Article

Name: Funeral and Memorial Lamentations of Erzya Mordvins of Zalesovskoe Prichumyshe: Functional and Semantic Aspect

Authors: Pavel S. Shakhov, Igor V. Zubov

Institute of Philology of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation

Research Institute of the Humanities, Saransk, Russian Federation

Abstract: This paper describes and analyzes funeral-memorial lamentations (layshemat) recorded in the villages of the Chumysh river area in the Zalesovsky district of Altai Krai. The corpus of Siberian texts of Erzya lamentations recorded at different times was compiled, making it possible to evaluate the materials by describing the ritual context and the performance circumstances. The most representative proved to be the audio recordings made in the village of Borisovo in 2008 and 2017 when the method of participant observation was used. The descriptions of funeral-memorial rituals using oral sources and poetic texts of lamentations allowed reconstructing to some extent the bearers’ ideas about death tradition, the afterlife, and the afterworld. Also, a description of the ritual codes (actional, objective, personal, temporal, spatial) was made, with their ritual functions determined. Moreover, the author has succeeded in establishing some parallels on the subject-thematic level with the autochthonous Erzya-Mordovian traditions, which are “maternal” for the Erzya Mordvins of Zalesovskoe Prichumyshe. The texts of funeral “lament of the towel” layshema nardamun’ and funeral lament sung on the 40th day before the “parting of the soul” are provided in the Appendix.

Keywords: Erzya-Mordovian lamentations, funeral ritual, memorial rituals, ritual codes, ritual functions, autochthonous and migratory folk traditions

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