Moldovan village between popular calendar and centralized planning in the second half of the twentieth century

The traditional calendar had a great importance in the village’s life in the past because it indicated the optimal time for plowing and sowing, for the sheep to go to the pasture, the days favorable for collecting medical herbs, weddings, etc. But over time, it has undergone countless changes caused by various factors. First of all, it is about the role of science and its intense development since in the modern era, which had in the transformation of the traditional calendar into one of a more symbolic character. Secondly, it is about changing the political context: Bessarabia becomes the Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic as part of U.S.S.R. and is subjected to ideological policies according to the instructions issued by Moscow, which aimed to Russify and denationalize the occupied peoples and form a new soviet consciousness. Last but not least, we must take into account the economic policy of U.S.S.R., which translated into life by applying a planned economy and, in general, a centralized planning in all spheres of life. Obviously, in such conditions, a large part of our ancestral traditions have not been passed down to us.

Decision support systems halve fungicide use compared to calendar-based strategies without increasing disease risk

The European Green Deal aims to reduce the use of chemical pesticides by half by 2030. Decision support systems are tools to help farmers schedule fungicide spraying based on disease risk and can reduce fungicide application frequency and overall use. However, the potential benefit of decision support systems compared to traditional calendar-based strategies has not yet been rigorously quantified. Here we synthesise 80 experiments and show that globally decision support systems can reduce fungicide treatments by at least 50% without compromising disease control. For a given fixed number of fungicide sprays, decision support systems were as effective as calendar-based programs in reducing disease incidence. When the number of sprays was halved, the increase in disease incidence was lower for decision support system-based strategies than calendar-based strategies. Our findings suggest that decision support systems can reduce fungicide use while limiting the risk to plant health and resistance development.

ON SPRING RITUALS IN THE UDMURT VILLAGE VARKLED-BODYA (WITH REGARD TO THE BILINGUAL MONOGRAPH BY E. TOULOUZE AND N. V. ANISIMOV)

This article is devoted to a review of a recently published bilingual monograph by E. Toulouze and N. V Anisimov called “Spring rituals of the Varkled-Böd’ya Udmurt” dedicated to the description and analysis of the complex of spring rituals marking the beginning of the new year according to the Udmurt traditional calendar. The authors try to understand how and in what way the transformation processes are manifested in the modern Udmurt village community, which strives to preserve its identity during the period of unification and globalization. Based on the works of their predecessors and their own historical and ethnographic research, the authors update the data on the spring rituals of the Udmurts: the initiation of boys ( Eru/Eur karon ), the ritual of chasing unholy spirits ( Shaytan Ul’l’yan ), the initiation of girls ( Nyl kuras’kon ) and the ritual of the Vös’n’erge Clan Ceremony.

THE ESSENTIALITY OF THE NUSANTARA TRADITIONAL CALENDAR

Today, tomorrow, yesterday, and later is the time because this life will always talk about the time that can affect the pattern of life in an environment. So that the existence of time becomes important. Based on this, a time system was compiled using the circulation of celestial bodies. Previous people have inherited the traditional calendar in their respective regions. This adapts to the condition of the community and its environment. The research question in this research is how the interpretations of the traditional calendars in the archipelago. The purpose of this research is to explore the essential meaning of the traditional calendars in the archipelago. The method used in this research is library research. This method is used to describe the various existing sources. The results showed that the calendar in each region has its own meaning for the wearer. The Batak calendar is used to determine good and bad days, the Pranatamangsa calendar for season markers, the Saka calendar for marking religious rituals, the Islamic Javanese calendar for historical momentum markers and Islamic teachings, the Bugis calendar for guidelines for daily activities and the Maluku calendar for marking the time of manufacture boat.

Modelizing epistemologies: organizing Catholic sanctity from calendar-based martyrologies to today’s mobile apps

The Catholic concept of “sanctity” can be thought of as a “cultural unit” (Eco) composed of a wide variety of “grounds” (Peirce) or distinctive features. The figures of individual saints, i.e., tokens of sanctity, are characterized by a particular set of grounds, organized and represented in texts of different genres. This paper presents a semiotic study of texts seeking to offer an encompassing view of “sanctity” by listing all the saints and supplementing their names with a short description of their lives emphasizing the grounds characterizing each of them. The analysis focuses on a seminal liturgical text, the Martyrologium Romanun (1584–2004), and the first official encyclopedia of saints, the Bibliotheca Sanctorum (1961–2013), as well as a sample of digital texts and media such as websites and mobile apps. While the first text offers a dogmatic perspective on sanctity and saintly figures and the second offers a historical and culturological one, websites succeed in reconciling the two paradigms into a single syncretic form of interactive fruition in which the more up-to-date encyclopedic model subsumes the traditional calendar one and, in the case of apps, adds a glocal dimension, enhancing situated cognition. The analysis shows that the introduction of the encyclopedic genre and subsequent proliferation of digital repertoires is connected to a shift in the Catholic “episteme” (Foucault) of sanctity and a growing tendency to consider saints as not (only) religious characters and objects of cult, but (also) as historical individuals and components of a culture and, consequently, as suitable objects of critical discourse.

