Saving the Native Faith: Religious Nationalism in Slavic Neo-paganism (Ancient Russian Yngling Church of Orthodox Old Believers-Ynglings and Svarozhichi)

Today dynamically developing neo-pagan communities in Ural and Siberia supply a discursive frame for national identities, group values and political ideologies. They share norms of ethnic solidarity, national unity, traditionalism and national awakening, just as the concepts of national peculiarity and anti-westernism. Russian patriotism, devotion to tribal ideals and the preposition about world’s multiplicity (material and spiritual) are considered as ethical principals. The subject of this paper is the neo-pagan community of Ynglings in Western Siberia and the movement Svarozhichi in Ural region. These two movements have seldom been discussed in research literature and they provide interesting case studies of nationalistic new religiosity in the provincial Russia. Participants of these communities are fostering ethnic revival: not only remembering the glorious past, but also rebuilding it, here and now. The movement‘s legitimacy is based on a presumed continuity with the cultural heritage of pagan ancestors. They advocate a conception of Slavs unity based on Aryan identity and the willingness to give up Christianity, which is deemed responsible for two thousand years of identity aberrations.   Keywords: neo-paganism, religious nationalism, traditionalism, Ural, Western Siberi

Visual Representations of Traditional Northern Communities in Ethnographic Film: Historical and Modern Perspectives

This paper investigates the ethnographic films about the indigenous peoples of the North, moving from the visual representations of the North produced in the Soviet state to the new discourses of post-Soviet Russian documentary films. By demonstrating how the representations of traditional ethnocultural communities of the North have evolved over time in Russian documentary, the authors focus on the contemporary documentary film Oil Field (Oil Field; Ivan Golovnev 2012), which depicts a life of the family Piak (Nenets Vasily Piak and his Khanty wife, Svetlana) in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug—Yugra. Authors came to conclusion that ethnographic cinema would be considered as a cultural mediator: it is both reflectively represents the reality of the traditional culture and contributes some of the most lasting visual formulae with regard to the way the indigenous populations of the Far North are framed and remembered. Keywords: ethnographic film, indigenous peoples of the North, reindeer herding, oil industry, Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug, Russia &nbsp

Discovering the Far East...’: Images of the Territory in the Works of V. K. Arsenyev

The article explores the works of the Far East explorer V.K. Arsenyev (1872–1930) with the purpose of using his works to find the representational potential of the region’s image. Using social constructivism as a methodology, we outline and analyze scientific and artistic types of constructing the Far East image and demonstrate the place each of these types occupies in Arsenyev’s works.     Keywords: regional image, constructivism, construct, visualization, Russian Far East, V.K.Arsenye

The Far East in the films of A. Litvinov: constructing the image of space

The article was submitted on 28.04.2016.Дан анализ просветительского документального кино (культурфильмов) как средства конструирования образов региона в советскую эпоху. В 1920–1930-х гг. советская киноиндустрия была направлена на создание образов, которые позволяли зрительской аудитории по-новому взглянуть на образ жизни своей и иных территорий. Работая на «шестой части суши», кинематографисты показывали региональное разнообразие большой многонациональной страны, старались популярно рассказать советским гражданам о регионах. На материале фильмов А. Литвинова, сыгравшего важную роль в развитии практики экспедиционных фильмов в СССР, показано конструирование визуальных образов советского Дальнего Востока. Предпринятый авторами анализ ранних киноработ А. Литвинова Лесные люди (1928), По дебрям Уссурийского края (1928), Неведомая земля (1931) позволяет заключить, что они создавали образ Дальнего Востока прежде всего как «культурного фронтира», региона, основанного на природном и этническом многообразии. Дальний Восток в фильмах Литвинова предстает как особый пограничный регион Советской России. В то же время киноработы А. Литвинова на Дальнем Востоке – это первые кинематографические репрезентации «малых народностей» края, переживавших качественные изменения, связанные с распространением советской идеологии. Их отличительный характер состоял в том, что они заключали в себе научно-исследовательский подход, сочетали кинематографический метод и литературное творчество. Делается вывод о том, что в СССР культурфильмы представляли собой яркий пример дискурсивного и концептуального освоения отдаленных территорий, символического их «изобретения» и включения в систему восприятия новой империи.This article explores the educational documentary film (Kulturfilm) as a visual construct of a region in the Soviet epoch. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the Soviet film industry was actively engaged in developing particular images, which refashioned the way the audience saw their own territories and those of others. Working around the “sixth part of the world”, filmmakers elaborated a set of lasting visual images, describing the regional diversity of the great multinational state. They also attempted to “popularise” the region among Soviet citizens. Based on the films of Aleksandr Litvinov, who played a prominent role in establishing the expedition film practice in the Soviet Union, the paper considers the construction of visual images of the Soviet Far East. A contextual analysis of the Forest People (1928), Through the Ussuri Area (1928), Terra Incognita (1931) demonstrates that they continuously emphasised the image of the Far East as a cultural frontier, which featured the natural and ethnic regional diversity. The Far East in Litvinov’s films is a peculiar region with borderland status. At the same time, Litvinov’s films on the Far East can be viewed as the first cinematographic representations of the “small peoples” of the Far East under Soviet-inspired changes. The combination of filmmaking with a scholarly approach and literary narratives is central to the understanding of the peculiar character of those early films. Litvinov’s case demonstrates that Kulturfilms in the Soviet Union provide an insight into the conceptual and discourse conquest of the remote regions as well as their full symbolic ‘invention’ and inclusion into the perception of the new empire.Статья подготовлена при поддержке гранта РФФИ, проект № 16-33-01038 «Образ региона в культурфильме (на примере творчества А. Литвинова)»

