Ritual and the Body: Ukrainian Rites of Passage
Maria Mayerchyk
Dec 2026 · Harvard University Press - T
Ebook
250
Pages
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infoThis book will become available on December 15, 2026. You will not be charged until it is released.
About this ebook
Ritual and the Body explores how people experience life’s most profound transitions: birth, marriage, and death. Drawing on Ukrainian folk traditions, Maria Mayerchyk shows how rituals mark changes in social status by shaping how the body moves, speaks, eats, hears, and even feels itself to exist.
From christenings and weddings to funerals, the book follows key figures and moments of ritual life—the newborn child, parents, newlyweds, and the deceased—and reveals how bodily states, clothing, sound, food, light and darkness, joy and grief all carry meaning. With clarity and insight, Mayerchyk invites readers to see the human body as a powerful cultural language, one through which communities make sense of loss, transformation, and belonging.
From christenings and weddings to funerals, the book follows key figures and moments of ritual life—the newborn child, parents, newlyweds, and the deceased—and reveals how bodily states, clothing, sound, food, light and darkness, joy and grief all carry meaning. With clarity and insight, Mayerchyk invites readers to see the human body as a powerful cultural language, one through which communities make sense of loss, transformation, and belonging.
Ritual and the Body explores how people experience life’s most profound transitions: birth, marriage, and death. Drawing on Ukrainian folk traditions, Maria Mayerchyk shows how rituals mark changes in social status by shaping how the body moves, speaks, eats, hears, and even feels itself to exist...
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About the author
Maria Mayerchyk is a professor at Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences in Germany and a senior research fellow at the Institute of Ethnology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. She is the author of Coloniality of the Indecent and co-author of Lena and Thomas Gushul: Life in Front and Behind the Camera.
Andriy Nahachewsky is a folklorist, professor, and Huculak Chair of Ukrainian Culture and Ethnography Emeritus at the University of Alberta.
Maria Mayerchyk is a professor at Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences in Germany and a senior research fellow at the Institute of Ethnology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. She is the author of Coloniality of the Indecent and co-author of Lena and Thomas Gushul: Life in Front...
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