Since its emergence as a special scientific field, African studies has constantly faced the problem of approaching cognition to the object under study. This problem is present in many sections of African studies, but its awareness and understanding is determined by the experience of the researcher himself, more precisely, by that difficult to define "matter" that can be called the feeling of Africa. The problem is obvious when there is a sense of barriers to understanding African realities: communication, mental, ethical, political, source studies, etc. The essence of the issue is the possibility of reconstructing African reality in terms of European culture and cognitive means of modern science.

In Russian African studies, the problem of the adequacy of scientific descriptions of the object under study is particularly acute. For the vast majority of Russian colleagues, Africa is more a speculative or theoretical concept than an empirical or vital reality. The actual source base of historical, sociological, and political science works is extremely limited or secondary in nature. Field research, so important for ethnologists and anthropologists, is available to individuals, and there is no hope of expanding it in the near future. If in the 1970s and 1980s these difficulties were to some extent compensated by the admission of foreign African literature to the central scientific libraries of Russia, then in the last period the named source of information is gradually drying up.

Of course, cognitive difficulties are not only present in the subject field of African studies, but also serve as a powerful incentive for its development. It actively uses a variety of methods to penetrate the cultural and behavioral codes, history, and mentality of African peoples. These methods provide increasing proportionality, comparability of the subject and object of research, and, accordingly, an understanding of the African reality.

This includes a far-advanced reconstruction of the past of non-written cultures based on oral tradition, an appeal to the vocabulary of living African languages as a reflection of the material and mental world of their native speakers, the use of "included observation" techniques, the study of behavioral strategies in recorded social circumstances, and models of socio-cultural synthesis and symbiosis. The application of these and other "understanding" methods and techniques largely determines the maturity and scientific significance of African studies. Maturity not only as a subject area, but also as a kind of methodological and epistemological complex. This also leaves a certain imprint on the" object side " of African studies. Objects of study in African studies are largely or mostly constructed objects, with an active or even leading role

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The role in this process is played not only by the people, cultures, and institutions studied, but also by the researchers in contact with them.

However, cognitive barriers remain. Moreover, their presence is felt more acutely now than it was 15-20 years ago, and in different, far-flung branches of African studies. Museum experts say that an adequate description of the objects of African collections is impossible without reference to the traditional mythology of peoples and continents, and a true reconstruction of the corresponding meanings and images is impossible in terms of European culture. African ethnologists, who have long studied traditional ethnosocial systems, question the applicability of the concept of "ethnicity"to these systems (at least to the pre-colonial era of their existence and development) 1 Economists and political scientists write about the marginalization of Tropical Africa in relation to the world community at the turn of the century, about the collapse of the social sphere and the growing alienation of the population from the state, about the opposite of these processes to the directions of development that were offered to African countries in the previous period as an unconditional political and cultural value 2 .

If in science there are doubts about the reliability and truth of its descriptions, concepts, and theories, then it is time to talk about a cognitive crisis (more precisely, a crisis of the epistemological foundations of science - its practices, norms, and images that ensure the proper correspondence of scientific knowledge to the reality being studied). Right now, at a time when a vast and diverse body of knowledge about Africa and its peoples is being accumulated, African studies is facing the most acute crisis of its epistemological foundations in recent decades. A clear expression of this crisis is the appearance in African studies of phenomena (or incidents) of misunderstanding or, more specifically, the eluding or disappearance of the original object of study. These are very dangerous phenomena: they lead the research to a dead end, and the researcher is faced with a painful question: what is being studied-the real Africa or the researcher's own ideas about the African reality.

The phenomena of object disappearance are more and more active in those areas of African studies where the most complete, deep and complex penetration into the studied society and the life world of aborigines has been achieved: the African city as a social structure and a specific cultural organism; ethnic processes and ethnicity in different parts of the continent; the formation and evolution of" sovereign statehood " in Tropical Africa. The more you immerse yourself in the study of these phenomena (taking into account their historical dynamics, the correlation of modernization and re-traditionalization trends, discursive expression in the system of European or African cultural codes), the more the objective content of the corresponding processes escapes understanding, the sooner the objective reality is replaced by value and terminological constructions, cultural images that coincide with terms, images,etc. meanings of European culture. It is as if everything is there: empirical ideas about the structure and dynamics of the transformation of local societies, and the methodological basis for reconstructing the actual African substrate of socio-historical changes, and detailed descriptions of local ethnological terms, and clear and reliable clarity in that we fix the original object of research and get true knowledge about it, not distorted by our presence, no.

For example, the concepts of "tribe" and" tribalism "can be considered as an effective cognitive and political construct, more commensurate with the realities of Tropical Africa than the concepts of "nation-state", "civil society", etc., corresponding to a completely different cultural and civilizational reality.

