Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2017 number

The subject of the article is wooden and ground constructions connected with fencing in Siberia in the XVII century. The authors study such constructions as walls and other elements of fortresses. The research objective is to reveal sign and symbolic functions of barriers in the ethnic, political and social space of a colonized territory. The authors analyze the Siberian documents, archeological data, graphic, and folklore materials. They use a semiotic-phenomenology paradigm both in its classic and post-Foucauldian interpretation as the main method of research. The authors refer to the modern Russian ethnographic school devoted to ethnic-symbolic colonization and sociological-anthropological research of the urban symbolic spaces. As a result the authors argue that the barriers had defensive functions at the beginning of the XVII century and provided three security levels: state, public and individual ones. However, very soon the government turned the walls and other fencing into a discipline strategy for people in Siberia. Furthermore, the barriers performed the important elements of the ethnical, political and social hierarchical representation of Siberia under the control of Russia. These facts showed no transparency of the institutional environment and the government endeavor to limit social mobility or at least set it under the administrative control. The author’s findings are that there were two trends during the period under study: the first one was connected with main cultural characteristics of the Russian space as continuously dispersing territory with huge migrants flows; the contrary second trend was in fixing people to the place of their living and proper social groups. In that case the fencing was the appropriate symbol of the Russian government efforts to shape the vast territory.