Representation of baptism ritual in everyday life speech of the people inhabiting the Kirillov District of the Vologda Region
Abstract
The article focuses on the frame structure of the baptismal ritual which is verbalized in the dialect everyday speech. In Russia, the Kirillov District of the Vologda Region belongs to the area which is known as ‘Northern Thebaid’, because its monasteries became outposts of Orthodoxy in the Russian North. While the dialect vocabulary of the Kirillov District has been fixing since nineteenth century, the spiritual field of regional speech is usually studied on a selective basis, i.e. in ethnographical or linguistic (mostly in folk studies) descriptions. The development of cognitive and linguacultural approaches allows of interpreting the facts of folk Orthodox rituals in two ways: firstly, the analyses of understanding of spiritual field and its actualization in the modern narrations; secondly, the analyses of verbal representation of the ritual in everyday speech. The source for the study is everyday speech of the inhabitants of the Kirillov District of the Vologda Region of Russia. The comparison of primitive texts, fixed in Vologda Dialects Dictionary in the second half of the twentieth century, and thematically identical narratives, recorded in recent years, or, more precisely, in 2013–2019, gives the authors an opportunity to describe the frame structure of the baptismal ritual via its locus, subjects, objects, etc., and to form the matrix of lexical lacunas, semantic shifts in the slots, and word preferences under the influence of extralinguistic circumstances. The study of the implementations of the elements of Orthodox baptismal ritual in so called ‘folk Orthodoxy’ reveals the hierarchical structure of the ritual elements in the conscious of rural inhabitants of the Russian North. Their preferences generally focus on new human relations, which are formed by rites of passage, and on the positive changes in the life of a child (God’s protection, belonging to the society, good health, etc.). The significant motif of modern narrations is the struggle with Orthodoxy in the Soviet era, which is interpreted by the informants as the reason of their lack of understanding Orthodox rules and traditions.
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