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However, the more the concept of tribalism is transformed into a constructed reality-politicized ethnicity (which is inevitable due to the dependence of modern political culture in Africa on Westernized cultural discourse), the more the original object of study - traditional social systems-disappears, dissolves, and becomes invisible in this new reality. These systems were uncharacteristic of politicized ethnicity; systems and social groups were not strictly distinguished by ethnicity. Thus, the line between the object under study and our vision of this object disappears. It is possible to change the point of view, for example, to record the relatively late appearance of the paradigm of ethnicity and ethnocentrism in the countries of Tropical Africa in comparison with the determinants of social, regional, confessional and other types. But then the object under study will also be significantly rebuilt: tribalism will act as an innovation, a phenomenon of modernization, and not a product of traditionalism. However, in this case, it is not entirely certain that when we reconstruct traditional social systems, we do not introduce distortions in them that obscure the original object of study.

The question of the objectivity of scientific knowledge is not new for Russian African studies. It was put quite definitely in the 1960s and 1970s, when the difference between the two research traditions became apparent. For one group of Africanists who gravitated to D. A. Olderogge and the Department of African Ethnography of the MAHE, the measure of objectivity of African knowledge was primarily the degree of use of ethnographic and sociolinguistic data. For the other group, which was mainly concentrated at the Institute of Africa of the Russian Academy of Sciences, objectivity meant extending to African history and modernity the world laws of social development in the version of the theory of formations and the world revolutionary process. Despite the elements of self-sufficiency and increased self-esteem, both traditions formed a single whole, a single cognitive space. This space was divided not according to the principle: empirical - constructed reality, but according to the principle: unique fact - typological scheme.

By the 1990s, both traditions (or schools?) we got closer. The line separating them has lost its former rigidity: Leningraders extended the ethnographic approach to the theory of politogenesis, social organization (management) and social history (works by V. V. Bocharov, N. M. Girenko, V. A. Popov) 3 At the same time, in the "Moscow" and similar regional Russian African studies, the ethno-cultural and sociolinguistic context has significantly displaced the abstract theory (works by A. S. Balezin, V. A. Beilis, V. B. Iordansky, N. B. Kochakova, E. S. Lvova, M. D. Nikitin, V. E. Ovchinnikov). 4 As V. B. Iordansky wrote in 1991, " there are signs of a growing interest of Soviet scientific thought in the deepest layers of African folk culture. Gradually, various categories of archaic social consciousness begin to become clear, the hidden mechanism of its work, some patterns of development are revealed. At the same time, the enormous complexity of the problems facing the researcher is also revealed" 5

Today's difficulties are qualitatively different. Doubts no longer arise about which approach - ethnographic or socio-economic - provides the greatest completeness and objectivity of our knowledge of Africa, but about the significance of this knowledge. Intersubject problem areas are formed, where such doubts are seriously justified. We see two such areas: global studies and cultural studies. The first is formed outside the framework of African studies, but extends its influence to understanding the problems of the continent; the second has its own foundations within African studies, and also contributes to the relativization of traditional scientific knowledge.

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In global studies, the most radical disqualification of the importance of African studies is the world-system approach based on the ideas of I. Wallerstein: the world as a whole and a sociohistorical system, capitalism as a world system of capital accumulation and surplus product appropriation, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as world classes. In this approach, African and generally country or regional communities do not have the meaning of a "unit" of scientific analysis and, accordingly, an independent objective content (as well as links between societies), the social whole is identified exclusively with the world-wholeness that develops in line with the expansion of capitalism and is divided into a center, periphery and semi-periphery. In Russian science, the concept of world integrity is well known and popularized (works by A.V. Poletaev, A.V. Fursov, M. A. Cheshkov) 6 and it is actively used in the framework of African studies (works by M. M. Golansky).

But even in the" post-Wallerstein", much more" soft " versions of global development, which emphasize trends towards regionalization and historical diversification of the world, strengthening the autonomy (identity) of its individual parts, and reviving historical traditions, up to the traditions of the archaic, African studies also lose much of the scientific and practical significance that it acquired at the beginning decolonization 7 . Africa is identified either with the zone of the "archaic Deep South" - "the forefront of mass destructive processes", "the margin of civilization" affected by the "new poverty virus", or with the periphery of the world, which lacks a certain civilizational identity and in some of its sub-regional parts suffers from "excessive diversity" 8 . Against this background, the accumulation of knowledge about Africa - both ethnographic and socio-economic - loses its intrinsic value, or even just its importance. According to M. M. Golansky's assessment, which he expressed in 1999, " ... only incorrigibly naive optimists can continue to believe in the possibility of eliminating backwardness by their own efforts... Tropical Africa in the new conditions of global development" 9 .

The opposite positions seem to be taken by cultural studies, cultural knowledge: African traditions, African identity, and African personality are recognized and defined as a valuable and largely self-sufficient world. In fact, this position, no less than the globalist paradigm, weakens the credibility of traditional African studies.

In Russian African studies, a radical version of this approach has already made itself known, which criticizes theoretical generalizing schemes for separating from the real object of study and connects the possibility of qualitative expansion of knowledge about Africa with direct, live contact between the subject and the object of study, existential (emotional, intuitive) penetration into the world of the "other". As an alternative to logical-explanatory models, this practice is not new and forms the basis of a number of areas and disciplines of the so-called non-classical science (ethnomethodology, cognitive sociology and sociology of everyday life, historical hermeneutics, etc.). However, for domestic African studies, which does not have significant field research experience, the practice of "connecting with an object" is largely new and exotic.

