Theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of complex monuments of cultural heritage

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of certain theoretical and methodological approaches with significant heuristic potential for the study of complex monuments of historical-cultural heritage. Organicism and its methodological derivatives — gestalt-culturological, cultural-genetic and architectonic approaches — are used as a theoretical foundation of the study. Although such a theoretical and methodological combination of approaches may appear unexpected and unusual, nevertheless, the authors consider it to be effective and justified, since the use of these approaches provides sufficiently clear and definite guidelines for modelling the complex layering of cultural heritage monuments as integral units that were formed during a series of historical metamorphoses. The article contains a number of examples of such monuments with different degree of their structural heterogeneity. Among the examples of the material-semantic heterogeneity of artefacts are its “two-layered”, “three-” and “four-layered” manifestations. Special attention is paid to artefacts, whose structure is characterised by a high degree of complexity and heterogeneity. The issue marks specific aspects of each of the approaches expressed in the objectified and naturalscientific aspects of the organismic approach, associated with the names of Goethe and Herder; in the focus on the sphere of the imaginary and psychological in the gestalt-cultural approach, the sources of which are directly connected with organicism, as well as with the ideas of C. von Ehrenfels, O. Spengler and G. D. Gachev; in the analysis of historical-genetic sequences and meaning origination in the culture-genetic approach developed in the works of V. M. Masson, A. V. Bondarev, and others; in deep structural shifts of the semantic sphere of the historically transforming monument in the course of its history in the architectonic approach, chiefly formulated by I. V. Kondakov. The authors emphasise the importance of employing the culturological level of cultural heritage study, located in the system of cultural knowledge between the factual cultural studies, affecting a variety of sciences, studying culture in one way or another, and abstract cultural philosophy, which has a philosophical character and the highest degree of generality and abstractness, which, for all their ideological and theoretical and methodological significance, are difficult to translate into the sphere of applied knowledge.