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Abstract: The article explores the process of reformatting the image of the Urals, with a particular focus on Perm Region, within modern mass consciousness. The study of constructing regional identity is carried out via investigation of its representations in local narratives, which have undergone a significant semantic shift over recent decades. The main object of research is the TV serial Territory (2020–2023), chosen because media and screenplay texts are currently among the most influential carriers of cultural meanings. Employing interdisciplinary methods such as spatial semiotics and narratology, rooted in the methodology of Vladimir Propp, and the methods of studying the formulas of mass culture by D. Cavelty the article examines the genesis of the renewed local narrative, its semantics, and pragmatics. The author concludes that Komi-Permian mythology functions in the serial as a synecdoche representing the entirety of the Perm Region. The study identifies a broader trend in a number of 1990–2020 local texts towards constructing the local identity associated with the ethnic identity of the ‘small’ indigenous peoples of the Urals, a tendency notably visible in the works of Aleksey Ivanov, who created a new vision of representation of the history of the Urals – the vision which is characterized by a “point of view” of indigenous pre-Christian peoples. The study of the TV serial Territory makes it possible to identify the functions of inclusion of elements of the Komi-Permian myths and folklore. The analysis of other phenomena of literature, cinema, and theater in Perm cultural life of the 2020s, conducted in the work, allows arguing that they, like the serial, are the result of the process of glocalization (R. Robertson’s term). On the one hand, the realities and myths of the Komi-Permian culture are used as a method of renovation of the genre conventions of the global mass culture by way of introducing content, unknown to the mass reader and viewer – the Komi-Permian culture. On the other hand, investigation and recreation of the Komi-Permian mythology, even in a simplified and adapted format, serves as an expression by younger artists of the value of the local cultural heritage, and the need to look for the national roots and increased attention to the local cultures of the ethnoses, who inhabited the Urals in the past and live here in the present.

About the author(s) :

Marina P. Abasheva

Perm State University

Perm State Humanitarian Pedagogical University (Perm, Russia)

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5720-7916

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt: 01.10.2025; date of publication: 29.12.2025

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