V. R. Arsenyev is an ardent supporter of this methodology. Applied to a specific object of study-society and culture bambara - he combines the hermeneutical approach with the traditional, empirical - analytical one: "the central problem for me is the definition of integrity parameters bambara cultures in unity lifestyle changes (conditionally, "objective reality"), images of the world (conventionally, "reflections" or "subjective reality") and "works of art" (i.e., a symbolic system...)" 10 . At the same time, the same methodology is used by him and T. B. Shchepanskaya, who is in solidarity with him 11 for a radical critique of the logical-theory-

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retic approach (the area of abstraction, generalization - in the terminology of V. G. Arsenyev and the area of cultural classifications - in the terminology of T. B. Shepanskaya). The radical nature of criticism lies in the fact that they question or even deny as mythological the objectivity and reliability of any ethnosocial and ethno-cultural reconstructions, if they are not related to the participation of researchers in the culture under study.

V. R. Arsenyev: "The tradition of science first of all dictates the author / observer to distract from the individual experience of communicating with a foreign culture, to free himself from the emotions generated by this communication, to convey the essence of what is learned, meaningful, and classified in a strictly logical and, most importantly, "reproducible" way, regardless of the author himself. in accordance with the established cliches and matrices of science. There is a process of distracting the author from the flesh of the material, from its vital fullness of feelings and impressions-there is a kind of" objectification " of the subject. The scientist, as it were, transports himself into a timely dimension. He seems to be an indifferent registrar of facts and phenomena. The fiction of such a statement is ultimately no secret to anyone. But the cliche works, as does a certain mythologizing line in the implementation of science itself" 12 And then: "The process of mythologizing science is a complex process, and it should be considered in the context of cultural phenomena of the present century" 13 . T. B. Shchepanskaya: "Ethnology tries to change the scale by speaking and asking questions on behalf of Science as a cognitive subsystem of society - but there, in the field, it also faces a society that is organized and operates differently... At home, in the scientific office, in the process of processing the collected data and even their verbalization itself, a different proportionality arises: the mind, by its means of rationalization, seeks to know a different rationality. And here the knowing mind is confronted with the paradoxical Alice through the Looking Glass effect: the deeper it invades the world of the mental system, the further it is from its understanding, with each step introducing more and more distortions, in fact reconstructing its own structure on exotic material" 14

The logic of these statements borders on the conclusion that the meanings of one culture are not fully permeable and can be translated into the language of representations of another, no matter what means we use (including methods of included observation, empathy, etc.), and that the radical way out of this situation may be to identify the researcher with the culture under study. It seems that V. R. Arsenyev and T. B. Shchepanskaya not only admit, but also accept this perspective: science "agrees to accept new information, but only as long as it fits into its own system of rationalities" 15 extrapolation of ethnographic materials to the traditional (historical) state of ethnic groups is "the same myth as ... the myth of the authors 'distraction from the material of direct observation" 16 .

Most Russian Africanists working in the cultural paradigm are not ready to go so far. Introducing a researcher to "exotic" cultures in order to better understand them is understood either as the need for a more accurate correlation of scientific definitions with local language norms and terms, or as fixing the dominant elements of local cultures, or as taking into account the influence of the socio - historical and mental-cultural environment on the essential features of African societies. All these options do not exclude the construction of generalizing schemes and models. This is clearly recorded by V. A. Beilis: the set of cultural traits is limited in principle and can be expressed quite accurately by a formula similar to that derived by V. Ya. Propp for a fairy tale, describing a hundred fairy tales as one (as a single text)", "the originality of a particular culture".-

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the difference is not in the presence or absence of any elements, but in their dominance, the way they are connected, in the stress system" 17 .

But even in the "soft" versions of the cultural paradigm, there is a tendency to relativize the objectivity of scientific conclusions. It is assumed that any attempt to logically express the ambiguity, mobility, and variability of cultural and linguistic meanings, and even in isolation from life situations, may lead to a reduction, distortion, or disappearance of the original object of research 18 (In consonance with the conclusions of V. R. Arsenyev and T. B. Shchepanskaya.)

Of course, global studies and cultural studies do not completely define the subject field of domestic African studies. Those who study the place of Africa in the processes of globalization pay little attention to the studies of ethnologists, anthropologists, and cultural scientists, and the latter, in turn, calmly dispense with the picture of a single global world, considering it as something far from the "reproduction of life" in Africa, or even denying the destruction of local traditions under the influence of Western civilization. For example, for V. A. Beilis, there is no doubt that " interaction (of African cultures. - I. S .) cooperation with the West contributes not to the destruction, but to the strengthening and expansion of traditional cultures, increasing resilience, including on the basis of competition (!) with other civilizations, at least in the spiritual sphere." 19 Representatives of our "workshop" are also deterred from extreme globalist and cultural approaches by the usual discursive practice, which still tends to make statements such as "African society", "social and political structure", "modern (national) state", etc. The usual theoretical discourse allows us to remain in a single conceptual field and creates a sense of the integrity of our knowledge about Africa.

