2022.4

The history of the missionary movement in India was reflected in various types of sources: both in official documents and in letters from Church ministers. These texts contain unique information about the region and, at the same time, allow us to imagine the perception by Europeans of the image of the “other” - the pagans, the antipodes of the Christians. An example of such sources can be materials related to the name of Pastor Bartolomäus Ziegenbalg, who headed the Lutheran community in Southern India at the beginning of the XVIII century. The texts compiled by Ziegenbalg clearly show the division of the entire Tranquebar society into three large and specific groups: Christians (Christen), Muslims (Mahometaner / Mohammedaner / Muhammedaner) and pagans (Heiden). At first glance, the main criterion in this division turns out to be the religious factor, and the characteristic of the inhabitants of Hindustan is built according to the bipolar principle typical of early forms of thinking: “we” (Europeans, carriers of true knowledge and genuine culture) and “they” (ignorant pagans, barbarians). On closer inspection, the situation seems more complicated. Ziegenbalg’s critical attitude towards local European Christians creates a distinct effect of a certain detachment of the mission servants and their flock from Christening. The pastor introduces the concepts of “new Christians” and “old Christians”. The new ones are those who join the community from among the pagans. The old Christians, as expected, mean European Christians living in and around Tranquebar.

Authors consider interaction of factors of Tuareg nationalism/ separatism and Islamist radicalism/jihadism in Mali. They show the influence of the Arab Spring on the development of the processes of growth of Islamist radicalism and Tuareg separatism in the northern regions of this country. Authors analyze the fourth Tuareg uprising, the Islamist revolution in Azawad that took place in the summer of 2012, the Islamist offensive in southern Mali in 2013 and its impact on relations between Bamako and Tuareg nationalists, as well as a new jihadist offensive in recent years. It is concluded that the central government of Mali and the Tuareg nationalists again turn out to be situational allies, since they now face one main enemy that threatens the existence of both the Malian state and potential real Tuareg autonomy, Azawad - Islamist jihadi radicals.

Russian Freemasonry in China - an extremely interesting phenomenon, it was markedly different from the Masonic lodges of the Western Diaspora of Shanghai, Beijing, Tianjin, Hong Kong. There was no specific “Russian” Masonic lodge in China, Freemasonry among the natives of Russia in the 1920-1930's turned into an arena of political struggle and mutual accusations, the opposition of conservative, monarchist, socialist and other ideas. It also turned out to be closely connected with moral and esoteric quests, intertwined with Roerichism and mysticism. Another feature was that, unlike Westerners, Russian Freemasons have never raised the question of the possibility of participation of the Chinese in the activities of the lodges, or on cooperation with the Chinese administration. Russian Freemasonry and the parallel anti-Masonic movement lived their own, active, but closed life. Accusations of Freemasonry were a traditional way of settling scores between various Russian groups, and the term “Freemason” became a formula for accusations of the worst sins. The Sungari Lodge in Harbin was founded on the wave of the opening of new Masonic organizations across northeast China on July 5, 1928, and operated for twelve years. In opposition to Freemasonry among the Western diaspora, which was not painful to discuss, was not politicized and did not serve as an arena for clashes between various groups, Russian Freemasonry in China was closely related to the search for new meanings of transformation of society, the discovery of “friends” and “enemies”, and it reflected the deep debate in the Russian émigré environment.

This article discusses various approaches used in describing the Chinese language basic unit of grammar. The problems faced by Chinese linguists along this path are due to the typological features of the Chinese language, where the word plays a peripheral role in the system, therefore units of all levels, from morpheme to sentence, were promoted to the status of the basic unit of the language in different periods. One by one we introduce problems, faced by Chinese linguists, as they are described in the most important works, along with the solutions they offer depending on the dominant theory of the linguistic history period. It shows how the views of scientists on the structure of the Chinese language and the choice of the basic (structural) unit of its grammar has been shifting due to the expansion of scientific knowledge about the typological features of languages. In contrast to previous periods, when a single view of the basic unit of grammar prevailed in linguistic research, today theories tend to pluralize. At the present stage, the search for ways to represent the Chinese language without the templates, developed with Western languages and European linguistics, has led to the emergence of several original concepts, hardly known to the Russian-speaking audience. The unsolved problem of defining a word, the difficulty of distinguishing units at the syntactic level in Chinese led to proposition of а sentence (clause), a syntagma (word group) and a character (taken on a new meaning) as the basic unit of the language structure. The validity of these approaches usually domestically described as those with Chinese characteristics requires discussion in the scientific community outside China and should be proofed or at least validated on a wide range of language concepts.

The article focuses on the analysis of elements of spoken language in Japanese commercials. Japanese colloquial speech is a structure that significantly differs from codified language which is reluctant to adopt any sort of change. Some of colloquial speech elements may even appear in other functional styles. The article describes main characteristics of Japanese colloquial speech in commercials seen on four language levels: phonetic, lexical, morphological and syntactic. It also examines primary tendencies applicable to these levels, and attempts to give possible reasons for usage such elements.

