The Twelfth Volume of the “Ethnographic Image of Modern Ukraine” as a Unique Folklore and Ethnographic Source

Author

Kalach Olena

a Ph.D. in History, a research fellow at the Ukrainian Ethnological Centre Department of M. Rylskyi Institute of Art Studies, Folkloristics and Ethnology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (Kyiv, Ukraine).

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6304-5076

The Twelfth Volume of the “Ethnographic Image of Modern Ukraine” as a Unique Folklore and Ethnographic Source

Abstract

A relatively new direction for Ukrainian humanities – cultural and military anthropology – becomes particularly relevant with the beginning of the great war caused by the russia’s aggression on the terrains of our country. This is the phenomenon when the focus of the scientist is on the ordinary person with new existential experience, emotions, transformation of worldviews and value orientations in the struggle for freedom and independence of both an individual and an entire nation.

The submitted article is an attempt to analyze the source base included into the twelfth volume of the fundamental multi-volume corpus of expeditionary folklore and ethnographic materials “Ethnographic Image of Modern Ukraine”, collected, arranged and presented to the public on January 28, 2025 by the scientific community of M. Rylskyi IASFE of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

The reader has an opportunity to get acquainted with the biography of an ordinary Ukrainian after the materials of the recorded narratives, autoethnographic and diary entries. The history of everyday life, feelings and heroic experiences of a person are described. It is possible to trace changes in identification practices and priorities. On the one hand, such narratives have a therapeutic post-traumatic nature for the respondents, and on the other hand, they are a valuable source of information for society in general and future generations reflecting a true chronicle of the events of a cruel reality at the level of individual perception, recording facts and details those later remain unnoticed by the narrator, becoming folklorized.

The authoress has concluded that the publication of such editions is important because of the detailed documentation of events as well as a testimony for the future, a fact of the conscious responsibility of our contemporaries towards future generations. The recorded testimonies will serve as a thread of intergenerational communication in the transfer of experience of mutual assistance, unification of the nation in the defense and protection of territorial integrity and state independence in the conditions of quantitative, qualitative and tactical superiority of the enemy forces.

Keywords

Russian-Ukrainian war, “Ethnographic Image of Modern Ukraine”, oral history narratives, autoethnographic stories, individual and collective memory, forced migration.

References

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