In fact, such integrity, in my opinion, is under threat or falling apart, despite the preservation of traditional theoretical cliches. The integrity that we have in mind implies the interaction or unity of generalizing and individualizing approaches. The essence of the cognitive crisis in Russian African studies is quite specific and consists in the gradual polarization, active or passive alienation of these ways of studying Africa from each other. The conditions for the crisis are created by the activation of the globalist and cultural paradigms, which weakens the possibility and necessity of theoretical self-determination of African studies. Until the 1990s, Russian African studies was able to offer or supplement a number of ideas and concepts that rose above empirical and applied country studies. This brought them closer to mid-level theories. Let us note the concepts of "colonial society", " secondary formational development "(the stage separation of political genesis from class formation), "early state", "relationships of the clan, community, large family" , etc.

However, within the framework of the globalist and cultural paradigms, the significance of these concepts is questionable. If African studies as a subject area were built entirely on the model of globalist or cultural knowledge, then the need for such concepts, as well as for the disciplinary organization of knowledge, would probably disappear altogether. In this case, the role of regionalism would be determined by the meaning of its specific sections and directions in specific cognitive situations, or even by its "utility orientation" 20 . This would not be very good for Russian African studies, since most African countries are pushed to the margins of globalization and it is impossible for Russian researchers to study Africa from the inside out.

However, the main factor of the crisis is the divergence and even polarization of generalizing and individualizing ways of studying Africa. We have already mentioned above that these methods are associated with two research traditions:-

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yami of Russian African studies. The first tradition tends towards political and economic research, has a political orientation, and identifies itself in the context of development the second one has a historical-ethnological or anthropological basis, based on politics ("conjuncture") and assesses its significance in the context of preserving traditions, reproducing life, and historical continuity.

We consider it incorrect to "divide" these traditions according to the local principle: Moscow versus Leningrad. Both individual researchers at the Institute of African Studies (N. B. Kochakova, I. E. Sinitsyna) and the cultural and historical direction of African studies at the Institute of General History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, headed by A. B. Davidson, have contributed to the individualization of images and meanings of African history, while it is difficult to imagine the works of D. A. Olderogge, V. V.V. Bocharova, N. M. Girenko, and V. A. Popova. And the synthesis of both approaches is known in Russian African studies (L. E. Kubbel, Yu. M. Kobishchanov).

At the same time, as noted above, both traditions were characterized by elements of self-sufficiency and increased self-esteem. Each of the approaches claimed a more accurate and in-depth understanding of the African reality. However, the trend towards competition and alienation was rather latent until the 1990s. Officially, different areas of African studies could only identify themselves with the Marxist-Leninist theory, which established a standard correlation between the general and the special in knowledge about Africa. Now that the former normative space of Marxist theory has lost its significance, the question of the relationship between the two approaches has become open. Their polarization occurs when the basis of African studies begins to lock in one of the two traditions of studying Africa, and it - this tradition - gets a clear normative and value value, becomes a way of scientific self-identification of the researcher.

After a prolonged crisis and the collapse of normative theory, Russian African studies is looking for ways of a new theoretical self-determination. But the synthesis of the general and the particular, the universal and the individual, the logical and the historical has not been achieved. On the contrary, there were signs of self-linking of generalizing and individualizing tendencies, of self-identification of researchers with the research tradition in which they grew up and got used to. This extends the cognitive crisis to the area of methodology: both traditions begin to compete for this area or do not notice the alternative approach.

The idea of understanding Africa through the artifacts of the researcher-interpreter's own activity contributes to the absolutization of the individualizing approach: strong-willed motives, a special style of presentation of the material, poetic images of Africa, up to the "feeling of Africa" and the ability to build a myth around oneself, one's colleagues and the object of study. In the 60s and 70s of the 20th century, a direct sense of Africa was considered a monopoly of writers, artists, and journalists. Now the semi-magical "sense of Africa" often acquires the status of a self-valuable, almost sacred reality, which takes the place of the empirical reality of facts. Independent significance is attached to artifacts of literature, art, and artistic creation in general. Sometimes, as a constructed reality, they are associated with the hope that Africa will emerge from the crisis and decline. 10 years ago, V. A. Beilis formulated an optimistic scenario for the development of Africa, based on the experiments of African writers. The design turned out to be, if not utopian, then idyllic-

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lyrical: love and romantic family relationships described in modern African literature will find analogs in real life, "true love" will turn into a value and foundation of culture, will keep Africa (and not only it!) from falling 21 .

Underlying assumptions of the generalizing approach are also changing. There is not much left of the previous tradition of formational attribution of African societies, and more importance is attached to the search for a holistic image, common theoretical and value orientations for practical assessment of the processes taking place in Africa. The previous typological schemes are being replaced by binary normative-value models: wild-regulated market, strong-weak state, decolonization - recolonization, etc. These models serve as a kind of standard, through comparison with which it is possible to judge the change in empirical reality.

