Local Civilizations Research Articles

The characteristics of modern flood deposits in the lower reaches of a small watershed and the significance of paleo-flood identification

The mountainous region of central Shandong Province in eastern China is renowned for its high frequency of rainstorms, which often result in devastating flood disasters and have profoundly affected the evolution of local ancient civilizations. To identify ancient flood disaster events, recognizing sediment signatures via multiple indices is important. Here, we investigated the 2018 flood deposits in the Danhe River Basin and sampled short core DH2, on which the grain size, total organic matter (TOM) content, carbonate content, magnetic susceptibility (MS) and pollen were measured. The fine grain size of the flood sedimentary layer reveals that the flood energy in the alluvial plain area is usually weak. The pollen species and concentration and the tree pollen content in the flood layer are significantly greater than those in the soil layer, suggesting that the flood sediment mainly originates from the mountainous areas in the upper reaches of the river, which provides more forest vegetation information. The MS of flood deposits is lower than that of the soil layer, which is mainly related to the intensity of pedogenesis. The research results indicate that the flood sediments in the downstream floodplain areas of small watersheds are predominantly composed of fine-grained components, with characteristics of high loss on ignition, low magnetic susceptibility, high pollen abundance and diverse species. These findings establish a multi-index identification system for paleoflood sedimentation, which has important reference significance for the study of paleoflood sedimentology and hydrology.

Research on the Composition and Socialvalue of Gongs and Drums in Huaihe River Basin of Anhui Province

The traditional Chinese folk instrumental music, gongs and drums, once flourished in southern China. The gongs and drums of Huaihe River basin in Anhui province were mainly distributed in Chizhou generation. The art of folk music originates from the life of the people. Relying on the unique historical, geographical and cultural environment, it presents a unique musical style to the audience. As an expression of ancient Chinese classical melody, it has continuously enriched and absorbed many excellent local culture and civilization achievements with the passage of time, and has exerted a profound influence on promoting the progress of Chinese traditional culture. Therefore, an in-depth exploration of its roots can enable us to more comprehensively understand and grasp the essence of this Great China culture with a long history of inheritance.

Особенности социально-философского и философско-исторического подходов к исследованию цивилизационной проблематики

The author of the paper insists on the need to highlight two complementary aspects in understanding the nature of civilization. In one case, civilization is a historical era, and in the other, it is the civilizational development of individual local states or societies (local civilizations). The paper reveals the thematic field of research on civilizational issues from the perspective of socio-philosophical knowledge (including its philosophical and historical component). It is noted that the uncertainty and vagueness of the concept of civilization is largely due to the fact that its philosophical status has not yet been identified, since the concept is considered, as a rule, without connection with the system of socio-philosophical categories. An important theoretical issue is the question of civilizational self-awareness of society. i.e. awareness of oneself as a civilization. Further, the paper talks about the theoretical and practical significance of studying the level of development of local civilizations during the transition from an independent type of development to a dependent type of development. Much attention is paid in the paper to the analysis of the dependent and backward type of historical development of non-Western civilizations, which lasted during the five-century cycle of world history. The last section of the paper discusses a complex and not fully clarified question, which was posed by S. Fourier in all detail. Does civilization as a historical era have a time frame of existence or is this era forever? Today’s change in the vector of world development, the rejection of unipolarity allows the author to raise the question of the transition of humanity from the era of civilization to a new era, to the New modernity, when the further development of human society will take place according to the laws of culture.

Conceptual Justification of the Political Future in the Three-Dimensionality of the Past-Present-Future

The article addresses the complicated issue of political future in a temporally three-dimensional manner. First, an attempt is made to dissect the conceptual contents of the idea of the “end of history” linking its historical evolution to contemporary international relations. Moreover, the article exposes the underlying connection between the “end of history” on the one hand and the “political future” on the other. In this sense, one may conculde that it is necessary to differentiate between the “end of history” as an arguable notion and the “desired end of history” as a universal direction of humankind. Second, an emphasis is made on the interrelationships among the individual, the society, the state and supranational entities revealing the sociocultural dimension of the political future. Finally, the article addresses the proposed matrix of “challenge-response to the challenge-counter-challenge” as a formula of an effective deal with contemporary sociopolitical phenomena. The general representation is, however, the anthropomorphizing effect of the political future in the context of global and local civilizations.

