BANS IN FUNERAL AND MEMOTIAL CUSTOMS AND RITUALS OF THE CHUVASHS

Одним из интересных и мало изученных источников для изучения традиционных представлений чувашского народа являются запреты (табу). По мнению чувашских лингвистов и фольклористов, они относятся к малым жанрам чувашского фольклора и являют собой отдельный вид афористических устно-поэтических произведений. Им свойственны четкая языковая форма построения, логичность, поучительная направленность, неукоснительность исполнения. Зародившись в глубокой древности, запреты служили одной из форм регулирования поведения человека в обществе. Они регламентировали повседневную жизнь, хозяйственные занятия, промыслы и ремесла, пищу, религиозные верования, поведение, этикет, язык, культуру речи и т. д. Особое место они занимали в обрядовой жизни, в том числе в обычаях и обрядах, связанных с проводами человека в последний путь. Целью настоящего исследования является определение роли и значения запретов в регулировании поведения людей и членов общины в рамках похоронно-поминальных обычаев и обрядов чувашей Урало-Поволжья. В исследовании запреты рассмотрены в соответствии с основными этапами похоронно-поминального обряда (подготовка к похоронам и охрана покойника; обмывание; проводы в последний путь; погребение; поминки). Работа основана на литературных, архивных и полевых материалах автора. При разработке указанной темы автор руководствовался одним из методологических принципов, в соответствии с которым система запретов понимается как часть социо-нормативной культуры народа, регулирующая поведение человека в повседневности и в религиозно-обрядовых практиках. В обоих случаях запреты имеют религиозную природу и выступают своеобразным императивом в процессе социальной жизни человека. Исследование показало, что запреты в контексте похоронно-поминальных обрядов определяли место, время, порядок проведения ритуала и регламентировали поведение участников. В запретах и предписаниях данного вида обряда проявляется двойственное отношение к умершему. С одной стороны, в них просматривается суеверный страх членов социума перед покойником и смертью, с другой — стремление умилостивить его и как можно скорее проводить в потусторонний мир. Благодаря соблюдению этих запретов происходило поэтапное вычленение покойника из мира культуры и социума, а также «перемещение» в мир предков. One of the interesting and little-studied sources for studying the traditional ideas of the Chuvash people are prohibitions (taboos). According to Chuvash linguists and folklorists, they belong to small genres of Chuvash folklore and are a separate type of aphoristic oral-poetic works. They are characterized by a clear linguistic form of construction, logic, instructive orientation, rigor of execution. Originating in ancient times, prohibitions served as one of the forms of regulating human behavior in society. They regulated daily life, household occupations, crafts and crafts, food, religious beliefs, behavior, etiquette, language, culture of speech, etc. They occupied a special place in ceremonial life, including in customs and rituals associated with sending a person on his last journey. The purpose of this study is to determine the role and significance of prohibitions in regulating the behavior of people and members of the community within the framework of funeral and memorial customs and rituals of the Chuvash of the Ural-Volga region. In the study, the prohibitions are considered in accordance with the main stages of the funeral and memorial rite (preparation for the funeral and protection of the deceased; washing; seeing off on the last journey; burial; wake). The work is based on the author's literary, archival and field materials. When developing this topic, the author was guided by one of the methodological principles, according to which the system of prohibitions is understood as part of the socio-normative culture of the people, regulating human behavior in everyday life and in religious and ceremonial practices. In both cases, prohibitions have a religious nature and act as a kind of imperative in the process of human social life. The study showed that prohibitions in the context of funeral and memorial rites determined the place, time, order of the ritual and regulated the behavior of participants. In the prohibitions and prescriptions of this type of rite, an ambivalent attitude towards the deceased is manifested. On the one hand, they show the superstitious fear of the members of society before the deceased and death, on the other — the desire to propitiate him and as soon as possible to conduct him to the other world. Due to the observance of these prohibitions, the deceased was gradually isolated from the world of culture and society, as well as “moving” into the world of ancestors.

Aboriginal Worlds and Australian Capitalism

Australia has a fairly established literature that seeks to explain, on one hand, the pre-colonial Aboriginal society and economy and, on the other, the relationship that emerged between the First Peoples’ economic system and society, and the settler economy. Most of this relies on theoretical frameworks that narrate traditional worlds dissolving. At best, these narratives see First Peoples subsumed into the workforce, retaining minimal cultural residue. In this paper, I argue against these narratives, showing the ways Aboriginal people have disrupted, or implicitly questioned and challenged dominant forms of Australian capitalism. I have sought to write not within the earlier framework of what is called Aboriginal History that often concentrated on the governance of Aborigines rather than responses to governance. In doing this, I seek to bring into view a history of Aboriginal strategies within a capitalist world that sought to maintain the most treasured elements of social life - generosity, equality, relatedness, minimal possessions, and a rich and pervasive ceremonial life.

