Urban Culture in Oral and Web Texts

Abstract

In the article the authors suggest ways of studying the 'city text' by means of methods of cultural anthropology and folkloristics. The central attention is paid to peculiarities of young people’s familiarization of space of a Russian provincial town situated in the Volga region (Yoshkar-Ola), which claims to be the cultural capital of Mari republic. The article is written on the materials of texts obtained via special questionnaires, interviews and participant observation method. Also the authors have monitored some forums and public pages of social networking services. The article focuses mainly on interaction of two possible approaches to the study of urban space: city as a value-oriented idea of the given type of settlement and community, their history, the urban way of life and urban environment; the ‘city text’ as a synthesis of verbal codes of urban communities. The result of the research is a presentation of verbal ways of interiorization of the city cultural text (its spatial constituent in particular) by modern young people. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n3s7p115