The subject of culturology allows you to familiarize yourself with the history of the emergence of problems of a cultural character, to form skills for using the categorical apparatus in life, provides the necessary knowledge about cultural values, and helps to realize your cultural and national traditions.
Culture as an object of culturology is considered from various positions, since it is a complex concept, including, as an artificial environment for human existence, and its self-realization.
The subject and tasks of culturology are to transfer accumulated cultural knowledge, and they also provide an opportunity to expand your horizons on your own.
The term culturology was widely used by the scientist L. White. It was he who first tried to create general theories of culture.
The subject of culturology is a complex socio-humanitarian discipline, which seeks to form a system of knowledge regarding culture, considering it as a holistic phenomenon. The subject and tasks of culturology are studies aimed at describing culture, analyzing and comparing different cultures, understanding intercultural communications, and also explaining the origins of a specific and general, changeable and sustainable in culture.
The subject of cultural studies is currently an integrative field of knowledge. The basis of culturology is individual sciences - history, archeology, art history, ethnography, etc. Culturology as socio-humanitarian knowledge considers the general significance of the multifaceted phenomenon of culture, including the ways of its study. Culture as a subject of culturology is the goal of research leading to an understanding of one's own and other culture, while the subject is the filling of public life. Therefore, culturology is the interaction of various elements of culture: norms, traditions, customs, values, cultural codes, social institutions, ideologies, technologies, etc.
Culturology is based on the unity of empirical and theoretical knowledge, since it considers not only specific cultural processes and phenomena, but also ultimate abstractions. The subject of cultural studies includes both applied and fundamental research.
We list the main tasks of culturological research:
• analysis of culture;
• study of the content of culture;
• definition of interconnections between elements of culture;
• study of cultural units and typologies of cultures;
• resolution of problems determined by sociocultural dynamics ;
• study of cultural communications and codes.
In practice, cultural studies find their application in the field of management and mass communications.
In cultural studies, the following methods are used:
• empirical - collection and description of factual material;
• comparative-historical - providing the opportunity to compare the distinctive phenomena of the cultural complex in a historical context;
• structural and functional - allowing to decompose the studied cultural object into its constituent parts and to reveal their internal connection;
• genetic - allows you to know the phenomenon under study from the standpoint of its occurrence and subsequent development;
• semiotic - is determined by the understanding of culture as a sign mechanism that allows the transfer of experience from generation to generation, as a symbolic system that ensures social inheritance.
Cultural studies includes several sections and is a complex science:
- Philosophy of culture;
- Theory of culture;
- Sociology of culture;
- The history of culture;
- Cultural anthropology.
Thus, culturology not only describes the cultural values accumulated by mankind, but also comprehends them.