Juri Lotman wrote, in Russian, a book Непредсказуемые механизмы культуры — the unpredictable mechanisms of culture. Its English translator, Brian Baer, preferred to translate the title as The Unpredictable Workings of Culture . He had a reason for this — many scholars tend to refuse the term ‘mechanism’ for the phenomena of meaning-making. However, there exist quite clear cultural differences in this opinion. For instance in Russian, ‘mechanisms’ are understood so broadly that there is no questi…
Read moreJuri Lotman wrote, in Russian, a book Непредсказуемые механизмы культуры — the unpredictable mechanisms of culture. Its English translator, Brian Baer, preferred to translate the title as The Unpredictable Workings of Culture . He had a reason for this — many scholars tend to refuse the term ‘mechanism’ for the phenomena of meaning-making. However, there exist quite clear cultural differences in this opinion. For instance in Russian, ‘mechanisms’ are understood so broadly that there is no question to use the term for purely mental creations; the case is similar in German, in Estonian, and in several other languages. It seems that the applicability of this term to culture is correlated with the usage of the term ‘science’. In Russian, in German, and in Estonian, the humanities are sciences , while the English-language tradition tends to separate the humanities from the sciences. However, the latter h ..