Socio-Сultural Context of the Archaeographic Research in Tomsk Region (on the materials of archaeographic expeditions from 1895 to 2010)
The article is devoted to the meaning of the socio-cultural context in the contemporary archaeographic research. Starting research in the areas of old-believers compact residence in the region, Tomsk archaeographers relied on the experience of centers of archaeography in Moscow, Leningrad, Novosibirsk and Sverdlovsk, in particular, on the imperative of studying the Cyrillic old printed books and manuscripts in the natural milieu of their existence. In the 1980s, when the regular work in Tomsk region began, the major task shifted from saving a book from physical destruction to reaching the understanding of the principles of interaction between the Book and the Man in the old-believers culture, so that a functional model accounting for this relationship could be worked out. Accordingly, the emphasis was on the systems approach to the organization of the collection and analysis of archaeographic material. On the basis of GIS technologies, researchers from TSU planned to develop the archaeographic atlas of Tomsk Region which would provide for the necessary up-to-date level of processing the data from expeditions. The essential aspect of the work of the Tomsk archaeographic expedition was to retain the established contacts even after the expedition had been completed, so the situation of a continuous expedition appeared. An important circumstance should be taken into consideration: at the time of the expedition a kind of a meeting of two cultures happens. University students and lecturers are representatives of the secular culture while old-believers, the guardians of book antiquities, are religious people. However, they had to appear not in the stance of mutual opposition as oneself and the other, but to find themselves in the situation of dialogue and understanding arising out of the mental memory of a person of Russian culture. A bright example of the functioning of cultural memory mechanism is the todays subject of TSU achaeographers - the Tomsk collection of birch bark manuscripts that is a part of skit library formerly belonging to the isolated community of peasants who had migrated in the 1920-1930s to the Narym region. The research revealed that it was the Cyrillic text as the confessional text that had been the main identifier in the old-believers culture, especially if the adaptation and survival in the alien natural and cultural environment was at stake. Studying the phenomenon of Old Belief as a particular system with its history of events, ideas, social practices in the dynamic structure of the contemporary social and cultural space allows the significant spiritual potential of the Russian national culture to be revealed.