AS PINTURAS RUPESTRES DA TRADIÇÃO NORDESTE NA REGIÃO DO SERIDÓ, RN, NO CONTEXTO DA ARTE RUPESTRE BRASILEIRA

Este artigo é uma reflexão sobre as pinturas rupestres da tradição Nordeste na região arqueológica do Seridó, que precisam ainda de estudos pormenorizados do seu vasto acervo arqueológico. Se pode afirmar que, paralelamente às pinturas do Parque Nacional Serra da Capivara, no estado do Piauí, os conjuntos rupestres do Seridó representam o maior acervo gráfico do nordeste do Brasil. Esta afirmativa não está apenas baseada na quantia dos sítios e dos registros, mas na riqueza imagética que os mesmos representam. Retratam as numerosas atividades da vida cotidiana e cerimonial dos povos que as fizeram, além da manifestação da cultural material, imaterial e técnica do pensamento abstrato indígena na pré-história brasileira. THE RUPESTRAL PAINTINGS OF THE NORTHEAST TRADITION IN THE SERIDÓ REGION, RN, IN THE CONTEXT OF BRAZILIAN RUPESTRY ART ABSTRACTThis article is a reflection on the cave paintings of the Northeast tradition in the archaeological region of Seridó, which still need detailed studies of their vast archaeological collection. It can be said that, in parallel to the paintings in the Serra da Capivara National Park in the state of Piauí, the rock paintings ensembles of Seridó represent the largest graphic heritage in the northeast of Brazil. This statement is not just based on the number of sites and records, but on the wealth of images that they represent. They portray the numerous activities of the daily and ceremonial life of the peoples who did them, as well as the manifestation of the material, immaterial and technical culture of indigenous abstract thought in Brazilian prehistory.Keyword: Rock Art; Seridó; Northeast tradition.

Introduction

The chapter introduces the Ndau communities at the center of this ethnography, the spirits who populate local ceremonial life, and the histories behind their emergence. The passage of ceremonial time, with the passing presence of one type of spirit to the next, is a truncated representation of the passing of local Ndau history. Madhlozi are spirits of encounter. They are the spiritual embodiment of encounter itself and the trauma, chaos, and violence that define it. Their emergence in ceremonial life is the continual emergence of history, ever unresolved and living in the spirits of the dead. But neither the history represented, the spirits who represent it, nor the practices used to engage with them are static or fixed in time.

Signs of the Spirit

This book is an ethnography of spirit possession ceremonies and accompanying musical practices in the rural Ndau-speaking communities surrounding Chipinge, Zimbabwe. Collectively called madhlozi, these spirits are the “outsider spirits” of distant social encounters that have shaped Ndau identity and history. The purpose of this book is to explain how musicking during ceremonial life in rural Ndau communities in Zimbabwe is meaningfully experienced during a single spirit possession ceremony. It investigates the immediacy of musical experience and the ways in which the ongoing present of ceremonial performance becomes emotional and socially salient. It provides a model rooted in ethnography and semiotic analysis that illuminates the tight relationship between sound, meaning, experience, and emotion, engaging with three overlapping bodies of knowledge: Ndau spiritual life, semiotics, and studies of emotion and affect. Each chapter in Part II focuses on a specific category of spirits and emphasizes an element of semiotic theory to build a model for exploring affect, emotional experience, and ceremonial efficacy: objects, signs, effects, and continuity. The purpose of the ceremonies I describe and analyze is to transform possibility into actuality, desires into reality. Music is uniquely suited to facilitate experiential transformations such as this. Situated within the historical, spiritual, musical, and political contexts of contemporary Ndau life in Zimbabwe, this book explains how important the experience of meaning is to ceremonial life.

Marriage and Family Relations in Ryabinov’s Denomination in the First Half of the 19th Century

Ryabinov’s denomination in historiography is a poorly studied Old Believers’ movement. It was spread in Kazan, Orenburg and Perm provinces of the Russian Empire. The only full-fledged article dedicated to their ritual life was written in the 19th century by professor of the Kazan Theological Academy N.I. Ivanovsky. Archival investigative cases about the Ryabinovites testify to their variety of religious life in the 1830s and 1850s. During the reign of Nicholas I, the authorities sought to strengthen disciplinary control over the Orthodox parish and to identify the “formal” Orthodox, who actually belonged to other religious communities. These measures would lead to a crisis in the relationship between the secular and spiritual authorities and Old Believers’ communities and to the heyday of investigative cases related to the apostasy of Orthodox parishioners split. Under these conditions, there is a confessionalization of the Old Believers’ denomination among the Rabinovites, aimed at separating their own community from the rest of the Orthodox parishioners and representatives of other Old Believers’ consent. Before the reign of Nicholas I, the Ryabinovites, like a number of other representatives of Old Believers’ denominations, were baptized and married in Orthodox parish churches. Thus, the authorities regarded them as “official” Orthodox. In the process of investigation, the ceremonial life of the Ryabinovites, in particular baptism and marriage, began to change dramatically. The work will show how Ryabinovites, abandoning any contact with the Orthodox Church, began to more actively perform their own rites of baptism and marriage.

Memorate despre câteva obiceiuri din satul Mărișel, jud. Cluj. Note de teren

The field research in this rural community, Mărișel village, Cluj county, took place between 2013-2015, using visual means and structured transgenerational interviews, thus observing the process of oral transmission of narratives. I did not propose the identification of some other meanings to the researched facts, other than those attributed by the interviewed subjects. I should mention that the historical-oral presentation of the life facts told by the people interviewed from the few hamlets of Mărișel village was made from the perspective of our interlocutors, being followed by autobiographical narratives. Thus, I paid attention to narratives articulated in an oral history of the area, stories about customs such as the carols of the young men, the "juni", the wedding or their meetings (“sezatoarea”), as perceived by people of the generation that lived in the interwar period or immediately after the war. The exploration of ceremonial, calendar and family life was done from a multiple methodological perspective, both ethnographic-anthropological and of oral history, so that "the ethno-anthropological analysis of the ceremonial life of a village can also function as a socio-anthropological diagnosis for understanding the deep transformations and mutations in the life of that community ”.(Neagota, 2016) The memorates that are the research object of this work are the result of interviews with village people, elders, in whose house I had the privilege of residing as their grandchildren’s teacher.