ART AND SCIENCE
Bibliography and culture · 2026/1

Cultural meaning as a relational reality: interpretation, practice and continuity

  • Kuanishbay Yusupov Nukus branch of the Uzbek State Institute of Arts and Culture image/svg+xml
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.66900/a9m8vn35
Keywords

philosophy of culture, cultural meaning, social ontology, hermeneutics, cultural memory, embodied practice, Karakalpak epic tradition, cultural continuity

Abstract

What persists when a cultural practice changes its form? This article argues that the survival of an artefact, the repetition of a performance, and the continuity of cultural meaning are different phenomena. It advances a relational account of cultural meaning as a publicly accessible yet historically revisable pattern of interpretation, embodied competence, and transmission. The argument reconstructs Simmel’s tension between objective and subjective culture, Gadamer’s account of historically situated understanding, MacIntyre’s practice-based conception of tradition, and Assmann’s distinction between communicative and cultural memory. It then engages Russian-language philosophy of culture and Central Asian intellectual and performance traditions. Rather than claiming to discover a new universal theory, the article develops the Meaning–Agency–Continuity (MAC) framework into a diagnostic matrix with explicit rival explanations and conditions under which it fails. The Karakalpak jiraw–bakhshi tradition is discussed as a documented illustration, not as original fieldwork. The result is a non-deterministic account of cultural continuity: preservation, critical reinterpretation, and competent participation can diverge, and none is sufficient in isolation. This framework is intended for philosophical comparison and future evidence-based cultural research.

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