At the meeting of the International Discussion Club “VISION 3000”, the topic of which was: “Mechanisms of generational formation based on family and traditional values,” spoke Ilyazov Iskander Sabitovich, Honorary Artist of Russia, Full member and Professor of Fine Arts of the Petrovsky Academy of Sciences and Arts.
Iskander Sabitovich highlighted the topic: “Cultural transmission”.
Dear participants of the Round Table!
Dear moderator Nadezhda Lebedeva!
When it comes to cultural transmission, people remember colorful national holidays, but they are only a small part of the issue. I believe that family and school play a major role in cultural transmission. Spiritual and moral education carries out the process of cultural transmission in the education system. This was especially evident in the Soviet school system. But I didn’t care much about it, but participating in the city Olympiad for students, being in the tenth grade, inspired me greatly, and since then I have known something about my native Transnistria. It was my personal practical cultural transmission, and I was in the role of a recipient.
I tell you as a certified linguist: the most important tool of transmission is the national language, with its proverbs and sayings, idioms, fairy tales and children’s rhymes, the spirit of national culture, and in general, each language has a unique structure, vocabulary, stylistics and phonetics.
The mechanism of transmission of traditions, norms, and values by an ethnic group to new generations is scientifically called “intergenerational transmission of values in the modern multicultural world.” It includes the processes of inculturation and socialization. There are three types of cultural transmission: 1) vertical — the transfer of cultural heritage from parents to children; 2) horizontal — the development of cultural and social experience through communication with peers; 3) “indirect” (oblique) — obtaining information while studying in various institutions, as well as through communication with surrounding relatives, neighbors, acquaintances, etc. I note that these types usually work together, “in a mixed mode”. An example of my personal inculturation: my native Tiraspol in my school years was in the cultural area of Odessa with its Jewish culture, and I absorbed this culture horizontally in communication with peers and at the same time indirectly in communication with others, neighbors and acquaintances.
The current breakdown of the old world with global transformations in the social structure, fundamental changes in technological organization, epoch-making changes in the environment and human nature inevitably affects the cultural transmission.
Symbols of culture are divided into symbols of material culture and spiritual culture. The former change rapidly with the progress of mankind. The latter are more stable. But what remains is what it was originally: unique cultural codes are transmitted, these quanta of cultural heritage, and they change slowly. Their mix is changing rapidly, their ratio, their actualization – what was background becomes solo, and vice versa. Example: national sacred meanings are very stable: they even experience a change of religions, and not just one. For example, the rituals for Ivan Kupala.
Now we see a violation of the algorithms of cultural transmission and, as a result, the problems of socialization of a growing person, assigning them cultural experience. Digital childhood with wide opportunities for inclusion in the technosystem immerses the child in online activities with their own requirements and new values. In traditional family practice, the older generation cultivates the sacramental restrictive values of the local cultural domain, while the digital world takes the child out of objective life into the world of augmented reality and artificial intelligence with free rules of unhindered existence. It is important not to overdo it here: if everyone, and especially young people, are forced to be in the paradigm of national culture from under the stick (sorry for the pun), then there will be a protest and a backlash. There should be relative freedom of choice.
In the USSR, there was an attitude towards the development of the culture of the peoples of the USSR, socialist in content and national in form. Using the example of my native Moldova, I will express the opinion that it worked. The Moldovan national culture was not only not lost, but was supported by the state and developed.
Let’s not forget about national music. I have a collection of audio for more than 1,000 hours of sound, of which about 100 hours is what is called world music, in Soviet terms, the music of the peoples of the world. Academic classical music, jazz and of course folk, as well as folk rock, drew a wealth of melodies from the music of the peoples of the world. The development of world culture has always been through the mutual enrichment of national cultures, and the greatest geniuses of world culture relied on both their own national culture and the world culture.
Who doesn’t like to eat delicious food? National cuisines, like music, say a lot about the national character.
As an artist, I build a dialogue with the audience belonging to different cultures. My abstractions work with cultural meanings and bear the imprint of the processes that are taking place today in the global world, at the regional and national levels. I broadcast meanings through the visual series of my abstractions and broadcast values – ethical first of all, as it happens in cultural transmission, but the source of the transmitted values is not the historical community as a people, but my personality. I must note that, again, my personality did not fall from the moon, but was brought up and grew up in a certain cultural environment, with its values and meanings, which I transmit and broadcast.
I took a cursory look at the problems of cultural transmission and found that they are much more relevant to me, and therefore to cultural figures, than I thought when our moderator Nadezhda Lebedeva asked me to speak at this round table.