Cultural Life Practices – Theory Issues

The paper raises the problem of the validity of the use of the term “cultural practices” in Russian cultural studies. It is revealed that it contains a stable connotation with the tradition of the “new cultural history”. It focuses not on culture as a kind of integral entity characteristic of society and important for its self-preservation, for the formation of stable semantic and valuable socially significant patterns, but on “fragmentation” and consideration of “history in fragments”, on the cultural characteristics of an individual and/or the small communities, which are taken by themselves outside of a clearly fixed general relationship with the whole. Because of this, the concept of “cultural practices” acquires a specific meaning of multiculturalism, which, when blindly transferred to a different cultural soil with a different tradition of attitude to culture, creates semantic inconsistencies and contradictions. For this reason, the author suggests using another term to describe a variety of so-called cultural practices: “cultural life practices” within the framework of a common cultural activity, the meaning of which is designed to preserve the proper harmony of the common unifying cultural whole and the specifics of its individual elements. The concept of “cultural activity” combines the scope of the concepts of “cultural life practices” and “cultural industries”. Author also criticizes the practice of comprehensive definitions of culture, including phenomena that may well carry an anti-cultural and anti-human meaning.