SECOND WRITING REQUIREMENT SUGGESTED TOPICS
You may use this course to fulfill the second writing requirement, if you wish. To qualify for this option, you MUST have completed ENWR 110 or the equivalent. In fact, if you are in your first year of study, I strongly urge you to postpone. Students do better on this requirement and get more out of it if they are more mature.
If you meet the above qualifications, here are some suggested topics. Please check with me if you have questions.
Your second writing paper should be a research paper. You will be doing fieldwork for your collection project. Your paper should be based on published texts and can serve as background for your collection project. Thus, if you are ready to select your collection project now, you are more than welcome to tailor your paper so that it will channel into that project. Otherwise, pick something fun and interesting from the list below. Or suggest your own topic. Please do check with me before you start, though.
Your second writing paper should meet national expository writing standards. This means that it should have a thesis that you set out to investigate. It means formal writing style: no contractions, no colloquial expressions or slang terms. It also means full documentation. You can use any international standard. Author name and page number in parentheses in the text and full bibliography at the end would be just fine.
SUGGESTED TOPICS:
1. David Ransel, the editor of Olga Semeyonova Tian-Shanskaia's book, did his own study called Village Mothers. Ransel is a historian and looks at his material from a historian's, rather than a folklorist's, perspective. What you can do (and we will all do some of this with Worobec's Peasant Russia) is examine Ransel's data (or a part of it) from a folklorist's point of view. What symbolic systems do you see? Can you give a symbolic interpretation to complement or counter Ransel's economic one? Support your perspective with material from our course. I would suggest narrowing your examination to just marriage, or just pregnancy and child-rearing. A focused paper is much more effective than a diffuse one.
2. Christine Worobec wrote a book called Possessed. It looks not so much at witchcraft as at people who supposedly suffered from the effects of witchcraft. In the 19th century, these tended to be women in difficult marital situations. Again, like Ransel, Worobec is a historian and what you would do is look at the material on young wives and possession from a folklorist's point of view.
3. Get W. F. Ryan's Bathhouse at Midnight: Magic in Russia. Extract and examine the magic acts that occur in conjunction with life cycle rituals. You will find some very interesting things that are done in conjunction with the wedding. What patterns can you see? An obvious approach would be to apply Douglas. Describe the patterns, connect to other material we have covered, and speculate on the meaning and purpose of the patterns you detect. Where do margins come into play? What pollution beliefs are at work? How are pollution beliefs used? The wedding is but one suggestion. You will find a whole section on charms. Some of these are love charms and you can study these for patterns. There is a nice section on people who might be considered anomalous. You can look at these and attempt your own interpretation. The one thing I do not want you to do is to try to do everything. Pick ONE narrow topic and check with me.
4. You worked with ritual towels on your Rushnyk assignment. You may continue with something like this by examining the symbols in rushnyky and comparing to the symbols on Easter eggs (there is a Pysanka unit on the same web site). What symbols repeat? Try to explain by connecting to the rituals of marriage, birth and death and the symbols used in these rituals. You should come up with a system of issues that are important in Ukrainian culture.
5. Alternatively, you can go to a big research database called SourceCat. You can access if off my faculty page. Or go the page directly; the URL is http://nmc2.itc.virginia.edu/SourceCatslfk/. Type <guest> into both slots to enter the database and view the material. Look up something like bread and see if you can find a pattern to the use of bread in life cycle ritual. Bread is used at weddings and funerals. Bread is given as a gift to people who perform certain services. Is there a consistency to the use of bread? Is it used to ward off a pollution danger? If so, which danger or dangers? Bread is only one possibility. There is enough material for you to look for patterns of rushnyk use in life cycle ritual. There is enough material for you to look at the use of the road in ritual. And there is enough material for you to look at openings: doors, windows, gateways &endash; and their ritual symbolism. Again, pick ONE of the approaches suggested.
The above are only suggestions and you can chose other topics. Good sources of Russian material, in addition to the books used in this course and the ones cited above are:
Ben Eklof and Stephen Frank, The World of the Russian Peasant
David Ransel, Family Life in Imperial Russia
Esther Kingston-Mann and Timothy Mixter, Peasant Economy, Culture, and Politics of European Russia
Rena Jean Hanchuk, Word and Wax
Joanna Hubbs, Mother Russia
Linda Ivanits, Russian Folk Belief
Marjorie Balzer, Russian Traditional Culture
Petr Bogatyrev, Vampires in the Carpathians
Caroline Humphrey, The Unmaking of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies after Socialism
And, of course, you can suggest material appropriate to your own ethnic group. Please check with one of us if you want to use a book not on the list.