Sacralization of archaeological sites in the Southern Urals: a look through social networks (based on the analysis of online communities)

Akhatov Al'bert Tagirovich PhD in History R.G. Kuzeev Institute of Ethnological Research 6 Karl Marx St., Ufa, Republic of Bashkortostan, 450077, Russia bertik@mail.ru Other publications by this author

Tuzbekov Ainur Il'fatovich PhD in History Senior Researcher; R.G. Kuzeev Institute of Ethnological Research is a separate structural unit of the Federal State Budgetary Scientific Institution Ufa Federal Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences. 6 Karl Marx St., Ufa, Republic of Bashkortostan, 450077, Russia tuzbek.80@mail.ru

Introduction

During the field trips, employees of the Department of Archaeological Heritage of the Southern Urals of the R.G. Kuzeev Institute of Ethnological Research of the UFIC RAS recorded numerous facts of the use of archaeological monuments in modern religious and ceremonial practice, both by representatives of traditional and non-traditional beliefs and teachings. Our research conducted from 2013 to 2018 allowed us to identify 3 fairly universal areas of sacralization of archaeological sites in the Southern Urals: 1) Islam in the formation of holy sites; 2) new religious movements in search of "places of power"; 3) archaic cults and archaeological sites. The identification of signs of sacralization made it possible to establish that, in quantitative terms, objects belonging mainly to direction No. 1 predominate on the territory of the Republic of Bashkortostan ^{[1, p. 79]}.

In our opinion, this is due to the widespread among the Muslim population (mainly Bashkir) of the rite of veneration of the graves of saints (aulia), closely related on the one hand to the cult of ancestors, and on the other to the cult of Ishan (leaders of Sufi tariqas), where the object of worship are primarily burial and religious buildings – mounds, stone layouts, mausoleums, etc., under which, according to people, the burials of certain saints were committed.

This tradition is conditioned by the peculiarities of the spread of Islam among the Bashkir population of the Southern Urals, in which the Sufi sheikhs of the Iasawiya brotherhood (XIV–XV centuries) and the Naqshbandiya-Mujaddidiya brotherhood (XVIII–XIX centuries) played an important role. As a result, starting from the 14th century, the cult of Ishan began to spread among the Bashkirs – venerating them as saints, and the graves of Ishan as holy places where worship and sacrifices were performed. He was associated with the ability attributed to them to work miracles (karamata), heal, and foresee the future ^{[1, p. 80]}. It is worth noting that the construction and functioning of Sufi sacred graves was initially initiated and supported by the sheikhs themselves ^{[2, pp. 27-28]}.

Currently, adherents of the Naqshbandi tariqa of Haqqaniah occupy a significant place in the Muslim Ummah of Bashkortostan (read more: ^[3]; ^[4]), and every year they organize a number of mass events related to the worship of saints whose graves are located at archaeological sites in the Southern Urals. For example, worship is organized at the Sandiyak settlement (Kuedinsky district, Perm Krai), at the mausoleums of Khusain bek and Turakhan (Chishminsky district, RB), Ilchigulovo IV burial mound (Miyakinsky district, RB), etc.

The most striking example of the granting of sacred contents to an archaeological heritage site associated with the graves of nomads of the 14th century is the complexes organized on the site of the Ilchigulovo-IV burial mound located on Mount Narys-Tau (Miyakinsky district, RB). In previous studies, we have repeatedly described in detail the process of sacralization of the monument ^[5]; ^[6], characterized both the object itself and the surrounding area, but people visiting this object, frequency, and rituals remained outside the field of study.

While studying the morphology of the sacralized archaeological site and the structures built around it, researchers have repeatedly conducted surveys of pilgrims who came to honor the holy place. Many people willingly shared the available information, told how they learned about the existence of this holy place, etc., however, they avoided personal and social issues. During the conversations, it was found out that one of the main sources of knowledge about holy places are online communities, among which communities associated with the study of Sufism were often mentioned.

In addition, many of them turned to the Internet as a means of religious communication – to communicate with like-minded people and co-religionists through various groups in which they belonged, to search for specific issues of Islam, including about certain saints, their burial sites, conducting collective prayers, etc.