Трансформация цивилизационных детерминант в эпоху глобальных кризисов и их воздействие на российский элитогенез

The research is devoted to the study of the influence of the transformation of civilizational determinants on the processes of formation of the political and administrative elite of modern Russia. Through the prism of geopolitical analysis, the authors state that the current phase of globalization is undergoing deep systemic and structural crises, causing changes in the factors shaping the contours of modern civilizations. These factors are the determinants of civilizational development, the transformation of which is observed in several main areas. The authors believe that the civilizational approach to the analysis of global processes better reflects the real picture of the formation of a multipolar world and civilizations than the idealistic one, and also helps to fix and understand the metamorphoses in the generation and behavior of political elites. Thus, Russia's conservative turn towards positioning itself as a local civilization leads to noticeable changes in the process of elitogenesis, becoming nationally oriented, centralized and ideologized. Consequently, the authors conclude that civilizational factors in the near future will determine the appearance of the elite groups of the Russian state-civilization.

Can the natural resource balance sheet system promote ecological civilization? --Empirical evidence from panel data of prefecture-level cities in China

As a crucial carrier of natural resource and environmental information, the natural resources balance sheet is important in enhancing ecological governance capabilities and advancing ecological civilization construction. Utilizing panel data from Chinese prefecture cities spanning 2012 to 2018, we employ a Difference-in-Differences (DID) model to examine the policy effects of the natural resources balance sheet system. The findings indicate that compiling the natural resources balance sheet significantly promotes local ecological civilization construction, and local government environmental governance efficiency partially mediates this relationship. Further analysis indicates that the outgoing audit of natural resources and public environmental concern positively moderates the relationship between the two. Drawing on the principal-agent theory, we provide in-depth analysis and elucidation of the mechanisms through which the natural resources balance sheet promotes ecological civilization construction, offering theoretical guidance and empirical data support for strengthening the compilation and application of the natural resources balance sheet.

Печоры: точки пересечения

This article discusses a border town of Pechory in Pskov Oblast and its surroundings. During the fieldwork for the project “People’s History of Russia: Crossroads of Local Civilizations” local residents were interviewed about significant periods in the history of the city and the uniqueness of the area. The focus of the article is on how the residents comprehend the border as a phenomenon (in spatial, geopolitical, intergroup, and other senses) and conceptualize the frontier as a local specificity. The paper reviews the particularities of the aforementioned fieldwork, which took place in the autumn of 2020, the toponymy and microtoponymy of the town where three ethnic identities interact, the conceptual frameworks of the state border, city branding through food and architecture, and the coexistence of two main conceptual frameworks: the primary one, “for our own and for others”, and the hidden one, “mostly, for our own”.

THE IMAGE OF RUSSIA AND ITS ARMY IN THE CONTEXT OF MODERN INFORMATION WARFARE

The article provides a general analysis of the nature of the new active phase of the Cold War of the West against Russia. The manifesto of this war was the report “The Russian Challenge” prepared by the British Chatham House. In the technologies of information warfare, psychohistorical weapons, social construction, and post-truth are singled out. One of the objects of defeat is the historical and spiritual image of Russia and its army. To do this, Russophobia is used, in the implementation of which the technologies of modern warfare are used. In addition, modern information warfare intrudes directly into the sphere of religious practices and traditional spiritual values, destroying the direct organic connection of a person with the world and his own kind. And behind the image of the West, there are subjects of globalization that seek to establish their own project of world order by dismantling nation-states and local civilizations. In order to survive, Russia must revive the practices of comprehending and embodying objectively existing meanings, taking into account its historical and spiritual experience and the nature of modern challenges and threats of a new information war.

