of a multinational country. Modern Russian culture has lost the features of ideological and party (communist) dependence, but retains the influence of the state, like any other culture of any country in the world. True, the influence of the state on the culture in each country goes to a greater or lesser extent. In Russia, this state influence on culture is very large up to the present day, and it has a pronounced dualistic character. On one hand, Russian culture is provided with financial assistance “from above”, and on the other hand, some kind of framework is created that cannot be crossed, almost as it was in Soviet times, when the state order in the cultural sphere dominated.

В представленной статье рассматриваются современные этнические процессы, протекающие в среде алтайского этноса и его субэтнических групп. Дается краткий обзор содержания наиболее фундаментальных концепций классификации внутриэтнической структуры алтайцев в отечественной науке. Отмечается, что проблема этнической классификации коренного населения Алтая стала разрабатываться в этнографической науке с XIX в., но до настоящего времени остается дискуссионной.Актуализация проблемы внутриэтнической структуры алтайцев в постсоветский период связана с наделением его субэтнических групп статусом коренных малочисленных народов. Факт обретения правового статуса позволяет думать, что произошло конституирование новых этносов. Однако концепция распада алтайского этноса неплодотворна для целостного осмысления его современного развития, поскольку внутри этноса наблюдаются и объединительные этнические процессы.Путем анализа материалов двух всероссийских переписей населения (2002 и 2010 гг.) и этносоциологических исследований, проведенных в Республике Алтай с 2004 по 2016 гг. автор раскрывает современную этническую идентичность алтайских субэтносов и важнейшие символы коллективной идентичности алтайцев: историческая территория, язык, культура, общие корни, общая историческая судьба.Обосновывается мнение, что современные этнические процессы (как разделительные, так и объединительные) в среде алтайского этноса являются частью процесса самоопределения алтайских субэтносов. Указывается, что самоопределение алтайских субэтнических групп происходило в двух параллельных плоскостях: политической и этнической. В то же время политическое и этническое самоопределение алтайских субэтносов не были тождественны друг другу. Именно поэтому в настоящее время многие представители алтайских субэтнических групп, обладая политической идентичностью коренного малочисленного народа, продолжают считать себя частью как своей этнической группы, так и алтайского этноса в целом.

Improving the health of the total population may be insufficient in eliminating racial disparities in population health. An expanding commitment to understanding social determinants of health aims to address the social conditions that produce racialized patterns in health inequity. There is also a resurging and evolving interest in the influence of cultural barriers and assets in shaping racial inequities in health. The meaning and function of culture, however, remains underspecified. This paper synthesizes analogous but fragmented concepts of cultural threat related to social and racial inequity as examined in public and population health, psychology, sociology, communications, media studies, and law. It draws on an existing typology of culture and social inequity to organize concepts related to cultural racism. Employing a transdisciplinary approach, the paper integrates multiple scholarly perspectives on cultural threat to frame cultural racism as cultural systems that promote false presumptions of white superiority relative to non-whites. The lack of shared conceptual grounding and language regarding cultural threats to health hinders a more precise identification and measurement of cultural processes as well as comparisons of relative prevalence and influence of pathways linking cultural processes and social inequity. Evaluating intersections among culture, structures, and racism is a valuable analytical tool for understanding the production of social and racial inequities in health. To adequately address health inequities rooted in systemic racism, it is imperative to discuss the function of cultural racism in shaping population health in the United States. Building a culture of health and achieving health equity requires that we assess cultural racism in a more meaningful way. Cultural processes are commonly referenced in health inequity scholarship, but the empirical literature generally lags behind the conceptual emphasis. A rich literature across disciplines has substantively engaged conceptualizations of culture and cultural processes, the importance of these processes as part of a system of racism, and mechanisms that may link cultural threats to health. When integrated, this literature offers essential insights for ways population health may address the complex issue of eradicating racial disparities in health.