Recently, there have been signs of an even broader and more complex relativization of the methodological foundations of African studies. It begins to affect the integrity of its methodological core and the unity of the cognitive space of the disciplines included in African studies. In some works, the traditions of generalizing and individualizing approaches lose their independent meaning, and they are replaced by various types of constructing social reality not as an empirical structure or fundamental typological scheme, but as an empirical process of identifying the object under study and the researcher himself with certain cultural and mental attitudes ("anti-Western" cultural environment) or with certain scenarios of global development. The social construct is separated from the empirical.

In the new global section of national African studies, scientific knowledge is already defined in terms such as strategy, project, program, etc. These terms fix the attitude to reality as a process and result of design, where the subject is inseparable from the image, the trend from the intention, the meaning from the plan, the real situation from the strategic choice. "One gets the impression," A. I. Nekless reflects in this new context, " that the real task of the modern economy is to: to the economy It lies not so much in the field of fundamental science, but in the field of universal technologies and strategies of behavior in conditions of limited and contradictory knowledge of the depths of the economic space. This deficit is especially noticeable in the transitional moments of history, when many well-established dogmas are collapsing. Perhaps the current state of the world economy would have been better understood if economics had given up its conscious and subconscious claims to the status of a natural science discipline, ... if it had recognized itself as part of ethics and politics, that is, the sphere of goal-setting and the "categorical imperative" of human behavior in the world" 22 .

The culturological (culturocentric) version of scientific knowledge, which is also formed in post - Soviet African studies, in turn removes the fragile line between the general validity of scientific knowledge and the identity of the subject-object of research, the rationality of the scientific approach and knowledge of the mythological type (pre-scientific?). Science is likened to a cultural tradition, which makes it indistinguishable from an image, symbol, ritual, or myth. This approach - not only as a general principle, but also as a research strategy - is developed in his recent works by V. R. Arsenyev. The construction of a literary text, in which the author is reincarnated as a hero, is considered not only as an additional (literary, hermeneutical) way of understanding a different culture, but also as a special reality-the language of images, associations - closer to "the nature of the object than the rationalization of scientific thinking" 23 . The question is, is it possible to build a single and universally valid subject field of African studies on the basis of this "special reality"?

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* * *

Africa has always been a "hard nut to crack" for positivist-oriented science, describing social reality "as it is". It is difficult not in the sense of the possibility of reducing the studied societies to empirical and theoretical reconstructions of the primary African reality, but in the sense of the adequacy of the theory of reality. Both empirical models and" big theories " exist as if parallel to this reality, touching and connecting with it, enclosing it in political and ideological constructions, but not reflecting it adequately and objectively in their fundamental foundations. So it was in the end XIX century and at the beginning of the 20th century, at the time of the crisis of classical evolutionism and the subsequent diffusionism in social anthropology. This was the case in the late 1920s and 1930s, when the discrepancy between functionalist theory and social change was revealed, and political anthropology emerged on African soil as an independent scientific sub-discipline. Such is the state of affairs today, after the theoretical and ideological concepts of modernization, African identity, Afro - Marxism (from the "ujamaa theory" to the concepts of non-development and social orientation) have shown their inconsistency.

The idea of African studies as a fully established interdisciplinary complex is related to how the possibilities of universal, rational and scientific knowledge of African realities are currently evaluated, which dominates in the scientific consciousness - confidence in the objective nature of approaches to the studied societies or doubts about their objectivity, reliability and importance, methodological relativism. It can be noted that the development of scientific knowledge about African societies combines stabilization and crisis trends, and one or the other takes over.

The stabilization trend is accompanied by confidence in the ability of science (more precisely, scientific knowledge imported into the political and intellectual centers of the continent) to achieve an understanding of all aspects of African development as development subject to general, fundamental and logically understandable patterns. The dominant feature of this state was and still is scientism - the orientation of knowledge towards modernization and innovation, supported by a belief in the Eurocentric ideals of progressivism, rationalism, etc.

The crisis trend arises at the moment of disillusionment with the latest universal models and recipes for African development, acute awareness of the speculative or artificial nature of these constructions in relation to the"African soil". The crisis state of African studies, as a rule, opens the way for radical criticism of its theoretical foundations and methods as Eurocentric, attempts to create alternative, Afrocentric theories and strategies that emphasize the traditional ("indigenous development") local social structures, their historical continuity and cultural identity, and not development in general, are becoming more frequent. The anti-Western and anti-modernist orientation characteristic of these theories is perfectly combined with deeper and more fundamental anti-scientific attitudes and sentiments. Despite all the external diversity of these attitudes (ethnic Romanticism, racial afrocentrism, mythologization of African history and culture) they rely mostly on the romantic cultural-critical consciousness. Consciousness, which denies the independent role of science and its functions in culture, considers the position of the scientist's involvement in the life of the society under study to be self-valuable, recognizes logical statements as equal to value and normative judgments.

