Yuri Rozhdestvensky (December 21, 1926 – October 24, 1999) - Russian rhetorician, educator, linguist and philosopher. Rozhdestvensky started his scholarly career from writing on Chinese grammar; his second Ph.D. involved the study and comparison of 2,000 grammars and established several language universals; he then moved on to comparative study of Chinese, Indian, Arabic and European rhetorical traditions, and then to the study of general laws of culture. Rozhdestvensky's influence continues to be powerful. In his lifetime, he directed 112 dissertations. His students now teach culture, media ecology, linguistics and communication theory courses in leading colleges in Russia.
Accumulative approach to media Similar to the field of media ecology which was developed in the West, Rozhdestvensky studied the role of communication media in society. Rozhdestvensky developed the theory of language in the information age. It says that language in society goes through the following stages: evolvement of language, the stage of folklore and syncretic performance. Plato's Cratylus addresses the philosophy of language for that period; formation of canonical texts, when the language of the religious canon is studied in schools and often creates diglossia. It is the stage of written language, and its philosophy is contained in the theories of divine origin of language; national languages, which arise after the printing press. At that stage countries receive documents and classical texts in vernacular and vernacular mutates into a national language. The language philosophy of that stage is contained in the theory of social contract; the informational age, the stage of languages spilling beyond national borders and employing electronic means for recording verbal acts.
The following classification of texts reflects the stages of language development, showing the accumulation of genres with the introduction of each new medium. Oral Genres: Pre-literary (daily dialogue, rumor, folklore) and literary (oratory (forensic, consultative, ceremonial), homily (sermon, lecture, propaganda), theater. Written genres: sphragistics, numismatics, epigraphy, paleography (personal letters, documents, literature). Printed genres: fiction, scientific literature, journalism. Mass Communication: mass information (radio, TV, newspapers), advertising, computer languages. This classification is open-ended and is meant to be a living tool – new genres which appear with the invention of a new medium will be comfortably plugged in the chart as its next level. One of the key aspects of the theory of language in the information age is that old genres do not disappear or lose their importance. On the contrary, they become invigorated and grow with the help of new technologies.Polski, M. and Gorman, L. (2012) Yuri Rozhdestvensky vs. MArshall McLuhan: A triumph vs. a Vortex. Explorations in Media Ecology
Every society has the three pre-literary genres: oral dialogue, folklore and news. For thousands of years human societies lived comfortably with those genres, perfected them and crystallized the rules of their use. In folklore we find everything needed to govern human communication: rules prescribing to listen before speaking (god gave you one mouth and two ears!); rules prohibiting direct physical and emotional harm to the listener (don't talk about the rope in the house of the hanged) and rules prescribing thinking before action (think before you leap). Folklore becomes the repository of culture because it is a form of speech that every member of a society is required to accept and heed as many times as the folklore text is directed at the listener. The main rule of communication recorded in folklore – do not harm the listener – puts important and different checks on the content of each of the above genres.Polski, M. (2008). Proverbs as the Ultimate Communication Theory. Who are we? Old, new and timeless answers from core texts. ACTC [Conference]. Plymuth, MA, April 3–6 Folklore never contains direct denigration of society members, and if criticism is issued, the figures of folklore are metaphorical – animals act instead of people. News may not include defamation – if it does, it becomes rumor, a scorned form of tongue flapping. Oral dialogue may not contain messages harmful for immediate participants of the conversation, but may have content denigrating a third party – as long as the conversation content remains confidential.
Only slowly and relatively recently does writing seep in the communication chart, first as seals and inscriptions on things (sphragistics and epigraphy), then as written genres, literature being one of them - a fairly late one, coming after documents and letters. With the appearance of writing old genres receive an influx of new energy: folklore can be recorded and stored, oral dialogue can involve exchange of notes, news can be recorded and spread confidentially. Public speeches now may be written down before they are pronounced, and there is an expectation of greater uniformity in grammar even in traditional oral genres.
With the invention of the printing press the number of genres grows. Again, the old genres do not disappear but become invigorated by the new technology – more of everything can be published now. For instance, scientific community can start a more rigorous exchange of ideas. For another instance, writing and publishing fiction becomes a major industry.
Electronic technology brings with it mass communication. The use of computer influenced almost every genre on the chart (e.g. documents and oral dialogue – modified and enhanced by e-mail) and added new ones, like blogs and web sites, which were not on Rozhdestvensky's chart, but fit in comfortably, like new elements into the Mendeleev's table.
