primitive culture as historical type

1 The problem of periodization of primitive culture and the main approaches to its study

Primitiveness is historically the first and longest stage in the development of human culture. The question of the time frame of this period causes much controversy. There is an archaeological periodization of primitive culture according to the material from which tools and weapons were made. It includes division into:

- stone Age(800 - 4 thousand BC);

- bronze age(3-2 thousand BC), who separated craft from agriculture, complicated the social system and led to the creation of the first class states;

- iron age(1 thousand BC), which dynamized the heterogeneous development of world history and culture.

In general, it is customary to divide the most ancient period of human culture (the Stone Age) into the Paleolithic era (800-13 thousand years BC), characterized by primitive stone tools, the construction of the first boats, cave paintings, reliefs and round plastic; the Mesolithic (13-6 thousand years BC), who made the transition to a settled way of life, to the breeding of livestock, the use of bows and arrows and created the first narrative paintings; and the Neolithic (6-4 thousand years BC), which approved cattle breeding and agriculture, improved the technique of stone processing and spread ceramic products everywhere. But even later, next to the emerging civilizations, archaic tribes of hunters and gatherers, as well as farmers and pastoralists who were at the stage of tribal relations using primitive tools, continued to live.

The first material evidence of human existence is the tools of labor. Archaeologists have no consensus on the age of the most primitive tools. In paleoanthropology, it is believed that they appeared 2 million years ago. Therefore, the inhabitants of this period are called Homohabilis (handy man). But a number of archaeologists date the first tools as 5-4 million years ago. Of course, these were the most primitive instruments, very difficult to distinguish from natural stone fragments. 800-300 thousand years ago, our ancestors could already use fire. But only Neanderthals (250-50 thousand years ago), apparently, began to do this all the time. The appearance of the first artificial burials is associated with the late Neanderthals, which indicates the formation of the cult of ancestors. Anatomical structure Neanderthals suggests that they already had the beginnings of speech. However, scientists believe that the collective life of the Neanderthals was still herd character. Therefore, only Homosapiens (Neoanthropist, Cro-Magnon), which appeared 50–30 thousand years ago, can be fully considered a cultural being.

In the Mesolithic era, in connection with the retreat of glaciers to the north, people began to camp under open sky, near the shores of the seas, rivers, lakes. Fishing developed intensively, new types of tools were created, a hunting bow and arrow appeared, the first domestic animal, a dog, was tamed. Funeral ceremonies became more complicated.

In the Neolithic, new methods of processing stone and bone in the manufacture of tools were discovered - polishing, drilling, sawing. There were such vehicles as a boat and skis. Pottery and weaving emerged. House building developed intensively. But the most important was the transition from an appropriating economy (hunting, gathering) to a producing economy (agriculture, cattle breeding), which led to the spread of a settled way of life.

Thus, the manufacture of tools, the emergence of burials, the emergence of articulate speech, the transition to tribal community and exogamy, the creation of art objects were the main milestones in the formation of human culture.

Anthropology is an important part of Western social science. The content of this science is to study the biological evolution and socio-cultural development of man and his races.

Cultural anthropology (cultural anthropology) is a special area of ​​anthropological scientific research, which analyzes a person as a creator of culture and as its creation. This field of knowledge has developed and took shape in European culture in the last quarter of the 19th century.

The main problems of cultural anthropology are:

The study of changes in the structure of the human body as a result of interaction with the cultural environment;

Study of human behavior in the process of its inclusion in the system of socio-cultural relations;

Analysis of family and marriage relations between people, issues of human love and friendship;

The formation of the worldview and attitude of a person, etc.

As noted above, Western scientific schools made a significant contribution to the development of anthropology, and, above all:

British School of Social Anthropology (E. B. Tylor, G. Spencer, D. D. Fraser, etc.);

North American School of Cultural Anthropology (A. G. Morgan, L. White, F. Boas, etc.)

They not only created theoretical programs for the study of man and culture, but formed a whole scientific direction - evolutionism, which has become a key model of the scientific study of culture in cultural anthropology.

2 Mythology as the original form of being culture

Myth (from the Greek. mythos - legend, legend) is a fantastic emotional-figurative narration about the deeds of the gods, the exploits of rulers and heroes. In modern everyday speech, any fiction is called a myth. But in the history of culture, myth was, on the contrary, the first form of the existence of truth, the first type of text that explained to people the structure of the world, themselves and their place in this world. The myth is understood not as a fairy tale, fiction or fantasy, but as it was understood in primitive communities, where myths were believed to denote genuine events (moreover, events were sacred, significant and served as an example to follow).

About the creation of the world;

On the founding of ancient states and cities;

About the actions of cultural heroes;

About the place of man in the world and his purpose;

On the origin of a number of customs, traditions, norms, patterns of behavior.

Myth is the first of the historically known forms of culture, explaining the meaning of the universe, the cosmos, of which man has always been a part. Elements of mythological consciousness are present in the culture of other eras as their organic part. Modern man also creates myths, sensually summarizing the phenomena of modern life.

Mythological images are rooted in unconscious foundations human soul. They are close to the biological nature of a person and arise on the basis of his ability to believe in a certain structure, life. Mythological plots and images were a reliable source of transmission of traditions and skills, aesthetic and ethical standards and ideals.

The mythological consciousness is characterized by a sense of belonging to the natural elements, deified and personified in the images of the gods: Zeus (Jupiter), Hera (Juno), Aphrodite (Venus), etc. Everything is explained through their will. A person acts as an agent of divine forces, his activity is entirely subordinated to magical rites, which, as it were, preserve the so-called. sacral (sacred) time.

Sacred time within the framework of myth is the prevailing factor in world perception. It opposes profane time and sets a certain scheme for the functioning of the human community, unchanged in its basic principles. Mythological consciousness is characterized by a magical (witchcraft, magical) way of interacting with the world. The English scientist J. Fraser singled out the so-called. "the law of magical sympathy", uniting a person and an object with which, at least once, he came into contact. Based on this magical involvement or sympathy, it is possible to influence the will of another person with the help of certain rites and rituals. On the whole, mythological consciousness is extremely static. It does not know the idea of ​​movement, progress. The changes flowing around are only manifestations of some unchanging and eternal order of things, seeming and illusory in its essence.

Mythological consciousness has a unique ability. It regulates the flow of new knowledge, since it is dominated by a system of rites and rituals that systematizes the influx new information about the world. And so the myth does not decompose as a result of the accumulation of knowledge, It explodes from within the gradual awareness of man of his freedom. Myth does not regulate life free man. He is not capable of it. Therefore, as a person realizes his freedom, a different picture of the world arises, which is no longer based on the dissolution of the individual in reality, in the elements of natural processes, but on the isolation of oneself from it, the formation of subject-object relations.

In general, mythological consciousness is characterized by:

The dissolution of man in the world;

Complete identification of man with nature, its deification;

Fetishism, that is, the worship of inanimate objects;

Animism, that is, belief in the existence of spirits, in the animation of all objects.

The heyday of the myth refers to the period of primitive - communal formation. In this era, the myth was:

The organizer of the behavior of the members of the primitive collective;

The accumulator of his volitional aspirations;

The rod, the axis of the whole public life.

In myths, collective experiences, impressions, passions, feelings, moods, caused by certain phenomena of reality, were objectified. Despite their sometimes fantastic outlines, mythological images are not at all a pure illusion, an absurd invention, an arbitrary distortion of the world. The myth also includes many elements of a true reflection of reality, correct assessments of certain phenomena. Without this, the relatively stable existence of the primitive collective, continuity in the reproduction of human relations and consciousness would be impossible.

Ministry of Communications of the Russian Federation

Petersburg State University Ways of Communication

Faculty: correspondence

Specialty: PGS

Department: Applied Psychology and Sociology

PRIMARY CULTURE

03-PGUPS-31

Teacher

Student A.Yu. Zhuravlev

St. Petersburg

INTRODUCTION

1. PRIMARY CULTURE.

2. RELIGION.

4. MYTH AND LITERATURE.

5. ARCHITECTURE.

6. ART.

7. MUSIC.

LIST OF USED LITERATURE.

INTRODUCTION

Culturology is the science of culture and its subject is the objective laws of universal and national cultural processes, monuments, phenomena and events of the material and spiritual life of people.

The word culture is in the lexicon of almost every person. The phenomena of culture are studied by many specific sciences - archeology, ethnography, history, sociology, as well as sciences that study various forms of consciousness - philosophy, art, aesthetics, morality, religion, etc.

At present, the concept of culture means a historically determined level of development of society, the creative forces and abilities of a person, expressed in the types and forms of organization of people's life and activities, as well as in the material and spiritual values ​​\u200b\u200bcreated by them. (1)

Culture is a very complex, multi-level system. It is customary to subdivide culture according to its carrier. Depending on this, it is quite legal. First of all, to single out world and national cultures.

World culture is a synthesis of the best achievements of all national cultures various peoples that inhabit our planet.

National culture, in turn, acts as a synthesis of cultures of various classes, social strata and groups of the corresponding society.

In accordance with specific carriers, the cultures of social communities, the family, and the individual are also distinguished. It is generally accepted to distinguish between folk and professional culture.

Material culture is the culture of labor and material production, the culture of everyday life. Topos culture, i.e. place of residence, culture of attitude to one's own body, physical culture.