Certain aspects of the problems of establishing marital and family relations according to the law of ancient eastern countries

It is pointed out that the issue of marriage and family relations of the Ancient World era and, in particular, Ancient Eastern societies, has always been in the field of view of domestic and foreign researchers. Such scientific interest in it is quite understandable in view of the need to clarify the essence of the emergence of the institution of the family, the factors that determined the evolution of this social phenomenon, the adjustment of the legal regulation of this process in the direction of optimizing marital and family relations in accordance with the level of development of society at each of the its stages. One cannot but agree, in this connection, with the opinion of the famous American philosopher of German origin, Felix Adler, that «the family is a society in miniature, on the integrity of which depends the safety of the entire large human society».
 The article is devoted to the analysis of certain aspects of the process of formation of marriage and family institutions under the law of the countries of the Ancient East. An attempt was made to reveal certain regularities of this process, in particular, the nature of the family as a social institution, marriage as a form of its realization in the oldest local civilizations of the Near East known to science. A partial comparative and legal analysis of the features of this segment of social relations in certain states of the Ancient East was carried out and the factors that, in the opinion of the author, determined these features were outlined.
 In a broad context, it was established that family, marriage, as a form of its implementation, are dynamic social institutions that are directly dependent on the level of development of society. Therefore, their form and content must correspond to the nature of social relations, establish the principles that are dominant in this society, while ensuring its harmonious development.

Features of Portuguese colonial architecture in South Asia in the period from XVI to XVIII centuries.

In this article, the author analyzes the Portuguese colonial architecture in the countries of South Asia in the period from the XVI to XVIII centuries. The author examines the military, civil and religious architecture built by the Portuguese during their presence in the South Asian colonies. Special attention is paid to the Portuguese colonial architecture of India (especially Goa) and Macau. Buildings in Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia and other former Portuguese colonies in South Asia are also considered. The author studies the process of formation and features of a special Portuguese colonial style in military (fortification), civil and religious (cult) architecture. The features in the design, decoration, as well as building materials of buildings are revealed. The novelty of the study lies in the fact that for the first time the samples of Portuguese colonial architecture in South Asia and their architectural features were comprehensively considered. The main conclusions of this study are the following. Firstly, on the one hand, the European architectural tradition has enriched the culture of the South Asian region. At the same time, different types of buildings show different degrees of influence. Secondly, on the other hand, Portuguese colonial architecture in South Asia itself has undergone significant changes under the influence of local cultural and climatic factors. Many of the changes made to classical European building designs were dictated by the weather and climatic features of the area. The choice of material was dictated by climatic and geological features. The culture of local civilizations also influenced the decoration and decoration of Portuguese buildings.

Естественно-научные знания в цивилизационных исследованиях

Modern knowledge of ethology are considered in their application to the problems of local civilizations. Human behavior is determined by innate and acquired patterns of behavior. They correspond to two interconnected parts of each civilization: a culture that correlates to the acquired behavior, and a mentality (self-preservation instinct), referring to the inher­ited behavior and ensuring the constancy of the behavior of the people from generation to generation. The relationship between culture and mentality and the negative conse­quences of imposing an alien culture on people with an ingrained mentality are shown on the example of the organization of labor in the Russian artel. Psychological personality types that are stably inherited are examed, and taking into account them, the role of the Moscow principality in the formation of the Russian state is considered.

Современные практики поминок и траура в похоронных обрядах аварцев Гумбета: исламский и неисламский компоненты