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The existence of African studies as a complex of scientific knowledge proper, with a certain level of interdisciplinary connections and a common theoretical basis, seems to be more consistent with the positional trend of scientific consciousness. It can be argued that African studies developed most dynamically during the crisis periods of social disintegration and political conflicts on the continent, for example, under the decisive influence of the process of decolonization. But this objection is only partially true. In the context of decolonization, the problem-subject field of African studies was rapidly forming and expanding, while its empirical development, consolidation, and theoretical reconstruction were based rather on a "solid foundation" in the form of scientific (or quasi-scientific) ideas and projects that were supposed to bring Africa out of a state of backwardness, crisis, and instability. In the 60s and 70s of the 20th century, a rapidly expanding body of knowledge about African societies was consolidated around the ideas of development sociology (from "catch-up modernization" to dependent development), economic-centrist theories, and the concept of "tiermondism".

The current state of the scientific foundations of African studies is hardly stable. The very ability of science to create - through universal schemes and general rules - a rational basis for an adequate understanding of the historical experience and development prospects of Africa is being questioned. Even with the most optimistic view of the accumulation of real knowledge about the mechanisms of development of African societies, it lags behind the formal improvement of the conceptual apparatus of science and technology for collecting information, and the existing gap is generally not decreasing, but increasing. This is indicated at least by the declining prognostic capabilities of the theoretical sections of African studies. And the total amount of knowledge about the cultural and social "space" of the African world is not so great. We have to agree with A. B. Davidson that even now we don't know much about Africa 24

The failure of almost all global projects and attempts to modernize many African countries raises doubts about the objectivity and reliability of concepts and theories based on non-African development experience and ignoring their own dynamics, their own priorities and values of the African "periphery". The typical African situation, in which, as B. S. Mirzekhanov writes, "people are freed from the burden of choice, all peoples are given one idea - the idea of development", cannot but cause criticism 25

The famous French Africanist J. Copano traced the transformation of the idea of "modernity" and related concepts, following the change in the image of Africa in anthropology and sociology in the last 30 years (in the "on-board journal of one generation of Africanists", as he himself writes). From political and intellectual fetishes to theoretical fictions and pseudonyms that have little relation to real life. As a result: "African knowledge has been multiplied in an impressive way over the past 30 years, but it has not led to anything and only turned out to be infected with the illusions of divelopmentalism, thiermondialism and self-reliance or liberalism... The African crisis is a crisis of knowledge and theories applied to Black Africa, associated with a stage, phase, mutation of structures of long time duration, still poorly defined" 26

In the wake of "afropessimism", there is also a very harsh relativistic criticism of the universal theories of development that dominated in the 60s and 70s of the XX century. Under the blow of this criticism were first economic-centric theories, which by the 80s of the last century had already faced a crisis of modernization, and then the entire ideologeme of development based on the perception of "universal modernity". Africa in this critique stands out as a model of the greatest deculturation under the influence of Western civilization.

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A natural and quite rational response to relativistic criticism is the emergence of complex development models that emphasize the authenticity and identity of such development (the rapid development of the informal economy and its inherent "informal" sociality system, successful rural development projects, etc.). By definition, the cultural-centric position is included in these concepts. However, relativistic criticism goes even further: cultural centrism turns into a paradigm that is negative in relation to modern development in general. Culturalism focuses on the critique of the West and modern civilization, and within this framework of "traditional science" as limited by the Eurocentric vision of the world, the tradition of suppression.

Cultural criticism could play a more positive role if contemporary African studies continued to absolutize scientistic approaches to traditional societies. However, almost all major trends and concepts in African studies have softened the scientific standard, rejecting the extremes of organicism and evolutionism. Economic concepts fit into complex constructions that have a cultural dimension (from the ideas of globalism to the cultural and historical theory of "modernity"). Social anthropology resolutely separates the laws of biological and socio-cultural evolution, emphasizing the ambiguous nature of evolutionary changes in society and their multilinear or probabilistic, nonlinear nature. Sociology focuses on the sensitivity of African cultures to social change and development. Thus, the confrontation between scientism and anti-scientism in modern African studies is not so great. Does this not mean that romantic cultural criticism lies outside the framework of African studies as a science, expressing the aspirations of an anti-Western counter-culture?

I would refrain from such a conclusion. It seems that in at least one very important respect, cultural centrism, relativistic criticism plays a positive role in the scientific development of African studies, forming a necessary moment for its self-development. We are talking about reflection, a critical assessment of the relationship between two types or levels of African reality: primary objective (in the sense of independence from the will and motives of the researcher), which is in line with African continuity and identity, and reality as a theoretical or political construct, determined by attributing to it certain cultural principles, a certain logic of behavior. After the appearance of the works of J. R. R. Tolkien The question of the correlation between objectified scientific knowledge ("ecumenical science") and cultural traditions-stereotypes, images, values-has acquired an independent scientific significance 27 , especially for Oriental studies and African studies, which operate (willingly or unwittingly) with concepts - images of the East and Africa.