Alongside the traumatic spasms of bank crises and currency devaluations that characterized the first decade of post-Soviet Russian life, an equally demoralizing and painful depreciation occurred in the realm of Russian culture. This devaluation shook the edifice of Russian literature down to its foundation. Solvency was not the main issue, though publishing houses and thick journals certainly suffered their own fiscal crises. Bluntly put, in the post-Soviet period Russian literature lost its status. Formerly one of the most important and financially remunerative of the arts, Russian literature now lags considerably in popularity and prestige behind music, cinema, theater, and other performing arts in a consumer-driven world now more oriented toward the audiovisual than the written word. Such is the opinion of Mikhail Berg, whose article ("The Status of Literature") lends this issue of Russian Studies in Literature its title and its overall theme. This decline in the status of literature occurred in American and European culture in the mid-twentieth century but was delayed in Russia by seventy-four years of Soviet rule, during which time literature remained an important medium of ideological education and thus retained its role-inherited from the nineteenth century—of "providing prescriptions on how life is to be lived." An important part in retarding the devaluation of literature in Russia was also played by censorship, which "accorded culture (and literature, in particular) the symbolic capital of a forbidden fruit and made of it a means of crossing normative boundaries in matters social, ethical, moral, and sexual." However, with the abolition of censorship in the post-Soviet period, the rise of mass culture, and the ideological disencumbering of such scholarly disciplines as sociology, psychology, and political science whose functions literature had previously assumed, writers lost much of their cultural capital and social relevance in Russian society. The lifting of cultural prohibitions together with the demise of the command economy spelled the end of literature's preeminent position in Russian culture. Formerly one was always accustomed to speaking of "literature and art" in Russia; literature was never merely one of the arts, but something set apart and therefore particularly privileged. That distinction has lost much of its force today. In the first half of his article, Berg discusses the historical factors that gave rise to literature-centric tendencies in Russia—Russian culture's "religious ethos," the "shamanic status" of the intelligentsia, the "supernatural mystique surrounding the Word," and the elevated social status of literature—and addresses the reasons for the disappearance of these factors at the end of the Soviet era. He then provides a broader context for his discoveries by tracing in the second half of his article the rise and fall of literature-centrism in Europe, which he discusses in the broad terms of "the changing goals and stakes of social competition and the new zones of power." By the end of his article, Berg shows us where the status of Russian literature in the post-Soviet period intersects with that of literature in Europe and America.

In the last two decades, cultural criminology has developed a unique viewpoint on criminal behaviour and law. Cultural criminology is a subfield of criminology that focuses on how dynamics of meaning underpin every process in criminal justice, including the very definition of crime. In other words, the goal of cultural criminology is to comprehend crime within the context of culture and cultural processes. This particular form of criminological analysis evaluates the convergence of cultural and criminal processes by interweaving a diverse array of perspectives that share a sensitivity to image, meaning, and representation. In addition, the discipline of cultural criminology is developing new methods that represent particular theoretical perspectives and connect with the distinctive elements of contemporary social and cultural life. The lightning-fast pace of contemporary crime and culture has opened up new ethnographic research opportunities for cultural criminologists. Bibliometric analysis is a common and rigorous technique for examining and analyzing vast scientific data, which enables the dissection of the evolutionary nuances of a specific field and the illumination of its emerging areas. In order to identify the nature and the distribution of the literature on cultural criminology, the paper aims to determine the number of publications, the intellectual structure, and the key concepts of cultural criminology via a bibliometric analysis, using VOSviewer software.

Introduction One of the most difficult methodological challenges in cross-cultural comparisons, especially in the field of intercultural communication, is the difficulty of interpreting and translating knowledge transmitted between cultures. New forms of participation and empowerment in the information society can only take place when the information transmitted by using codes of one culture is successfully interpreted and converted as knowledge in another culture. Different schools of thought have used different methodologies and research paradigms in the field of cross-cultural comparisons. For example, defining culture as a latent variable (Smircirch, 1983) external to the organisation and based on national difference has been expostulated in comparative management literature by 'Hofstedians' (Magala, 2009) like Geert Hofstede (1984), Hall (1984), Trompenaars (1996): variable internal to the organization by system