Urban cultural anthropology in the Russian context. Part II. Object of researches
Authors:   National Research University Higher School of Economics, Panteleeva Liliya M. 
Published: November 2024

The article continues the study about the place of cultural anthropology of the city in the national system of the humanities. It proposes a definition of the object of science and describes the foreshortenings of contemporary studies of urban culture. The author thinks that the cultural anthropology of a city should study of the cultural specifics of a particular city in all its diversity. He insists that attempts to develop a more specific definition of the central object of urban anthropology, regardless of one aspect or another, are deliberately helpless. The plurality and heterogeneity of cultural units will always hinder the ultimate completeness of definitions. The ratio of this vision of the object with the aspects developed to date is presented in the form of the opposition “general / particular”. Particular aspects are built up in relation to internal and external cultural anthropology. Internal cultural anthropology is addressed to the study of cultural units and their types, processes, developmental features, and external – to the connection of culture with the external circumstances of its existence (social structure, linguistic expression, architectural embodiment, historical conditioning, etc.). The inner culture anthropology of the city has been developed so far only in two directions – descriptive and semiotic. The descriptive direction involves the study of various (directly perceived and thought-artistic) manifestations of culture. It originated at the turn of the 19th – 20th centuries in the works of I.M. Grevs and N.P. Antsiferov, the founders of Petersburg studies. The semiotic direction is associated with the analysis of sign systems that contain cultural information. Its foundations were laid in the works of representatives of the Moscow-Tartu school – first of all, Yu.M. Lotman and V.N. Toporov. The history of the descriptive and semiotic direction of urban anthropology is closely related to literary criticism. The first steps in the study of urban culture were laid on the material of literary creativity and thus built connections between reality and a particular artistic concept – expressing and / or forming a unique image of space. At the present time, when studies on the specificity of the city are clearly divided between two independent areas – the study of literary text and the study of culture, the genetic ties of urban anthropology and literary criticism manifest themselves in the presence of terminological homonymy in the zone of central concepts. The external cultural anthropology of the city demonstrates how anthropological problems are linked with other sciences. To a greater extent, this pairing can be seen with literary criticism, art history, as well as a combination of architectural and construction, architectural and artistic sciences, brand marketing and tourism marketing. To a lesser extent, the cultural anthropology of the city is associated with linguistics, psychology, history, mass communications and philosophy.