Культурно-географічні підходи дослідження зміни геокультурного простору України у ХХ–ХХІ ст. (на прикладі перейменування міст)

Abstract

The article discusses the main cultural and geographical approaches to the study of renaming: critical toponymic, palimpsest, and geoconceptual. The renaming of geographical objects is a complex interdisciplinary problem that has a cultural and geographical dimension. Therefore, given the complex, multifaceted, often contradictory nature of the phenomenon under study, the presence of political, historical, social, and, of course, cultural aspects (both in the anthropological and “branch” sense of the concept of culture), the research methodology is simply obliged to be interdisciplinary. As a component of cultural geography, critical toponymy studies the issues of toponymic politics, that is, the formation of praxeological application of the theory. The transition of politics into cultural anthropology makes it possible to turn decommunization into de 112 Russification, as well as to get rid of the legacy of totalitarianism through the destruction of imperial Russianness. The first works on toponymy using the conceptual framework of critical geography appeared in the English-speaking academic environment in the 1980s. During this period, the study of place names moved away from traditional research toward a critical understanding of the socio-political and symbolic role of place names, the politics of nomination and its political results, as well as related socio-economic and other processes. In the 1990s and 2000s, the number of publications in the field of critical toponymy increased due to the theoretical and methodological expansion of the field of research and the use of examples from different regions of the world. The works of geographers based on the application of critical social theory have brought significant progress in explaining the motivations and values involved in the nomination process, in understanding other socio-cultural and political processes involved in the “creation, overthrow and revision” of place names. Particular attention was padding to the cultural politics of naming geographical objects, such as who controls the nomination process and who does not. The experience of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, where the relevant processes took place, was use ding for comparative analysis.