Today, when the straightforward, progressive schemes of Africa's development have generally been eliminated, it is obvious that the basic image of the "other" - African reality-plays no less, if not more, a role in shaping scientific ideas about Africa than the actual research technique itself. An image that is inherent in the culture whose attitudes and stereotypes are shared by the researcher. This image is no less a given or a reality than the object being studied. However, unlike the latter, it - the image-has a constructed character, is built on the attributes and criteria attributed to the object of research. Moreover, only the a priori presence of such an image can radically reduce uncertainty about the object you are looking for: in order to effectively use historical or statistical sources, you need to have a stereotyped image of them in your mind. By preserving the image of the object under study, the researcher confirms the universal significance of their culture as a participant in an intercultural dialogue.

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It is clear, for example, that in the scientific usage of the former colonial powers, the concepts of "development" and "modernization" in relation to Africa have long been determined by the images and attitudes of European cultural superiority that developed during the creation of colonial empires. Influenced by these images, acculturation concepts were at the core of African versions of modernization theory until the early 1970s. They proved that successful modernization can occur through borrowing external samples of Western culture 28 Another characteristic example of the "cultural modeling" of scientific knowledge about Africa is the image of it as a single space or country. As Zh. writes: Copano, it would never occur to anyone to say that what is good for Iran is good for Singapore, but it is possible for Black Africa 29

The culturalist critique of fundamental ideas of development, modernization, etc. reveals an internal, "intimate connection" between these ideas and the attitudes inherent in the European cultural tradition, the European "picture of the world": a universal view of the world, the absolutization of universal principles of being, an orientation towards rational behavior and rational organization of social life. Culturalism also reveals the importance of the constructivist approach to reality as a process of identifying individuals with cultural norms and patterns of behavior, and the absence of an absolute boundary between this approach and the objectivist view of a social object as an invariant or type of social interaction. Science creates theoretical abstractions that do not always claim to describe real phenomena and in this sense are constructed objects. On the other hand, social reality itself is a hard-to-separate combination of invariant, system-structural features and situationally changing attribution of community traits to oneself and others. The more difficult it is to separate them, the further away the observer is from the culture being studied.

Nevertheless, science cannot arbitrarily connect empirical reality, independent of the observer, and the objects it constructs, especially if these objects are constructed without proper reflection, assessment of one's own and other people's identity, on the basis of moral or emotional motivation.

A synthesis of objective and culturalist approaches is possible and often necessary, but their syncretism is dangerous when a researcher begins to speak on behalf of a "different" culture or attributes their own cultural characteristics to the society being studied. It is not the constructed images themselves that are dangerous, but their displacement on the basis of fictitious and factual meaning, the appearance of cultural fictions, quasi-objective imaginary ones and working with them as with real entities.

African studies forms its subject area, relying largely on the use of constructed objects. Due to the lack of sources, African history is constructed in general (especially its early stages), African traditions and traditional foundations of ethno-social organisms are reconstructed (starting mainly from the so-called remnants), and in the 1960s and 1970s, a purely model construction of modern African societies as nation-states was established. The danger for African studies is not these constructions in themselves, but their identification with social integrity, with the real driving forces of African development. The belief in the success of decolonization and the irreversibility of modernizing African countries has obscured this danger. Now this belief is crumbling, and with it the objective status of many theoretical and ideological constructs, the social principle of constructing Africa's past, present, and especially future, is being undermined. Who can guarantee that the future of Africa belongs to the nation - states? Is it possible to be sure that a genuine social evo-

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люция местных (реальных) обществ идет в направлении разрыва с традициями, а не в направлении их модернизации, возрождения и укрепления на новой основе?

There are still no works in Russian African studies that assess the general state of its theoretical and methodological foundations. The question of the relationship between constructed and empirical reality, if it is raised, is only in terms of specific research methods and operational procedures. In my opinion, this indicates not so much the stability of our knowledge about Africa, but rather the slow or latent development of crisis trends in it. It seems to me indisputable that in the 1990s, the stabilization trends in the development of domestic African studies were replaced by crisis trends. Its theoretical and methodological core is destabilized: the fundamental conceptual apparatus of research, the connection of theorizing with descriptions of individual objects. Relativization of methods, theories, and conclusions fully correlates with the general crisis of African studies as an area of objective and reliable knowledge. In the Russian context, this process is open and more complex due to the greater integrity of the interdisciplinary complex, the connection between individualizing and generalizing approaches, and the weakness of culturalist criticism.

The cognitive crisis in African studies requires special research and discussion, as well as its possible consequences. Now the significance of this crisis for the further development of African studies is difficult to assess unequivocally. For a long time, methodological work in African studies was aimed at growing and improving the reliability of the source, added knowledge. At the same time, the state and development of so-called presuppositional or a priori knowledge, which is associated with the cultural identity of the researcher, images and values of their own and the studied culture, and performs the function of goal-setting and socio-cultural orientation in science, remained in the shadows 30 The crisis in question reveals first of all the weakness and limitations of presupposed knowledge, its inadequacy to the actual complexity of the processes taking place in Africa. In this connection, for the first time, the problem of correlation between empirical and constructed objects in the African knowledge becomes really acute.