Surveys and interviews with individual pilgrims do not provide an opportunity to give a general description of people visiting sacred archaeological sites, their interests, the rituals and rituals performed, the frequency of visits, or to study the reasons for visiting holy places. In this regard, after reviewing various data sources, we came to the conclusion that at the moment one of the most accessible and informative ways to study can be both materials published by the pilgrims themselves in virtual communities on the Internet, their interaction, communication, and their online profile. According to G. Reinhold, a virtual community is a group of people who may or may not meet each other face to face, who exchange words and ideas through computers, ads and networks ^[7].

Literature review

The study of the processes of sacralization of archaeological monuments, the participation of people in the formation of new sacred spaces around and around them, was conducted by scientists from various scientific disciplines — archaeologists, ethnographers, cultural scientists. Archaeologists, examining these monuments, see them primarily as objects of historical and cultural heritage, therefore they prove the far-fetched and untenable myths that contribute to their sacralization. When studying the formed sacred spaces at archaeological sites, ethnographers are primarily interested in the history, principles of object formation and forms of its use by the modern population. Scientists describe the "holy" place in detail, record legends and traditions about its origin, existing modern rituals. Most of the works of cultural scientists contain mainly a general description of various types of perception of archaeological sites at the present time (in more detail ^[17]).

At the same time, researchers remain unaware of the direct participants in the processes of sacralization of archaeological sites, among which a significant part are Muslims participating in mass events related to the worship of saints, whose graves are often associated with archaeological sites in the Southern Urals. According to the famous French Islamic scholar D. Stephane, currently many issues related to Islam and its followers can be studied by analyzing social networks, which are becoming an important component of modern Islamic religious practice. So, in his work “Cyber-Sufism. Sufi Institutions” He concludes that since the mid-2000s, social networks have not only facilitated the establishment of connections between individuals and communities, but also their interaction with the environment ^[12].

The study of virtual communities, conducted earlier by E. Y. Rozhdestvenskaya, V. V. Semenova (tourist aspect) ^[7], A.S. Bikkulov, V. E. Pashkevich, A.V. Chugunov (political science aspect) ^[10], etc., in different perspectives, has shown their validity. It is worth noting that until today, studies aimed at studying the processes of sacralization of archaeological sites in the Southern Urals through the prism of social networks have not been conducted. This actualizes this problem and should contribute to the development of similar research in the region.

The purpose of the study

The purpose of this work is to study Muslim pilgrims visiting sacred sites of the Republic of Bashkortostan (including archaeological sites). as a special socio-cultural group, determine its main characteristics and interests based on the analysis of the SufiRB online community on the VKontakte social network.

Research methods

To achieve the purpose of the study, we used the methods of netnography. The term "netnography" was fixed in scientific usage by R. V. Kozinets. In his opinion, the essence of modern netnography can be described as follows: it is a specific set of related research practices for collecting, analyzing and presenting data, as well as ethical standards for conducting this kind of research.

According to the scheme developed by R. Kozinets, online research should consist of five steps:

1) definition of a research question or research problem;

2) identification of communities and their selection;

3) Enabled community surveillance and data collection;

4) data analysis and repeated interpretation of the results;

5) writing and presentation of results, theoretical application ^{[8, p. 79]}.

Following the above scheme, after defining the purpose of the study, we set ourselves the following tasks:

1) to carry out a general description of the participants of the Internet group organizing and visiting sacred archaeological sites;

2) drawing up an average portrait of subscribers of virtual communities;

3) identify the interests of subscribers of online communities;

4) determine the main types of content produced, the level of perception and activity of subscribers;

5) study the main producers and consumers of content;

6) to characterize publications in the online community and identify their main topics;

To achieve our goals, we have researched:

− profile data of group members;

− the communicative activity of the group's subscribers on the Network;

− messages, comments, reposts (re-publications), likes (endorsements) dedicated to relevant and most discussed topics by subscribers.

According to the annual survey of the audience of social networks in Russia conducted by the Brand Analytics social media and media monitoring and analysis system (leading in the CIS market), the VKontakte social network remains the largest in terms of the number of authors and the volume of content (27.9 million authors and 472.4 million messages) ^[9]. The study analyzes both structural and attribute variables of data obtained using resources. vk.barkov.net and socstat.ru . In accordance with the fact that in order to achieve the intended goal and fulfill the research objectives, it is more necessary to analyze the communicative activity of subscribers, publications, and comments, we decided to continue analyzing Internet groups on the VKontakte social network and apply methods previously tested by researchers. ^[8]; ^[10]; ^[11].

