Concept of the “Russian North” презентация

Culture:
spirituality; beliefs; aesthetics;
values; morality; epistemologies;
systems of representation (language/writing/painting/music, etc.);
gender; ethnicity; sexuality;
ideology, etc.

Characteristics of the “way of life of the group”:
The dominant values of a society
The values that guide the direction that societal change might take
Shared linguistic symbols (language)
Religious beliefs
What is considered to be the correct way for people to behave in their day-to-day lives
What is considered to be the highest intellectual and artistic achievements of a group, including science, art, literature, music and so on.
Formal behavioural traditions and rituals.
Dominant patterns of living, including styles of architecture and patterns of land use.

Community:
socio-economic entities; political structures; power and authority;
religious, educational and judicial/legal institutions;
geography (rural/urban etc.) spaces (domestic/work; private/public; secular/sacred; gendered spaces, etc.);
sociocultural roles (women/men/children/aged etc.); civic ritual, etc.

Ethnicity defining characteristics
The perception by others that the group in question is different
The perception of those in the group itself that they are different from others
The fact that that those defined as being in the same group – with the same identity – share activities based on their sameness, whether real or imagined.

“The creation of “a people” – whether defined as an “ethnicity”, “a nation”, or a “diasporic community” – is not a matter of archeologically unearthing layer after layer until the original layer is revealed;
rather, it is a matter of imaginative and creative rediscovery, in which contemporary interpretations and needs fill the gaps, re-create the past, and bridge the discontinuities with new mythologies”.
Stuart Hall

A cultural landscape is an area where:
the landforms have been created by human culture as well as by nature;
human culture has been created by the landscape as well as the people;
each now depends upon and continues to exist because of the other.
For tourists culture and scenery are integrated in the expectations and perceptions of locals and tourists alike.

The UNESCO concept of cultural landscape
“coexistence of territory and human civilizations”, “particularly by way of agropastoral activity”
(UNESCO 2006 Cultural Landscapes
(23 May).

Landscapes include the entities:
Nature
Culture
Community
Children of Kimza village (Arshangelsk region) Picture by G. Mikheev

Using the concept “landscape”:
we look at particular individuals, emplaced within a physical environment, who interact with others within their social environment through their remembered and imaginary experiences.
Scene from everyday life of Kizhi museum employees

«Россияне» (Rossiyane)
National level of ethnic identity customary termed in Russian studies;
It emerged in the situation of Russian Empire, characterized by ethnographically diverse population.
It was “reinvented” in post-soviet Russia as the solution to the ethnic revelation and ethno nationalism problem.

“National” and “Ethnic”: conflated terms
Cultural distances between the various geographic groups of ethnic Russians can be greater than the cultural distances between them and the peoples with whom they have been living in long historical contact.
Russians prefer to identify themselves as “inhabitants of the region”.
Regional cultures demonstrate differences in material culture (dwellings, food, clothing), means of subsistence and behavioral norms.

Russian
Basically cultural or spiritual in nature
Language, literature, ancestral homelands (soil), and religion are the markers of Russian identity.
Politics (the state) is judged in terms of its conformity to the nonpolitical dimensions of Russian ethnicity.
Is basically expressed in the Russian state political activities
Russian Empire as traditional and sustainable reincarnation on the “Russian soul” (including Soviet Union and Post soviet Russian Federation)
Opposed to “western” values and political institutions.

Russian regional cultural identity:
Idea of the important role of local natural, cultural and symbolic features in the national culture context;
Combination of texts, artefacts and symbols, representing specific social, political and ideological status of a region in a state context.
Myths of the common historical fate of local population, important for its solidarity and identification.
Regional cultural representation of a national and ethnic ideal and values associating with it.

Regional cultural traits:
- The dominant values that guide the interaction with other ethnic and regional groups;
- Shared symbolic systems (language, art, architecture, aesthetic styles…)
- Religious beliefs
- Correct (normative) way for people to behave in their day-to-day lives
- Highest intellectual and artistic achievements of a group, including science, art, literature, music and so on.
- Formal behavioural traditions and rituals.
- Dominant patterns of living, including styles of architecture and patterns of land use.