Motives and Images of Folk Laughter Cultures as the Commonplaces of the Soviet Carnival of 1920–1930

The article is devoted to the study of the problem of continuity between images, motives, poetic clichés of Russian as well as Jewish folk cultures and components of the laughter discourse of the Soviet era. Genre patterns (procession, round dance, game, street song, everyday wit), chronotope (Pesach / Easter / May day), archetype (a dying and resurrecting hero), ethnical and social stereotypes (“aliens”), ritual objects (carnival carriage; matzo vs Easter baking), grotesque rhymes (“matzo – lamza-dritsa”) are analyzed on the basis of the popular city song “Tram No. 9”, ditties, memoirs, satirical wall newspapers. Those elements of the traditional laughter culture of the Slavs and Jews had been actively interacted in the urban environment at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries, was exploited by the Soviet carnivals of the 1920s–1930s, and remained in Russian folklore of the second half of the 20th century. The study demonstrates that the scriptwriters and actors of the Soviet carnivals borrowed some of the brightest and at the same time common elements of folk laughter culture, which formed extremely labile semantic ties outside the traditional calendar and everyday contexts changing their content in agreement with the political situation. At the same time, the basic techniques and bottom semantics of the folk comic remain unchanged.

RECONSTRUCTION OF THE CHUVASH CALENDAR AND THE RITUAL COMPLEX KALAM

The process of mass Christianization and the use of the official language and the Julian calendar in the administrative offices of local authorities influenced heavily the traditional calendar of the Chuvash people. First of all, the names that denoted the months of the transition period, as well as the name of the main Chuvash rite at the vernal equinox – Kalam, were subjected to semantic transformation. Prior to mass Christianization of the Chuvash people, their calendar year began with the month of norăs / nurăs. This term, along with the concept of a 5-day week, was borrowed from the neighboring Iranian language no later than the 4th–8th centuries AD. Before this period the ancestors of the Onoğurs-Bulgar could name the first month of the year as having the meaning «head month [of the year]» and have, like all Proto-Turkic, a 3-day week. The latter is well reflected in the rules for dividing individual parts of moon phases in the Onoğuro-Bulgar calendar, as well as in a 9-day division of moon phases in the calendars of the Chuvash, the Tuvinians and some other Turkic peoples. Number 9 expresses the main idea of the harmonious unity of the three forces of the universe: the Sky (the Sun), the Man from the middle world and the Earth, where the remnants of his ancestors are. The chronotope of Kalam ritual complex reflects the universal idea of «dying «and «resurrecting» nature. The complex was formed on the basis of the ancient cult of the Sun among the proto-Turks, who associated the year (in the meaning of a «warm season») only with the summer sun. With the development of cattle breeding and the emergence of the concept of a two-season (summer and winter) calendar year, the idea of its beginning also changed. The Chuvash, like other Turkic peoples, divided the months into two groups: summer months and winter ones. Later on, the ancient Turks began to mark transition periods from one season to another. The ancient Turks understood summer and winter as the time of heat and frost «birth and death». Sĕren rite, which originally symbolized treating and seeing off the ancestral spirits, gradually transformed into the agricultural festivals Akatui (sĕren) and Sabantui «plow wedding».

ANCIENT SACRAL MEANINGS OF CONIFEROUS TREE (SPRUCE, PINE) IN TVER TRADITIONAL CULTURE

The article is devoted to comprehension of ritual and magic role of coniferous tree (spruce, pine) in traditional national culture and is based on materials of a long-term (2000–2019) folklore and ethnographic expeditionary survey of villages of Tver region made by teachers and students of the State Academy of Slavic Culture (nowadays — Russian State University named after A. N. Kosygin). In addition to expedition materials, the work includes identified folklore and ethnographic archival records and publications of past years, related to the evidence of the coniferous tree's sacral meanings and reflecting the ritual tradition of not only Tver land, but also of territories associated with it. In Tver folk culture there is often a ritual synonymy of spruce and pine, which manifests itself both in attributive and in verbal terms. The logic of this article is primarily associated with Tver traditional calendar and agrarian complex, in which the spruce (pine) tree acts as a mythopoetically saturated ritual attribute of calendar rites and holidays. In addition, folklore and ethnographic evidence of the ritual and symbolic role of spruce (pine) in family and household rituals (wedding, maternity, recruiting) has been introduced. Thus, the material is built so that the archaic sacral meanings of the image of spruce (pine) in the ritual zone of Tver traditional culture are revealed, first of all, taking into account the North Russian dialect vocabulary connected with words "yel' ", "yelina", "yolka", "sosna" аnd their dialect meanings, аnd secondly, with the involvement of local ethnographical samples of traditional folk architecture and applied arts such as embroidery, weaving, wood carving and painting, which have preserved in a more or less evident form the sacred character of the depicted coniferous tree.

Catholic Liturgical Practices in Soviet Russia in the 1920s and 1930s: Canonical Norms and Anomalies

This paper examines changes in the liturgical and paraliturgical practices of Roman Catholics in Soviet Russia in the 1920s and 1930s. Nine documents from different archives outside Russia were first used to show changes made at the request of Russian Catholics. These documents deal with a number of disciplinary issues, such as the time for the celebration of Mass, observation of a natural fast before Mass, permission for lay people to bring Holy communion to the sick or imprisoned people. The Holy See readily relaxed canonical requirements. Consequently, at the turn of the 1920s and 1930s, the time for the celebration of Mass became variable, moving more often to the evening hours; the rules of a natural fast before Mass for clergy and laity were relaxed, which paved the way for regular communion at evening Masses; laity were given permission to bring Holy communion to those who could not personally hear the Mass; the practice of stipends for Mass became an instrument of financial support given by the Holy See to impoverished Catholic clergymen in critical situations. The main reason for these dramatic changes was the anti-religious policy of the Soviet government and the disruption of the traditional calendar. The fact of continuing contacts with the Vatican sheds light on those aspects of religious life in Soviet Russia that are not reflected in the official Soviet documentation.