Spiritual culture acts as a multi-layered formation and includes cognitive and intellectual culture, philosophical, moral, artistic, legal, pedagogical, religious.

Historically, culture is associated with humanism. Culture is based on the measure of human development. Nor advances in technology. Neither scientific discoveries by themselves determine the level of culture of a society if there is no humanity in it, if culture is not aimed at the improvement of man. Thus, the criterion of culture is the humanization of society. The purpose of culture is the all-round development of man.

1. PRIMARY CULTURE.

The search for a beginning is perhaps the most difficult search that an inquisitive mind embarks on. Any phenomenon once and somewhere began, originated, arose - this seems obvious to us. But, step by step, getting to its sources, one can discover an endless chain of transformations, transitions from one state to another. It turns out that any beginning is relative, it itself is a consequence of a long previous development, a link in endless evolution. Not only is the origin of life and the human race on Earth not thought of as a one-time act of creation or appearance, but also the origin of human institutions proper. Such as the family, property, the state, are also the result of a long process, a link in the chain of transformations. The same can be said about the development of culture, the civilization of human society.

Speaking in a broad ethnographic sense, culture and civilization are made up of knowledge, beliefs, art, morality, laws, customs, and some other abilities and habits acquired by a person as a member of society. “Man,” said Wilhelm Humboldt, “always puts everything in connection with what is in front of him” (2). The idea of ​​the continuity of civilization, contained in this expression, is not at all some kind of dry philosophical position. It acquires an entirely practical significance by virtue of the simple consideration that anyone who wishes to understand his own life must know the successive steps which have brought his views and habits to their present state. Auguste Comte hardly exaggerated this need when he expressed the idea that "no idea can be understood without its history" (3). This phrase can be extended to culture in general.

The main sources of study of primitive society and primitive culture are, of course, archaeological research, ethnography, data from geology, anthropology, mythology, and folklore. Since time immemorial, man has been worried about his past, but only the scientific achievements of the last century made it possible to answer a number of questions that have interested mankind for centuries. One of these questions was the question of when the first man appeared on Earth. Thanks to relentless search, one of the oldest human cultures on Earth, dating back to the Paleolithic era, was discovered. The man whose remains were discovered during excavations was called Sinanthropus.

The discovery of the Sinanthropus culture dates back to the 20s. of our century, when traces of their activities were found 40 km from Beijing. According to the bone remains of Sinanthropus, its physical appearance was recreated. The average height for a woman is 152 cm, for a man - 163 cm.

In the cave where the excavations were carried out, a large number of tools and weapons of Sinanthropus were found: items made of quartz and quartzite, sandstone and hornfels. These are roughly crafted chopping tools with a wide oval blade. Sinanthropes systematically used fire. The compressed layer of ash from the fires in the cave reached a thickness of seven meters. This means that the cave was inhabited, probably for several millennia. Some of the animal bones found in the cave are burnt, on the basis of which it can be concluded that the Sinanthropes roasted the meat of animals on fire.

Hunting, maintaining a fire, obtaining materials for the manufacture of stone tools and weapons, and finally, a common dwelling - a cave - united the Sinanthropes into a stable society.

For judging the level of intellectual development of synanthropes, the fact of their mastery of fire as a technical means and the elements of nature is of decisive importance.

The Neanderthal era was a significant step forward in the development of the productive forces of primitive society, its material and spiritual culture.

The next step in the primitive history of mankind was the transition from herd societies to a tribal system, to the formation of a maternal tribal organization. It was at this time (the period of the Aurignacian culture), along with the improvement of flint tools for hunting, the manufacture of tools from bone, that the development of fine arts and the formation of primary religious ideas and beliefs began.

So, at the stage of prenatal society, mankind has been about a million years.

In the field of spiritual culture, people of this time formed the rudiments of knowledge about the outside world, moral and moral norms, religious ideas and some types and forms of art: mythology, architecture, fine arts, music - that is, what is defined by the concept of "artistic culture".

2. RELIGION.

The beginnings of religion began to form several tens of thousands of years ago. Experiencing enormous difficulties in the struggle for existence, fearing incomprehensible phenomena, man began to attribute supernatural meaning to the forces of nature. This fantastic understanding of reality went through a series of stages in its development and, in the end, led to the emergence of modern religions. Our distant ancestors were not only powerless in the face of formidable natural phenomena, such as floods, storms, but also helpless in relation to everyday phenomena, had no protection from the cold, lived under the threat of hunger. Man had at his disposal only the simplest tools, made of stone or wood. In search of food, people were forced to constantly change the place of their camps. Whether tomorrow and the day after tomorrow they will have food - largely depended on luck in the hunt. At every step, other dangers threatened a person: an attack by a predatory beast, a lightning strike, a forest fire ...

Without knowing natural causes phenomena of nature, not understanding what is happening around them, people began to spiritualize the objects and forces of nature, to endow them with supernatural properties. They considered various favorable phenomena to be good, and those that brought illness, hunger, death, on the contrary, were considered evil. Later people began to imagine these phenomena in the form of powerful beings - spirits, demons, etc. Deified man and animals. Fish were deified among people who were mainly engaged in fishing. With the domestication of animals in primitive society, gods appeared in the form of a bull, a dog and other domestic animals, from which people expected help in economic life.

The fact that our ancestors once spiritualized the phenomena of nature is evidenced, for example, by such facts. The Negritos of the Andaman Islands, who are at a very low level of social development, still believe that the Sun, Moon and stars are living beings.

The religion of pre-class society is very diverse. One of the oldest forms of religion was totemism. The essence of totemism in science has not yet developed a consensus. In its most general form, totemism is the belief in a mysterious kinship between a group of people, on the one hand, and a certain object, type of plant, animal or natural phenomenon, on the other. Totemism is closely connected with the tribal system. And there is an opinion that this form of religion arose as a fantastic reflection in the minds of people of the emerging tribal relations.

Usually each genus was at the same time a separate totemic group and was named after a totemic animal, plant, etc. totemic beliefs have several varieties: in addition to generic totemism, there is tribal, sexual and individual totemism.

For primitive man, the geographical environment surrounding him was of great importance. Nature dominated man. Hence the emergence of the cult of nature in its various variants. So, among primitive people the veneration of the sun, earth, water was widespread. Various commercial crops were also developed. Belief in magic was also very common among primitive people. According to magical ideas, through certain actions, spells can affect any natural phenomenon or a person. Early arose in primitive society and fetishism - the veneration of inanimate material items, allegedly possessing supernatural properties.

A higher form of primitive beliefs is animism, that is, belief in spirits and the soul. Primitive man inhabits the whole world around him with spirits. Souls, according to his ideas, possess plants, animals, phenomena and objects of nature.

For a developed tribal system, primarily for the paternal clan, the cult of ancestors is very characteristic - the veneration of the spirits of deceased ancestors, who supposedly influence the life of their descendants.

The word "myth" is Greek and literally means "tradition, legend". Usually it means tales about gods, spirits, heroes deified or connected with gods by their origin, about the first ancestors who acted at the beginning of time and participated directly or indirectly in the creation of the world itself. Its elements are like natural. So are cultural ones. Mythology is a collection of such tales about gods and heroes and at the same time a system of fantastic ideas about the world.

Myth-making has been an important phenomenon in the cultural history of mankind. In primitive society, mythology reflected the way of understanding the world, and myth expressed the worldview and worldview of the era of its creation. Myth, as the original form of the spiritual culture of mankind, is “nature and the social forms themselves, already reworked in an unconsciously artistic way by folk fantasy” (4).

The main prerequisites for a peculiar mythological logic were, firstly, that primitive man did not distinguish himself from environment, and, secondly, the fact that thinking retained the features of interpenetration and indivisibility was almost inseparable from the emotional sphere. The consequence of this was the naive humanization of all nature. Human properties were transferred to it, animation, intelligence, human feelings, often human appearance were attributed to natural objects, and, conversely, features of natural objects, especially animals, could be assigned to mythological ancestors. Certain powers and abilities could be plastically expressed by many-armed, many-eyed, the most outlandish transformations of appearance: diseases could be represented by monsters that devour people, the cosmos could be represented by a world tree or a living giant, tribal ancestors had a dual nature.

It is typical for the myth that various spirits, gods and heroes are connected by family and clan relations. In the myth, the description of the model of the world coincides with the narrative about the emergence of its individual elements, about the deeds of the gods and heroes that determined its current state. The current state of the world: relief, celestial bodies, species of animals and plants, lifestyle, social groups, religious institutions, tools, hunting and cooking methods - all this turns out to be the result of events of a long past time and the actions of mythological ancestors, gods, heroes.

The story about the events of the past serves in the myth as a means of describing the structure of the world, a way of explaining its current state. Mythical events turn out to be "bricks" of the mythical picture of the world. Mythical time is the initial, early, first time; this is the right time, the time before the time, before the start of the historical record of the current time.

The most important function of mythical time and myth itself is the creation of an example, a model, an image. Leaving models for imitation and reproduction, mythical time and mythical heroes simultaneously exude magical spiritual forces that continue to maintain the established order in nature and society; maintaining this order was also an important function of the myth. This function is carried out with the help of rituals, which often directly stage the events of the mythical time. In rituals, mythical time and its heroes are not only depicted, but also, as it were, revived with their magical power, events are repeated. Rituals ensure their "eternal return" and magical influence, which guarantees the continuity of natural and life cycles, the preservation of the once established order.