There are different variants of this correlation, and each of them can have its own impact on the prospects for the development of African studies, the degree of its integrity as a subject area. The version that is put up for discussion as new paradigms for studying peripheral societies (globalistics-cultural studies) actively pedals the topic of presupposed knowledge and the need to update it. At the same time, it is unclear how priority attention to images and models of the world (global and local-cultural) can affect the quality of African knowledge.

Let's ask two questions:

1. Will African studies retain its integrity as a special subject area?

2. Will it retain the quality of fundamental science, objective and generally valid knowledge, or will the functions of expert, geopolitical, technological, and quasi-mythological knowledge come to the fore?

notes

1 Girenko N. M. Ethnos: the tragic myth of the XX century. Educational and Theoretical Journal of the Leningrad School of African Studies, St. Petersburg, 2000, No. 1, p. 58.

2 Lebedeva E. E. Tropical Africa on the threshold of the XXI century / / Postindustrial world: center, periphery, Russia. Collection 2. Globalization and the periphery. IMEMO RAS, Moscow, 1999, pp. 205-233.

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3 This contributed to the rethinking of many basic theoretical concepts (political genesis, state, social management, political culture, etc.), the development of domestic African sociology and political science, and the regional version of the theory of formations.

4 The traditions of the two schools are united by the scientific heritage of L. E. Kubbel.

5 Jordansky V. B. Animals, people, and gods. Essays on African Mythology, Moscow, 1991, p. 7.

6 See the discussion of the world-system approach, its opportunities and disadvantages: Making Sense of World capitalism (and. Wallerstein and the world-system approach in modern Western literature). Collection of articles. IMEMO RAS, Moscow, 1997.

We have in mind, first of all, the latest domestic versions of the theory of world-integrity proposed by the author. M. A. Cheshkov (the idea of a global community of humanity) and But . I. Neklessy (ideas of the New World and "new regionalism" - "geo-economic areas").: Cheshkov M. A. Global context of post-Soviet Russia. Ocherki teorii i metodologii mirotselostnosti [Essays on the theory and methodology of world integrity], Moscow, 1999, pp. 9-136; Neklessa A. I. Postmodern world in a new coordinate system / / Global Community: New coordinate system (approaches to the problem). St. Petersburg, 2000, pp. 11-78.

8 Neklessa A. I. Decree, Op. pp. 51-52; Cheshkov M. A. Decree. op. p. 65, 71.

9 Golan M. M. The future of the world economy and the fate of backward countries. Global Community, p. 292.

10 Arsenyev V. R. Bambara: from a way of life to images of the world and works of art. Experience of ethnographic museology, St. Petersburg, 2000, p. 19.

11 See T. B. Shchepanskaya's preface to the book by V. R. Arsenyev.

12 Arsenyev V. R. Decree. op. p. 189.

13 In the same place.

14 Shchepanskaya T. B. Edict. op. p. 12.

15 Ibid., p. 13.

16 Arsenyev V. R. Decree. op. p. 190.

17 Baylis V. A. Dominant features of African cultures - signs of civilizational community / / Cultural heritage: Continuity and changes. Issue 3. Collection of reviews. INION OF THE USSR ACADEMY OF Sciences, 1991, p. 67.

18 The ambiguity and fluidity of cultural phenomena, for example, relativizes the concept of "traditional Africa". The polysemy of language as a sign communication system relativizes the relationship between kinship systems and systems of kinship terms (see Fig.: Burykin A. A. The opposition of reciprocity and non-reciprocity in the systems of kinship terms: correlation of linguistic and ethnosociological components / / Algebra of kinship. Issue 4. St. Petersburg, 1999, pp. 33-38).

19 Baylis V. A. Edict. op. p. 125.

20 Cheshkov M. A. Decree. op. p. 113, 129.

21 Baylis V. A. Decree. op. p. 127.

22 Neklessa A. I. Decree. op. p. 61.

23 Arsenyev V. R. Decree. op. s. 190-191.

24 Davidson A. B. Muse of Nikolai Gumilyov's Travels, Moscow: Nauka Publ., 1992, p. 8.

25 B. S. Mirzekhanov Intellectuals, power and society in Black Africa. IVI RAS, Moscow, 2001, p. 46.

26 n. La longue marche de la modernite africaine. Savoirs, intellectuels, democratic. P.: Editions Karthala. 1990. P. 19-20, 111.

27 J. The Grand Tradition: Science and Society in East and West. L., 1969; Said E.L. Orientalism. P., 1978. In Russian cultural studies, this problem is posed by A.V. Gordon.: Gordon A.V. Modern civilization between world-culture and cultural area (Europe and Asia in the XVIII-XX centuries). Scientific and analytical review. INION RAS, Moscow, 1998.

28 Erasov B. C. Social Cultural Studies, Moscow, 1996, p. 282.

29 n. Op. cit. P. 85.

30 For more information on the role of both types of scientific knowledge in the process of cultural interaction, see: I. N. Ionov Methodological problems of the theory of civilizations and the Russian philosophical tradition // Problems of historical cognition. Proceedings of the international Conference. Moscow, May 19-21, 1996, Moscow, 1999, pp. 65-67.

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