Традиционный орнамент номадов как визуальный архетип

The article considers the concept of visual archetype in relation to the nomadic ornament phenomenon. Ornament is the most characteristic ethno differentiating feature of nomadic cultural and artistic tradition. In traditional arts and crafts, it expresses ideological and axiological bases of an ethnic group and narrates about its beliefs, customs and spirituality. Nomads transmit their cultural symbols and values by means of ornaments. In fact, ornament of nomads incorporated all their considerations about universe, its structure and functioning, about a man and his place in the world. For the cultures with no written linguistic tradition, like traditional culture of the Central Asian region nomads, ornament is the most acceptable and almost the unique way to preserve and communicate their ethnic and cultural information. Ornament, considered from the standpoint of its functional value, is a symbol realized by signs that are potentially ready for further transformations of their form and meaning, which depends on spatial and temporal context. This phenomenon with no changes of its essence can be found absolutely in all cultural traditions throughout the epoch of their existence. Here the symbol represents materially expressed ideological constants; it is a visual archetype coded by signs. These signs, depending on the type and nature of the cultural tradition they belong to, can have any form, style and script, so they can be embodied in various kinds of material culture of an ethnic group. In the art of nomads ornament is a visual archetype, an aesthetically expressed conventional system of symbols encoding the entire paradigm of the whole nomadic ethnos.