The Udmurt Pantheon and the Udmurt Worldview

The research gives an overview of the Heavenly (in/inma/immu/inmu, lit: ‘heaven/heavenly earth’) area, its construction, and its gods. Udmurt narratives about the creation of the world are related to biblical subjects and images. In their folklore we find the image of a heavenly stove and heavenly table, i.e. the constellation of Ursa Major. The supreme deities include the creator God (Inmar, Kuaz’, Kyldys’in/Kylchin) and the female deities (Kaldyk-mumy/Kaltak, Shundy-mumy, “Mother-Sun / Mother of the Sun”, Invu-mumy “Mother of Heavenly Water / Heavenly Grace”, Invozho-mumy “Mother-Invozho, Goddess of Summer Feast Time, i.e. Transitional Time”, Gudyri-mumy, Thunder-Mother, Muz’’yem-mumy, Mother-Earth).

About vozho, the Spirit of Transition Time and Holiness among Udmurt and Komi

This article concentrates on one very central character in Udmurt mythology. It is a character typical of the transitional time around the solstices, an ambiguous and liminal time, which requires particular caution from the humans to protect themselves from dangerous interference from the world beyond. This character, whose name, vozho, appears in the Udmurt name of these periods, vozho-dyr, the time of vozho for the winter solstice and invozho, heaven-vozho for the summer solstice, is also a water spirit. I reflect also on other water spirits and on their peculiarities. This analysis leads me to reflect on the origin and the ramifications of the concept behind vozho with its linguistic correlations, the way it is articulated and how it sheds light on the concept of holy in the Permic languages and for the Permians, Udmurt and Komi. This leads me to reflect on the correlations between liminality and holiness, the liminal places and spaces and their value, and the particular characters in the mummery festivities that characterise this transitional time and which are connected both to the spirits of the other world and to the dead ancestors, who are among the main providers of well-being in the Udmurt world.

“It’s Not Real Life”: Liminality and Summer Camp Employment

Liminal spaces occur separately from everyday life and are important to human development. Due to increased technological connectivity, young people are rarely separated from their home lives. Understanding young adulthood is a transitional time and summer camps can be settings for development, the purpose of this study was to understand the nature of summer camp employment as a liminal space. Individuals from a national (USA) study of summer camp employment ( n = 77, Mage = 21.3) participated in in-depth interviews. Participants were 77.9% White ( n = 60), 9.1% Black or African American, 9.1% Multi-Racial, 2.6% Asian, and 1.3% Latinx. About 64.9% identified as female ( n = 50), 33.8% identified as male, and 1.3% identified as gender non-conforming. Interview transcripts were inductively analyzed using thematic coding. Participants described camp as a liminal space with four dimensions of separation: physical, psychological, social, and technological. They also described experiencing a liminal time of life. In combination, the separation and time-of-life dimensions created an experience of liminal intensity manifested through a closed social system, blurred boundaries between work and non-work life, and increased autonomy. A revised conceptualization of liminal space is suggested and considerations regarding liminal intensity for young people are discussed.

‘On a mission’: Christian Youth Workers in Australia in the 1960s–1970s

The historical intertwining of youth work and Christianity is well-recognised, especially in the United Kingdom and in the early establishment of youth work in Australia. However, Australian youth work underwent significant changes from the 1960s to late 1970s. This article uses a representative case study approach to illuminate how Christian youth workers were active in this transitional time. It finds that Christian youth work efforts in this time (1) both entrenched youth ministry as a serious pursuit in Australia, and created space for Christian work in secular settings, thus (2) contributing to a divide between church-based youth ministry and secular youth work. The paper discusses the implications of these findings for contemporary youth ministry, and concludes by proposing areas for further research.

A Normative Approach to Understanding How “Boomerang Kids” Communicatively Negotiate Moving Back Home

The present study adopts a normative approach to examine the context-specific dilemmas and strategies experienced by individuals returning to their parental home after living independently. Through 31 in-depth interviews with individuals ranging in age from 22 to 31, we identified that the central communicative dilemma participants experienced was articulating the decision to move back home as an investment in the future rather than a source of stigma. Participants indicated various strategies to destigmatize the decision to move home and make the experience a positive step toward their futures and in their relationships with their families: communicate clear expectations, contribute to the household, embody adult behavior, and articulate clear timelines. The findings shed light on the complexities of creating an adult identity at a transitional time and supplement understanding of the moving—back—home experience by illustrating how adulthood embodies specific meanings in this context.

General solutions to $$\mathcal {N}$$-field cosmology with exponential potentials

We construct the general analytical solution for the $$\mathcal {N}$$ N -field product-exponential potential in an expanding FLRW background. We demonstrate the relevance of this analytical solution in more general contexts for the derivation of estimates for the transitional time between an arbitrary initial state and the slow-roll solutions. In certain cases, these estimates can also be used to demonstrate the non-linear convergence towards the slow-roll solutions. In addition, we extend the solution to include stiff matter as well.