Mythology is the most ancient, archaic ideological formation that has a single, indivisible character. The germinal elements of religion, philosophy, science, art are intertwined in the myth.

Myth, and especially ritual, was directly related to religion.

4. MYTH AND LITERATURE.

Myth stands at the origins of verbal art, mythological representations and plots occupy a significant place in the oral folklore tradition of various peoples. Mythological motifs played a big role in the emergence of literary plots: mythological themes, images, characters are used and rethought in literature almost throughout its history.

Tales about animals and fairy tales with their fantasy grew directly from myths. Unlike myth, which primarily reflects initiation rituals, the fairy tale reflects many elements of marriage rites. A fairy tale chooses the destitute as its favorite hero. The hero is often endowed with the traits of an ancestor and a cultural hero who extracts some natural and cultural objects and then cleanses the land of monsters. In the images of epic heroes, witchcraft abilities still often prevail over purely heroic, military ones. AT early epics there are also traces of images of tricksters. Karelian-Finnish runes, the Scandinavian songs "Elder Edda", the North Caucasian epic about Nart heroes, distinct echoes of the archaic can be found in Gilgamesh, Odyssey, Ramayana, etc., have such an archaic character.

At the classical stage of the history of the epic, military strength and courage, a violent, heroic character completely overshadow magic and magic. The historical tradition is gradually pushing aside the myth, the mythical early time is being transformed into the glorious era of the early mighty statehood. Separate features of the myth can be preserved in the most developed epics.

Myths served as sources of literary plots in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and later. In accordance with people's ideas about the world around them, a completely new philosophical content was put into mythological plots. The mythology of the Middle Ages was dominated by the mythology of Christianity, focused on the moral values ​​of the gospel teaching. During the Renaissance, when the desire for the revival of classical antiquity appeared with particular force in society, a source literary works ancient myths began, where the gods, descending from the inaccessible Olympus, lived among people, entered into battles and entered into marriages with mere mortals.

At the same time, plots of folk demonology, based on medieval superstitions, began to penetrate into literature.

Over the centuries of its existence, world literature has absorbed a powerful mythological layer and continues to be nourished from this richest source.

5. ARCHITECTURE.

The word "architecture" in Greek means "building". This is one of the oldest human activities. The surviving remains of human settlements indicate the existence of different ways of life of people in different parts of the globe and at different stages of human development.

The oldest of the monumental structures that have come down to us belong to stone age and are called megalithic. The name comes from the Greek words "megas" - large and "lithos" - a stone, that is, structures made of large stones. They are found in various countries of Europe, North Africa, Asia Minor, India, Japan and other parts of the world. Such buildings are called menhirs, dolmens, and cromlechs.

The simplest of megalithic structures- menhir, a huge, roughly processed stone, vertically installed on the surface of the earth. Menhir is a Celtic word. The largest number of these monuments has been preserved in the north of France, in Brittany, where the tribes of the Celts once lived. The tallest known menhir is 20.5 meters high. One can only guess what a titanic labor the transportation and installation of the menhir cost the ancients and what a colossal impact this structure had on them.

The purpose of the menhirs is not entirely clear. It is assumed that they were erected in honor of memorable events, prominent persons, primitive deities.

A more complex megalithic structure is a dolmen: two vertical stones on which the third rests. Lying horizontally. It is still far from the Atlanteans and Caryatids, but it is here that the path of architecture as an art form began: the division of building elements into load-bearing and carried, supports and ceilings.

Gradually, the design of the dolmen became more complicated, there were more and more vertical supports. Closing into each other. They formed the walls of the burial chamber, the ceiling of which was the burial slab lying on them. Covered from the outside with an artificial mound of earth - a barrow, the dolmen became a burial place, a tomb, a kind of monumental home of the dead - a noble person or a whole family.

Over time, the size of the burial chambers increased, they learned how to make ceilings in several layers of masonry, letting them over each other until they closed in the middle. This design is called a false arch, because it transfers the entire load to the supports vertically, without lateral thrust. One more step - and the first dome appears, the most structurally perfect form of covering the tomb-dolmen.

Cromlech can be considered the most complex and mysterious of all types of megalithic structures. Scientists think that this is a sanctuary that serves as a place of sacrifice and ritual celebrations associated with the burial of the dead. Some features of the orientation of the most significant of the cromlechs that have come down to us - in Stonehenge (England) - suggest that. That it reflects the primary astronomical knowledge of prehistoric man and, in particular, is associated with the cult of the sun. There is also such a version that the concentric circular "paths" of Stonehenge, formed by stones evenly spaced around the sanctuary, could serve for horse competitions. After all, the cromlech is the “youngest” of the megalithic structures. If the menhirs date back to 5000-2000. BC, then Stonehenge is attributed only to 1600 BC. at that time, the decomposition of the tribal system was already actively going on in Europe, and the horse acquired especially importance for the privileged segments of the population. If these guesses are correct, then it turns out that the cromlech is the world's first multifunctional building, and what a cathedral, an assembly hall, a stadium, and even an observatory at the same time.

However, no matter what the cromlech served to our distant ancestors, there is undoubtedly one thing - by the time it was created, they had learned to process stone blocks much better, giving them regular, relatively rectangular shapes. Massive stone blocks installed along the outer perimeter of Stonehenge form a regular circle and are connected together by a common horizontal line of stone lintels. The regular repetition of the same type of spans has become a completely conscious construction technique. The outer fence of Stonehenge clearly shows the division of the structure into posts and beams, and in this sense can be called the prototype of the colonnade.

Isn't it surprising that everything, it seems, the limitless variety of forms of world architecture, including its most modern achievements, only reproduces in different ways these eternal beginnings, laid down by the still nameless architects of the Stone Age!

Metal structures acted as public buildings, but since ancient times man has needed housing. It is unlikely that anyone is able to find out where and when a person built his first house. In the Neolithic, in some places, dwellings were built from wood, reeds, twigs and clay. In others, they erect buildings on piles and the so-called communal houses. The settlements found in northern Italy (approximately 1800 BC) had a peculiar character. On the pillars arranged around the area, which housed the huts. A wooden fence was erected around the village, and a moat was dug, filled with water.

As a result of research in Anatolia (Turkey), an ancient fortified settlement dating back to the 6th millennium BC was discovered.

But, perhaps, the most ancient human dwelling is described in the book by V. Glazychev “The Origin of Architecture”. The house reconstructed by scientists was built 11 thousand years ago in the Wadi en-Natuf valley (upper Jordan River) and looked like this: a round recess in a stone base, flexible poles inserted into pre-hollowed holes and converging at the top. Then the poles were intertwined with thinner rods and smeared with clay. In the middle of the base of this round house is the place of the hearth, above it is a hole. There are still long millennia ahead, discoveries and disappointments, the greatness of the Egyptian pyramids and perfection the Athenian Acropolis, the monumentality of Rome and the frantic impulse of the Gothic, but there, in the distant Wadi-en-Natuf, a decisive step has already been taken, the great craft of architecture is already keeping track of time. A person finds a roof over his head, protection from bad weather and danger, warmth and coolness not under a tree or in a cave, but in a specially built permanent house.

6. ART.

When and why did fine arts begin?

There is no exact and simple answer to this question. It did not begin at a strictly defined historical moment - it gradually grew out of human activity, was formed and modified along with the person who created it.

In the study of its most ancient forms, historians visual arts are in a more favorable position than historians of the art of the word, music, theater. The latter can judge primitive songs and spectacles only by indirect data, by analogy with the creativity of living peoples who remained at the stage of the primitive communal system until the 19th and even 20th centuries. However, these analogies are approximate: no matter how archaic the social system of peoples pushed aside from the main paths of history, the past millennia could not remain for them a time without movement, without development. And the modern art of indigenous Australians or Africans is still quite different from that of people of the Stone Age.

Stone Age people gave an artistic appearance to everyday items, although there was no practical need for this. Why did they do this? One of the reasons for the emergence of art is considered to be the human need for beauty and the joy of creativity, the other is the beliefs of that time. The beliefs are associated with beautiful monuments of the Stone Age, painted with paints or images carved on stone, which covered the walls and ceilings of underground caves, rocky cliffs. Primitive artists knew very well the animals on which the existence of people depended. With a light and flexible line, they conveyed the poses and movements of the beast. Colorful chords - black, red, white, yellow - mineral dyes mixed with water, animal fat, plant sap, made the color of the cave paintings especially bright.

In September 1940, near the town of Montignac in southwestern France, four high school students set off on their planned archaeological expedition. In place of a long-rooted tree, a hole gaped in the ground, which, according to rumors, was the entrance to a dungeon leading to a nearby medieval castle. Inside was another hole, smaller. One of the guys threw a stone at it and, based on the noise of the fall, concluded that the depth was decent. He widened the hole, crawled inside, lit a flashlight, gasped and called his friends. From the walls of the cave in which they found themselves, some huge animals were looking at them, full of such confident strength, sometimes it seemed, ready to turn into a rage, that the children became terrified. And at the same time, the power of these drawings was so majestic and convincing that it seemed to the schoolchildren that they were in a magical kingdom.

