This project on "Russian Culture and Identity" is an attempt to analyse how the Russian cultural identities have been reformulating through the adaptation and transformation of the traditional, soviet and western values, which the Russian people inher ...
This project on "Russian Culture and Identity" is an attempt to analyse how the Russian cultural identities have been reformulating through the adaptation and transformation of the traditional, soviet and western values, which the Russian people inherited or imported. In the rapidly changing society, the contemporary Russians are compelled to reexamine their values and reevaluated old ways, and in doing so they are searching for a new identity both for themselves and for their nation. This inevitably resulted in the reformulation of the Russian cultural identities.
Our interdisciplinary project drew on the resources of both the humanities and the social sciences, which allowed for a cross-pollination of ideas. Our team included historians, political scientists, sociologists, lawyer, folklorist, and literary critics. The participants used a wide range of methods to explore their subjects, including opinion surveys, personal interviews, and analysis of Russian literature, advertisement, and popular magazines. In particular, opinion surveys, conducted in Moscow and St Petersburg in 2006 and 2007 by the Levada Analytical Center upon our request, provided precious information on how contemporary Russians perceive their own political, economic, social and mass culture.
In the first year, each participant explored 10 different subjects such as the perceptions of democracy, the state symbols and state identity building, the state-church relations, production workers' perceptions of their work, business elites' perceptions of law and economy, women's perceptions of gender and feminism, youth's perceptions of western culture, and the changing nature in production and consumption of drama and pornography. In the second year, participants were grouped into 4 research teams, each exploring four cultural domain-political, economic, social, and mass culture.
So far, the project has produced 16 individual articles. Two more joint papers are waiting for the publication. A collection of 14 articles will be published as a book this year.