The object of research

As it was noted, in quantitative terms, archaeological sites with signs of sacralization within the framework of direction No. 1 predominate on the territory of the Republic of Bashkortostan, and the most active organizers of events at holy sites are adherents of the Naqshbandi tariqa of Haqqani. In this regard, we decided to explore the virtual communities of this particular tariff.

The results of the study and their discussion

When entering the queries "Sufism" and "Sufism" in the VKontakte search engine (in the community category), about 80 Internet pages were identified, with the number of participants ranging from ten to several thousand people, some of whom are virtual Sufi communities of the Naqshibandi Tariqa, followers of Sheikh Muhammad (Mehmet) Adil Haqqani al-Kiprusi.

The goals outlined in the information about these groups correspond to the four main goals of most online communities, described by J. Prisom: "to exchange information with which you can get answers to questions or send information; to provide support that conveys sympathy, expresses emotions verbally or non-verbally; to communicate in an informal setting using synchronous communication; to discuss ideas, the promotion of which, as a rule, requires the help of a moderator" ^{[7, p. 27]}.

The initial analysis showed that the largest number of subscribers from Bashkortostan is recorded in the following groups: 1) "Sufism. The path of the Heart. The Path to God" (https://vk.com/club38488863 ); 2) "Sheikh Muhammad (Mehmet) Adil Haqqani Naqshbandi (https://vk.com/sheikhnazim ); 3) "Naqshbandi Tariqa. Sohbets, quotes, books" (https://vk.com/naqshbandrus ) and 4) "Sufi RB" (https://vk.com/club78436717 ).

Despite the fact that M. Castells believes that online communities are formed on the basis of a common interest, rather than any geographical location ^{[13, p. 153]}, the latter group, Sufi RB, was taken as the object of research, which was due to the following circumstances.

This community (the only one containing the name of the region in the name), the main principles of which are the unity of the subscribers' territory of residence and interest in Sufism and the activities of Sheikh Muhammad (Mehmet) Adil Haqqani al-Kiprusi. A study of subscriber profiles showed that of all the people who indicated their location (66%), the vast majority (71%) live in the Republic of Bashkortostan (more details below).

The geographical connection of the community to the region is confirmed by a link to the associated website "Naqshbandi Rabbani Sufi Order Republic of Bashkortostan" dedicated to this topic ^[14], as well as the fact that many publications are made in Bashkir, understandable to the local Bashkir and Tatar populations.

In addition, as it turned out, the members of the group are subscribed mainly to regional and urban news feeds, as well as Bashkir national communities (more details below), which also indicates their geographical connection to the region.

Grave graves of the Ural Batyr (Beloretsky district), Muzhavir–Hazrat's grave (Baymaksky district), and other sacred sites located on the territory of the Republic of Belarus, as well as collective celebrations and prayers, are confirmed by numerous photo and video materials posted on the community's wall.

It is also worth noting that the audience of this group is a significant proportion in almost all of the above-mentioned communities (among those who indicated their location): "Sufism. The path of the Heart. The Path to God" – 7%, "Sheikh Muhammad (Mehmet) Adil Haqqani Naqshbandi" – 17%, "Tariqat Naqshbandi. Sohbets, quotes, books" – 16%

An analysis of the publications allowed us to classify the Sufi RB group as a so-called community of "multimodal social worlds" (according to the classification of A.C. Garcia, A.I. Standla, J. Bechkoff, Y. Tsui). The peculiarity of this type of online communities, according to researchers, is that they need to be studied using both online and offline methods to obtain some kind of cumulative material ^{[11, p. 97]}.

As part of this work, we limit ourselves to conducting online research, supplementing it with field materials obtained earlier. In this regard, we used digital netnography tools to a greater extent (it belongs to the third type of netnography). According to R. Kozinets, digital netnography combines all data analysis methods, including software for recognizing words and languages, for calculating and representing social connections based on human understanding and comprehension. He believes that human interpretation takes precedence over all forms of mechanical understanding, as it takes into account the context when analyzing data ^{[8, p. 79]}. In addition, the visual method of analyzing photo and video materials, which is widespread in ethnography, was used.