In the information age it is important to study new genres and the influence of new media on old genres. It is also important to understand that the explosion of new technologies has happened before: with the invention of writing, with printing press, telegraph and radio. Humankind has coped with the previous technological explosions and expansions of genres, and is now coping with another step on the same road. In the Western tradition, similar ideas have been expressed by Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman.
The Study of Culture Source:Rozhdestvensky Yuri. Introduction to the study of culture. Moscow, CheRo: 1996
Rozhdestvensky founded a vibrant school of culture studies in Moscow Lomonosov University, profoundly influencing Russian intellectuals through his writing and teaching. To make culture amenable to organized study, Rozhdestvensky identifies, classifies and describes the domains of culture common to all human societies. He builds his blueprint on John Locke’s (1690) three parts of knowledge outlined in his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. For Locke “all that can fall within the compass of human understanding” is of three sorts: physica (natural philosophy), practica (“the skill of right applying our own powers and actions, for the attainment of things good and useful”) and semeiotike (“the nature of signs the mind makes use of for the understanding of things, or conveying its knowledge to others”). Rozhdestvensky (1996) explains how three commonly noted domains of culture—physical, material and spiritual—may be interpreted as relationships between the vectors of Locke's three domains of knowledge (physica, practica and semeiotike).
In order to make the field amenable to study in its totality Rozhdestvensky also introduces its division into the culture of a person, an organization and a whole society. The culture of a person exists inside that person and is available to other persons who are in contact with him/her. It is the person's skills and knowledge. The culture of a whole society is impersonal, is preserved in archives, museums, libraries and is (or at least should be) accessible for all members of society. Their relationship forms a matrix: Person Organization Society Physical + + -- Spiritual + -- + Material -- + +
Components of culture According to Rozhdestvensky, physical culture contains hygiene, childbirth and birth control, games, rites, diet, safety, etc.; material culture contains animal breeds, plants, cultivated soils, buildings, tools, roads and transportation, communication technology; spiritual culture contains morality (tribal, religious, professional, national and global levels), beauty (applied and non-applied art), and knowledge (information, wisdom, including religions, science). Categories of spiritual culture are correlated with the categories of philosophy: Truth Beauty Justice Morality -- -- + Beauty -- + -- Knowledge + -- --
Trained as a linguist, Rozhdestvensky developed a semiotic approach to the study of culture. In the Introduction to the Study of Culture he argues (ch. 2) that signs are the carriers of culture; e.g. nature becomes part of culture when it is studied by humans, which can be done by verbal description, by codifying soils or domestic animal breeds, etc. Sometimes the process is not formal, e.g. personal physical culture of an individual becomes formally described or recorded only in exceptional cases. Rozhdestvensky demonstrates that it is impossible to record culture outside semiotics. Rozhdestvensky argues based on archeological, folklore and ethnographic data that all human societies possess sixteen semiotic systems. Of these systems four (language, rites, games and count) are of unifying, society-wide application, and the rest are specialized systems where non-experts can participate, but only select individuals achieve master-level skill. They are the systems of prognosis (signs, omens, fortune-telling), non-applied art (dance, music, pictures), applied art (crafts, architecture, costume), management (commands, measures, reference points). As societies become more complex and technology develops, no new semiotic systems are added, but the existing ones grow; e.g. weather forecasters and financial engineers use advance computers and mathematical models to predict the behavior of weather fronts or stock markets, expanding the semiotics of prognosis.
The unique value of Rozhdestvensly's approach is that it systematizes the study of culture so that societies can apply it to further their spiritual and economic well-being. He argues that mastery of culture is the condition of proper application of capital to land, demonstrates how economic wealth interplays with other ideals of humankind like truth, honor, honesty, beauty, creativity, leisure and basic human health, and explores the "art of world-wide community". Thus, the proposed translation will be of use not only to humanities scholars and to the general public, but also to policy-makers, because it can inform their economic and social decisions with the understanding of cultural processes.
As one example of the application of Rozhdestvensly's theory to practical dilemmas of contemporary world, consider his study of the levels of morality. These levels are tribal (justifying murder for the sake of protection of kin or tribal territory), religious (where the murder of a non-relative is as condemned as the murder of a relative), professional (often involving exceptions to religious morality, e.g. artists who are required to prefer beauty over truth), and ecological (the level that presumes to overcome tribal, religious or professional allegiances for the sake of global well-being). Rozhdestvensky demonstrates how all of these levels co-exist and complement each other within individuals in the world "struggling with globalist forces on the one hand and localist instincts on the other" (Leach, Bridging Cultures, 2009).
The Law of Non-Destruction and Accumulation of Culture