The Bible and folk memory tell us about a flood, which ended in a
new bright beginning signified by a rainbow. Its colors introduce people to the
wonderful world of light and the action of vibratory forces, which give rise to
it. Hence, the person, as an intermediary between the sky and the earth,
becomes a crown of life’s creation, allows the force of the laws of nature to
pass through her. A person’s life is complete only when it is filled with
paints, colors, and shades. Hence, since ancient times, color has been a strong
yet elusive force, determining the human behavior.
Some scientists claim that in the history of development of various
peoples, there are indications they experienced partial color blindness. There
are also claims that some peoples that are culturally lagging behind,
experience partial color blindness even today. On the other hand, some insects
have the ability to recognize colors. In 1858, young British scientist K. M.
Gladstone asserted that Ancient Greek were blind to the light-blue color[1].
He based his assertion on the fact that Homer did not have a name for the
light-blue color. In ancient descriptions of the rainbow, some colors are
missing, while the order of some of the others is interchanged. This fact is
also being used as proof of the ancient peoples’ partial color blindness.
However, one must remember that Homerian poems were created in the
pre-classical, pre-written era. Hence, it is risky to make conclusions about
perceivable colors based on their verbal names. Even in modern poetry there are
contradictory indications, which also might lead one to diagnose partial color
blindness. One fact appears certain: both ancient and young peoples, similar to
newly born children, are less sensitive to short wave colors, i.e., green and
light-blue. This is why a lack of definitiveness in the names and recognition
of these colors is so common. Natives of Bongo in Inner Africa call all long
wave colors “red”, and all short wave colors “black”. Hence, the sense, which
perceives colors, has developed gradually.
Multicolored ness of natural occurrences is reflected in the human
consciousness, and helps a person find her place in the surrounding social
environment and to adjust to its changes. However, people are creative beings.
They transform nature, “humanize” it, and continually expand cultural space,
using, among other means, the entire color spectrum. In products of their
creative activity, people reflect the entire range of their feelings and
emotions, shaping them such that they can be understood and felt by another
person, become an element of the culture, and remain in human activity. Memory,
as the ability to accumulate, preserve, and re-create past experience, plays an
important role in this activity. Unlike history, memory researchers speak of
such memory types as “partial”, “conditioned by interest”, “selective”, as well
as “distorted” or “taken out of context”. Memory serves as one of the
“regulators of social behavior”[2],
one of the mechanisms of maintaining the stability of certain group identity.
It was initially based upon myths, perception stereotypes, and “put aside, and
then re-called, images of the past, which, having experienced a certain
transformation, exist in the societal consciousness”.[3]
A polychromatic phenomenon (PCF) is a color symbol as an abstract
reality, embodied in a concrete sign, capable of transferring the most complex
logical notions, ideas, mystical occurrences and states. For example, to the
Ancient Greek, a symbol is a relative material identification sign for members
of a certain group. On the most elementary level, in various cultures,
different colors have their definitive, strictly fixed meanings. Art historians
are well aware of the standard color codes in mythological, religious,
cosmological, and secular notions. However, symbolic meanings of colors are
truly objective, and do not depend on the position of certain colors in the
sequence of individual predilections.
Symbolic meanings of colors cannot have appeared as a result of a
“social contract” since the foundation of the processes of color
“comprehension” and “signification” is a deep connection, which exists between
peculiarities of certain light vibrations and unconscious psychical dynamics.
Since the ancient times, color has determined human behavior. This
is evidenced by numerous archeological and ethnographical data about ritual and
military painting among ancient and primitive peoples, as well as mythology and
folklore of the entire world. For example, not only was the primeval person
subject to the influence of light vibrations, but she also tried to mimic them,
appeal to them for help in contributing to her happiness or repugnance of evil.
Gradually, color becomes a specific part of the human image, passing from one
person (society) to another, a specific expression of the relations and a means
of socialization among people, i.e., an element of socio culture as passing
experience from one generation to the next.
PCF are artificially created color effects. Any material object in
the society, as a product of human activity, is, in one way or another, either
a mono- or a poly-chromatic phenomenon. Color outside of PCF is irrelevant. It
is only a part of the bigger picture and performs a social function.
Polychromatization is directly related to the ever more complex relationships
between the person and the world, as well as between the person and
herself. Individual memory lets people
go beyond their hereditary limits and absorb social experience embodied in the
cultural heredity of the society as a whole.
PCF are catalysts of human socialization. One of the main functions
of socialization is the formation of personality, which adequately reflects
social situation and is capable of solving the most critical socially relevant
problems and of transferring a person’s non-material cultural activity to those
who live in the same society, nation, family, indeed the entire civilized
space.
