The Socio-Communicative Space of Transboundary Areas: A Reconstruction Model of the Cultural and Linguistic Landscape of Siberia

The article substantiates the effectiveness of an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the cultural and linguistic landscape of Siberia as a transboundary region, which has been forming over a long historical period under the influence of integrative and disintegrative trends. The research hypothesis is that the equilibrium state of the cultural and linguistic landscape of regions, the transboundary characteristics of which are complemented by a pronounced tendency to localization, is ensured by the balance of historically established formal and informal social networks and communities and depends on the nature of information flows circulating in them. Based on works by Frithjof B. Schenk, the authors propose a reconstruction model of the socio-communicative space of a region. The model consists of four components: “physical substrate”, “regulation systems”, “interactions and actions”, “symbolic coding and perception”. The authors analyse the components in the linguistic, literary, archaeological, and anthropological aspects, which makes it possible to comprehensively describe the space. The authors propose to study the mutual influence of written texts and oral speech, ideas and social practices, things and technologies at two levels: (1) group (at the level of individual social and ethno-confessional communities); (2) societal (at the level of speech practices and cultural patterns, voluntarily or involuntarily, consciously or unconsciously shared by the population of Siberian microregions (cities, villages, historically formed territorial units). The authors describe the sources of interdisciplinary research, which are data obtained by historians, dialectologists, archaeologists, literary scholars. The explanatory power of the proposed model, in the authors’ opinion, lies in the fact that it allows (1) describing social communications of two types: political/vertical ties between the centre and the periphery and cultural/horizontal ties of regional communities with immediate and distant neighbours, which, along with the transfer of ideas and technologies, can be a source of formation of alternative, unofficial loci of political and legal, sacral and memorial values; (2) taking into account the variety of social options of the cultural landscape and dialect speakers’ speech behaviour; (3) taking into account the peculiarities and limitations of different types of information sources used in the study of these processes, which is significant for the development of conventional terminology and tools.

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