Chekhov’s sakhalin: Photographic fixation of the Island

The article examines the photographic representations of Sakhalin in the end of XIX century, in the period of A. P. Chekhov’s stay on the island. Sakhalin is viewed as a peculiar cultural and geographical space with clear frontier characteristics. Sakhalin regional identity is seen as formed on the basis of ideas of “the remote island – continent” and “the place of nameless misery”. Beginning with an analysis of Sakhalin in the context of imperial imagination, authors rediscover a photofixation of the island in the above-mentioned period. Analysis of Chekhov’s photo collection is addressed to the works of frontier and memory studies as well as visual anthropology. The article is based on empirical data of Archive of Amur region Research Society (Vladivostok) and photos from Benedict Dybovsky’s (1833–1930) album that is stored in Kamchatka Regional United Museum (Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky). Developing a discourse about photography as a valuable resource for visual representation of the frontier territories, the authors give systematization and classification of the main images of Sakhalin at the end of XIX century (a case of photographer I. I. Pavlovsky), present the correlation between photographic and literary images as well as reveal the role of those photos in perception of Sakhalin inside and outside of an empire. The article argued that visual criteria of Sakhalin’s life were created by means of typical protagonist’s positions and scenes (labor and everyday life of hard laborers), physical anthropology (indigenous faces, faces of criminals), architect and natural landscape of the island. The authors came to the conclusion that photos of Sakhalin as well as literary works on the island depict the visible margins between Sakhalin and other parts of Russia and present the specifics of Sakhalin regional identity. © 2020 Tomsk State Pedagogical University. All rights reserved

Traditional Northern communities in ethnographic film: Khanty. The case of the documentary film Tiny Katerina

This article investigates the representation of traditional culture in ethnographic films among the indigenous peoples of the Russian North. The special attention is paid to childhood in traditional culture of Khanty peoples in Ugra. The article focuses on the documentary film Malen’kaia Katerina (Tiny Katerina; Ivan Golovnev 2004), which depicts the childhood of a Khanty girl in northwestern Siberia over the course of three years. Authors analyze the child’s relation to nature, adulthood, and the development of gender identity. The article looks into the cinematographic techniques used for the film creation and major episodes of the film such as “a child`s role in Khanty culture”, “play”, ‘the adult world”. Also explored are objective and subjective conditions in which the cinematographic image is created, with a special emphasis being put on studying filmmaker's (director's) role in film production. The conclusion drawn is that, on the one hand, the ethnographic film is a valuable contribution to Anthropology that adds to the corpus of documents on traditional culture of the indigenous peoples of the Russian North. On the other hand, the film contains evidence of scientific criticism and allows one to explore cinematographic material from anthropological, historical, and psychological positions. Authors came to conclusion that ethnographic cinema can be seen as promising research methodology in the field of contemporary anthropology. This essay reelaborates and enriches some of the themes already present in a previous contribution The Representation of Childhood in Ethnographic Films of Siberian Indigenous Peoples: The Case of the Documentary Film Malen’kaia Katerina (Tiny Katerina) [Golovnev I., Golovneva E. 2016, 83-106].This work was supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (RFBR) as part of project No.18-09-00076 The traditional Northern communities in ethnographic film

The constructs of “old” and “new world” in soviet kulturfilm

Soviet kulturfilm of 1920s–1930s is considered a constructed reality on the screen, where a process of forming and introduction of constructs of “old” and “new world” into mass consciousness was one of the central pieces. The ideas of D. Vertov and S. Eisenstein regarding the constructing nature of cinema are demonstrated to be a methodological basis for characterization of the “old” and “new world” constructs in Soviet kulturfilms. The analysis of content of those constructs helps to reveal the ideological role of kulturfilms in the structure of Soviet film production.Советский культурфильм 1920–1930-х гг. рассматривается как конструируемая на экране реальность, в которой важное место занимал процесс формирования и внедрения в массовое сознание конструктов «старого» и «нового мира». Показано, что идеи Д. Вертова и С. М. Эйзенштейна о конструирующей природе кинематографа являются методологической основой для характеристики конструктов «старого» и «нового мира» в культурфильмах. Рассмотрение содержания этих конструктов позволяет полнее выявить идеологическое значение культурфильмов в структуре советского кинопроизводства.Статья подготовлена при поддержке гранта РФФИ № 18-09-00076 «Традиционные этнокультурные сообщества Севера в этнографическом кино»

ALERT: Adapting Language Models to Reasoning Tasks

Current large language models can perform reasonably well on complex tasks that require step-by-step reasoning with few-shot learning. Are these models applying reasoning skills they have learnt during pre-training and reason outside of their training context, or are they simply memorizing their training corpus at finer granularity and have learnt to better understand their context? To tease apart these possibilities, we introduce ALERT, a benchmark and suite of analyses for assessing language models' reasoning ability comparing pre-trained and finetuned models on complex tasks that require reasoning skills to solve. ALERT provides a test bed to asses any language model on fine-grained reasoning skills, which spans over 20 datasets and covers 10 different reasoning skills. We leverage ALERT to further investigate the role of finetuning. With extensive empirical analysis we find that language models learn more reasoning skills such as textual entailment, abductive reasoning, and analogical reasoning during finetuning stage compared to pretraining state. We also find that when language models are finetuned they tend to overfit to the prompt template, which hurts the robustness of models causing generalization problems