Changing values of the category “Other” in religious spheres. A phenomenon of communication as seen from historical prospective

Abstract

The article deals with the phenomenon of communication in religious spheres and its role in the changing and transformation of the category of the “other”. It is about how religion, as a social institution, used the principles of social (artificial) kinship by imitating the principles of biological kinship and thus turned the “alien” people into co-religionists. Singling out the religious communication as an independent issue (along with other types of communication, such as social, political, ethnic, economic, legal, cultural, etc.) is one of the components of the recently introduced system-communication approach to the study of history. Another aspect of this approach is the use of a “cross-cultural method”. Among its working principles this method has a reference to semantically equivalent (or similar) phenomena, which occur in different cultures and traditions.