So the Lascaux cave was discovered, soon nicknamed " Sistine Chapel primitive painting”: this comparison with the famous frescoes of Michelangelo is not exaggerated, because the painting of the cave fully expresses the spiritual aspirations and creative will of the people who created their own fine art that still amazes us. This painting is so expressive that some even doubted its authenticity, suggesting that the drawings are the creations of modern painters who wished to laugh at the gullible crowd. However, this claim has been refuted by scientific expertise.

Hundreds of figures outlined in dark contours, yellow, red, brown, painted with ocher, soot and marl, adorn the walls of the Lascaux cave: deer heads, forming amazingly elegant decorative friezes, goats, horses, bulls, bison, rhinos - all almost life-size.

In almost all parts of the world, centers of material culture of ancient times have been discovered. At many sites of primitive man, objects were found that can be called works of art.

In rocky caves, it happened to discover entire "museums" of primitive culture - paintings and sculptures. Stone sculptures grow together with a rock mass there: some ledge of rock, already partly resembling the body of an animal, its head or spine, is hewn and brought to a complete resemblance to a wild boar or a bear. On the walls and ceilings of the caves there are numerous images, large and small, partly carved, and partly filled with mineral paints. These are also images of animals - deer, bison, wild boars, wild horses, long-haired mammoths, saber-toothed tigers. Only occasionally come across the outlines of human figures and heads, or rather ritual masks.

The earliest images dominated by "portraits" of animals are from the Upper Paleolithic. The appearance of amazing stone figurines, called “Paleolithic Venuses”, belongs to the same period, scientists still argue about the significance in the life and beliefs of our distant ancestors. In most cases, the faces on the figurines are only outlined, but certain parts of the body are very specific and sharply exaggerated. Not grace and harmony female body the primitive artist wanted to convey, and with the help of strict geometric lines and volumes, the power, the heavy, life-giving power of the ancestor and protector of the hearth.

According to modern science, the Upper Paleolithic man was homo sapiens, that is, according to physical data, he is quite similar to modern man. He spoke articulately and knew how to make rather complex weapons from stone, bone, wood, and horn. Tribal groups lived by hunting large animals. It would seem that this primitive human society, which did not even cultivate the land and did not domesticate animals, should not have any art. Meanwhile it was - the proof is available. It is older than the state and property, older than all those complex relationships and feelings, including the feelings of personality, individuality, which took shape later in a developed human collective. This art is older than agriculture, animal husbandry and metalworking.

It can be assumed that the art was extremely primitive. But let's take, for example, a drawing on the ceiling of the Altamira cave in Spain, one of the images of a bison: economical, bold, confident strokes, combined with large combinations of paint, betray a monolithic, powerful figure of the beast with a surprisingly accurate sense of its anatomy and proportions. The image is not only contour, but also three-dimensional: how palpable is the bison's steep ridge and all the bulges of its body. The drawing is full of life, you can feel the trembling of tensing muscles, the elasticity of short, strong legs, you can feel the readiness of the beast to rush forward, put out its horns and look from under the brows with bloodshot eyes. The painter probably vividly recreated in his imagination the heavy running of the buffalo, its furious roar and the military cries of the crowd of hunters chasing him. This is not a primitive drawing. The hand of the master has already become wise. In addition, sharp observation was also necessary, developed truth, in a certain, narrow direction - in everything that concerned the habits of the beast. The beast was the source of life, the focus of thoughts, enemy and friend, victim and deity.

The skill of the hand, which has already known the great school of labor, and the accuracy of the eye made it possible to create magnificent, masterful images. But to say that they were masterful in everything is impossible. Primitiveness affects, for example, in the absence of a sense of overall composition, consistency. About two dozen bison, horses and wild boars are painted on the ceiling of the Altamira cave. Each image individually is excellent, but how are they arranged?! Disorder and chaos reign in their relationship among themselves: some are drawn upside down, many images are superimposed on one another ... and there is no hint of the environment, the situation ... apparently, the very thinking of primitive man, very trained in one respect, is helpless and primitive in another - in awareness of connections. He peers intently at individual phenomena, but does not understand their causal relationships, interdependence. And if he doesn't understand, he doesn't see. Therefore, the compositional gift of the primitive artist was in its infancy. But mainly the primitiveness of consciousness is manifested in the extremely limited scope of its attention. Basically, he depicts only animals, and only those that his fellow tribesmen hunted.

The appearance of ceramics in the Neolithic was of great importance in the development of that unconscious feeling in a person, which, standing out from others, later became known as aesthetic. Decorating the vessels he made with whimsical patterns, man perfected the art of ornamentation, marked by ever greater geometric harmony, the rhythm of colors and lines.

The visual art of the Neolithic is also very different from that of the Paleolithic. Realistic pathos, accurately fixing the image of the beast, as a target, as a cherished goal, is replaced by a desire for a new harmonious communication, stylization and, most importantly, for the transfer of movement, for dynamism. And indeed, some scenes of driven hunts with archers in the paintings of Eastern Spain and North Africa are, as it were, the embodiment of the movement itself, brought literally to the limit and concentrated in its stormy whirlwind, like energy ready to escape.

The Bronze and Iron Ages are majestic new stages in the development of mankind. Metal improves production methods. Art takes on new forms. Each perfect work of art represents an invaluable artistic heritage for future generations.

At the very end of the tribal system, the art of primitive society was destined to show the world new evidence of its great creative power. Art bronze age, marked by high achievements among different peoples of the earth, was unusually clearly manifested in Scythia. The heyday of Scythian art dates back to the 7th-6th centuries. BC. typical monuments of the Scythian culture are the burial mounds of the leaders. Masterpieces of Greek art, which depict the Scythians of the Northern Black Sea region, give a vivid idea of ​​their appearance: bearded. In long coats, in soft leather boots and felt hats. The culture of the Scythians is a culture vast world predominantly nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes that lived in the 1st millennium BC. in the Northern Black Sea region, in the Kuban, Altai and in Southern Siberia, that is, in the territory stretching from the Danube to the Great Chinese wall. A culture that in the south and southwest was in contact with the Hellenic and the culture of Western Asia, in the west with the culture of Central Asia of China. The people of this culture lived an intense life, where merciless hostile forces invaded human destiny and where a person had to constantly attack and win in order not to be defeated himself.

In what kind of art did these nomadic pastoralists excel, these warriors, who probably never parted with their weapons? The ideal of beauty, perhaps not fully realized, they combined with the desire to create objects that would symbolically have some kind of magical power over the mysterious forces of nature. The very way of life of the nomads did not dispose them to capture these symbols in monumental painting or sculpture, they were constantly moving, therefore, works of art could only serve as decoration for their weapons and equipment. Without a doubt, the decorative effect of these products is one of the most remarkable achievements of the world of decorative art.

The main style of Scythian art is the so-called "animal style". Its roots go both to the work of unknown ancient tribes that lived in these places in the previous era, and to the art of Western Asia, especially Iran.

One of the famous masterpieces of Scythian art is the golden figure of a deer from the mound of the village of Kostroma (Kuban region, 6th century BC). The image of a deer was associated among the Scythians with the idea of ​​the sun, light. The whole figure of a deer is subject to some special, intense rhythm. There is nothing superfluous or random in it. Finished, thoughtful composition. A harmonious combination of a deer's neck, wonderful in a soft bend, with its thin muzzle, above which curls of huge horns thrown back, which are not found in nature, majestically rise, and which solemnly spread along its entire back. Everything in this figure is conditional and at the same time extremely truthful, and therefore realistic.

7. MUSIC.

Outside witnesses are struck by the strange contradiction in the musical creativity of the "backward" peoples. On the one hand, the primitiveness of their dances and instruments, and especially their songs, seems obvious. On the other hand, no less obvious is the earnest seriousness, rigor and solemnity with which they practice their music. The explanation for this contradiction can only be the fact that music was an integral and extremely important part of all activities of primitive man.

Hunting, of course, also influenced the emergence of music - mainly by the experience of studying animals, their movements and habits. Reproducing the character and appearance of an animal in dance, primitive man conveyed not only the rhythms of his behavior. Equally important from the very beginning was the task of vocal imitation of the sounds made by animals. Together with timbre colors, the intervals and intonations inherent in their voices were reproduced. But other forces of nature were alive for primitive man: water and earth, wind and fire, thunder and heat, flowers and trees, mountains, sky, sun. They must be tamed and propitiated. Doesn't the wind speak to man in the language of the flute? And the drum - in the language of thunder and thunder? Maybe to tame the wind you need to play the flute, and to bring rain - to beat all the drums?

And so, from primitive times to modern religious processions, people turned to things, hoping to come to an agreement with the gods. Flute and drum are objects full of music. But other objects also have their own music: a lowered bow, a clattering ax, a jingling necklace and a falling stone, pouring water and caressing light. Every time of the day, every state of nature and man has its own music. Whoever wants to understand things, plants, animals, the forces and times of nature, must understand their voices, hear and unravel their mysterious names. Here are the roots of the primitive magic of the name and word.

In this space - from elementary imitation of the voices of nature to their reflection in the name and name - there is a slow ascent from a vague emotion to its strong fixation in the human voice and word. Music from the very beginning and still connects both of these poles, in some cases blurring in emotional uncertainty, in others - entering into an inseparable union with a clear and concrete word. Thus, like all other arts, music is initially woven into the reflection of the world by man and into the human psyche, formed by the totality of man's relationship to the world.

