We are used to thinking that we live in an “unenchanted world” where there are no secrets, but only secrets - information that someone is hiding from someone. But the mystery, sent out the door of modernity as one of the central forms of thought, returns through the window as a key figure of the imagination - along with detective stories, spy stories, TV series about the mysterious, and fantasy books. What gives the secret lasting importance and makes it return to our lives? What role do these riddles and mysteries play in everyday life? How are they related to the foundations of social life? These questions formed the basis of Dmitry Kurakin's research, the results of which were published in the American Journal of Cultural Sociology. In his work, he built a cultural-sociological theory of mystery and illustrated its effect on the “tragedy of the Dyatlov Pass”.
Back in February 1959, a group of tourists-skiers died in the Northern Urals under unclear circumstances: their tent was cut from the inside, and half-naked and unclothed bodies were found in the distance. Despite the colossal amount of available information (extensive materials of the official investigation, the diaries of tourists and the photographic films they filmed during the last trip, numerous interviews with friends and members of the search expedition), the cause of their death remains unclear to this day. Now, almost sixty years later, amateur researchers are studying the circumstances of their death, hypothesizing what happened then. The tragedy of Dyatlov's tour group and the colossal excitement around the mystery of her death (hundreds of articles in the media, more than a dozen books, numerous TV shows and documentaries, thematic forums on the Internet,expeditions to the Urals and attempts to reconstruct events) well illustrates the attractiveness of mystery in the modern world.
Why is mystery important to sociology? Just as knowledge of the microcosm in physics reveals to us that under the surface of well-known objects and bodies is hidden colossal energy, which sometimes bursts to the surface, in the sociology of culture, seemingly insignificant phenomena play a special role. For example, the children's cult of "treasures", which Roger Caillois writes about in his essay "Secret Treasures", which refer to the fundamental principles of how culture works. These phenomena can be recognized by the excess of the emotional response they elicit, compared to what would be expected from their pragmatic value. Why do children attach such importance to useless trinkets? Why do hundreds of people spend days, months and years to figure out what killed the Ural tourists more than half a century ago? If we do not understand this, we also do not knowhow culture energizes our lives and how the social foundations of our desires, hobbies and aspirations are arranged.
As in physics, in order to get closer to understanding the operation of these all-pervading forces, one must start with those cases when they manifest themselves in the most obvious way - as they say, "burst to the surface", as, for example, in many chemical reactions. Nuclear reaction undermines the self-evidence of Newtonian mechanics, the world of macro-objects that inhabit the life we know. In social life, the role of Newtonian mechanics is played by formal rationality, in which Max Weber saw the main constituent force of modernity, which will more and more “disenchant” the life once richly saturated with mysterious forces. We live in an intelligent world where human actions are largely governed by clear and easily discernible rational motives. Even violations of public order and crimes do not disturb the clarity of this world,when there are understandable and predictable motives behind them, such as following their own selfish interests and the desire for profit. The very existence of mystery and its extraordinary attractiveness, the ability to excite, indicates that culture works in a different way than we could imagine by painting a picture of rationally acting individuals for whom it is only a way to communicate with each other. This makes it an excellent "strategic research material". This makes it an excellent "strategic research material". This makes it an excellent "strategic research material".
How is the sociological riddle of the mystery solved? As a starting point, it is worth paying attention to two theories that allow you to get closer to the solution. The first is found in Luke Boltansky's book Mysteries and conspiracies: Detective stories, spy novels and the making of modern societies, and the second in Philip Smith's Why war? The cultural logic of Iraq, the Gulf War, and Suez. The essence of Boltanski's insightful observation is that mystery, which usually appears to us as a local and isolated phenomenon, is in fact directly related to a much broader semantic context. The growing importance of mystery, manifested, for example, in the growth of the genre of detective and spy novels, is associated with the idea of the lawfulness of social life and the idea ofthat chains of causality permeate our lives and make it clear and rational. Secrets indicate - apparent or real - the interruptions of these chains and thus pose a threat to the whole picture of the world. The mystery turns out to be a local anomaly, whose potential is entirely determined by the power of the global explanatory paradigm with which we make sense of the world that this mystery challenges.
Philip Smith, in turn, shows how the genre characteristics of the discussions and discussions that develop around an event determine the decisions taken in relation to it. To do this, he analyzes the socio-political discourse that preceded and accompanies potential and current military conflicts, based on the theory of genres by Northrop Fry. Smith shows that what the prevailing genre of these discussions turns out to be, to a significant degree, also depends on what decisions are ultimately made - military or peaceful resolution of the conflict. The genre sets the semantic markup of the discussion, thanks to which common sense recognizes some actions as logical and justified, and others as excessive and unacceptable. For example, "low mimesis" forms a restrained and pragmatic approach to political decisions,in which dialogue and political bargaining seem more reasonable than an open conflict, and the “apocalyptic” genre, on the contrary, forms an acute polarization of the opposing sides, in which an uncompromising struggle against evil looks like the only meaningful way out. In analyzing the political events of the past several decades, Smith found that often these genres are set in motion by some kind of "keys", switches, flash events or statements that shape the perception of conflict and give rise to a particular genre - which subsequently leads to war or peace. Smith found that often these genres are set in motion by some kind of "keys", switches, flash events or utterances that shape the perception of conflict and give rise to a particular genre - which subsequently leads to war or peace. Smith found that often these genres are set in motion by some kind of "keys", switches, flash events or utterances that shape the perception of conflict and give rise to a particular genre - which subsequently leads to war or peace.