theorists in terms of system-structural view (Van de Ven and Astley, 1981) or social-factist paradigm (Ritzer, 1975). However, one of the main weaknesses in all these paradigms of culture is the simplification and reduction of culture as a variable thereby ignoring the complexity, context dependency and dynamism of the cultural processes within organizations and cultural processes that influence the organization in different nation-states. Also, reducing it to the level of a uniform national culture that remains constant over time is oversimplification of the term 'culture'. Treating culture in this way has been also been criticized for its racial myopic tendency (Gupta-Biener, 2005), ignoring fragmentations and inconsistencies across groups as depicted in the work of many scholars (Martin, 1992). In the past two decades, another school of thought has emerged as a result of development in the field of sociology and psychology. Here, culture is no more considered as a 'bounded world of beliefs and practices' (Sewell, 1999) which is learnt in childhood and passed on from one generation to another but is rather considered as a 'tool kit' (DiMaggio, 1997) or 'culture as practice' (Sewell, 1999) which is used by the actors in contextual and opportunistic way as for example, in cross-cultural boundary spanning (Author, 2009). However, even this concept has its critics. One of the main criticisms is that if culture is such a conscious act, then intercultural conflicts would not exist (Magala, 2009). Methodology In this paper, I suggest a new transdisciplinary methodology and research paradigm based on semiotics to analyze culture and to frame communication in a language which can be translated in the language of another culture. This translation is necessary as the actors within the sphere of a particular institution can only interpret the signs using the cognitive cultural translation tools available in the institutional culture. I have used the basic concept of Biosphere and Lotman's concept of Semiosphere to develop new ontological concepts which can be used in transdisciplinary research projects dealing with cross-cultural comparisons. In my work, I assume culture in terms of epistemic communities sharing certain common knowledge categories, which are implicit. Here knowledge categories imply the unwritten rules, norms, taken-for-granted assumptions which determine the interaction and information dissemination between the actors. If we now assume that these knowledge categories are conveyed in terms of signs which can be represented in a language, then we can use semiotics to analyse these knowledge categories. In organisational literature, researchers have used symbols like stories, myths, rituals and artefacts to analyse organisational culture. For example Barley (1983) has used semiotics to analyse the culture of funeral homes and recently Gupta & Mishra (2007) have used it to analyse the culture of an Indian organisation. However, until now, one of the main weaknesses of using semiotic was that one tried to interpret individual symbols and signs and the entire semiotic phenomenon was considered a succession of signs (Lotman, 1990). Hence, one has to ontologically look for an approach which would include epistemic communities which are ignored in the study of individual signs. As Lotman (1990) has pointed out, analysing only the signs would be 'heuristic expediency'. We have to analyse and translate the signs with reference to the system in which they are embedded. Therefore, we would be using the concept of Semiosphere borrowed from Yuri Lotman to analyse the societal and organisational culture. Based on the concept of biosphere, culture and cultural processes can be imagined encapsulated in a semiosphere consisting of all possible signs which reflect the culture. According to Winner (1984), semiosphere can be defined as "dynamically related systems of information, conveyed by sign systems in all possible modalities and organized by underlying psychobiological and related cultural perceptions of time and space as well as by central metaphors (or fundamental symbols), and values, all of which participate in the construction of world-views". One of the advantages of using the concept of semiosphere is that it allows for heterogeneity with all its irregularities and dynamism in culture. Moreover, translation and deciphering of signs becomes easier as one uses the semiosphere as a base for understanding the meaning of signs. Like the description of Biosphere, Semiosphere is a closed system with its own self-regulating mechanism. The semiotic space within a semiosphere consists of different layers and levels of other semiospheres. For example, organisations are one of semiospheres existing within the large semiopsphere. The inner dynamic is a result of the movement of signs and symbols from the centre to the periphery and vice versa. The signs and symbols on the periphery are responsible for filtering the information to the world outside the semiosphere and vice versa. This filtering process is necessary so that the stability within the Semisophere is not disturbed which is a natural homeostatic process. One of these semiospheres is the semiosphere of the organisation. To analyse the semiosphere of the organisation, we would be analysing the group culture where I would like to introduce new ontological categories namely that of 'sociosphere' (J. Assmann, 2013) and the individual actors within an organisation in terms of 'idiosphere' (Author, 2009). Sociosphere, can be defined as "common elements of culture (knowledge categories along with their meaning) shared