The most important feature of primitive music was its everyday life. But this is not an unsystematic mishmash of continuous sound. Everyday life of primitive music has a clearly organized and timed character. There was music accompanying holidays and gatherings, rituals, competitions and children's games, courting and lulling children. All music was tied to certain deeds and actions, was of an applied nature, without losing its main task - the formation of a unified worldview.

The formation of a unified worldview - a function of worldview or educational - was the core, the core of all other functions of music. At the same time, music contributed to the assimilation of the worldview, not as a set of concepts and words, but as a set of real experiences, emotions indelible from the memory, as a powerful charge of volitional energy. The volitional element became the defining and organizing educational influence of music on primitive man. The dominance of rhythm, the direction of emotional excitement, the element of suggestion and even hypnosis, noted in primitive music, were associated with this. Involving everyone in a single musical action, music established a stable connection between people.

This is a connection strictly organized in space and time.

In space, because it was not about joint listening or parallel movement in a dance to the same music, but about joint music-making, genuine co-creation, which does not know passive observers and isolated small groups.

In time, because this unity of people, formed in joint music-making, did not disintegrate, but developed.

In the primitive choir, behind the artistic and creative unity, there was also an ideological, labor, and tribal, tribal unity. Therefore, singing in such a choir was a universal school of morality. Spiritually uniting, joint creativity at the same time disciplined, inner need coincided with duty, individual - with family. Without ignoring individuality, primitive art set rigid limits for it, determined by the interests of the community. In his Everyday life man depended not only on numerous natural elements, but also on established customs that had to be observed, no matter how they were spent with newly acquired habits and experience. Song, dance, playing musical instruments allowed the weak to compensate for their physical shortcomings, the loser - to regain the interest of the female half of the tribe, to restore their tribal authority. The compensation for weakness before natural forces was the magic of sounds or body movements. A huge role was played by the very opportunity to “sing out” grief and failure, “dance” the accumulated irritation, relax and mentally free.

When viewed from the outside, it may seem that primitive man enjoyed some kind of wild noise, which is too early to call music. When viewed from the inside, the picture is completely different. This person enjoyed in a joint musical action the experience of the commonness of his worldview - collective, tribal, spiritual unity, the release and discharge of psychological tension.

In the musical and dance "performance", timed to coincide with the main holidays of the tribe, the entire life process, from the past to the future and from labor to intimate relationships, was replayed.

Getting acquainted with the early stages of musical life, it would be naive to treat them condescendingly. Behind the apparent simplicity of the forms of this music was hidden such a complex ideological core, such a complex of realized vital functions, which is worth envying.

Sensitive attention to the nearest sound environment was combined in this music with the cosmic order of natural phenomena. And this connection was made in every song and in every dance.

The lullabies of such peoples are a children's encyclopedia of the surrounding life, mothers sang in them about the worries of the tribe, and about the difficulties of their own lives, about the past and the future, about plants and animals, about the simplest and most mysteriously incomprehensible.

For the mythological consciousness, disorders of the body and soul are generated by the divergence of rhythms separate life with the rhythms of the universe. Therefore, the "correct" music is always able to eliminate the discord between man and nature.

LIST OF USED LITERATURE:

1. O.B. Lisichkin. World Art. Part 1. The ancient world. "Special" St. Petersburg. 1999

2. edited by A.N. Markova. Culturology. Tutorial. "Unity". Moscow. 2000

3. E.B. Tylor. Primitive culture: Per. from English. publishing house political literature. Moscow. 1989

4. A.S. Carmine. Culturology. "Lan". St. Petersburg. 2001

(1) Philosophical Encyclopedic Dictionary. – M.: Soviet Encyclopedia, 1983. - S. 292-293.

(2) p.7. ABOUT. Lisichkin. World artistic culture: part 1: ancient world: tutorial for senior classes of secondary school. - St. Petersburg: SpetsLit, 1999

(3) p.7. ABOUT. Lisichkin. World art culture: part 1: the ancient world: a textbook for high school students. - St. Petersburg: SpecLit, 1999.

(4) Marx K. and Engels F. (4) p. 13 O.B. Lisichkin. World art culture: part 1: the ancient world: a textbook for high school students. - St. Petersburg: SpecLit, 1999.

Ministry of Railways of the Russian Federation Petersburg State University of Railways Faculty: correspondence Specialty: PGS Department: Applied Psychology and Sociology Abstract PRIMARY CULTURE 03-P

Literature

Boas F. Mind of primitive man. M.-L., 1926.

Abramova Z.A. Image of a person in the Paleolithic art of Eurasia. M.-L., 1966.

Eremeev A.F. Primitive culture: Origin, features, structure. Lecture course in two parts. Saransk, 1997.

Zolotarev A.M. Tribal system and primitive mythology. M., 1964.

History of primitive society: General issues: Problems of anthroposociogenesis. M., 1983.

Levy-Bruhl L. Primitive thinking. M., 1930.

Mirimanov V.K. Primitive and traditional art. M., 1973.

Myths of the peoples of the world. Encyclopedia. T.1-2. M., 1982.

Okladnikov A.P. Morning art. L., 1967.

Stolyar A.D. Origin of fine arts. M., 1985.

Artistic culture of primitive society. SPb., 1994.

1. features of primitive culture:

A type of culture is a cultural complex that arose on the basis of an ethnic group or territory and exists for a certain time. The type of culture is characterized by an original cultural complex, which arises on the basis of an original worldview, peculiar only to the bearers of this culture.

Primitive culture is the first type of culture that appeared and existed in history. It was formed on the basis of a primitive society, which is characterized by common ownership of the means of production, collective labor and consumption, low level development of productive forces.

Stages of development of primitive society:

Paleolithic - from 2 million years ago to 10 thousand years BC. - there were pra-people, about 40 thousand years ago a man appeared modern look. People lived in a primitive herd, engaged in hunting, gathering, fishing. The maternal lineage appears.

Mesolithic - 10-5 thousand years BC - bow and arrows appeared, the dog was tamed. The maternal clan is gradually replaced by the paternal large family community. Gradually, the community becomes a neighbor.

Neolithic - 8-3 thousand years BC - the period of the Neolithic revolution - the transition from an appropriating economy to a producing economy (from hunting and gathering to agriculture and cattle breeding)

Primitive culture is characterized:

*syncretism. Syncretism (fusion, indivisibility) - the unity of culture, society and man, there is no understanding of the difference in activities, and rest, and work, and art - all this is part of a magical ritual. The roots of syncretism lay in the practical activity of primitive man, which had the character of a ritual. Syncretism manifested itself:

The first thing that struck Europeans who got acquainted with the life of peoples at an early stage of development was the undivided fusion of man and nature. The inseparability of the living and non-living world, subjective and objective: all phenomena and objects of the same order, are equal: (hello lake, execution of cabbage). A line from a Bushmen song:

Weeping grass asks the wind

bring the rain

The earth under the sun cries: "I am dried up."

My heart is crying by the fire: "I'm lonely"

The wind comes and says "The rain will come soon"

And the grass whispers: "There is a hunter"

In the culture that produced this text, it was perceived as a true, documentary description of reality. A mask put on by someone on the face is in reality the demon or the animal that it depicts. Gradually, this undivided unity is destroyed, and the mask is perceived not as God himself, but as a symbol of God, his partial incarnation. This attitude was very stable. It persisted in cultures ancient east, for example, in Egyptian mythology, where the sky appeared either in the form of a cow, or in the form of a woman stretched out above the earth, or in the form of a river along which the sun floats. In the mythology of the Hellenes, Zeus, who had a human appearance, could turn either into a swan or into a bull. Only with the development of the craft did man begin to distinguish his essential difference from nature, but this process lay already beyond the limits of primitiveness.

This should also include the indivisibility of myth and ritual. The rite plays important role in mythological culture, during the ritual, myths become reality, and the animal killed during the ritual is actually killed (in the view of the hunters). The dispute about what comes first, myth or ritual.

Not separating the "I" from the "we", the individual from the collective. A person thinks only in terms of the "we/they" collective. Each member of the tribal team is equal to the whole: one name, one hairstyle, jewelry, songs, dances, myths, rituals.

The practical activity of primitive man is syncretic; it combines hunting, gathering and tool making. Within the framework of this activity, the cultural practice of a person was realized, which combined material, spiritual creativity. Spiritual creativity is a mythology that was created and used during hunting, gathering, and tool making.

*traditionality: in the minds and behavior of people, in all kinds of activities and culture as a whole, tradition dominates. All the features of the life of each community are stable, rigid, indestructible and are passed down from generation to generation as an unwritten law, sanctified by mythological ideas. Tradition is the regulator of people's behavior. Tradition is a mode of transmission cultural property- the main experience lies in the wisdom of the ancestors. Mythology requires people to unconditionally accept the system, otherwise a person is excluded from the collective, which is tantamount to death (an example of initiation).

*Mythology of culture. Often primitive culture is called mythological.

A myth is not a fairy tale, it is a form of understanding of being by a primitive person, which is unacceptable for a modern person. Human traditional cultures sees in myth the only true revelation of reality. Myth is the first way to comprehend the world.

