Road as an Object of Conceptual Reflexivity

This article is dedicated to making sense of the cultural term “road” in research literature. Also, the author makes a disclosure of different “road” term interpretations in various scientific articles. The necessity of this analysis is contingent on terminological variety, which leads to problems while using terms even in one and the same article. In this article we are trying to highlight a dominant term for different fields of knowledge for the word “road”. It turns out that in ethnologist articles specialists describe the road as an archetype, a mythologeme. The archetype of the road as a sort of spatial archetype appeared in the collective mind and outspoken in ethnic texts; traditions and rituals play an important role in the world view of different nations. Describing a road as a mythologeme allows to give it a sacral meaning, a road as a way to the “other world”, the borderland between ‘us’ and ‘them’, a dark place. In literary articles the road is viewed as chronotopos, assembling spatial and time relationship in literary texts. A number of researchers highlight that the “road” chronotopos as a storyline creator and organizer is reflected in Russian literature of XIX-XXI centuries and act independently in the texts of different periods and different authors. The analysis of the road as a metaphor can also be found in linguistic research. Authors suggest different ways of metaphorization, such as “way of life/way of death”, “way of perception”, “way of work”, “way of salvation/way of sin”, “way of creation/way of destruction”. The culturological method permits the authors to look at the road as a concept and divine the terms “road” and “way”. Within philosophy of culture a “road” had a meaning of a cultural universal relevant to different cultures, world models: mythological, religious, philosophical, artistical. Art science makes an accent on characteristic art’s image of the road. The article concludes about the importance of the phenomenon of the road as an integral part of culture at all stages of its development, as well as a fairly thorough study of the road as a cultural phenomenon, the formation of various conceptual schemes for its description in the domestic research literature.