Using Cultural Framings to Disentangle Viliui Sakha Perceptions, Beliefs, and Historical Trauma in the Face of Climate Change

This article explores how a community’s perceptions of a changing climate may shift over time, and the ways in which certain cultural predilections emerge in the process. Through replicating the same focus group method with Viliui Sakha in 2008 and again in 2018, the analysis reveals both continuity in cited changes as well as new emergent ones. Following this comparative exercise, the article further probes two culturally specific phenomena: how some inhabitants continue to attribute change to a long-disproven driver, de facto perpetuating a cultural myth, and how others expressed starkly contrasting perceptions of change. For both, the analysis reveals the importance of using a cultural framing founded in a people’s vernacular knowledge system with a focus on historical precedence for the former case, and on sacred beliefs for the latter.

“St. Petersburg Flood Legend” and the Myth of the “End of Petersburg”

The article examines the “flood legend” as part of the cultural myth of the “end of St. Petersburg” (ie, in essence, the end of the empire created by Peter I.). The existence of a “folklore flood legend” is postulated by all authors of works on the “Petersburg myth” and “Petersburg text”. It is believed that it is she who lies at the origins of literary works on this subject. In reality, the situation was the other way around: it was not a literary legend that arose from oral tradition, but the idea of “oral tradition” arose under the influence of an already existing literary legend. There is not a single early record of the “flood legend”, and the record published in 1888 by P.P. Karatygin cannot be accepted as historical evidence. The literary “flood legend” began with A. Mickewicz. It was he who created the first eschatological (in the exact sense of the word) image of the death of St. Petersburg from the flood and connected it with the idea of the original curse of the “city on bones”. Then this image was developed by Russian romantic poets, but the decisive role in the codification of the “legend” belonged to D. Merezhkovsky's novels “Peter and Alexis” (1904–1905) and “Alexander I” (1911–1912).

Chaadaev’s work and its interpretationin the intellectual culture of the Silver Age

Peter Y. Chaadaev (1794‒1856) is a key figure of Russian philosophy. His experience of theorizing about subjects of the highest order – God, man, knowledge, history, and reli­gion – is still a historical and philosophical problem that does not allow us to fully under­stand the mystery of Chaadaev’s creativity, which has the thickness of a cultural myth. From our point of view, the Chaadaev theme in the history Russian thought is not only the question of what the author of the Philosophical Letters said, in other words, it is not about the explication of his ideas. In our opinion, this is rather a question about the exist­ing discourse about Chaadaev as well as about the perception and understanding of his texts in the context of Russian intellectual and political culture. Philosophers of the Silver Age tried to get close to understanding the deep motives of Chaadaev’s thought. “Chaadaev’s problem” provided Russian intellectuals with a powerful creative impulse prompting them to ask questions about Russia, its history as well as its cultural, civiliza­tional, and political identity.

Scenery by M. V. Dobuzhinsky as a Version of Pushkin Studies

The sets by M. V. Dobuzhinsky for the operas by Mussorgsky and Tchaikovsky based on Pushkin’s works represent an attempt to reconstruct Pushkin’s world and Pushkin’s attitude to history. The libretto required a stylization and standardization of scenography, but Dobuzhinsky continued to interpret the images of St. Petersburg and central Russia, correlating the plots of operas with a new national upsurge. Thus, the plot of The Queen of Spades was understood as part of Pushkin’s view on the successes and failures of the Petrine reforms, about the connection between adventurism and the imperial style, which corresponded to the general cultural myth of Petersburg but was supplemented by a number of observations on the Pushkin text. The plot of Boris Godunov was read not as a Russian story, but as a common one for countries inheriting the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Russia. The plot of Eugene Onegin was brought closer to the dacha plots of Russian literature, becoming part of the integrated image of a lost Russia. It is proved that Dobuzhinsky in his decisions followed not the structure of the libretto, but a close reading of Pushkin’s texts.

