To all students and graduates
of the High Anthropological School University
of 1998-2015
Pages: 296
This book by Mark Tkachuk contains three essays written in different years, from 1997 to 2015. What unites them is a certain conceptual similarity of analysis of the catastrophic processes that first manifested on the former USSR territory to later acquire a more global character. The author is a professional archaeologist, editor-in-chief of Stratum plus, an international journal of archaeology and cultural anthropology, and a well-known ex-politician. This background enables him to assess the above phenomena not only through the lens of different theories (from the critical theory to the dynamic structuralism), but also through his own experience.
What are the driving forces behind crises and catastrophes? — The author proposes to seek answers by analyzing antiquity and looking at modernity as a certain outcome of some long-term periodical processes.
Science Editor:
Doctor of History Igor V. Manzura (Kishinev)
Reviewers:
Doctor of Mathematics Victor I. Borshevich (Kishinev)
Vasile Ernu (Bucharest)
CONTENTS
From the Author ... 9
Non-Russian Idea. An experience of patriotic hermeneutics ... 15
I. Where one’s Homeland begins?
Archaeological approach to the question ... 15
II. Main songs about auld things
1. Binary analogies? ... 23
2. A story to nobody’s interest, or On the eve of a semantic revolution ... 26
3. A complot of those alive ... 29
III. An expedition into my own handmade theory
1. A complot of those unborn. Hypothesis of threshold meanings ... 37
2. Birth and death in synergetic terms ... 47
3. From the ridiculous to the sublime. A trajectory of the absurd ... 52
IV. When one’s Homeland begins
1. A complot of the dead ones ... 65
2. Europe’s dreams ... 74
3. The hollow from the inside. “The Great Scythia” as Russia’s birth injury ... 105
4. Postdiction. “Sphinx” turns its head ... 127
5. Therapy. A monument to a destroyed monument ... 136
Literature ... 138
Road to Bucharest
If Moldavia disappears… ... 143
It can happen! ... 143
A trickster country ... 146
Between Asian lashing and European shop-window ... 160
To Europeanize, until the country is completely eliminated! ... 179
Instead of conclusion. Can a miracle happen in the Dniester region? ... 197
The coming past, or the present future? ... 205
Brave New World... ... 205
Patriarchal remake: a simulation on blood ... 211
From an axial project-based approach towards liberal archaikos ... 216
Three theses on three types of history ... 226
Thesis 1. ‘A strange’ history of cultures ... 228
Thesis 2. Global racing: history of instruments and technologies ... 234
Thesis 3. 'Cro-Magnon Woods’ and social gravitation ... 238
Resistance of history: project vacancy ... 246
Literature ... 254
Victor Borshevich
Culture and progress in the catastrophic context of social gravitation, revelation of Mark Tkachuk ... 257
Vasile Ernu
Who is Mark Tkachuk: a partisan, a frontier guard, a smuggler, a customs officer or an interpreter in the borderland?
Intelligentsia in the peripheral empire: between the ‘Romanian orchestra’ and the ‘Balkan whiff’ .. 277
References ... 293