Data about the group and its subscribers was obtained using the vk resource.barkov.net , which is a universal set of tools that allows you to extract a wide variety of data from social networks in a convenient way. As a result of the collection of material carried out from 10.10.2014 to 12/31/2022, summary tables were obtained containing open, structural and attribute variable data, which made it possible to make a sex and age characteristic and find out the place of residence of subscribers.

As for the content published in the group, its statistics (quantity and type), audience activity between the moment of creation and 12/31/2022, were analyzed using the sociometric method using the resource http://popsters.ru , which is a service for statistics and content analysis of social media communities.

In accordance with the guidelines of the Association of Internet Researchers, the information received was generalized and depersonalized. Therefore, the work does not contain information about users' personal data and does not have links to personal pages. The study used exclusively open data posted by the users of the social network themselves, who adopted the Rules for protecting information about the users of the site. vk.com and they are aware that in accordance with clause 6.2 of these rules, the information they post will be available to any registered user of the site.

General characteristics of the online group and subscribers. The online community "Sufi RB" was created on October 10, 2014. At the time of data collection – the end of December 2022, 811 people had subscribed to the group (751 people after excluding blocked and deleted subscribers). In total, 1,915 publications and 185 comments were recorded during the specified period of time.

The "Information" section states: "Mawlana Sheikh Nazim Khwaja Amina's wife was from Bashkortostan...". The group has one administrator. The publication of materials by other subscribers is limited by the settings. The administrator re-published only the materials of 4 authors. Three of them are men and one is a woman living in the Republic of Bashkortostan and St. Petersburg.

As already mentioned, an automated method of studying using the vk resource was used to clarify the parameters of the community.barkov.net conducted from October 10, 2014 to December 31, 2022, which allowed the collection of data on the group and their subscribers.

According to the VKontakte rules, subscribers are required to indicate their gender when registering. As a result, it was found that in the group under consideration, women make up the majority – 57%, and men, respectively, less – 43%.

This gender gradation is generally correlated with data on the active audience of the Russian segment on VKontakte at the end of 2022 (27.9 million authors: 59.5% women and 40.5% men) ^[9].

Almost half of the subscribers (44%) indicated their years of birth on their personal pages, which were distributed by age group as follows: 3.3% under the age of 17, 9% aged 18-29, 24% aged 30-39, 20% aged 40-49, 43% over the age of 50. The data obtained indicate that almost half of the group's participants are people over 50 years old.

These results correlate with the available field materials obtained during the expeditions in 2013-2018, during which it was noted that their main visitors to the holy sites are women, most often middle-aged and older.

The predominance of women is most likely due to their high religiosity, due to their special psycho-emotional and physiological state. According to Russian researchers, women are much more likely than men to attend churches, belong to so–called sectarian communities, and are subject to superstitions such as faith in witchcraft, fortune-telling, divination, omens, fate, prophetic dreams, the evil eye, etc. ^{[15, pp. 24, 36]}.

The majority of subscribers in the study group indicated their country (74%) and their place of residence (62%). The data obtained indicate that the vast majority of those who indicated the country live in the Russian Federation (95%). Among those who indicated their place of residence, 62% mentioned settlements in the Republic of Bashkortostan, among which a significant part (44%) live in Ufa, 2% each in the cities of Sibai, Beloretsk, Baymak, Sterlitamak, Kumertau, etc. I would like to note that the majority of subscribers besides Ufa live in cities and villages located in the south and south-the eastern parts of the region, where the Bashkir population mainly lives.

Next, the subscribers' educational level was studied. An analysis of the profiles of community members showed that almost a quarter of the actors have higher education – 27%. Most of them are graduates of Bashkir State University, Ufa State Academy of Arts named after Z. Ismagilov and Bashkir State Agrarian University.

Despite the fact that the VKontakte user message states that upon registration, the user must provide all the necessary reliable and up-to-date information to create a personal page, many prefer to remain anonymous and may publish false information about themselves. In this regard, when analyzing online communities, it is important to study the interests and information interaction between actors.