The article is devoted to the analysis of Islamic component in the elements of funeral and memorial rituals with one of the sub-ethnic groups of the Avar – Gumbet Avars. Based on the field ethno-graphic material collected in the villages of Gumbetovsky district of Dagestan applying the methods of historical (historical-genetic, comparative-historical, historical-typological, retrospective) and eth-nological studies (survey, individual and collective interviewing of respondents, par-ticipant observa-tion), commemoration and mourning rituals are studied as forms of expressing grief. As the field material showed, the funeral and memorial rites of Gumbet Avars demonstrate their ideas of the posthumous reincarnation of the soul, the other world, the connection between the living and the dead, honoring the souls of the dead, caring for them. An analysis of the commemoration and mourning rites has demonstrated both their common features and local diversity, the stability of tra-ditional beliefs and a growing influence of Islam since the early 1990s of the 20th century. In differ-ent villages of Gumbetovsky district, commemorations are held on various days fixed by tradition, as well as on the anniversary day after the death of a person. Ta'ziya, dhikr and sadaqa (alms-giving) make their Islamic component. The remaining funeral rites are manifestations of so-called “domestic Islam”. The reflexes of mourning are growing beards by men for a certain period, while women wear dark-colored clothes for a year. Widows observed the iddah period and usually did not marry after it. Observance of the iddah period can be considered an Islamic component in mourning customs, while the rest belong to traditional rituals. This confirms the syncretic nature of the funeral and memorial rites of Gumbet Avars with the dominant Islamic religious canons and relics of traditional beliefs. Despite the strengthening of the positions of Islam, traditional beliefs remain and this is one of the paradoxes of the zone of local civilizations, such as Dagestan and the North Caucasus.

Russia and Mongolia in the civilizational and geopolitical paradigms of Central Eurasia development

The relationship between Russia and Mongolia in the civilizational and geo-political paradigms of Central Eurasia development is extremely important for political science, sociology and regional studies. The authors’ definition of Central Eurasia differs from the generally accepted neutral interpretation due to its connection with a specific civilizational space - three local civilizations - the historically summarized limits of their dominant influence. The article considers the following limits of the influence of the Mongolian, Russian and Chinese civilizations from ancient times to the present: the great steppe empires (from the state of the Xiongnu to the Great Mongol Empire of Genghis Khan) with the center in Mongolia, the Russian Empire and the socialist camp with the center in Russia (USSR), and the economic corridor Russia-Mongolia-China with centers in three countries. The recognition of the taxonomic equilibrium of Russia, China and Mongolia as the cores of the Russian, Chinese and Mongolian civilizations, united by the space of Central Eurasia, allows to reconsider the Russian-Mongolian relations from ancient times to the present. The authors admit the existence of the world civilization hidden in Inner Asia and based on more than two thousand years of the nomads’ written history - the Mongolian civilization. The authors develop a new scientific direction - civilizational political science which considers the interaction between societies through the intertwined civilizational world order. The authors believe that civilizations cover the entire global space; introduce the concept “cascade of the civilizational boundaries”, which requires a combination of modeling methods and geoinformation technologies with cultural-historical ideas; consider the historical tradition of relations between Russia, Mongolia and China in the Eurasian region as being revived in the new context of trilateral cooperation.

Exploration and Practice of Integrating the Shangshan Culture into Art and Design Teaching in China’s Higher Vocational Colleges

Archaeological authorities consider Shangshan culture, a unique name for China’s outstanding local culture, to be the origin of the world’s painted pottery civilization, Chinese farming villages, and the world’s rice civilization. Shangshan culture is more than 3,000 years old compared to the local civilization discovered by historians. We hypothesized that introducing art and design majors into China’s vocational colleges is an effective method for promoting local culture. Integrating local culture into art and design teaching in China’s vocational colleges provides diversified teaching resources, heightens students’ sense of cultural identity, improves their creative performance, and extends local culture’s influence. Therefore, by analyzing the current status of art and design teaching in China’s vocational colleges, we highlighted local culture’s role in the teaching process. We adopted a quasi-experimental design method to conduct an experiment on 90 students from a vocational college majoring in an art and design course. These students learned about the integration of Shangshan culture into art and design under their teachers’ guidance and applied their learning to their artistic creations. This study’s results will help better integrate local culture into art and design teaching, and consequently, achieve a win-win outcome.

