COMMEMORATION PHENOMENON: AN EXPERIENCE OF CULTUROLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF PUBLIC COMMEMORATION PRACTICES (By the Example of Chelyabinsk Streets Naming)

The notion of cultural memory is popular and rather well developed today. However, that cannot be said about the forms of its visualization — commemoration practices. The commemoration phenomenon, though drawing attention of scientists-humanists, is mainly comprehended in the practical plane (as a set of concrete memorial events and reactions to them). The article attempts to add a theoretical studying aspect to this research perspective. Several significant features form the basis of commemoration, distinguishing it from other ways of cultural memory visualization. Those features are publicity, collectivity, rituality, retro-orientation, axiological orientation and emotionality. Its structure is constituted by three interconnected elements: a core (the occasion of commemoration — a significant person, event, set of events, place, etc.), a symbol (the mythologema, which creates around the core a certain figurative-value space and is addressed to society, modeling the forms and ways of its existence) and a function (whose task is integration, identification, socialization, compensation, accumulation, etc.). On the basis of this three-part structure, a technique of analyzing specific commemoration practices is developed (by the example of Chelyabinsk streets naming). As a part of implementation of this technique, a number of criteria for analyzing the commemoration core are highlighted: territorial localization (regional, national or global), chronological localization (before the 20th century, the 20th century, the post-Soviet period), type (personality, event, place), subject (presentation of different spheres). The content analysis of empirical material (the names of 260 streets), conducted in accordance with the specified criteria, allows to allocate the most demanded commemorative symbols (“heritage” and “hero”) and to draw not only parti­cular conclusions on specific directions of cultural memory preservation and promotion, but also the conclusions of a wider scale — on the value strategies of the modern cultural policy.

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