Myth is- a way of human existence and worldview, based on such a semantic kinship of a person with the world, when a person does not distinguish psychological significance and the meaning of things from their objective properties and perceives natural phenomena as animated beings

Origins of the myth:

Myth is a product of the collective consciousness of primitive society, the creation of a collective. Initially, myth and rite were merged, myth did not exist outside of rite, "danced", then, being fixed in the language, the myth acquired a certain independence. The myth has no variants, is not subject to individual changes on the part of the narrator. Telling a myth is always a sacred act, sometimes myths can only be accessed by specially initiated people (for example, men who have passed the rite of initiation).

Types of myths:

q Etiological ("causal", "explanatory"). They explain the reason for the appearance of certain natural, cultural and social events, objects or phenomena. These are stories about the origin, which was the result of the activities of the gods or heroes.

q Cosmogonic - they tell about the origin of the cosmos as a whole and its individual parts: the sun, moon, earth, planets. Myths about the transformation of chaos into space. Myths convey ancient ideas about the structure of the Universe, about the birth from the chaotic, formless elements of the earth, sky, about the emergence of fire, air, water. These are the myths of developed peoples, for example, the Australians almost do not have them. (Egyptian myths: first there was the sun god Atum Ra and the Ben-Ben hill, as well as Tefnut - fertility. Then Geb - the earth and Nut - the sky were born, which gave birth to Osiris, Set, Isis and other gods. The golden age in Egypt came after the division heaven and earth.

These include anthropogonic myths that tell about the origin of man from animals, earth, clay, wood, etc.

Astral (about stars and planets), solar and lunar

q Totemic myths are distinguished, pointing to ideas according to which there is a relationship between people and totems. Such myths are especially common among Australian and African peoples.

q Calendar myths were associated with the economic activities of people: about the fruitful power of the earth, about its dying in winter and resurrection in spring. For example, the Egyptian myth about Atum Ra, the god of the sun, and his daughter Tefnut, who left. Her return is the rebirth of the earth. When Tefnut leaves, chaos ensues on earth

q Myths about cultural heroes consist of stories about the miraculous birth of a hero, include trials, exploits and his death. The hero is usually half god. The hero always leaves or is expelled from his family, travels to other lands, acquires temporary friends or helpers there, experiences temporary death, and is resurrected. His exile is motivated by the persecution of the deity or his own misdeeds. The main task of the hero is to establish world order.

q Eschatological myths - telling about the death of the world, about global catastrophes, and the death of giants, about the death of gods, etc. The Apocalypse of Christian mythology is an example of an eschatological myth. Such myths can tell about the crimes of people, violations of law, morality and other sins.

Myth functions:

Myth is historically the first form of culture, compensating for the lack of practical mastery of nature through semantic kinship with it. Accordingly, myth as a culture has all the functions of culture: regulatory, communicative, didactic, etc.

The myth streamlines and regulates human relations, programming the unconscious sphere human psyche(since consciousness is still poorly developed) with the help of the magic of symbols, taboos, rites and rituals. Magic actually tames the elemental forces of the soul, which, having escaped from control, are capable of disrupting the life of the community. Such control is achieved by the complete dissolution of the person in the team.

Peculiarities mythological thinking:

· The logical principle of thinking is based on a system of binary oppositions: good-evil pairs, man-woman, left-right, we-they. Definitely one good, one bad

Various phenomena are interconnected on the basis of random (for us) signs (associations or semantic connections), but for primitive man these signs are important, for example, signs of color: all black animals are associated with the underworld - a black cat, a black raven. These connections are built into semantic fields, or archetypes (K. Jung) Archetype - the content of the collective unconscious, a pre-existing form that is part of the inherited structure of mental existence. The archetype underlies universal human symbolism, manifests itself in stable motifs of fantasies, dreams, hallucinations, in fairy tales, myths, plots and structures of artistic culture (disease - water - death, the most common semantic series: dead and living water, to cross the river before the realm of the dead, etc., the funeral rites of many peoples are associated with sending the body to the sea). Semantic series - words related by meaning and pronunciation (single-root). For example, in Sumerian, the words: night, darkness, illness, black - have the same root and are somehow related in meaning.

Weak development of abstract (general) concepts, everything is extremely concretized (table - a concrete concept, furniture - abstract, pine - tree)

In Sumerian: “open” = “push the door”, “kill” = “hit the head with a stick”, “affectionately” = “female to speak”, “property” = a thing of the hand.

· The picture of the world in mythological culture

The world in myth appears as a magical cosmos in which everything is animated and connected with everything. Man and the gods are only elements of the cosmic whole, and are subject to the fate of the cosmos. Human life there is a direct continuation of cosmic life and the inner drama of the human soul is the result of the intervention of demons and gods.

Myths tell stories about the fantastic transformation of chaos into space, about the origin of natural objects and phenomena, social institutions and orders.

A special idea about time. Modern representation: vector, time is a unidirectional process from the past to the present and the future. The vector is infinite in both directions. But this time is exclusively abstract, it does not exist, since the past is no more, the future is not yet, and the present is so instant that it cannot be caught. A mythological person cannot understand such a time, since he does not understand abstract categories, he needs to touch and feel everything.

Mythological representations: Time is cyclical, rhythmic, not linearly.

These time cycles, which are obvious to mythological thinking, are different. The first cycle is the daily cycle: morning, afternoon, evening, night. And every day is no different from the previous one and the next. The days are the same. Since the Neolithic era, rhythmic images have appeared in art.

The next cycle is a year, which also consists of several cycles - either solar months or lunar months. A year consists of 365 days and 12 months of 30 days. But 5 days are too long. For 360 days society lives as usual, and for the remaining 5 days it is necessary, as it were, old world break down to start new life again in the new year. For these 5 days, time ceases to exist, all boundaries disappear: in time, all the customs of society, they simply do not exist. (for example, carols: masks (if you put on a mask, you became an animal), demanding bread from the rich, singing obscene songs, drinking. That is, as it should be, to show that all the rules and regulations have disappeared). Why is this needed? The world is tired, the world has become old, we must give way to the new world. And the old is killed, for example, the leader - the symbolic murder of the old. And all for these 5 days. These days, myths about the creation of the world are reproduced, and accordingly a new world is being created.

In Egypt, the goddess Maat divided the year into 3 equal parts - the time of the flood, the time of Shoots, the time of Harvest. Each lasts 4 months, 30 days each, and Thoth played five days, and during these days Nut could give birth.

The next cycle is an epoch, their length is different for each people, for example, the Greeks had a 4-year cycle from Olympiad to Olympiad. At the end of an era, the real end of the world occurs. Large cycles are compared with very large catastrophes: the death of Atlantis, the flood, etc. But some may survive, such as gods or humans. Hence the possibility of prediction, as the cycles are repeated.

Space. In any mythology, it is divided into 2 parts: ours and not ours, in accordance with the division of society into us / they. All positive characteristics are attributed to our space, and negative ones are not attributed to ours. A clear boundary is drawn between the spaces. The border not so much actually defends, protects, but ritually. For example, fences, first around the village, then around the house, around the window - a carved casing, around the neck - an embroidered shirt collar. Wherever there is sacred space, there is a boundary. The boundary can be water. Water will separate the worlds. The border separates us and them, we are people, and they are non-humans: elves, gnomes, ghouls, etc. This can also be seen in the language (the Slavs are glorious, and the rest are inglorious). It is dangerous for a person to cross the border. It is accompanied by intense ritual acts of cleansing, since you, when you return, may not be you anymore. An example of magical cleansing is a bath. A bath is always offered to those who come from a long journey. There you can look at the person, if there is a tail. Fire, water and wood are pure elements. Steamed by a birch, which our tree does not always recognize ours.

The second component of space is axis of the world. In Indo-European mythology, incl. Slavic, this is the world tree, the whole world rests on it. The axis of the world can be a hill, or a plague hole, i.e. that which connects the worlds. In Indo-European mythology, the axis connects three worlds: upper, lower and middle. The three worlds correspond to three types of inhabitants. And on the world tree three worlds and their inhabitants can be traced. In the upper world live the gods, birds and white animals. Middle world- people, animals, trees, lower - underground monsters, fish, animals living in holes and animals of black color, animals that eat carrion (Ra, when he swims through the sky, swims through the underworld at night).

There are characters that belong to two or three worlds at once, for example, a raven, a gray wolf, a white horse. These characters are interesting for mythology in that they can be used to penetrate from one world to another, although a skilled shaman can penetrate without their help. The place where the world tree is located is not one, there are many of them.

The place where the true world tree is far away, in the thirtieth kingdom, in the thirtieth state. This is our world, but it has the greatest holiness. Not everyone can enter this world. But at the same time, there are such places in our daily life. Moreover, often any new settlement had to have its own axis of the world. The axis of the world, by its appearance, establishes the cultural power of man over the territory, and the world turns from chaos into space. (What is installed in the first place? For example, Perun - a pillar, a temple, a church, a flag when conquering a mountain. That is, the axis is the most holy place, the navel of the earth). The vertical structure is actually combined with the horizontal one, i.e. to go to the gods, you can go up the tree and along the ground.

