The Cultural Turn in the Russian-Asian Civilizational Borderland

Abstract

The author addresses the problem of sociocultural self-identification through the civilizational perspective. The paper is based on a civilizational approach developed by a Polish historian Jan Kieniewicz and employs an axiological focus to study Russian-Asian civilizational borderland. Kieniewicz views the borderlands as imagined spaces that are important for expressing one’s identity, understanding the nature of relationships and inter-civilizational interactions. The falling of the emerging Soviet civilization revealed a lack of civilizational unity and exposed the original local types of civilizations. The Russian society is presently experiencing the changes in ideological self-identification from the “Soviet man” to national self-identifications. The Russian-Asian civilizational borderland seems to be less defined in comparison with the Russian-European one, but more amorphous in terms of the manifestation of civilizational values. At the same time, there is a strengthening of the Asian vector in terms of associations between the states in the inter-civilizational space. The author applies the indigenous methodology and methodology of the cultural turn in interdisciplinary studies of self-identification through artistic mythological and metaphysical images of national dignity in situations of “domination-subordination”, transformation and transition. Doing so, she reveals the contextual intersection and intertwining of the East and the West, Europe and Asia, modernization projects of Russia as Eurasia. The author claims the need for an active sociocultural dialogue about the Images, Senses and Values of the borderlands that form frontier interactions between peoples, cultures and civilizations. She argues that the geopolitical turn of Russia towards Asia and the Asia-Pacific and is not studied from a critical viewpoint on its frontiers, value transformations, principles of interactions and an assessment of possible subordination to Asian civilizations.