Concepts of Culture: Form, idea, social regulation

Abstract

The article presents a methodological way for interdisciplinary research on ethnic culture. It is called the way of conceptualization of ethnoculture. It focuses on the discourse of Western cultural anthropology, but is based on the Russian thesaurus conception of subjective knowledge and considers the term “concept of culture” as a methodological tool. Despite the active use of the term of concept (in particular, “concept of culture”) by Russian scholars, the studies note a linguistic and cultural “imbalance”. It has its downsides related to the philological character of most studies in this field. The way of conceptualization of ethnoculture suggests proceeding not from researchers’ disciplinary characteristics that“split” culture into separate perspectives. It is proposed to focus on culture that specialists in different academic fields should study. The essence of culture appears primarily in the semantic field— the thesaurus or the treasury of knowledge. Its most important elements are concepts of culture. They have an abundance of forms, including word forms, and are dialectically associated with human activity (being its result and, in turn, determining it), as well as with things and material objects that embody the results of comprehension of these ideas by a person who has created them. All these aspects of concepts can be reconstructed in three hypostases: “form”, “idea”, and “social regulation”. The features of this reconstruction are shown by the example of studying a specific ethnic culture — Tuvan.