Therefore, one of the vk resource tools was used to determine the interests of subscribers of the group in question.barkov.net , which allows you to take into account which other communities the group's audience participates in (Table 1).

Table 1. The 10 most popular communities subscribed to by the group members

As a result, it was found that the subscribers of the group are mainly interested in Islamic topics, Sufism and subscribed to Bashkir communities. The recorded high proportion of subscriptions to the personal Internet page of Talgat Safa Tajuddin, Chairman of the Central Duma of Russia, testifies to the high loyalty of the community's subscribers to this particular spiritual administration of Muslims.

In general, having considered the interests of the group's participants, it can be concluded that in addition to Islam and Sufism, the community's audience is interested in regional and urban news aggregators, as well as popular Bashkir national communities.

Informational interaction between subscribers. In addition to general information about the group members, it was also decided to consider the behavioral characteristics of the actors, as well as to study their reactions (likes, reposts, comments, views) to the published materials. The tools of the Internet resource were used for this purpose. http://popsters.ru with the help of which the content and type of published materials were studied (Table. 2), the activity of the audience since the creation of the community until 31.12.2022 (Fig. 1).

Table 2. Content and audience activity

Figure No. 1. The number of views of community publications from the date of creation of the community until 31.12.2022 (taking into account the viewing of publications in the settings, enabled since 2017)

The published materials in this group are represented, as in many online VK communities, by text, photo and video materials, as well as links. Analyzing the relative activity by type of content, we can conclude that participants are almost twice as interested in photo materials (51%), less in text (23%) and videos (18%) posted on the community wall. At the same time, according to the results of a study of the activity of the Internet community audience in 2021, the network-wide indicators of VKontakte looked as follows: video (18.8%), photo (34.3%), text (31.9%) and links (15.0%) ^[16].

In our opinion, the significant interest of actors in photographs is caused by the fact that this format is the easiest and easiest for users to perceive and it is easier for people to look at than to read the texts, especially since the materials were made on the territory of the republic during social gatherings, i.e. meetings where conversations on religious topics, collective celebrations, etc. are held.

I would also like to note that the views of publications in this group increased significantly in 2022. The most popular of which are dedicated to events at the Aldar Batyr memorial complex (Burzyansky district), at the grave of Ural Batyr (Beloretsky district) and at Mount Narystau (Ilchigulovo IV, kurgan burial ground) (Miyakinsky district)

In order to study the main consumers and producers of content, 3 tables were formed, consisting of data obtained as a result of studying the personal pages of participants who were active (likes, reposts, comments) in the community 1, 50 and 100 times.

Initially, we studied the profiles of actors who were active more than once – 658 subscribers. Of these, 67% are women, 33% are men. Slightly more than half of the actors (53%) indicated their age, of which 57% are over 50 years old, 20% are from 40 to 49 years old, 15% are from 30 to 39 years old, 11% are younger than 29 years old. Of the 72% who indicated the country, 98% live in the Russian Federation. 60% indicated a locality, of which 76% live in towns and villages of the Republic of Bashkortostan. The largest number of active actors are in Ufa (36%) and other cities and villages, mainly in the southern and southwestern parts of Bashkiria.

Activity was recorded more than 50 times in 8 actors, including 4 women and 4 men. Of the 5 people who indicated their ages, two women were 49 and 53 years old, and the men were 32, 34 and 41 years old. Of those who indicated their place of residence, 3 were from Ufa, 1 from Beloretsk, and 1 fromKueda (Perm Region)

Among the 5 most active actors (more than 100 activities), men predominate in the group (3 people). Of the 3 people who indicated their age, one woman is 49 years old, and the men are 32 and 34 years old. Of the 3 people who indicated their place of residence, two live in Ufa, one in the village of Kueda. A preliminary review of the profiles and publications on the walls showed that almost every one of them re-publishes materials from the SufiRB group, publications about Islam, Sufism and the activities of Sheikh Muhammad (Mehmet) Adil Haqqani al-Kiprusi.

An indicator of subscribers' interest in community policy is the Engagement Rate. The objectives of the study were to compare the popularity of information published in communities. To evaluate it, the engagement rate per post was calculated – this is the proportion of user actions per post, calculated using the formula (number of actions/number of subscribers) *100% (Engagement rate).