Today, a growth of the non-material cultural bond between the
individual and the global society takes place. The significance of interests
and values, which are common to all mankind, as well as to the person,
continually increases. PCF is one of the ways of accustoming an individual to
the social and cultural experience. A conscious use of a wide variety of the
PCF is related to absorbing certain social norms and values; this is where
individual memory plays a crucial role. For instance, formal (visual, acoustic,
tactile) and semantic types of individual memory preserve images of episodes,
events, occurrences, which a person has had a chance to observe in their
polychromatic depiction and decode their semantics.
But PCF are also color images as a whole, yet incomplete,
representation of a certain object or class of objects in their multicolored
ness. Image, as an ideal product of psychical activity, becomes concrete in one
or another form of psychical reflection: sensation, perception, etc.
It is a known fact that image memory is the memory of presenting,
remembering, maintaining, and re-creating images of previously perceived
objects and occurrences of reality. While an image is being kept in memory, it
undergoes a number of transformations: simplification due to the omission of
some details, exaggeration of some other details, transformation of shape into
a more symmetrical one, etc. Depending on which analyzer takes the most
significant part in the perception of the memorized material, image memory is
further sub-divided into the following types: visual, aural, tactile,
olfactory, and taste.
British and German scientists have studied the visual, color image
memory. They conducted a number of experiments, where they asked participating
volunteers to carefully look at some 48 landscape photographs, some color, and
some black-and-white. The pictures were then mixed with another 48 photographs,
and the participants were asked to recognize them. It turned out that the
volunteers “identified” the color pictures much faster and more precisely than
the black-and-white ones. Scientists also asked the participants to look at
several black-and-white photographs, and then look for those same pictures, but
now presented in some unnatural colors, through a thick bundle of photographs.
Again, similar to the experiment with regular black-and-white photographs, the
participants demonstrated poor results remembering these pictures.
Those same researchers hypothesize that “precise” shades, inherent
of natural objects or living organisms assist in the imprinting of an image in
the human brain. Probably, in the evolutionary process, our eyes have tuned
primarily to the perception of color tones that exist in the nature. The brain
registers, in the first place, those shades that are inherent of natural
objects. At the same time, the person rejects those objects, whose color does
not correspond to her “built-in program”.[4]
The world of nature is a natural bosom in a person’s life.
Everything that surrounds her on Earth and in the observable Cosmos is actually
or potentially capable of evoking aesthetic experiences, becoming the object of
an aesthetic relationship. At the same time, natural objects and occurrences by
themselves are neither beautiful nor ugly. Their colors initially have the
capability to optically influence the person. However, physical properties of
colors are not identical to their aesthetic value. Aesthetic significance of
natural objects and occurrences reveals itself to the person only through the
process of their cultural discovery, both material and otherwise.
Therefore, PCF is a color-semantic form of social-cultural and
informational interaction created in the process of joint nature-sensitive
mastering of reality. PCF, which, similar to the language, appeared elementally
due to a social necessity, are today yet another key to understanding the time,
events, and occurrences (be it the color range of a great masterpiece or a
person’s clothes, the flag of a state or the emblem of a firm). PCF are
becoming ever more important in the socio-cultural environment, which
determines types of activities, through which notions about the
polychromatization of the environment are being formed.
Hence, the study of PCF confirms the formulation “memory is semantic
movement in time”[5].
Visual expressions, constantly contradicting full knowledge, act merely as an
impulse, which puts into motion a person’s cognitive abilities; objects’ visual
images are created as a result of internal thought processes, i.e., a person
would not be able to realize a material multicolored world if she were not able
to think it. In the course of history of human society, people have gone a long
way in the development of their polychromatic thinking. Of course,
accomplishments in the development of polychromatic thinking, due to social
memory, have been amassed gradually, having been transferred from one
generation to the next. Thus, these accomplishments, in one way or another, are
becoming more secure. Otherwise, their progressive and also ever accelerating
growth would not be possible.
[1] Gladstone K. M. Life of famous people. – Ekaterinburg: Publishing House
“Ural University”, 2001. – Page 438.
[2] Porshneva O.S. Methodology and methods in the
study of cultural memory // The century of memory, memory of the century.
Experience of handling memory in the XX century. Cheliabinsk, 2004. – Pages
22-37, 23.
[3] Bobkova M. S. Event memory and historical
notions in historical works of the Middle Ages and Renaissance // Images of the
past and collective identity in Europe prior to the New Age. – Moscow, 2003. –
Pages 52 – 64, 52.
[4] Fedorova A. Color helps memory // http://nature.web.ru/db/msg.html?mid=1185573&s=122101000 05-Nov-2002.
[5] Sokolov A. V. General theory of social
communication. – Saint Peterburgh. Publishing House of V. A. Mikhailov, 2002. –
Page 461.
77th Annual Pacific Sociological Association Meeting,
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