Things in oral narratives and social practices of rural Siberia
Authors:   National Research Tomsk State University, Dutchak Elena E. , Voloshina Svetlana V. ,   National Research Tomsk State University
Published: December 2024

The article reveals the information possibilities of things and stories about them and their role in the formation of the Siberian rural cultural and linguistic landscape in historical and linguistic aspects. Research materials are: (1) more than 200 reader's bookmarks-enclosures in handwritten and printed books of the Tomsk–Chulym skete of Old Believers-wanderers. They act as direct participants in group and individual prayers and leisure reading of sketes, impartial witnesses of their changing material and emotional needs; (2) oral autobiographies of rural residents of Tomsk Oblast, born in the late 19th – first half of the 20th centuries, which were recorded during dialectological expeditions and memoirs, and are presented on the websites of the projects Sibiryaki vol'nye i nevol'nye [Free and Involuntary Siberians], Otkroi ssylku [Open the Link], Tsentr pamyati raskulachennyh [Center for the Memory of the Dispossessed Kulaks]. The analysis of the material is carried out using the model for studying the networks of people and things, which is proposed by S.V. Sokolovsky. It includes in the analytical field such parameters as: a situation-setting with a place, participants and their types of activities; actions delegated to things to regulate the intellectual activity of people; the synergistic effect of human interaction with a thing and its influence on sensory and transcendental experience. It is determined that the rural cultural and linguistic landscape formed in the conditions of voluntary and forced migrations is a cumulative result of verbal and non-verbal communications, in which individual things get social life due to their division into utilitarian and symbolic ones and their inclusion in narratives; and interconnected material complexes are capable of initiating reflections on the material markers of human relations. The mutual framing of the material and the social is implemented according to conditionally autonomous scales – a linear time scale, described by peasant speech as the transfer of symbolic artifacts between generations, and a nonlinear spatial scale, evaluating the exchange of objects as episodic or, on the contrary, requiring continuation and regulation. Their complementary action is a basic condition for constructing a sense of the correctness of life in one's place, and it leads to the co-evolution of everyday things and social forms of dealing with them. The conservation of the usual functions and semantics of things forms an attitude to places of their high concentration as zones of backwardness and inferiority. Our observations show that in relation to traditional communities, for which oral reflection is primary, the opposition of things and narratives does not explain the patterns in the formation of local landscapes. In our opinion, it is more productive to take into account the multicultural and monocultural characteristics of object-centric socialities, in which things appear as information
systems with a conflicting set of meanings, and material complexes as complexly organized hierarchies with an immanent ability to produce positive and negative images of the place of residence.