Waterpower romance: the cultural myth of dying watermills in German hydro-narratives around 1900

Even in the twenty-first century, myths of preindustrial forms of energy utilization are woven around watermills, waterwheels, and traditional millscapes. Along German watercourses, many grinding shops and hammer mills held on to waterwheels and delivered mechanical rather than electric power well into the twentieth century. It is not the case that the days of these “old technologies” (Edgerton 2008) were numbered as soon as hydroelectricity and “modern” hydraulic turbines appeared in the 1880s. When analyzing the dominating contemporaneous discourses around hydropower, it is easy to overlook these tendencies of historical persistence. This is not surprising, considering that scientific, literary, and preservationist narratives around 1900––actively and subtly––propagated and spread the idea of Muehlensterben, or the myth of dying watermills that has been rehearsed over and over again in reflections on hydropower history. In this article, we challenge the popular imaginaries of “old” and “outmoded” watermills in a two-step approach. Firstly, we contrast the well-known transition at the advent of hydroelectricity with hydropower activities, which took place simultaneously in Germany’s traditional commercial landscapes. Here, waterwheels remained in good use, despite the electrification and scientific development of hydraulic turbines. Secondly, we deconstruct the romantic bias towards the preindustrial symbolism of the waterwheel by analyzing different arguments in professional journals as well as romanticizing and nostalgic literature. We combine approaches and empirical material of both historical and literary sciences to gain a better understanding of how different narratives reinforced the image of watermills and waterwheels being outdated. In this respect, the interdisciplinary approach contributes to the emerging field of the Environmental Humanities.

Niemcy – migracja jako impuls do krytyki kultury?

Germany – migration as a culture critic?The common roots of the crisis and criticism indicate that the contemporary „migrant crisis” in Europe can also give a fundamental impulse to the criticism of culture—one so far-reaching that it can lay the foundations for a new cultural identity. The subject of this analysis is Germany as a cultural space in Europe and a unique community. Due to its history and both post- and always pre-national character, it is faced with a great opportunity to create a model of social integration yet unseen on the Old Continent. There is one condition: Germany will need to create a relevant cultural myth. This article presents three possible argumentative paths which show that such a scenario is not unlikely. Niemcy – migracja jako impuls do krytyki kultury?Wspólne korzenie kryzysu i krytyki wskazują, że współczesny „kryzys migracyjny” w Europie może stać się także zasadniczym impulsem do krytyki kultury. Krytyki na tyle daleko idącej, że może ona zrodzić fundamenty nowej kulturowej tożsamości. Przedmiotem analiz są tutaj Niemcy, jako kulturowa przestrzeń w Europie, jako szczególna „wspólnota”, która ze względu na swoją historię i post- a zarazem zawsze już przednarodowy charakter, staje przed ogromną szansą stworzenia niewidzianego na Starym Kontynencie modelu integracji społecznej. Pod warunkiem, że uda się im stworzyć odpowiedni mit kulturowy. W artykule przedstawione zostały trzy możliwe ścieżki argumentacyjne, które wskazują, że taki scenariusz nie jest nieprawdopodobny.

LATOUR’S METHOD: SEMIOTICS BETWEEN LITERATURE AND SCIENCE

This article attempts to reconstruct the method of Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory by articulating its links with the semiotics of Algirdas Julien Greimas. Semiotic methodology is considered as a point of entry to the labyrinth of Latour’s projects and a thread of Ariadne through it. The article is divided into two parts. The first one examines Greimas’ conceptions of narrative grammar and narrative programmes. This analysis leads to a number of conclusions: a) Greimas’ semiotics is as ambitious a scientific project as Latourian sociology. Greimas elaborates the general premises of structural linguistics and proposes to extend the latter not only to scientific discourses outside cultural (myth, folktale) and literary texts, but also beyond the textual world itself; b) Elements of semiotic methodology crucial for Latour are emphasized, including the operation of bracketing out (of referent and enunciator) and a separation of orders of (semiotic) acts that points to the distinction between linguistic operations inside the text and the meta-linguistic operations of semiotician; c) The vocabulary of movement (trajectory, a point of departure, circulation, vehicles etc.) that are omnipresent in Latour’s writing is narratological in origin and has methodological importance for his work. The second part of the article shows how Latour appropriates and transforms elements of semiotics in his early work on the sociology of science. Methodologically, Latour’s anthropological approach to science is marked by two successive moves: 1. suspension of the key binaries in sociology and the philosophy of science (e.g. subject/object, truth/falsity, social/intellectual); 2. reassembling such distinctions. In his works, Latour carries out these methodological practices by means of sequences of operations designated here as “bracketing in,” “bracketing out,” and “unbracketing.”