Promoting Religious-Friendly Tourism for Developing Religious Harmony: A Study of Tourist Gaze

In the process of Islamization of Nusantara, there was an interaction between Islam and local civilizations in various regions of Nusantara, which then became attractive objects for tourist gaze, including in Bali. Some areas such as Denpasar, Badung and Bangli were not much known as the entrance points of Islam in Bali. Tourist gaze has been concentrated on pleasure and leisure with a focus on popular tourist attractions and hotelaccommodations, as well as cultural authenticities. This article aims to explore the potential of tourism industry by promoting the aspect of interreligiosity (such as between Balinese Hindu and Islam) to reconstruct the religious-friendly tourism of Bali. The study employed principles of netnography and literature study. The data was obtained from the internet, books, and journals, as well as a systematic literature review through Publish or Perish (PoP). The data is presented in narrative analysis and interpretations. The results of the study suggest that inter-religiosity could be integrated into the tourism industry. Some religious-friendly tourist destinations can be reconstructed through representations of inter-religious relationships in Denpasar, Badung, and Bangli. As such, religious-friendly tourism could support the development of harmonious life for a sustainable civilization. For further research, it is suggested to conduct research on other tourist gaze areas that are limited by this work.

Comparative analysis of gut fungal composition and structure of the yaks under different feeding models.

The yaks that inhabit the Tibetan plateau are a rare breed that is closely related to local economic development and human civilization. This ancient breed may have evolved a unique gut microbiota due to the hypoxic high-altitude environment. The gut microbiota is susceptible to external factors, but research regarding the effects of different feeding models on the gut fungal community in yaks remains scarce. In this study, we compared and analyzed the composition and variability of the gut fungal community among wild yaks (WYG), house-feeding domestic yaks (HFG), and grazing domestic yaks (GYG). The results revealed that Basidiomycota and Ascomycota were the most preponderant phyla in the gut fungal community, regardless of feeding models. Although the types of dominant fungal phyla did not change, their abundances did. Intergroup analysis of fungal diversity showed that the Shannon and Simpson indices of WYG and GYG were significantly higher than those of HFG. Fungal taxonomic analysis showed that there were 20 genera (Sclerostagonospora and Didymella) that were significantly different between WYG and GYG, and 16 genera (Thelebolus and Cystobasidium) that were significantly different between the WYG and HFG. Furthermore, the proportions of 14 genera (Claussenomyces and Papiliotrema) significantly decreased, whereas the proportions of eight genera (Stropharia and Lichtheimia) significantly increased in HFG as compared to GYG. Taken together, this study indicated that the gut fungal composition and structure differ significantly between yaks raised in different breeding groups.

Цивилизационные вызовы устойчивому развитию России

The liberal model of globalization, proceeding from the “naturalness” of the unipolar world, essentially personifies the “modern barbarism”: sustainable development of the Western civilization is a priori meant to be at the expense of other countries. Today, its functioning is running into the resistance from local civilizations, whose economic and political weight has increased significantly in the 21st century, allowing the non-Western countries to become important actors in international relations claiming to realize their national interests and own type of sustainable development. Alliances are emerging among these countries, based on an alternative type of globalization, which implies both mutually beneficial cooperation and national development outside anyone’s external dictate. In fact, a global-local reality is being formed in the context of the multipolar world formation. The reaction of the West is to maintain its dominance by all means, holding back the creation of new international poles. These processes demand “rediscovery” of the established “universalist” approaches to sustainable development of human civilization: the problem of its alternative type has an independent scientific and practical significance for Russia as well as for the countries of non-Western civilization. In this regard, the study on the mutual influence of global and local factors that produce complex risks to sustainable development is being updated. Their complex nature is manifested in the fact that under the influence of hybridization of socio-techno-natural realities and inter-civilizational confrontation, they simultaneously cover a number of life spheres, overlapping each other, thereby acquiring an interference character. The author sees the answer to the challenges of these risks in the actualization of long-term functioning factors of a humanistic nature, which should be included in Russia’s strategy of a global-local sustainable development.

