Author
Stishova Nataliya
candidate of historical sciences, deputy director for scientific work of the M. Rylskyi Institute of Art studies, Folkloristics and Ethnology of the NAS of Ukraine.
Calendar rituals of Ukrainians in the research of scholars of the 20th-21st centuries
Abstract
The article analyses the works and sources on researching the calendar customary and ritual culture of the Ukrainians written by domestic and foreign scholars of the XXth–XXIst centuries, in order to clarify the state of preservation of festive ceremonies and uniform presentation of annual cycles, as well as the relationship of religious and secular spheres in the calendar-holiday rituals, the role and place of rites in religion.
Every new decade, starting from the early XXth century, was characterized by thorough monographic works of famous scholars (Vasyl Myloradovych, Mykola Sumtsov, Volodymyr Shukhevych, Vasy Domanytskyi, Khvedir Vovk, Mykhaylo Hrushevskyi, Mykola Hrinchenko, Klyment Kvitka, Vasyl Kravchenko, Viktor Petrov, Ksenofont Sosenko, and others), as well as by various periodicals.
The early 1930s was distinguished by banning on research activities leading to a natural consequence – the elimination of all academic periodicals and the implementation of the first steps towards the forcible introduction of the Marxist methodology. Scientific centres were reorganized and liquidated, researchers were repressed; yet, some ethnographic centres still continued to exist.
In the field of view of researchers indirectly were aspects of the relationship between religious and secular spheres of calendar-holiday rituals.
In the mid- to late XXth century, calendar customs and rites of the Ukrainian population were considered in the context of rituals of other Slavonic peoples.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Kyiv and Lviv scholars have prepared and published generalizing historical and ethnographic works, namely Boykivshchyna; Hutsulshchyna; Podillia, etc., while in the XXIst century – An Ethnographic Image of Modern Ukraine: A Corpus of Expeditionary Materials of Folklore and Ethnographic Studies (Vol. 6: Calendar Rituals).
Modern monographic editions of leading Ukrainian researchers deserve a considerable attention in studying calendar customary and ritual culture.
A review of the literature allows drawing conclusions about a certian progress in scholars’ theoretical understanding of factual information on Ukrainian calendar rituals, as well as the uniformity in presenting each of the annual cycles. Currently, there is a lack of works that would highlight the tween religious and secular spheres in the calendar-holiday rituals, as well as the role and place of rites in religion.
Keywords
calendar rituals, customary and ritual culture, annual cycle, scientific studies.
References
- KUROCHKIN, Oleksandr. Festive Year of the Ukrainians from the Times of Yore to the Present. Bila Tserkva: Oleksandr Pshonkivskyi Publisher, 2014, 385 pp. [in Ukrainian].
- SKRYPNYK, Hanna. Ethnographic Achievements of the 1920s Academic Research Institutions. In: Hanna SKRYPNYK, ed.‑in‑chief, Materials for Ukrainian Ethnology: Collected Scientific Papers. Kyiv: IASFE Press, 2002, iss. 2 (5), pp. 262–271 [in Ukrainian].