If you combine these two ideas, it becomes obvious that there is a "trigger" - an event that triggers a reaction of collective emotional excitement associated with a mystery. This event is not an accidental or additional element of it, but on the contrary, is directly related to its structure, the foundations of which are revealed by Boltanski's model. The “trigger narrative” model can explain this. It relies on the resources of Durkheimian cultural sociology, reveals the cultural construction of the attractiveness of mystery.
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Mystery is an “emotional attractor,” a cultural construct whose specificity is essentially the ability to attract attention and evoke strong emotions. It draws this ability from a fundamental property of culture: the emotional charge of its elements and the relationship between them. By connecting the trigger and the narrative, the mystery triggers a reaction that harnesses the energy of this cultural emotional charge. Thus, at an elementary level, it has a relational nature, i.e. is determined not by a (mysterious) "event" as such and not by a narrative that sets the context in which this event can only appear "mysterious", but by their interaction. A trigger - an event, symbol, or other object - challenges a master narrative; outside the context of the narrative, this event has no meaning,just as in the absence of this event, the narrative is not thematic and belongs to the passive part of our worldview. When these elements combine, the effect of emotional attraction occurs: our imaginations are overwhelmed and draws vivid and emotionally charged images. This is the elementary mechanism of emotional attraction and it provides the basis for the formation of mystery.
The mystery of Dyatlov's tour group, which served as an illustration in this work, consists of a number of such emotional attractors, in each of which it is possible to reconstruct the connection between the master narrative and the "trigger" that actualizes it. These master narratives can be thought of as hierarchies, from a humanistic narrative challenged by the very fact of death, which frames mystery as a tragedy, and a rationalist one, challenged by the apparently illogical actions of leaving the tent on a winter night in a half-naked form; to a whole series of special narratives directly related to the generation of versions of solving the mystery.
The secret of Dyatlov's tour group is notable for the coexistence of several dozen versions, from rational (snowfall) to conspiracy (testing of secret weapons) and esoteric (UFO, Bigfoot, Mansi magic). Each version is based on a master narrative that is challenged by a trigger that catches the imagination. So, the name of the mountain where the tragedy took place is said to translate as "Mountain of the Dead", and this launches a number of esoteric versions. The radioactive traces found on the clothes of the deceased tourists launch an "ecological narrative" that forms a worldview in which these traces are a glaring anomaly that becomes the semantic center of the entire collision. The master narrative of the “closed body”, central for our time, places traumas in the foreground, and not those that are most life-threatening, but those thatthat most strikes the imagination (because they are most strongly opposed to the model of a "closed body"); thus, the missing language of one of the bodies becomes the key center of the imagination and underlies several versions at once.
In addition to this, the elementary level, the mystery has another - a complex level, which is set by the configuration of elementary attractors. The key characteristics of a mystery configuration are uncertainty and tension. Uncertainty is not just a lack of information, it is a state where the fundamental foundations of common sense are called into question. In this, the secret differs from the secret, another sociological problem, the comprehension of which begins already with the works of the classic of the discipline Georg Simmel, and today it is represented mainly by works on the study of conspiracies and the culture of suspicion. The significance of the secret is determined by the importance of the hidden information, while the social effects of the secret do not in the least depend on how important the unknown is: if the former is rooted in the work of social institutions, then the latter is the pure work of cultural structures,free from someone's interests and needs. The power of mystery is that it makes us, at least for a moment, doubt the very foundations of our worldview: the unshakable power of causality, the meaning and importance of life, the reliable separation of our lives from the unpredictable and threatening "supernatural."
Tension is another property of mystery, associated with temporality: mystery lasts in time. The solution destroys uncertainty; in this sense, mystery is a kind of "enduring instability." This differentiates it from gambling or the stock exchange, where excitement is associated with a rapidly approaching resolution. The tension of secrecy is often determined by a lack of information, a semantic vacuum, but in the case of the tragedy of Dyatlov's group, it, on the contrary, is supported by the simultaneous coexistence of a number of versions against the background of a colossal amount of information, none of which is free from contradictions and cannot become dominant.
The potential of the “trigger-narrative” model goes beyond the mystery, and in the future may enhance sociological understanding of how culture forms emotionally charged markup for social action. Future research in this direction may help to understand how, interacting with one or another master narrative that define the semantic landscape of social groups, bright cultural symbols (brands, iconic images, status symbols, memes) shape their perception and become triggers of “self-evident »People's decisions, whether it is a career choice, artistic preferences or political sympathies.
Dmitry Kurakin