by members of a group". Idiosphere, can be defined in terms of "a collection of symbols, along with their meaning called knowledge categories in the mental sphere of an actor". One of the advantages of these ontological categories is that it covers the cognitive, symbolic, structural, and psychodynamic perspectives on organization and culture. Interaction of Semiosphere, Idiosphere and Sociosphere can be analysed as follows: If Semiosphere is represented as Se, Sociosphere as So and Idiosphere as I, then the relationship can be represented in the following equations: So= I1∩ I2 (where I1 and I2 represent the Idiospheres of two different person) Se= I1 +I2 +I3+---+In+∑Xn+1 (Semiosphere is a sum of all Idiospheres and other symbols /signs represented by the sum of Xn+1 which may not belong to any Idiosphere and maybe floating around freely in the Semiosphere) and In = s1+s2+s3+---sn (where s1, s2—represent the signs existing within the Idiosphere) It should be noted that Idiosphere can have signs belonging to two or more Semiopsheres as seen in bicultural personalities (Morris et.al, 2000) or immigrants who are integrated in their new culture. Application of the methodology One of the studies in which this methodology was applied was conducted for the Integration Ministry of the state of Baden-Wurttemberg (Germany). The purpose of the research was to find out the reasons why those immigrants who are integrated in the German society do not participate in voluntary civic activities in their German community (Gupta-Biener, 2013).Using qualitative techniques of research, including focus group interviews, narratives of immigrants were transcribed and analyzed. Since culture is implicit and is context dependent, context was created to evoke responses from the respondents. These transcribed responses were understood as signs which had to be translated. Results and Discussion Using the idiosphere of the immigrants against the larger semiosphere as the base, it was concluded that, for example, most of the immigrants had had a 'traumatic experience' in relation to the German culture either as children or as adults. This trauma was then expressed in the word (here considered as symbol) 'cold'. The word 'cold' became a sign for this group of immigrants as it was related to their painful experiences which marked the boundary of their sociosphere. To understand Semiosphere, we used the 'collective memory' (A. Assmann) to demarcate the boundary of the Semiosphere. Demarcation of boundaries was necessary so as to make sociosphere, and semiosphere apparent. One of the suggestions which emerged as a result of this study was that German institutions have to make efforts towards creating positive experiences with verbal and non-verbal communication (especially for second generation immigrants). Also, an open public discussion about the traumatic experiences would help that signs within the boundary of the 'sociosphere' gain positive meaning thus motivating the immigrants to participate actively in the German civic community. Conclusion: This paper shows with an example of a research project, how the concepts of semiosphere, sociosphere and idiosphere and the related methodology could be used for deciphering tacit knowledge in intercultural field. Also, like with Biosphere, it is possible with the concept of 'Sociosphere' and 'Idiosphere' to work with different fields of social sciences and information together in cross-cultural research. Literature List: Assmann, Aleida. Einführung in die Kulturwissenschaft: Grundbegriffe, Themen, Fragestellungen. Grundlagen der Anglistik und Amerikanistik 27. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2006; 32011 Assmann, Aleida. "Homo Interpres und die Welt als Text." Zeitschrift für Semiotik 12, 1990: 359-373. Assmann, Aleida. "Nietzsche versus Ritschl: Zwei Theorien impliziter Axiome." In Wolfgang Huber, E. Petzold und Th. Sundermeier (Hgg.) Implizite Axiome: Tiefenstruktur des Denkens und Handelns. München: Kaiser, 1990: 246-62. Aleida Assmann, "Vom Gewicht des Ungesagten." In W. Huber, E. Petzold und Th. Sundermeier (Hgg.) Implizite Axiome: Tiefenstrukturen des Denkens und Handelns. München: Kaiser, 1990: 13-18. Assmann Aleida. "Resonanz und Einschlag: Zur Affektlogik von Bildern im Kulturellen Gedächtnis" Nova Acta Leopoldina 113.386. 2012: 23-35 Aleida Assmann, Erinnerungsräume. Formen, Wandlungen und Medien des kulturellen Gedächtnisses, München: Beck, 1999 u.ö Gupta-Biener, N. "Are Western Cultural Models really applicable for Business Communication with India?" Management Learning, Lancaster, 2013 Gupta-Biener, N. "Nutzung des impliziten Wissens von Menschen mit Migrationshintergrund für die Erhöhung der Bereitschaft zu bürgerschaftlichem Engagement: Eine Handreichung" , Netzwerktreffen Integrationsforschung, Ministerium für Integration, Baden-Würtemberg, 2013 Gupta-Biener, N. "Kultureinflüsse auf die Krisenkommunikation. Ein theoretischer Ansatz zur Analyse von Kommunikation und Diskurs zwischen Institutionen in verschiedenen Kulturen" in Band "Wahrnehmung, Kommunikation und Bewältigung industrieller Katastrophen" in Steiner Verlag, 2013 Gupta-Biener, N. "Tacit Knowledge in Intercultural Communication", Max-Planck Society, Konstanz, 2013 Hofstede, G., Culture's Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviours, Institutions and Organizations Across Nations. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2001. Hofstede, G. and Hofstede, G. J. Cultures and Organisations: Software of the Mind, New York: McGraw Hill, 2005 Lotman, Yuri. M., Universe of the Mind. A Semiotic Theory of Culture, I. B. Tauris & Co. Ltd.: London, 1990 Magala Slawomir, Cross cultural Life of Social Values and Organizational Analysis: An Introduction to the Special Themed Section, Organization Studies 30: 925, 2009 Morris,W.Michael, Hong. Ying-Yi et.al, Multicultural Minds: A dynamic constructivist Approach to culture and cognition,in American Psychologist, Vol.55, Nr. 7, 709-820, 2000g-, 709-720 Nisbett, Richard E., John H. Holland, K. J. Idalyoak, P.R. Thagard, Induction Processes of Inference, Learning and Discovery, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986. Nisbett, Richard E., The Geography of Thought, How Asians and Westerners think differently and why, London, UK, Nicolas Brealey, 2003 Sewell, W H Jr., A theory of structure: duality, agency, and transformation. In Journal of Sociology, 98:1–29, 1992 Sewell, W H Jr., The Concepts of Culture, In : Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Dimensions in the Study of Society and Culture, Ed. by Bonnell E. V. and Hunt, Lynn, (1-35), 1999. &nbsp

REVIEWS 553 There is little to criticize about this treasure trove of informative material, but I do have three minor reservations. First, although the level of scholarship in most of the essays is admirable, only ten of the volume’s nineteen essays are original contributions. The rest are reprints of previously published articles (by Gaidenko, Nethercott, Novikov, Molchanov, Shchedrina, Granin, Obolevitch, Plašienková and Opalev). And, in some of the new essays, the texts borrow heavily from previously published material. This unfortunately diminishes the value of the volume’s scholarly endeavour, although the argument could convincingly be made that this kind of collection should aim at thoroughness rather than novelty. Second, metaphysics is underrepresented in the first part, considering that it was supposed to be concerned with both the theory of knowledge and metaphysics in presumably equal proportion. Third, the bibliography is incomplete and would have benefited from thorough proofreading by someone acquainted with French. Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University Frederic Tremblay and Sofia University ‘St. Kliment Ohridski’ Dobrenko, Evgeny and Lipovetsky, Mark (eds). Russian Literature since 1991. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2015. x + 308 pp. Notes. Works cited. Index. £64.99. In their introduction to this comprehensive volume, the ‘first attempt at an integral study of Russian literature after the breakup of the Soviet Union’ (p. 18), Evgeny Dobrenko and Mark Lipovetsky posit that ‘the time from the 1990s onward is unique in the history of Russian culture: it is the only lengthy interval in which Russian literature developed in the complete absence of censorship of both the political and moral varieties’ (p. 1). Thus they set the stage for subsequent examination of texts produced during the approximately two-and-a-half decades since the Soviet Union’s collapse. With an approach framed by the editors’ assertion that the post-Soviet period has been one in which the place of literature in Russian culture has been interrogated and reestablished , the authors of the volume’s fourteen chapters persistently locate continuities and disruptions within the Russian literary tradition and link them to representative works. In presenting the volume’s central aim, Dobrenko and Lipovetsky argue that two major strands of post-Soviet writing (namely, mainstream and minority) engage in a shared ‘search for languages and strategies for the self-realization of personality that could restore to the subject agency as an individual participant of history and not as a particle of the “collective body”’ (p. 13). The essays SEER, 96, 3, JULY 2018 554 collected here were developed from papers delivered at ‘After Censorship, Before Freedom: Mapping Contemporary Russian Literature’, a workshop held at Princeton University in 2014. Each chapter provides an overview of the trend in question, followed by cultural contextualization and illustration of the trend’s salient features through close readings of several texts. The volume’s first five chapters focus on mainstream literature. Dobrenko begins by exploring the legacy of Socialist Realism and examining the changing relationship to the Soviet past, maintaining that ‘reworking the Soviet past’ has engendered a fundamentally new literature in the post-Soviet period (p. 21). Similarly, Serguei Oushakine’s contribution argues that though the contemporary ideological novel contrasts sharply with late Soviet and early post-Soviet postmodern literature, it is a new form rather than a mere recapitulation of previously established genre conventions and Socialist Realist forms. Chapters four to six examine the multifaceted approaches to historical trauma in post-Soviet Russian literature. Kevin M. F. Platt presents examples of the historical novel as texts that form ‘prosthetic narratives of the Russian past’ in their attempt to compensate for historical loss and the fiction of ‘history’s wholeness’ (p. 69). Eliot Borenstein’s chapter next establishes a typology of texts focused on dystopia and apocalypse, with Chernobyl as a crucial catastrophic phenomenon giving rise to subsequent literary works in this vein. Examining the post-Soviet uncanny and its treatment in literature, Alexander Etkind writes about magical historicism as a phenomenon that is related to, yet must be differentiated from, magical realism. Ilya Kalinin’s chapter takes petropoetics as its subject, identifying the ‘oil text’ as a unifying category within mainstream literature that emerged in the 2000s and which includes...

