“Sociology at the Crossroads”
Yerevan State University, Yerevan, Armenia,
June 11 - 14, 2009.
Social and cultural
means of communication
Nataliya Ikonnikova
State University – Higher School of Economics
Journal “Personality. Culture. Society”
(Moscow, Russia)
Research questions
 Wherein does, in fact,
communicative quality consist of
considered social interactions, and
what within them is not
communication?
 Should I describe these
interactions as cultural, or social, or
social by their form and cultural by
content or vice versa?
 What is there within these
interactions the role of things and
corporeal context?
 How does this corporeal
communications effect upon local
communities, professional nets?
 Nataliya Ikonnikova
Yerevan, June 12, 2009
Construction and/or imitation
of identity by media
Any media not only
reflects the position and the
intention of the
communicator.
The reflection is a mask of
the position and the
intention.
It is not construction, but
imitation of social reality,
that causes the hypocrisy in
political, economic, public,
and interpersonal
interactions.
 Nataliya Ikonnikova
Yerevan, June 12, 2009
Social and cultural processes
 Nataliya Ikonnikova
Yerevan, June 12, 2009
Spiritual – corporeal tension
and polarization’ ironic consequences
The choice of particular concept
reflects the theoretical and
evaluating position of the
researcher, his readiness to look at
phenomena as aspiration for one
of the poles: spiritual (religious,
existential) tension or passionarity
(for example, in Lev Gumilev'
concept), when the tension is
considered as specific quality of
social and cultural environment
providing mobilization of cosmic,
biological and other primordial
resources for sustainable and
positive dynamics of society.
 Nataliya Ikonnikova
Yerevan, June 12, 2009
… Ironic consequences
I may classify the moods of social
and cultural mobilization as social
forms and legalizing them frombeyond normative systems and,
further, mechanisms of legitimizing:
from mobilized development in
Soviet-type society to religious
ascesis.
There in Soviet-type society
energetic (labour and material)
components are redistributed for
legitimizing and consolidation of
norms of official ideology, as a result
– the object articles of culture is
weakened: materialism destroys
material culture.
 Nataliya Ikonnikova
Yerevan, June 12, 2009
Paradoxical prosperity
Moreover, paradoxically, the reversal side of spiritual orientation is
legitimizing of civil activity and emancipation of forms' creation of set of
cultural artifacts: spiritual orientation creates prosperity. (An example is
Weberian Protestant ethics, which is considered as the foundation of
capitalism prosperity.)
 Nataliya Ikonnikova
Yerevan, June 12, 2009
Frame modification
 Nataliya Ikonnikova
Yerevan, June 12, 2009
Symbolic cultural media
Symbolic media consists of:
the value normative code,
argumentation,
and affective tinting are
aspects of the process
...and they need to be
embodied in signs, things,
buildings, bodies...
 Nataliya Ikonnikova
Yerevan, June 12, 2009
Normative social media
Social media are classified twofold: what kind of identity is
reproduced (through what structural conjunctions actor is involved to
the communication), and, second, what kind and scale of integrity is
established.
 Nataliya Ikonnikova
Yerevan, June 12, 2009
Normative social media
At normative level (normative media) I
distinguish some types of social media:
 collective (constructing and imitating
different forms of communicative ties from
kin to non-kin groups and collectives);
 organizational (constructing
communications, that vary from rigid and
formal organizations, institutions and
positions to social nets);
 and personal. Personal social media
construct or imitate communications, which
take forms from spontaneous and
impartitioned (between social roles and
participations) “I” to competent (trained,
well designed, represented, played…) and
differentiated image (called me).
 Nataliya Ikonnikova
Yerevan, June 12, 2009
Institutional social media
institutions of formal
competent (expert)
communication;
institutions of public
(civil) communication;
institutions of inter-,
intra-, and transindividuated dialogue.
 Nataliya Ikonnikova
Yerevan, June 12, 2009
Double corporeality:
social body and artificial coat
Corporeality can be interpreted as
a double embodiment (according
to Heidegger’s and Bakhtin’s
ideas). The corporeality of
personality consists not only of a
body of an individual, but it is also
doubling by means of the signs or
social objects – the conductor (in
terms of P. Sorokin).
There are social objects of two types. First type of social objects, both
phylogenetic and ontogenetic, is Alter (or Other) – other social mask,
an identity, a group of membership. The corporeality is declined in
social relations.
 Nataliya Ikonnikova
Yerevan, June 12, 2009
Field testing
Religious values and norms
structure the social
conjunctions of the members
of communities in their
interrelation within different
social institutes.
1. The minor community
appears to be “open” as
number of member of
large society, but it is
close as identity by
shared knowledge, values
and norms.
 Nataliya Ikonnikova
Yerevan, June 12, 2009
Field testing
2. The “communal body” and artificial corporeality are important media for
even religious (not only for so called “youth subcultures”) identity
presentation and, especially, (re)construction.
3. The symbolic media determines the demonstrated Otherness in body
techniques (including dietary, hairdressing, signs on body and so on) and
social coat (including clothes, processions, book sale, farming,
employment overall and so on). Rejecting of common material culture, the
community creates Alter forms of its own.
The result is growing cultural corporeal
diversity. In many cases this diversity
don't stay only communal,
it is commercialized
and shared by other groups and
subcultures.
 Nataliya Ikonnikova
Yerevan, June 12, 2009
Conclusions
• Communicative and sociological (critical)
•
•
analysis of social inter-(trans-) actions
reveals both their social (organizational)
and cultural (meaningful) aspects; their
demonstrative and latent aspects
The tension assembles communication
process as bidirectional, both spiritual
and corporeal poles are significant
Any spiritual content does not exist for
social agents if it is not embodied in
some things, buildings, other forms of
corporeality
 Nataliya Ikonnikova
Yerevan, June 12, 2009