From Nature as a "First Teacher" to the "Subjective Idea". Changes in Aesthetic Criteria in the Second Half of the ХVI Century and Their Impact on the Studies of Proportions

In the second quarter of the XVI th century, some changes occur, which reflected in the art from that period. As early as the second half of the century, some new trends began in the art of the High Renaissance. The crisis in the humanistic culture of the Renaissance led to changes in the mentality of the individual person. Feelings like anxiety and disharmony enterеd in the balanced soul of the Renaissance man. They formed new aesthetic criteria, which required a change in the proportions and shapes of the human body and image. Undoubtedly, this is a transitional time in search of new ideals and artistic means.

Preliminary results of 2020 archaeological studies of the monuments of Kazakh Altai

Archaeological studies in the context of scientific interpretation were carried out in the region back in pre-revolutionary times and continue to the present. The research that have continued now for a third century led to accumulation of a rich historiographical foundation of archaeological material and solid literature dedicated to various aspects of life of the region’s ancient population. The first research have begun in 1960 by the South Altai archaeological expedition. S. S. Sorokin performed reconnaissance explorations across Bukhtarma from Katon-Karagai to the Kurtu River. As a result of these surveys 15 monuments were discovered., one of which is the Kurtu burial site. After the research of S. S. Sorokin, the works on the site have terminated, and half a century later, in 2019, they were resumed. One of the outcome of the conducted research consists in specification of the topo-landscape situations of Tautekeli necropolis; this led to substantiated division of Kurtu necropolis previously studied by S. S. Sorokin, which included the group Tautekeli. The historical name of the necropolis Topkayin was introduced into the scientific discourse. Until the present day, it was a known fact for the archaeological science that Topkayin and Tautekeli burial sites consist only of funerary-memorial complexes of the beginning of Nomadic era, i.e., the Indo-Skythians period. The conducted archeological explorations resulted in acquisition of the material that chronologically relate to the transitional time from the Mayemer period to the Pazyryk period. The unique materials that contain knowledge on the burial rite of the population, armament, horse munition and burials of the horses themselves, were obtained.

The myth of the journey of the soul and Bronze Age funerary sites of the Sintashta and Petrovka type in the Southern Trans-Urals

The article presents an attempt to interpret the semantics of one of the brightest examples of the burial rite among the pastoral population with high level of metal production, which left the sites of the Sintashta and Pet-rovka type, localized in the Southern Trans-Urals (Trans-Ural peneplain). They are presently dated to the period between the 21st and 18th c. BC (transitional time from the Middle to Late Bronze Age). Materials from the burial sites (cemeteries of Sintashta and Krivoye Ozero) have been analysed, with direct involvement of the author. The problem appears as follows. The vast majority of researchers believe that within the burial chamber of some Sin-thashta and later Petrovka socially significant persons, the chariots were placed, in an assembled or disassem-bled form, yet chariots. The main purpose of the chariots, in their opinion, was participation in military activities, with a caveat about the possibility of their use in rituals, and that the buried themselves should be recognised as chariot drivers-warriors who ruled the life of communities (clans). The article substantiates the hypothesis of the apparent existence of a tradition in the Sintashta, Petrovka and other synchronous Eastern European steppe cul-tural formations, of placing in the burial chamber the very parts of a chariot, especially the wheels, and not the whole chariots. The author suggests considering the funeral rite of the chosen members of the Bronze Age Sin-tashta and Petrovka communities (clans) of the Southern Trans-Urals, which involved the use of chariot parts (wheels), as a kind of symbolic text, as a modelled realization of the funeral myth, which tells the story of the jour-ney of the soul to the afterlife on the burial chariot of the Vedic twin gods — Ashwins. The detailed parameters of such models should not be literally correlated with the real transportation means. According to the author, the individuals buried in such tombs were not necessarily chariot drivers-warriors. The paper discusses another im-portant aspect — the localization of the other world for the Bronze Age Sintashta and Petrovka population of the Southern Trans-Urals. According to our observations, the ideas about the localization of the world of the dead were not permanent and could change over several centuries, from the Sintashta period to the time of the classi-cal stage of the history of the Alakul Culture (pottery with a ledge shoulder, with ornamentation spread across two or three zones). The majority of adults in the Sintashta burials with wheel hollows, were orientated with their heads to the northwest sector. Similar was the orientation of symbolic wagons and equally symbolic horses. For alike Petrovka burial sites, the latitudinal orientation already prevailed. These changes, as it appears to the author, reflect modifications of the funeral myth.