The article examines the features of the economic development of Russia since 1887 by growth and risk parameters. The development risk was measured using the standard deviation of the annual growth rates of real GDP. Progressive, regressive, conservative, and aggressive development is proposed to determine according to the changes in growth and risk. The authors have analyzed the process of development under individual governments, as well as in general for the imperial, socialist, and post-Soviet periods, with the emphasis in the last two Stalinist and post-Stalinist, liberal and patriotic periods, respectively. Progressive changes in economic development are revealed: Stolypin reforms, industrialization and the “vertical of power”; regressive: civil war, Khrushchev reforms, perestroika, liberalization, and modernization; conservative: Kosygin reforms and “nationalization of the elite”. Except for opportunistic growth and risk surges 1911-1913 and 1998-2000, no aggressive developmental periods with identifiable institutional causes were found. The repetitive development cycle of the socialist and post-Soviet periods is shown. The conclusion is made about the greater authenticity of the Russian culture of the socialist development model and the least of the liberal ones, as well as the need to develop post-industrial development institutions that are authentic to the Russian culture for their application after the predicted institutional crisis.

This chapter examines the cultural and social force of the adolescent in Russian culture, focusing on the Soviet and post-Soviet period.1 My purpose is to assess Soviet understanding of the pre-adult years, and the gaps and contradictions in this perception. I also look at how representations of the shift from childhood to youth have changed since the demise of the Soviet Union and the arrival — under direct influence from the West —of a much greater preoccupation with the transitional phase and with the figure now often referred to using a word transliterated from English, the tineidzher (teenager). Following the famous yet often misunderstood strictures of Michel Foucault in L'Histoire de la sexualité, I do not, however, see this process of 'westernising' perceptions of the transition between childhood and youth as necessarily contributing to the 'liberation' of the human subjects involved (Foucault, 1976). Rather, I shall be concerned to emphasise that the silences imposed by the canons of official (and unofficial) Soviet culture on certain corporeal topics could be in some respects more 'liberating' than the stress on the importance of frank sexual discussion that followed. In any case, the post-Soviet period (as in contemporary western countries) also saw the emergence of another kind of anxiety focusing on adolescence, where the established cliché of the 'end of childhood' as the loss of innocence started to be intermingled with the idea of 'vanishing childhood' as a symptom of social malaise, producing widespread concern about supposedly premature puberty and its consequences.

Indigenous media refers to diverse audiovisual production activities involving indigenous people. Indigenous people's experience of media technologies date to their earliest contacts with European explorers and scientists. Since the 1970s a growing number of indigenous communities have adopted recording and broadcast technologies for their own purposes. Throughout the closing decades of the twentieth century, indigenous media activity evolved to engage national and international audiences. The emergence of computer networks and digital media has enabled further innovations. Indigenous media productions reveal distinctive cultural imperatives and ways of seeing. Anthropologists' attention to indigenous media has contributed to new conceptualizations of culture and cultural process.

REVIEWS 543 less indiscriminately. This is regrettable, as some attempt, however constrained by the limited material, to determine local variations would have been one of the most interesting and informative aspects of the study, particularly in the context of the practices of neighbouring countries which may have coexisted with local traditions in some of the territories considered. This context, however, is totally lacking:thereisnoattempttocompareorcontrastSerbiandocumentarypractice with that elsewhere in Europe. This considerably hampers the reader’s ability to assess the significance of the material. Even worse, perhaps, is the complete lack of statistical data. Beyond the fact that we are dealing with ‘approximately 1000 Serbian medieval documents’ we are given no information about the numbers preserved in particular archives or written at specific times or places. This again makes it very difficult to know what significance to attach to any particular example. The book is provided with thirty-eight monochrome illustrations, mostly of reasonable quality but all considerably reduced and, more seriously, with no indication of the size of the original. This book, therefore, provides a comprehensive survey of the surviving documentary materials current in Serbia up to the second half of the fifteenth century. The fact that it ends with a few general remarks ‘in place of a conclusion’ is sufficiently expressive of its weaknesses; nor, unfortunately, does it really provide the tools for its readers to draw conclusions of their own. Winchester R. M. Cleminson MacKay, John. True Songs of Freedom: ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ in Russian Culture and Society. The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, 2013. xv + 157 pp. Illustrations. Historical Timeline. Notes. Bibliography. Filmography. Index. $24.95 (paperback). In his introduction, John MacKay writes, ‘I see this book […] as primarily a study of Uncle Tom’s Cabin — even a close reading of sorts, but executed as if through a multifaceted crystal, turning on its axes’ (p. 9). That is exactly what the book is, a study of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel, as seen through the many facets of a crystal — Russian, American and Western European history, society and culture from the mid nineteenth century through the Cold War era, up to the present. MacKay attaches a coda and conclusion that place his investigation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin within the context of the late Soviet and post-Soviet period and within the context of the contemporary global issues of borders, migration and labour. He writes that True Songs of Freedom ‘was a lot of fun to write’ (p. xi). It’s a lot of fun to read, too. The reader learns curious facts, such as this: ‘the […] first SEER, 93, 3, JULY 2015 544 public performance of tango in Argentina took place during a staging of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1856’ (p. xii). The book is a pleasure to read. It is well-researched, intelligently conceived and intelligently presented, well-written and lively. MacKay is a knowledgeable, authoritative, enthusiastic guide through his discoveries. Not only is the book fun to read, but it is well worth reading because of the many connections that the author makes to literature, history and culture as he leads his readers through the complexities of the reception of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Russia. It was a wise decision, on MacKay’s part, to write an appendix with a brief summary of Stowe’s novel, for those who have not read it and for those who may have read it long ago. Also useful is an historical timeline of American and Russian events for the years covered in his study. The four chapters that comprise the main body of the book follow the general lines of Russian historical development: the pre-emancipation years; then, the period until 1917; the beginning of the Soviet era until the end of World War Two; and the Cold War years. Thus, we see the responses of advocates of literature as social criticism, Chernyshevskii and Pisarev, and their divergences of opinion, just as their views on so many topics diverged. We learn that Herzen was the first Russian, in a British publication, to evaluate Uncle Tom’s Cabin. We learn of the parallels that have been drawn between Turgenev’s Sketches from a...

This article examines the impact of the church schism in 2018 on the change in the civilizational identity of modern Ukrainians. Modern Ukraine is in the zone of the conflict of Russian and Western civilizations, openly expressed since 2014. One of the strategies for resolving the conflict appears to be changing the civilizational identity of the enemy by transforming the cultural core of civilization, which also includes religion and religious practices. The transformation of the civilizational core in Ukraine occurs through the instrumentalization of religion, which turns into a way to solve the internal and foreign policy problems of the modern Ukrainian government. This article studies the history of the establishment of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) in 2018, the reception of tomos from the Constantinople Patriarchate and the confrontation between the OCU and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP), which acts as a conductor of the Russian civilization's influence. The internal goals of the Ukrainian government, achieved through a church schism, include reducing the consolidation of society and strengthening its own position in a fractured society. Their foreign policy objectives involve reducing the cultural influence of Russia, excluding the Russian part of the Ukrainian society from receiving the Russian civilization's values and changing the civilizational identity of Ukrainians. One way to change the civilizational identity of Russians in Ukraine while formally preserving the Orthodox religion in the country involves promoting eucharistic ecclesiology, which is not historically rooted in the Orthodox Church and has been developing since the mid-20th century as an alternative to the universal ecclesiology. The latter assumes that the universal church is not reduced to the sum of its parts, that the criterion for correct faith is the unity of the episcopate, and that maintaining the integrity of the empirical church is one of the values of church communion. Eucharistic ecclesiology presumes that the fullness of grace is contained in each experiential community united by the common Eucharist. Eucharistic ecclesiology aids in instrumentalizing the church and turning it into the spokesperson for the secular interests of communities, which is already happening in Ukraine. This article shows that despite the church schism itself does not remove Ukrainians from the Russian civilizational space, it includes church communication into the foreign policy of reducing the Russian cultural influence in Ukraine and changing the civilizational identity of its inhabitants.

В статье изучается процесс формирования представлений о направлениях изучения современной культуры Сибири в региональной историографии, осмысления институциональных проявлений историко-культурной динамики. В ракурсе взаимодействия триады акторов культурной сферы - государство - общество - человек - охарактеризован культурный облик территорий Сибири с учетом традиционных институций - библиотек, музеев, театров, сферы наследия. Фестивали выделены как форма организации социокультурного пространства, синтезирующая профессиональную, народную и массовую культуру. The article presents a generalized picture of the culture of Siberia in a broad chronological and problem-thematic context based on the definition of the essence of socio-political processes in the post-Soviet period. The relevance is due to the need to develop and test new approaches to the study of modern culture of the last three decades. The object of the study is the culture of Siberia at the end of the XX - the first decades of the XXI centuries. The subject of the research is the dynamics of culture in the context of the relationship between its constituents - political and social. The purpose of the article is to form ideas about the directions of studying the modern culture of Siberia in regional historiography, to comprehend the institutional manifestations of historical and cultural dynamics. The authors focus on the interaction of the triad of actors in the cultural sphere: state - society - individual. The main vector of the state cultural policy was directed from separate legislative acts to the federal target program “Culture of Russia”, then the cultural sphere was given a strategic status in accordance with the national project “Culture”. Since the beginning of the XXI century, the government authority has consistently opposed the space of creative chaos in the sphere of culture of the 1990s. The authors note the socio-cultural features of the subjects of the Siberian Federal District, the connection with poly-ethnicity. The article describes the cultural appearance of the territories of Siberia, the process of preservation, adaptation and development of traditional cultural institutions - libraries, museums, theaters, and the sphere of heritage. The integration of professional and traditional folk culture with the socio-cultural environment of settlements has been expressed in organizing of festivals of various genres - musical, literary, historical, book, folk, ethno, culture and art festivals. It is noted that the culture of Siberia is increasing the potential of social influence, the rapprochement with Russian and world culture, the leveling of the differentiation of culture into metropolitan and peripheral.