Personality and Society in the Dichotomy of Power and Freedom: Russian Contours

The understanding the place of personality in history, its relationship with power and society as a whole is considered in the paper taking into account geography, social and economic characteristics, historical spiritual origins of the North Caucasian ethnic groups. A retrospective journey into history and philosophy allows comparing the options of the human community developed by peoples and civilizations – the relationship of the individual with power, with the values of freedom, knowledge, experience of capitalism, liberalism, socialism, to search for the most acceptable for Russia and its regions. Much attention is paid to European experience, which managed to accumulate the achievements of upbringing, education and science. In our opinion, the relations of personality and society in European civilization are refracted by a through line of power and knowledge, truth and freedom, perfectly revealed in the philosophical work of Nietzsche and Foucault. Their approach is very critical striking not so much with its objectivity but with pessimism and nihilism. Modern societies are disciplinary, and appropriate procedures as an interrelated sequence of actions of power and society, form such a person, having the ultimate goal of establishing dominance over it. This is not carried out in an obvious way, but by many layers of socio-political and cultural acts of the state. The paper gives preference to a regional civil society with Eurasian basic values that have the character of ideological-forming, resistant to the twists and turns of globalization. They form the spiritual structure of peoples and allow them preserving their identity, which is the goal and task of historical progress. Not the search for some main universal ways of development, but the desire of peoples to sufficiently large, but local civilizations, to communities in which optimal harmony of personality and state, citizen and power, freedom and responsibility is possible.

Peace through the prism of civilizations: approaches, interactions and crisesк

The term "civilization" emerged in Europe only at the turn of the 18th-19th centuries, but over time, it has been used in diverse approaches that seem contradictory. Initially denoting the opposite of barbarism and a certain level of societal development, it transformed into a global concept unifying various cultures. Among the characteristics of such a global civilization, one can highlight the vector of development and prioritization of values outlined by French philosophers: freedom, rights, and justice. Scholars commonly synonymize and contrast "civilization" and "culture" in their interpretations. In seemingly different approaches by Immanuel Kant and Oswald Spengler, civilization appears as something external, constant, and mechanical against the living, dynamic culture. The approach of local civilizations, represented by scholars like N. Danilevsky, Oswald Spengler, Arnold J. Toynbee, S. F. Huntington, etc., remains popular and debatable. It reflects the peculiarities of individual cultures, their interactions, factors, and the cycle of development. The article suggests departing from the usual opposition and synthesizing the global and local approaches to civilization, where global civilization is not cultural unification but a space of cultural interactions with common, universal values. By comprehensively examining the crises faced by society at each of these levels, the interrelatedness of these levels can be traced, revealing factors influencing international security that are not apparent for local problem-solving. In the second part of the work, the context of the history of the Orthodox civilization is provided, emphasizing the importance of a thorough and comprehensive study of the formation of state civilization identity to understand local civilization and its core.

The economic diplomacy as a tool to shape the image of the future in a changing geopolitical reality

Two images of the future – «Digital totalitarian world or ―cybertotalitarianism― as ―digital concentration camp― with the Fourth Industrial (limited) revolution, the ―Great Reset― with reducing the population of the Earth from 8 to 2 billion people» and «The development of local civilizations of the fifth generation based on humanism, dialogue, partnership and peace-loving diplomacy between States, peoples, and civilizations, on the basis of constant concern for nature and the noosphere, with the leadership of the East and the Russian multinational civilization», they came together in a fierce battle for primacy on their territory and the planet Earth in the 21st century. This article focuses on current international agenda about forecasting the image of the future as a collision of models of paintings and strategies of the world order for the near and medium term. Its content in an accessible form shows the global price that humanity will have to pay for the strategy of a unipolar ―Collective West‖ and an ―alternative‖ to a multipolar world based on the principles of transhumanism, the rules of TNCs, total digitalization (according to K. Schwab and other). Peace, diplomacy, state sovereignty, reliable cooperation, safe work, and the identity of peoples, the continuity of classical values and universal concern for nature are designed to overcome power transhumanism and the Western ultra-liberal model of human development. Economic diplomacy is seen as a tool for harmonizing international life.