On “large systems” and the technique of knowledge acquisition (Polemical notes)

Abstract

The article critically reviews a number of trends in the humanities, such as evolutionism and anti-evolutionism, structuralism and post-structuralism. It also delineates the author's methodological premises regarding present day research in the field of folklore and mythology. These premises are based on the assumption that all folklore traditions from around the world dispose of a limited set of composite elements of different levels, types and volume. Such elements, in turn, can be divided into subsets: semantic and morphological constants of verbal texts (including the plot-motif corpus and compositional-stylistic structures); the most common stereotypes of social practices; fixed ideas and images related to the “naïve” (mythological) picture of the world. Accordingly, all these traditions can be represented as a kind of topological space, a system of interconnected and grouped elements - whatever the reasons for their convergence and connection. Therefore it becomes possible to understand some “obscure” texts of folk culture (or their elements) by drawing on data borrowed from other traditions (including distant ones). Folklorists resort to such “semantic (~ typological) reconstructions” quite regularly. In some cases they are working not only with variants that partially preserve the hypothetical original form, but also with texts that are not genetically related to each other, but came into being as a result of the implementation of the same narrative model. In general, the universe of culture tends towards systematicness, both synchronically and diachronically. It is clearly governed by some kind of laws, although we have not yet been able to fully identify and describe them. However, we can hope that we are on the way to finding adequate analytical tools to do that.