E-mail: gmisharina@gmail.com
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Unioninkatu st. 38, 00014 Helsinki, Finland;
Doctoral student, Institute of Philosophy, History, Culture and Arts (Folklore Studies), Helsinki University
Traditional cultures around the world maintain archaic purifying rituals — in other words, banishing rituals, which central aim is the protection of people and their livelihood from different types of noxious beings: predatory animals, reptiles, and also representatives of impure spirits. In this paper, the central focus is on Komi1 rituals for the banishment of bedbugs from houses and thistles from fields. This article addresses certain banishing rituals and the problem of defining genre for their verbal-musical texts. In 1960, the collectors of Komi folklore came across the so far unknown singing performances, described later as the “forgotten genre of folklore”. The group of collectors included a musicologist, and considered what they had found to be close to Komi funeral and wedding laments in both melody and poetic system. In the present day, genre classification in folklore studies according to many approaches has been left behind in the history of research, yet the category of genre can still be used as a key for understanding and interpreting folklore texts. This paper undertakes an attempt to identify the nature of the genre and an analytical term for this category of problematic texts. The poetics of laments for bedbugs and thistles are analyzed from the perspective of performance. The interrelation of banishing rites which employ laments and burial rites which employ funerary weeping are explicated.
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