“Russian North” as a paradoxical term
Русский Север
(Russian North)
Cultural meaning of the Russian colonization of marginal and peripheral territories of the state.
Symbol of the Russian traditions survival in extreme natural conditions and spiritual revelation in the alien area.
Европейский Север России
(European North of Russia)
Geographic term for the territories to the north from the middle lands between Volga and Suhona rivers,
Where Russian groups has lived in the neighbourhood with karelians, komi, vepsi, saami and other peoples for centuries.

Term the “Russian North”
First used by A.P.Engelgard, Arkhangelks region governor at the end of the XIXth century, travel writings (in the borders of the Arkhangels region).
Articulated if the activities of “Arkhangel society of the Russian North studies”, founded in 1909 (regional research group).
By 1930s established as the ethnographic and geographic term in the Russian humanities (synonyms for “Pomorie”, “Pomor land”)
By 1970s is recognized as ethnocultural term for “nonofficial” mental interpretation of the region with the
“Russian core” – area of Arkhangelsk and Vologda, parts of Karelia, Leningrad, Novgorod, Yaroslavl and Kirov region
Multiethnic perithery (Finno-Ugrian heritage)

«Русский Север»
А.П. Энгельгардт

History of the concept

“Colonization”- lasting migration of Russian communities from the central and southern parts of the Russian state.
1. First settlers, hunters and fishermen, came here 14 thousand years ago: legendary chud (чудь) and lope (лопь) tribes.
2. In the 8th century the first groups of Slavs from Rostov-Suzdal and Novgorod areas came to the North (brought land-cultivating, written language, Christianity).
3. In the 12th-15th centuries there already appeared first cloisters, by the 17th century there had been about 60 Russian Orthodox monasteries.
4. 17th century – Russian old-believers settled in the area hiding from official church in the remote places.

Cultural Identity of the Russian North Settlers in the 10th - 13th centuries
Interaction of the Slavs and the Finns especially intensive in the 10th - 13th centuries.
- the abundant place-name data which is of Finno-Ugrian origin and which was registered in a major part of northern territories that by the 12th century had been integrated into the Novgorod and Rostov-Suzdal’ lands
Archaeologists can clearly observe the dissimilarities in woman’s costume, pottery, and the burial rite of the Finnic tribes and the Slavs formed in the late 1st millennium AD (in contact zones)

Fragment of Antonio Jenkinson map 1562

Northern Europe and the North of Russia at medieval European map

The “edge” phenomenon:
at a border of a geographic area all the cultural traits are vividly articulated and strongly recognized

Northern Russian rural traditions
Sedentary agriculture and animal husbandry combined with fishing and hunting have been traditional for Russian culture since the proto - russian (slavs) communities formed (in the Bronze Age).
The Russian migrants mastered seemingly alien forms of economy borrowing its basics from the indigenous population drawn in the migrant's cultural environment.
They remain Russians both in their self-consciousness and cultural and ethnic identification by «outsiders».

Architecture is exceptionally important adaptive mechanism, making the environment adequate for people survival

Architectural details are markers of the regional cultural identity.

Intuition and feelings prevail rational and pragmatic attitudes;
Aesthetic interpretation is valued more that logical “calculation”
Tradition (“eternal present”) is preferred to historical changes.
Collective and anonymous creativity succeeds the idea of authorship.

The sacral component of the Pomor culture played a peculiar role in the «spiritual renaissance» of the Russian culture in the 19th — early in the 20th century

Looking for
«Russian cultural sources»
in the North
Russian painter
Vasiliy Vereshagin
(goes down Dvina River in 1894)
«Икона Святого Николы с верховьев реки Пинеги», 1896

The northern landscape appears in artistic and academic texts of that time as the territory revealing secret, shadowed and gradually disappearing Russian traditional worldview.

A set of unique rural historical settlements as objects of cultural heritage have been preserved in the Arkhangelsk region up to the present time.
genamikheev6373_novyi_razmer

Traditional Northern Russian Peasants’ Craft Reconstruction Movement
It started in the 70s of the 20th century with the widespread among young people search for the ethnic values and later (in 90-s) it influenced the choice of the content and the strategies of “authentic ethnic cultures” education programs.

Integration of the notion “Pomor heritage" into the activity system of governmental, legal and public structures means a change of paradigm in relation to the past and historical memory.

Pomor villages become important cultural tourism destinations of the European North of Russia.