Bondaruk T. Ukrainian legal tradition in the context of cultural memory
Among the significant number of approaches to the study of legal tradition (the starting point of which there is a vision of the right as a cultural phenomenon), the concept of cultural memory, offered by the German researchers Jan and Aleide Assman, attracts attention.
In particular, cultural memory is characterized as a means of identification; as an integral element and component of the social and individual consciousness; how prolonged in time; as having a high degree of formalization; as related to social groups for which it is a condition of self-identification; as such, "fixation points" or «objective forms» of which are «figures of memories»: texts, images, buildings, inscriptions, etc. Its structure forms a functional and accumulative memory.
At the same time, the establishment or stabilization of identity, which can be defined as political/national from a certain time, is by and large a factor in the formation and existence of both legal tradition and cultural memory. Moreover, the sustainability or duration of the existence of certain elements of cultural memory depends on the degree of its integration into traditions and how much the latter corresponds to the cultural needs of the community.
And the legal tradition and cultural memory can be interpreted as a special symbolic form of the transfer of cultural meanings and correlate with the notion of mentality that can be defined as the historically formed measure of the intellectual energy of a certain society, the corresponding emotional atmosphere and the psychological framework of culture, the spectrum of life positions and behavioral guidance, which Socium prefers.
The Ukrainian legal tradition can be defined as an invariant, on the basis of which consist in varying degrees of co-ordinated, mostly materialized, expressions of legal consciousness, legal mentality, legal understanding, legal culture within a certain legal space, due to the plurality of society, ethnic, religious, regional variegatedness, which eventually provides its manifestations of a synthetic nature.
Important in the study of legal tradition appear to be the concept of the canon proposed by J. Assaman, on the basis of which the concept of legal canon is proposed.
Key words: Ukrainian legal tradition, cultural memory, identity, values, legal canon.
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