Society. It is built according to the law of hierarchy, strict order, gender and age division of functions. Initiations. Initiation functions - the transition of a person from one social status to another. Strict separation of functions between gender and age groups gives rise to a rite that fixes the transition from one group to another. The meaning of the ritual is ritual death and the birth of a new person. Signs: a demonstration of grief for the "dead", blood, pain, torture, torture, cutting off a part of the body (circumcision, cutting hair, nails, the cut off part of the body is destroyed, this is a symbol of the death of an old person), assigning a new name to a person, joy over the birth of a new person. The content of the initiation depends on the particular case. The heaviest, longest and most difficult initiation among shamans, almost to the point of death

Two characters stand out from society - a shaman - an intermediary between the worlds, and a trickster (Lisa Patrikeevna), who builds his relations with others not by force, but by cunning. In mythological texts, the trickster is a symbol of a person who exists next to the gods and heroes, fighting them with cunning. Causes respect.

Shaman - it is a clear status of a person, neither man nor woman.

A person becomes a shaman a) directly by calling "call" or "election"; b) the transfer of shamanic skill by inheritance; c) by personal decision or, more rarely, by the will of the tribe. A shaman is recognized as a shaman only upon completion of training in two aspects: the ecstatic order (dreams, visions, trance, etc.), and the technological order and knowledge of customs (technical methods of shamanism, names and purpose of spirits, mythology and genealogy of the tribe, secret language and etc.). Spirits and old shamans are responsible for the training.

The future shaman is distinguished by progressive oddities in behavior, seeks loneliness, becomes a dreamer, likes to wander through forests and desert areas, sings in his sleep, he has visions. Among the Yakuts, a young man sometimes goes into a frenzy and easily loses consciousness, hides in the forests, feeds on the bark of trees, throws himself into fire or water, inflicts wounds on himself with a knife. For example, epilepsy strongly suggests that one of the child's ancestors was a shaman.

Initiation into shamans is public and constitutes a separate ritual, it is equivalent to initiation.

Magic is a way of interacting with the mythical world through certain symbolic actions and verbal formulas in order to achieve specific empirical results.

Evolution of the myth:

§ Myth gradually ceases to be an undifferentiated unity of subjective and objective

§ Gradually, images of spirits and gods are formed, each of which embodies a certain element or phenomenon, property or quality of a person

§ Gradually, the myth and ritual are dissected, along with the ritual embodiment of the myth, its verbal (verbal) embodiment arises. The rite is more conservative; it sometimes persists even after the death of the myth. (For example, the commemoration ceremony is now completely meaningless. A glass of vodka covered with a piece of bread - feeding a deceased ancestor. Putting your hand to your head in the army - picking up the banner.)

§ Gradually there is a dismemberment and complication of the original mythical images

§ Gradually, the mythological consciousness turns into a religious one: the world is divided into the natural and the supernatural

§ Cultural heroes are separated from the gods - heroes endowed with supernatural properties. He fights monsters symbolizing chaos, defeats them, teaches people crafts, introduces customs and rituals (Hercules, Theseus, Prometheus, Gilgamesh). They realize the dreams of man to subjugate the forces of nature

§ A myth remains a myth as long as there is faith in the reality of the events it tells about. Once this belief is lost, the myth becomes piece of art, epic, fairy tale.

Factors of decomposition of mythological culture- the emergence of other ways of mastering the world besides the myth:

The emergence of a religion that separates the supernatural from the natural

ü The birth of art not as a participant in the ritual and a way of influencing God, but as a result of the spiritual development of the world, as a need for symbolic and figurative expression of thoughts

ü The birth of philosophy, a way of rational development of the world

ü The myth loses its power when a person realizes his autonomy and freedom, when the direct fusion of a person with society and nature is violated.

ü But the myth does not disappear completely, it hides in the unconscious recesses of the human soul, since a person always retains the need for the non-rational twinning of the world.

primitive culture

Building a team to implement strategic change

It is important to note that the education team is important for strategic management.

1. Closed management model - leaders of this type are focused on stability and order, establish official relations with the staff, value industriousness, diligence, discipline in subordinates. More inclined to criticize subordinates than to reward.
2. Open model - leaders are people-oriented, have a talent for persuasion and inspiration, tend to make decisions based on personal sympathies and can turn a blind eye to problems in the hope that everything will work itself out.
3. Management model of the type (idea) - managers have the talent of a strategist, a systemic thinker, show enthusiasm for the ideas of subordinates, take on new projects with enthusiasm, but most of all they are not able to complete them.
4. Random management model - focused on actions to solve real problems. Talented negotiator, collaborative relationship with subordinates, much time is devoted to troubleshooting the organization.

last wrong

according to the strengths for the opportunities

1. The concept and characteristic features of primitive culture

2. Cultural epochs of primitiveness

3. Myth, ritual and magic as forms of spiritual life

4. Primitive art: origins, features, evolution

1. The concept of primitive culture denotes historically the first type of sociality. Secondly, the culture of modern, pre-state peoples and thirdly, the archaic part of modern culture.

Primitive culture reveals life before civilized, before state, pre-literate communities that live within natural cycles, in the absence of the idea of ​​development and ideas about historical time. The main purpose of this culture was the formation of man as a social being.

Character traits:

Syncretism - the original unity, changeability, and not dismemberment of all elements of forms

Extreme conservatism - it was provided by the sacredness of traditions

The dominance of the mythological worldview, in which the boundaries between thinking and intuition and emotions are different

The use of prohibitions as the most important regulators of social interactions

The use of magic in all spheres of life

Lack of understanding of the personality of a single person

2. In the history of culture, Upper Paleolithic, which is characterized by a sharp increase in the number of its types of stone tools, a ban on incest and the emergence of a family and clan on this basis, as the first forms and elements of sociality (the Paleolithic revolution). These tribal communities solved the problem of survival on the landscape, therefore the traces of their material life are not very expressive. But in the same period, the active development of the psyche took place, the formation of language, figurative and abstract thinking, mythopoetic consciousness and fine art skills. For this reason, the monuments of spiritual and symbolic life are very interesting.

There are 2 epochs in the European Paleolithic:

Period (35-20 thousand BC)

Orignan (30-19 thousand BC)

Saltpeter (20-15 thousand BC)

Madeleine (20-10 thousand BC)

An analysis of these cultures shows that the fundamental basis of spiritual life is hunting mania, the awareness of the unity of the family was provided by totemism.

Mesolithic (10-6 thousand BC)

In cultural terms, the process of improving the already accumulated elements, the development of a new material culture and the change in the social structure, the establishment of tribal communities that were not purely hunting are presented. A person notices himself and gets the right to a name.

Neolithic (6-4 thousand BC)

It is characterized by the transition to a productive economy, which radically changes cultural development. The picture of the world is changing, within which astronomical, agronomic, and medical knowledge is changing. Religious knowledge, dominated by analysis, is becoming more complex.

These cultures were called barbarian and on their basis agricultural cultures and civilizations of bronze and iron were formed.

3. Myth was used to refer to stories about gods, heroes and ancestors who participated in the creation of the world.

Modern consciousness perceives the myth as a fairy tale or fiction. For ancient man the myth was true about the world and about itself, in ĸᴏᴛᴏᴩᴏᴇ he firmly believed. The main function of the myth was to eliminate the unpredictability and alienness of the upcoming reality, the transformation of chaos into an ordered cosmos. Τᴀᴋᴎᴍ ᴏϬᴩᴀᴈᴏᴍ, the myth ensured the harmony of man, society and nature. And laid down a program of sustainable behavior.

Ritual

Man felt in the establishment of order and in its constant. bodily renewed, that is, with the help of a ritual based on the principle of imitation of nature. All members of the team participated in the ritual. All organs of perception of the world were involved, in connection with this, it was a means of intuitively comprehending the laws of nature. Rituals subsequently developed another form of cultural activity, which formed the foundations of morality. It was the burial rituals that first revealed the human in a person, and researchers believe that the countdown of culture begins from this very moment.

Magic did not affect the objective properties of things, it affected a person, his unconsciousness and completely took possession of the psyche, inspiring feelings of confidence, she experienced success, helped to unite, and therefore left a deep mark in the history of culture and is present in culture.

4. Fine art is the beginning of the visible life of a person.

Among theories about the origins of art stand out:

· Labor

Religious

Agar

The main features of primitive art:

Its similarity to myth, magic, ritual

Conditional character of the image.

The symbolism of forms

Lack of aesthetic generalizations

In the Paleolithic eras, arignan-saltpetre-dominated mobile art with an animal image, and the first symbol appeared. Art in the Neolithic era, painting becomes colorful. In the Neolithic, silhouette painting appears, which acts as a story about an event. In the same era, having developed the art of architecture, Neolithic, religious buildings appeared.

Culture (Lk 4)

Primitive culture - concept and types. Classification and features of the category "Primitive culture" 2017, 2018.

Primitive culture as a historical type

1 The problem of periodization of primitive culture and the main approaches to its study

Primitiveness is historically the first and longest stage in the development of human culture. The question of the time frame of this period causes much controversy. There is an archaeological periodization of primitive culture according to the material from which tools and weapons were made. It includes division into:

stone Age(800 - 4 thousand BC);

bronze age(3-2 thousand BC), who separated craft from agriculture, complicated the social system and led to the creation of the first class states;

iron age(1 thousand BC), which dynamized the heterogeneous development of world history and culture.

