Flea market as a cultural phenomenon

Using microurbanism as a combination of approaches to the study of the city’s cultural environment at the micro level, the author examines the totality of the relations of this phenomenon of modern culture, as the popularity of flea markets, such universals of human existence, work, play, sharing, childhood. It is shown that the proliferation of flea markets in the culture of developed countries can be considered as part of the processes of aestheticization and the gamification of life, on the one hand, and puerilely culture - on the other. The article presents the description of Volgograd flea market, its social structure, and place in the urban space, the nature of communication and its inherent “atmosphere”. In the framework of the project for the study of the anthropology of things in regional culture, the author describes characteristics of relations to things at a flea market. From this point of view, the paper introduces a typology of buyers and sellers. In the article, they ask the question on necessity of the exploring of the relationship of human economic behavior with other internal properties, and social-cultural qualities consideration from the point of view of culture philosophy. The specificity of the Volgograd flea market as a form of confrontation between the global and private, social and intimate is that the city is still not ready to allocate and equip a special place for this new form of leisure and social interaction. The main thing that makes the flea market the person is able to set free a child beginning and at the same time to protest against fashion on disposable items, disposable linear relationship and the certainty of a status-situational communication. This movement of will and thoughts received the terminological designation culture “puerility”. The article is criticism of the approach that represents the phenomenon of the flea market as a “city scene”, and argues that the approach can be seen as a consequence of the process of “showisation” of contemporary culture, understood as civilizational tendency, broadcasted by media, to see the performance first of all in every phenomenon of life. Moreover, the flea market includes the performance elements of everyday life and aestheticization of life, it is not still limited to the performance of the “urban scene”.