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Attributes of wedding rituals of the city: semantics and symbolism

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The authors of the publication:
Bekh Kateryna
p.:
122-134
UDC:
392.5:316.361]:911.375.11(477)
Bibliographic description:
Bekh, K. (2018) Attributes of wedding rituals of the city: semantics and symbolism. Materials to Ukrainian Ethnology, 17 (20), 122–134.

Author

Bekh Kateryna

junior researcher at the “Ukrainian Ethnological Center” Department of the M. Rylskyi Institute of Art studies, Folkloristics and Ethnology of the NAS of Ukraine.

 

Attributes of wedding rituals of the city: semantics and symbolism

 

Abstract

The complex of urban wedding ceremonies, like that of traditional ceremonies, embraces the use of a number of different attributes, functional purposes and the semantic load. The existence of attributes with their symbolic and semantic loads, as well as all components of the wedding ceremony, varies depending on the socio-political and cultural processes. The most noticeable modifications of nuptial attributes take place in a city that always has a population with more intercultural interaction and quickly takes and adapts new festive and ritual trends.

Of the whole complex of marriage ceremonial paraphernalia, one of the most stable remains the main wedding bread – a loaf, which is associated with a number of rituals, including its preparation, decoration, and gifting. In a modern wedding, the townspeople have a wide range of traditional ceremonial attributes. A towel being a symbol of the common path of a bride-couple and their future unity as spouses, remains in use. Among the modern urban population also popular are the rites of sprinkling a bride-couple, familial hearth, whose attributes have today their modified forms.

At a modern city wedding, there are also a number of attributes borrowed from the Western European wedding culture, in particular, wedding rings for declaration of love, bonbonnieres, glasses, figurines of brides, which are given a symbolic meaning of protective functions.

Nowadays, in conditions of dynamic integration and cultural processes occurring mostly in the urban environment, urban wedding attributes are presented in their modified and adapted forms. At a modern wedding, we can often observe the simultaneous use of traditional, Soviet and new (borrowed) attributive components.

 

Keywords

wedding, attributes, symbols, bridecake, tart, towel, bonbonnieres, wedding rings, candle, familial hearth, wedding doll.

 

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