In general, it is customary to divide the most ancient period of human culture (the Stone Age) into the Paleolithic era (800-13 thousand years BC), characterized by primitive stone tools, the construction of the first boats, cave paintings, reliefs and round plastic; the Mesolithic (13-6 thousand years BC), who made the transition to a settled way of life, to the breeding of livestock, the use of bows and arrows and created the first narrative paintings; and the Neolithic (6-4 thousand years BC), which approved cattle breeding and agriculture, improved the technique of stone processing and spread ceramic products everywhere. But even later, next to the emerging civilizations, archaic tribes of hunters and gatherers, as well as farmers and pastoralists who were at the stage of tribal relations using primitive tools, continued to live.

The first material evidence of human existence is the tools of labor. Archaeologists have no consensus on the age of the most primitive tools. In paleoanthropology, it is believed that they appeared 2 million years ago. Therefore, the inhabitants of this period are called Homo habilis (handy man). But a number of archaeologists date the first tools as 5-4 million years ago. Of course, these were the most primitive instruments, very difficult to distinguish from natural stone fragments. 800-300 thousand years ago, our ancestors could already use fire. But only Neanderthals (250-50 thousand years ago), apparently, began to do this all the time. The appearance of the first artificial burials is associated with the late Neanderthals, which indicates the formation of the cult of ancestors. The anatomical structure of Neanderthals suggests that they already had the beginnings of speech. However, scientists believe that the collective life of the Neanderthals was still herd character. Therefore, only Homo sapiens (neoanthrope, Cro-Magnon), which appeared 50-30 thousand years ago, can be fully considered a cultural being.

In the Mesolithic era, in connection with the retreat of glaciers to the north, people began to camp in the open air, near the shores of seas, rivers, lakes. Fishing developed intensively, new types of tools were created, a hunting bow and arrow appeared, the first domestic animal, a dog, was tamed. Funeral ceremonies became more complicated.

In the Neolithic, new methods of processing stone and bone in the manufacture of tools were discovered - polishing, drilling, sawing. There were such vehicles as a boat and skis. Pottery and weaving emerged. House building developed intensively. But the most important was the transition from an appropriating economy (hunting, gathering) to a producing economy (agriculture, cattle breeding), which led to the spread of a settled way of life.

Thus, the manufacture of tools, the emergence of burials, the emergence of articulate speech, the transition to a tribal community and exogamy, the creation of art objects were the main milestones in the formation of human culture.

Anthropology is an important part of Western social science. The content of this science is to study the biological evolution and socio-cultural development of man and his races.

Cultural anthropology (culturanthropology) is a special area of ​​anthropological scientific research in which a person is analyzed as a creator of culture and as its creation. This field of knowledge developed and took shape in European culture in the last quarter of the 19th century.

The main problems of cultural anthropology are:

study of changes in the structure of the human body as a result of interaction with the cultural environment;

study of human behavior in the process of its inclusion in the system of socio-cultural relations;

analysis of family and marriage relations between people, issues of human love and friendship;

the formation of a person's worldview and attitude, etc.

As noted above, Western scientific schools made a significant contribution to the development of anthropology, and, above all:

British School of Social Anthropology (E. B. Tylor, G. Spencer, D. D. Fraser, etc.);

North American School of Cultural Anthropology (A. G. Morgan, L. White, F. Boas, etc.)

They not only created theoretical programs for the study of man and culture, but formed a whole scientific direction - evolutionism, which has become a key model of the scientific study of culture in cultural anthropology.

2 Mythology as the original form of being culture

Myth (from the Greek. mythos - legend, legend) is a fantastic emotional-figurative narration about the deeds of the gods, the exploits of rulers and heroes. In modern everyday speech, any fiction is called a myth. But in the history of culture, myth was, on the contrary, the first form of the existence of truth, the first type of text that explained to people the structure of the world, themselves and their place in this world. The myth is understood not as a fairy tale, fiction or fantasy, but as it was understood in primitive communities, where myths were believed to denote genuine events (moreover, events were sacred, significant and served as an example to follow).

about the creation of the world;

about the foundation of ancient states and cities;

about the actions of cultural heroes;

about the place of man in the world and his purpose;

about the origin of a number of customs, traditions, norms, patterns of behavior.

Myth is the first of the historically known forms of culture, explaining the meaning of the universe, the cosmos, of which man has always been a part. Elements of mythological consciousness are present in the culture of other eras as their organic part. Modern man also creates myths, sensually summarizing the phenomena of modern life.

Mythological images are rooted in the unconscious foundations of the human soul. They are close to the biological nature of a person and arise on the basis of his ability to believe in a certain structure, life. Mythological plots and images were a reliable source of transmission of traditions and skills, aesthetic and ethical norms and ideals.

For the mythological consciousness is characterized by a sense of belonging to the natural elements, deified and personified in the images of the gods: Zeus (Jupiter), Hera (Juno), Aphrodite (Venus), etc. Everything is explained through their will. A person acts as an agent of divine forces, his activity is entirely subordinated to magical rites, which, as it were, preserve the so-called. sacral (sacred) time.

Sacred time within the framework of myth is the prevailing factor in world perception. It opposes profane time and sets a certain scheme for the functioning of the human community, unchanged in its basic principles. Mythological consciousness is characterized by a magical (witchcraft, magical) way of interacting with the world. The English scientist J. Fraser singled out the so-called. "the law of magical sympathy", uniting a person and an object with which, at least once, he came into contact. Based on this magical involvement or sympathy, it is possible to influence the will of another person with the help of certain rites and rituals. On the whole, mythological consciousness is extremely static. It does not know the idea of ​​movement, progress. The changes flowing around are only manifestations of some unchanging and eternal order of things, seeming and illusory in its essence.

Mythological consciousness has a unique ability. It regulates the flow of new knowledge, since it is dominated by a system of rites and rituals that systematizes the influx of new information about the world. And so the myth does not decompose as a result of the accumulation of knowledge, It explodes from within the gradual awareness of man of his freedom. Myth does not regulate the life of a free man. He is not capable of it. Therefore, as a person realizes his freedom, a different picture of the world arises, which is no longer based on the dissolution of the individual in reality, in the elements of natural processes, but on the isolation of oneself from it, the formation of subject-object relations.

In general, mythological consciousness is characterized by:

the dissolution of man in the world;

complete identification of man with nature, its deification;

fetishism, that is, the worship of inanimate objects;

animism, that is, belief in the existence of spirits, in the animation of all objects.

The heyday of the myth refers to the period of primitive - communal formation. In this era, the myth was:

the organizer of the behavior of the members of the primitive collective;

accumulator of his volitional aspirations;

core, the axis of all social life.

In myths, collective experiences, impressions, passions, feelings, moods, caused by certain phenomena of reality, were objectified. Despite their sometimes fantastic outlines, mythological images are not at all a pure illusion, an absurd invention, an arbitrary distortion of the world. The myth also includes many elements of a true reflection of reality, correct assessments of certain phenomena. Without this, the relatively stable existence of the primitive collective, continuity in the reproduction of human relations and consciousness would be impossible.

Myths systematized the collective experience of people, embodied it in the most concise, concentrated and universal form. They objectified the elements of social consciousness generated by essential connections and relations in society. In myths, the experience of forming for a given level of social development of relations between:

man and nature;

the collective and the individual.

Myth also became the earliest form of pre-scientific knowledge. Mythology embraced and reflected all aspects of social life. It was the first archaic form of pre-scientific synthesis of all available knowledge, from which the most important areas of human knowledge and creativity later spun off - philosophy, art, science, religion, etc.

The practical situation in which primitive man found himself was extremely complex. There was much accidental, unforeseen in it: the individual was very weak, and the infinitely powerful nature was too harsh on him. The collective (community) played the role of an environment for a person. It was through the community that the individual adapted himself to nature and social life. The team formed a system of rules and values, and the person modeled his behavior taking into account the existing conditions of social life . The gradual mastery of the forces of nature by man, the ascent of social consciousness "from myth to logos" (ie, to an expansive understanding of nature) makes it possible for the beginnings, elements of proper scientific knowledge to appear.

Ancient myths attract close attention of many modern researchers. Myth-making, like artistic creativity, due to the active role of the unconscious principle in it, is ambiguous, therefore each new era can open up new meanings in myths that can be actualized in new historical conditions. The vitality and stability of these meanings once again confirms the fact that mythology in many respects, true, reflected social relations in the early stage of their development and created primary social ties, which miraculously remained relatively unchanged on the historical path of the formation of human society.

3 Specificity of primitive art. The origin of early religious beliefs (fetishism, totemism, animism, magic)

3.1 Primitive art

primitive art- the art of the era of primitive society. It arose in the Late Paleolithic around 33 thousand years BC. e., reflected the views, conditions and lifestyle of primitive hunters (primitive dwellings, cave images of animals, female figurines). Neolithic and Eneolithic farmers and pastoralists had communal settlements, megaliths, and piled buildings; images began to convey abstract concepts, the art of ornamentation developed. In the Neolithic, Eneolithic, Bronze Age, the tribes of Egypt, India, Western, Central and Minor Asia, China, South and South-Eastern Europe developed an art associated with agricultural mythology (ornamented ceramics, sculpture). Northern forest hunters and fishermen used to have rock carvings and realistic figurines of animals. The pastoral steppe tribes of Eastern Europe and Asia at the turn of the Bronze and Iron Ages created the animal style.

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