NATURAL AND LANDSCAPE BORDERS AS SIGNS OF THE TERRITORIES’ FRONTIERS
The author continues elaborating the topic of symbolic demarcation of the space inhabited by Russian pioneers in Siberia in the XVII century. The paper considers using natural objects as symbols of fencing the territory. For the first time, the study focuses on various types of borders’ definition including natural ones. The first Siberian settlers often use drivers, reservoirs, ravines, noticeable trees and other objects as natural boundaries. The author introduces a concept of adaptive populated space into scientific use. It is a space that allows different groups of residents to live in a conflict-free area in accordance with their established lifestyle and, at the same time, to create new forms of interaction. Adaptive behavior patterns in the habitable space are life strategies that members of a population group choose without limitations imposed by intra-group prescriptions, customs, rituals. The study objective is to find answers to questions: how strongly multicultural, fragmented and isolated territories can turn into a single administrative space with a strictly defined structure; to what extent communities with highly adaptive models of behavior can function here; what other behavior models can occur in such territories. The author declares that the boundaries establishment is, in fact, a division. Fencing a territory in any space means establishing the ownership of this part of the space, or claiming possession of a territory. This universal rule is preserved not only in human communities, but in the animal kingdom as well, where animals mark their territories showing habitats to other fauna representatives. Human communities have been demarcating the space into their own and that of others since ancient times. The archetypal nature of this opposition demonstrates transpersonal forms of consciousness, leading to transformation of chaos into order. Individualizing space, the territory is divided into its own and someone else’s, dangerous and hostile. Later, the borders were lined up between the states entailing conflicts due to increase of territory.