Cultural approach in the legal myth studying

Abstract

The article is devoted to substantiating the importance of the culturological approach to clarify the socio-cultural features of the legal myth in terms of categories of culturology.

It is noted that myths were created and passed down from generation to generation throughout its existence and development.  This gives reason to say that the myth is a fundamental form of understanding and constructing reality.

The characteristic mythologems of different epochs are traced, which are defined as stable mythopoetic universals, which pass from society to society, from one time to another.  It is argued that the mythologies of peoples and epochs concentrate the general, collective ideas of people about how "it should be", contain certain stereotypes that can influence the ideology, thinking and behavior of people of a certain social culture.  It is concluded that such mythologisms are introduced and live in the depths of human consciousness, and, more precisely, the subconscious.  It is proved that collective ideas that characterize the specifics of the national spirit, national character, mentality, must be "experienced" by representatives of a particular era to become a myth.

The general characteristics of the legal myth are analyzed, such as dogmatism, sociality, out-temporality, regularity, irrationality, energy, ambiguity, antinomy, cyclicity.

Specific features of the legal myth are distinguished: the legal myth operates with legal concepts or their metaphorical analogues and aims to increase the authority of law by differentiating it from other social systems, and is potentially formally and normatively provided.

It is substantiated that the culturological approach to the study of the essence of the legal myth includes three aspects: anthropological, hermeneutic and semiotic.  The anthropological approach allows us to identify the personal dimension of the legal myth.  The hermeneutics of the myth gives rise to the idea of it as a certain carrier of cultural identity.  In the semiotic aspect, the legal myth is considered as an element of the sign-symbolic system to which culture belongs.

It is argued that understanding the phenomenological nature of legal myth and its cultural archaic roots makes it possible to comprehensively understand the essence of this phenomenon, identify the place of legal myth in modern legal reality and understand its impact on lawmaking and law enforcement.