Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2021 number

As a basic component of natural and cultural heritage, landscape belongs to interdisciplinary categories that fall within the research field of ethnography, ethnology, cultural ecology, humanitarian geography, environmental anthropology and other disciplines. Actualizing landscape problems is currently due to the fast transformation of modern cultural landscapes caused by global changes in the world economy related to the accelerated development of agriculture and forestry, industrial and mining production. The study objective is a historiographic review and comparison of domestic and foreign literature devoted to the problems of landscape studies, with special attention to the issues of historical dynamics and structure of rural cultural landscapes in Siberian regional studies. The earliest views about the cultural landscape in Russian anthropogeography were characterized by the influence of the ideas of geographic determinism. On the contrary, English-language research was initially focused on studying the cultural landscape material components. These differences, to a certain extent, continue to persist up to the present time. The specificity of the modern rethinking of the concept is associated with its symbolization. The landscape components endowed with historical senses and symbolic meanings serve as an expression of cultural memory and local identity of the population. Positive identity promotes the manifestation of ecological forms of behavior and increases the opportunities for sustainable development. In general, the idea of the landscape as a kind of «physical capacity filled with natural resources that must be extracted and used optimally» is being replaced by a new paradigm, according to which an integral part of the process of mastering and transforming the environment is to endow it with spiritual and symbolic properties.