786 SEER, 85, 4, OCTOBER 2007 Beumers, Birgit. Pop CultureRussia! Media, Arts, and Lifestyle.Popular Culture in the Contemporary World. ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara, CA, Denver, CO and Oxford, 2005. xxxi + 399 pp. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Bibliographical references. Glossary. Index. ?62.50. The editors of the series Popular Culture in theContemporary World empha size that its remit is to appeal to travellers and general readers, as well as to students of a particular culture. Birgit Beumers' contribution to the series, Pop CultureRussia! Media, Arts, and Lifestyle,is an accessible, informative and entertaining read and achieves this aim. It is also a valuable resource for students of late Soviet and post-Soviet Russian culture. The book is comprehensive in its selection of different spheres of contemporary life,with chapters dealing with theMedia, Visual Culture, Performing Arts, Music and Word, Popular Entertainment and Consumer Culture. The Introduction provides a clear and incisive account of the uses of culture during the entire Soviet era and up to the present day. Beumers takes the opportunity to situate terms such as 'popular', 'mass' and 'commercial' within the Soviet and post-Soviet contexts, explanations which serve the reader well in the thematic sections. In her Visual Culture chapter, Beumers gives a coherent sense of developments in film in the post-Soviet market and the role of animated films in Russian culture; she also deals with architecture, arts and crafts and icons. Under Performing Arts come theatre, estrada and the circus, as well as an excellent section on anecdotes and jokes. Consumer Culture includes an insightfuldiscussion of advertising and a survey of aspects of everyday life such as food, leisure, fashion and contemporary folk belief. Each of the chapters balances concise and coherent narrative of the cultural changes of the past thirtyyears with reference to historical events, public figures and appropriate case studies. The historical overview section that begins each chapter is crucial in explaining the institutions, individuals and practices that governed a given cultural sphere during zastoi, and enables the reader to make greater sense of the changes that began under Gorbachev and the shiftsthat continue to the present day. The chapter on theMedia is characteristic in its impressive handling of a huge amount of information. It provides an informative and nuanced narrative of a heady series of events, while working in small but memorable details ? the role played by references to advertising for Snickers in the construction of the public profiles of both Zhirinovskii and Putin (pp. 27, 29, 319-20) being one such example. The privileging of lyrics in some genres of popular music remains an important idiosyncrasy of contemporary Russian culture, and Beumers' chapter on Music and Word provides several song lyricsby bards and rock groups in translation. The emphasis here is on the glory days of perestroika era rock. This chapter might not seem themost natural place for a discussion of slang,which plays a part inmany other manifestations of the popular too, but the examination of youth culture and language iswell informed and com prehensive. Related to this is a very good working definition of the form of straight-faced mockery of sacred cows, known in Russian as steb; the impact REVIEWS 787 of steb,too, isby no means confined to theworld of rockmusic. The intention of theMusic and Word chapter is to reveal the origins of contemporary pop music 'on the one hand in the official Soviet pop culture of the 1960s and 1970s (estrada) and on the other hand in the underground bard and rock movement' (p. 199). This is a crucial undertaking and the account of Soviet popular music, official and non-official, iswide-ranging and lucid.One minor omission is the explanation of the institution of the state-licensed vokal'no instrumental'nyi ansambl' ? despite not defining this phenomenon, Beumers occasionally uses the acronym 'VIA'. Nonetheless, the chapter provides a much-needed account of theway inwhich both official and unofficial Soviet culture played a part in shaping post-Soviet trends. It also introduces an interesting discussion of the importance of gender, sexuality and transgression in the lyricsand visual culture of rock and pop since the 1980s. One of the real successes of Pop CultureRussia!, especially as a...