The Categories of “Cultural Universality” and “National Cultural Identity”

Cultural studies as an interdisciplinary field of knowledge quite often faces the fundamental problem of lack of a unified, strictly systematized categorical apparatus. Unlike natural sciences, it operates with complex, multifaceted categories borrowed from philosophy, sociology, psychology, history, anthropology, linguistics and other disciplines. The formation of key categories of cultural studies is mostly spontaneous, when existing concepts are adapted and modified for the specific needs of analyzing cultural phenomena. This leads to a situation when the same terms can be used by different researchers with different connotations, and interdisciplinary terminological homonymy arises, which complicates communication and hinders the development of intra-disciplinary methodology. In addition, the continuous nature of culture complicates the process of categorization of cultural phenomena, which are thought of holistically by researchers. As a consequence, overlapping categories emerge in scientific concepts, representing different levels of concepts in a non-disjoint manner. A similar picture is observed in the scientific analysis of the concepts of “cultural universals” and “national cultural identity”, which “share” the main categorical names. For these reasons, the development of our own, specifically cultural categories, which could clearly categorize the “indivisible continuum of culture”, becomes a particularly urgent task for the further development of this discipline.

This article describes the semantic structure of the categorical field of “cultural universals” and indicates the areas of intersection of its subcategories with the conceptual field of “national cultural identity”. On the example of individual cultural universals it is demonstrated how they, getting into the adjacent conceptual field, change their characteristics: they lose the ability to “delimit” the generalized meanings of the category and acquire new properties of accumulation of specific information included in the integrating conceptual field. In this field these subcategories receive the name of “cultural constants”. The analysis of categorical transformations and the structure of categorical and conceptual fields, which represent scientific novelty in this direction of science, is presented.

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