The article analyzes the understanding of agentivity by Japanese linguists both during the historical formation of this concept and in the context of the current functioning of this semantic category in the Japanese language. Agentivity is an important linguistic universal that influences the formation of both deep and surface syntactic structures, ultimately determining the characteristics of any linguistic structure. The current level of linguistic knowledge about how agentivity is represented in the Japanese linguistic discourse could be considered as insufficient; it does not provide a systematic understanding of the features of the Japanese perception of agency, even though the structure of the hierarchical relations of semantic and syntactic actants with the predicate in the Japanese language determines the functioning of all key grammatical categories. An array of Japanese-language and partly English-language works has been studied for more than 100 years, from the end of the 19th century to the end of the 21th century to perform several tasks: to determine the essence of the concept of “agency” in Japanese terminology; to identify and systematize the linguistic phenomena described by Japanese linguists to be determined by the agentive characteristics of the event participants; to clarify the significance of agentive features for various grammatical categories. It has been found that Japanese linguists are unanimously of the opinion that Japanese tends to exhibit low-agent properties which are expressed in the structure of Japanese voice, in the system of Japanese polite verbs, in the case marking of actants, in desiderative and potential constructions, etc. As further prospects for study, we see the investigation of Japanese-language linguistic papers on the role of agentive features in the formation of Japanese vocabulary and further systematization of agentive characteristics in the morphosyntactic aspect.

This article is devoted to rethinking the understanding of creativity - zuo in the treatise of Wang Chong (c. 27 - 100 AD) “Discourses in the Balance” (Lunheng), which is a logical continuation of the ideas of some of his predecessors. The article draws attention to the peculiarities of the philosopher's literary thought and compares them with the ideas of Yang Xiong (53 BC - 18 AD) from the treatise Exemplary Speeches (Fayan). The main provisions of Wang Chong's literary thought are revealed on the basis of an analysis of the chapters from “Discourses in the Balance”, which the philosopher wrote to fight works that were incorrect, from his point of view. Thanks to a scrupulous examination of such works, the philosopher managed not only to generalize the important thoughts of his predecessors in relation to literary creativity, but also come to many new discoveries that were successfully developed by subsequent literary theorists. The philosopher understands literature - wen quite broadly and includes in it those types of written creativity that during the next era will be excluded from the concept of wen. The thinker himself does not believe that wen means in general everything written in hieroglyphs, and therefore excludes matter-of-fact reports from wen, which is carried out by local officials. Wang Chong assigns a separate place to odic poetry in the wen system and even places a partial emphasis on the aesthetic function of literature. He considers discourse - lun to be a standard of wen, to which he refers his own treatise. The thinker puts forward certain requirements for the style of reasoning and observes them himself throughout the entire treatise, turning it, on the one hand, into a theoretical work, and on the other, into a practical one, on the pages of which this theory is embodied.

Basing on the documents from the investigation file, the paper displays the life of the famous actress of the Japanese Theatre and Cinema - Okada Yoshiko. Together with her beloved man - Sugimoto Ryokichi (who was the member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Japan), she crossed the Soviet-Japanese border in Sakhalin Island in 1938, hoping to start a new happy life in the Socialist country. Instead, they were immediately arrested and forced to “admit” that they came to the USSR with the spying purposes. After about a year Sugimoto war judges and shot, and Okada was sentenced for 10 years in the concentration camps. Nevertheless, she was not broken down, she managed to survive, come to Moscow and start working on the State Radio and for some Moscow theatres.

The present article is a further extension of the authors’ previous publication dealing with the main milestones in the development of the Department of Near and Middle East History during the years of Soviet power. This part of the study covers the range of issues relating to the functioning of the staff of the department from the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 to the present day. The challenges faced by domestic higher education and Oriental studies in the post-perestroika period are described, as well as the characteristics of the departmental leaders who were able to ensure the consistent development of the department in the new realities of a rapidly changing world. A considerable part of the article is devoted to the analysis of academic and pedagogical activities of the Department’s teaching staff at the present stage. The members of the Department actively and fruitfully work on creation of new high-quality training programs for Orientalists specializing in the history of the Middle East, making a significant contribution to training and education of Orientalist specialists at Moscow University, and promoting Oriental studies and historical science in general.

The article is dedicated to the 90th anniversary of Dega V. Deopik, Professor, PhD in History, whose brilliant research and educational work is closely related to the Institute for Asian and African Studies of the Moscow State University. The article dwells upon major fields of his research activity in oriental studies. Nevertheless, the scope of his academic interests is much wider, it embraces archaeology, ancient history and culture, origin of writing in the Eastern Asia, etc. In the article a special attention is given to the Vietnamese studies, his first and for long major special field, and also to his works on countries and peoples of the South-East Asia as well as ancient history of the Eastern Asia, so called Old China. Mentioned are his achievements in studying epigraphic artifacts and medieval chronicles and also development and implementation of quantitative methods in oriental studies. It is emphasised that Dega V. Deopik is also a distinguished teacher, research advisor and lecturer.

Index of the journal’s articles and materials published in 2022.