The data obtained indicate that the engagement rate by type of content is quite different. With an average coefficient of 1.402%, the group's subscribers respond more to photos (11.7%).

In order to rank groups by overall engagement, we use the resource popsters.ru The average subscriber engagement per post is calculated. As a result, a fairly high level of average subscriber engagement per post was established, and greater interest in the content (Fig. 2).

Figure No. 2. Engagement rate per post by days from the date of community creation to 12/31/2022.

In order to identify the most interesting publications for subscribers, 10 posts with the highest engagement rate were identified in the group.

In the first place was the post "Stone to Aldar Batyr! Burzyansky district" (ER 42.41%) dated 07/31/2022, on the installation of the cenotaph Aldar Batyr (Burzyansky district). In second place is the publication "On June 12, a meeting of Muslims was held on Mount Narystau" (ER 23.18%) entry dated 06/14/2022 The publication contains information about an event held in Narystau, which brought together about 10,000 Muslims. In third place is the message "Sheikh Usman S. Kildin - representative of the mawlana of Sheikh Mehmet al Naqshbandi ar Rabbani" (ER 20.83%) entry dated 08/13/2022 The submitted entry is accompanied by a photograph of a document authorizing Sheikh Usman S. Kildin from Bashkortostan to be a murshid of the Naqshbandi Tariqa In fourth place. The post in Bashkir dated 08/10/2022 about the opening of the Aldar Batyr memorial complex (ER 20.83%). The fifth place was taken by the post announcing the opening date of the Aldar Batyr memorial complex (ER 16.39%) dated 08/04/2022.

Conclusions

Long-term research conducted by the staff of the Department of Archaeological Heritage of the Southern Urals at the R.G. Kuzeev Institute of Ethnological Research of the UFIC RAS on the study of the processes of sacralization of archaeological sites led to the conclusion that a number of objects are included in the modern cult and ritual practice of representatives of different branches of Islam. One of the main models of the sacralization of archaeological sites is the traditional cult of the grave of the saint – Auliya, which is closely related to both pre-Islamic religious beliefs and the cult of ishan (leaders of Sufi tariqas), when funeral and religious buildings are declared the burial place of saints.

In the context of global internetization of society, when social networks are gaining more and more popularity and include an increasing number of people, one of the promising areas for the study of pilgrims is their study as a separate socio-cultural group using netnography methods, using various programs based on applied software and computer analysis of textual information.

The data obtained allows us to accurately determine: the place of residence of people who regularly visit sacred archaeological sites, their gender, age and interests; identify the most active actors and community leaders among subscribers; determine the level of engagement and interaction between community members. The data obtained in the course of the study made it possible to establish that in the region a fairly large number of people participate in events organized by representatives of the Naqshbandi Tariqa of Haqqani in holy places in order to mobilize their followers.

As a result of studying the gender composition of the subscribers of the online community, a slight predominance of women over men was found, which confirmed our earlier thesis that mainly middle-aged and older women living in rural areas participate in worship rituals at the graves of Auli. A study of the interests of the participants and their involvement in individual publications showed a high interest of the actors in Sufism and posts about the rituals of worship conducted by Sufis at holy sites, especially those organized near Mount Narystau (Ilchigulovo IV kurgan burial ground).

During the analysis of the SufiRB Internet community, it was found that one of the effective tools for studying the initiators of the sacralization of archaeological sites is to identify the most active actors, the so-called leaders of the Internet community. Further examination of their personal pages showed that they often organize trips to holy places themselves and often actively participate in the formation of new places of worship.

Thus, summarizing the above, we can note the following. Study of Muslim pilgrims visiting sacred sites of the Republic of Bashkortostan (including archaeological sites) as a special socio-cultural group, based on the analysis of online communities in the social network VKontakte, it was possible to determine its main characteristics and interests. At the same time, this can and should be the beginning of work on the creation of effective measures in the field of protection of archaeological and cultural heritage sites, including through the use of social networks and Internet resources. To do this, you can use online communities, multimedia portals and services, directing their activities to disseminate scientific information about places (primarily archaeological sites) that have undergone sacralization.