Five Lonely Lighted Windows of an After Hours History Department: Models, Practices and Rituals of Informal Intellectual Communities (case of Tyumen State University, second half of 1990th -first half of 2000th)

Abstract

The article deals with the attempting to reconceptualisation the metaphor «University as community» into micro-interactionism, that has been developed by American sociologists Erving Goffman, Randall Collins and others. From that point of view, community is considered as an event. Thus, it focuses on what Randall Collins called the «generality of human communicative operations» and «interaction ritual chains». The communities so defined are not always in everyday life, but they are assembled and disassembled under particular conditions. They are unstable, situational, fluid. Description and explanation of the informal intellectual communities on an example of the history department of Tyumen State University as the typical representative of the raznochinetz universities to be had in the Soviet Union in 1970-s in new, rapidly growing the capitals of the Soviet Republics and regional centers at the base of teacher's training colleges. Informal intellectual communities as a defined communicative locales of intellectual networks were generated by identity crisis inherent in the transition from Periphery to Provinces. The actors of intellectual communications are aimed at creating and development of the free intellectual sphere, or in other words, their own in ward university. Based on this example, we consider such basic interaction rituals as lecture and dispute as an essential elements of intellectual networks.