TRADITIONAL NATIONAL FUNERAL PRACTICE: CULTURAL TEXT AND SOCIAL CONTEXT

Year 2016, Issue: 1, 35 - 43, 01.12.2016

Olena Ivanovska

Abstract

Ukrainian traditional culture is distinctive phenomenon that fits into a mosaic picture of the folklore heritage of the world. Humanity during its existence created many options for handling cultural practices with the body of a deceased person from cannibalism, funeral parting in the country of the ancestors of the still live infirm person to cremation or interment. Each ethnic group has its own history of the burial culture that depends on many factors: geographical location, landscape conditions, religious beliefs. The purpose of the research reveals the cultural universals and original features of Ukrainian tradition of interment. Source materials of the research are the folklore collection of nineteenth and twentieth century and the author\'s own observations. The subject of the author\'s research is to ascertain the meaning and generation of the principles of the concept \"death\", to identify features of initial burial ritual and to perceive the semantic intentions of the actant of burial practices. Despite Ukrainian ethnographic zoning of lands and the existence of the local manifestations of burial traditions, the dominant nationwide that is a sacralization of the deceased is determined, all stages of burial and ritual actions of the body are semiotically filled. In the funeral ritual is prevailed the metaphor of \"taboo\" that caused the archaic human faith in the word as a material substance, and therefore attempts to provide vital senses of the phenomenon of dying. During the study, author concludes that the main source of information about the ancient burial options is preserved by oral culture, where form of death and the transition to otherness are encoded in the metaphorical meanings; initial character of the texts of culture, which is the leading theme of death is rather arbitrary, because the main differentiation is not between the status (\"who he is\"), but between the loci (\"where he is\"), in the spaces of being and otherness; weighing component around which focuses the creative activity of society is transit.

Keywords

Culture, Folklore, Initiation, Transit, Oral Culture, Tradition, Burial Practices, Meaning and Generation, Locus of Life, Locus of Death