Žúžoľ / Civil society organization
New approach towards Culturology in Central Europe and beyond
Definition
Historically, the notion of "Kulturologia" (Культурология in russian) may be traced to late 19th century and early 20th century in Russia and is associated with the names of Mikhail Bakhtin, Aleksei Losev, Sergey Averintsev, Georgy Gachev, Yuri Lotman, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Vladimir Toporov, and others (1). During the Stalinist era, this kind of research was superseded by Marxist social studies. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, however, culturology was institutionalized as a new discipline in Russia and some other states of the former Soviet Bloc. Defined as an integral study of human cultures as integral systems and their influence on human behavior, it may be loosely compared to the Western discipline of cultural studies, although it has a number of important distinctions.
In terms of contemporary social sciences, the word "culturology" is borrowed from American anthropologist Leslie White who defined it as the field of science which studies culture as cultural systems (2)(3). Following White, Mario Bunge defined culturology as the sociological, economic, political and historical study of concrete cultural systems. When synchronic, culturology is said to coincide with the anthropology, sociology, economics and politology of cultures. By contrast, diachronic culturology is a component of history (4). Scientific culturology also differs from traditional “cultural studies” in that the latter are too often the work of idealist literary critics or pseudo-philosophers ignorant of the scientific methodology and incompetent to the study of social facts and concrete social systems.
Bunge’s systemic and materialist approach to the study of culture has given birth to a variety of new fields of research in the social sciences. Fabrice Rivault, for instance, was the first scholar to propose "international political culturology" as a subfield of international relations in order to understand the global cultural system, as well as its numerous subsystems, and explain how cultural variables interact with politics and economics to impact on world affairs (5). This scientific approach differs radically from culturalism, constructivism and cultural postmodernism in that it is based on logics, empiricism, systemism and emergent materialism. While a similar approach ought to be adopted in the emerging fields of political culturology or cultural economics, Rivault’s work is presently been used by scholars around the world to study cultural factors in international relations (6)(7).
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(1) Epstein, Mikhail, (1999) “Transcultural Experiments: Russian and American Models of Creative Communication,” St. Martin's Press, New York.
(2) White, Leslie, (1959) "The Evolution of Culture: The Development of Civilization to the Fall of Rome", McGraw-Hill, New York.
(3) White, Leslie, (1975) “The Concept of Cultural Systems: A Key to Understanding Tribes and Nations, Columbia University, New York.
(4) Bunge, Mario, (1998) Social Science Under Debate, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
(5) Rivault, Fabrice (1999) "Culturologie Politique Internationale : Une approche systémique et matérialiste de la culture et du système social global", McGill Dissertation, 1999, Montréal, Culturology Inc.
(6) Xintian, Yu (2005) “Cultural Factors In International Relations”, Chinese Philosophical Studies.
(7) Xintian, Yu (2009),"Combining Research on Cultural Theory and International Relations".
Read more: http://www.culturology.com/definition/
The scope of culture is much broader and deeper than that of society as such. While society encompasses all living people in their combined activity and the interrelations of their roles, culture embraces the activity of all previous generations accumulated in artistic works, scientific discoveries, moral values, and so on. The social level is but one horizontal section of culture, which in its totality permeates all historical worlds as we see in the perpetual migration of texts and meanings--from country to country, from generation to generation. Culture is the totality of objectified relations of human beings among themselves. And therefore, as the individual becomes part of culture, growing in the knowledge of multiple levels of cultural heritage, s/he discovers ever more facets of humanity within him or herself.
Of course, culture necessarily includes the social dimension, but it cannot be reduced to it. To live within society and to be free of it--this is what culture is about. It enters the blood and bone of society, in order to liberate individuals from the constraints of their social existence, from its repressive tendencies and historical limitations, much as spirit is not free from body but represents a liberating force able to transcend external obstacles. Society can develop only with the nourishment of non-social, meta-social, and trans-social elements, such as those contained in the cultural products of different epochs, in their mystical revelations, artistic imagery and ethical imperatives. Culture is the porous and sponge-like quality of a social body that enables it to breathe the air of all times.
As a force for liberation, the ideal of culture--rather than that of politics or technology--is predominant in truly democratic societies. Enlarging upon the definition proposed above, I would add that culture is the creation of a human being insofar as s/he is free from physical, social and other needs; at the same time, culture functions for the liberation of other human beings as well. It is an objectified form of freedom, passed down through times and spaces, so that a single person may become the representative of all humanity in its past, present and possible future.
For these reasons, culture needs not only libraries, museums and schools (although these, too, are often lacking), but above all laboratories, focusing on experimental production of cultural objects and ideas in small quantities, but of genuinely new quality--an approach that precludes the distributional emphasis. After all, the culture of the Modern Age was born in craft workshops, alchemists' laboratories, and artists' studios. Each epoch of cultural tumult (an important part of which is always some type of political "perestroika") renews our perennial need for "minor," socially unconnected forms of intellectual production, conspicuously discrete from the dominant ideologies of the time. By its very nature, culture is an alternative form of consciousness: in the fifteenth century, it offered an alternative to religion, in the twentieth century--to politics, and in the twenty-fifth century, perhaps it will offer an alternative to science. Yet an alternative to culture itself is hardly possible when we conceive of culture as the totality of alternatives, rooted in human freedom.
Society has need of culturology in order to effectively concentrate within itself the genuine totality of human capacities. And by the same token, culturology should not only be an indispensable part of an individual's consciousness, but should also represent the wholeness of this consciousness as it integrates all aspects of life and cultural participation.
