Abstract

First of all, I would like to stress that the discussion covers at least three different culturologies. The first is a science with the relatively modest task of studying certain properties of culture that are not studied in other fields of knowledge. The second is an attempt at an enormous mystification, a substitution of concepts in which there is an attempt to smuggle in ordinary sociology under the popular word "culturology." Much of what has been said here under the heading of "culturology" has, in my view, no relation to problems of culture, but is linked with the well-known sociological-political attempt to develop a system of technologies of direct social regulation of the consciousness and behavior of people, which would suit not so much cultural agencies as the Ministry of Internal Affairs . And finally, third, the issue is a certain intellectual tendency that formed in our country, partly as a protest, under conditions of a total ban on any attempts, other than official Marxist ones, to comprehend the world. Here, as always, everything began with a critique of Western theories , in the course of which the critic imperceptibly "crawled over" to the positions of the criticized. By the 1970s, the term "culturology" became more or less legitimate, but the attempt in the 1990s to create a "unified culturology" that would include the philosophy of culture , Anglo-Saxon sociocultural anthropology , French semiotics , and so on, unfortunately , failed