Socio-Сultural Context of the Archaeographic Research in Tomsk Region (on the materials of archaeographic expeditions from 1895 to 2010)

The article is devoted to the meaning of the socio-culturalcontext in the contemporary archaeographic research. Starting research in the areas of old-believers compact residence in the region, Tomskarchaeographers relied on the experience of centers of archaeography in Moscow, Leningrad, Novosibirsk and Sverdlovsk, in particular, onthe imperative of studying the Cyrillic old printed books and manuscripts in the natural milieu of their existence. In the 1980s, when theregular work in Tomsk region began, the major task shifted from saving a book from physical destruction to reaching the understanding ofthe principles of interaction between the Book and the Man in the old-believers culture, so that a functional model accounting for thisrelationship could be worked out. Accordingly, the emphasis was on the systems approach to the organization of the collection and analysisof archaeographic material. On the basis of GIS technologies, researchers from TSU planned to develop the archaeographic atlas of TomskRegion which would provide for the necessary up-to-date level of processing the data from expeditions. The essential aspect of the work ofthe Tomsk archaeographic expedition was to retain the established contacts even after the expedition had been completed, so the situation ofa continuous expedition appeared. An important circumstance should be taken into consideration: at the time of the expedition a kind of ameeting of two cultures happens. University students and lecturers are representatives of the secular culture while old-believers, theguardians of book antiquities, are religious people. However, they had to appear not in the stance of mutual opposition as oneself and theother, but to find themselves in the situation of dialogue and understanding arising out of the mental memory of a person of Russian culture.A bright example of the functioning of cultural memory mechanism is the todays subject of TSU achaeographers - the Tomsk collectionof birch bark manuscripts that is a part of skit library formerly belonging to the isolated community of peasants who had migrated in the1920-1930s to the Narym region. The research revealed that it was the Cyrillic text as the confessional text that had been the main identifierin the old-believers culture, especially if the adaptation and survival in the alien natural and cultural environment was at stake. Studying thephenomenon of Old Belief as a particular system with its history of events, ideas, social practices in the dynamic structure of thecontemporary social and cultural space allows the significant spiritual potential of the Russian national culture to be revealed.

Keywords

Authors

References