Ukrainian Rituals on the Prairies by Natalie Kononenko, based on a decade of fieldwork in rural Canada, offers rich and abundant material for an ethnographer, folklorist, or anyone interested in the life of Ukrainian communities in the central and western parts of Canada. It conveys information about building and representing a community in a multicultural environment through the lens of ethnography, with coverage of food, rituals, customs, celebrations, clothing, rites of passage, and the role of the church, all intertwined and providing insight into how we define and group folklore genres, the meaning of place and historical process, and the pertinence of academic discussions.
This book embraces the main rites of passage that are familiar to folklorists and ethnologists. It focuses on the core role of religion, with chapters on the church, social identity, and rite-of-passage milestones including birth, baptism, weddings, and death and funerals, concluding with a treatment of calendar customs and rituals. These chapters bring many details into a discussion of how communities are established and how members remain connected with one another and with their historic homeland, and they shed light on the main actors, voices, and patterns active in the construction of community. Elements of material culture, such as food, clothes, and buildings, elements that are both tangible and consumable, as well as radiant and visible customs and rituals–these are the cultural expressions highlighting these processes for participants and observers.
Readers will notice that some foods, for example kutia, perogies, kolachi, and kovbasa, appear at each significant rite-of-passage event, whether it is baptismal celebrations, wedding parties, mourning the deceased, or preparing a Christmas or Easter dinner. The presence of ethnic food with symbolic meaning signifies for the community a connection to its long-time traditions and manifests to outsiders a sense of group presence and vibrant existence. The regions with a long-term presence of the Ukrainian Canadian community are marked with more durable material items, as in these Alberta Province towns: a giant statue of sausage, kovbasa, in Mundare; the Vegreville egg, a sculpture of a pysanka, the Ukrainian Easter egg, also used for Christmas in the Ukrainian Canadian tradition; and a massive sculpture of a pierogi (pyrih) in Glendon. Created between the late 1950s and mid-1970s, these imposing statues symbolically mark the spaces settled by Ukrainians since the first wave of their immigration in the late-nineteenth century.
The reader will notice a similar consistency with regard to clothing, such as the rushnyk, a woman’s embroidered scarf, used to build ties within and beyond the community. Clothes are stored for a lifetime as significant items worn for baptism, when a person enters the community, or for a wedding, when the person reaches adult status, or they are buried in a home closet for those who passed away in an untimely manner. Some instances of preparation for the afterlife are discussed in the book, such as preparing clothes for a funeral or a coffin before a family member passes away. While these examples testify to internal ties within the ethnic community, the use of Ukrainian national costumes at heritage festivals and dance performances, and conducting embroidery classes for children and adults, are ways to demonstrate publicly the presence of the ethnic community.
Religion, church, and church rituals are topics running through the pages of Ukrainian Ritual on the Prairies. Historically among Ukrainian Canadians, religious identity has prevailed over national identity, especially for the first wave of Ukrainian immigrants to Canada, and in many locations religious practice replaced social and governing bodies on the Canadian prairies. Church was the central place for emotional attachment. Kononenko shows how Ukrainians in Canada easily adopted the Canadian style in their home designs even as they retained the traditional decoration for their churches. She contends that for the Ukrainian peasants arriving in Canada in the late-nineteenth century, the home was seen as just a shelter where they could sleep overnight, while the church was the emotional center of the community.
In Kononenko’s account, church as a place of meeting for different practices connects sometimes contradictory tendencies. Details of various religious practices provide examples of pure magical thinking, such as people's manipulations of blessed objects received from the church to control weather or family well-being, and using natural objects such as stones “to prevent souls of the deceased from returning to Ukraine from Canada” (45). At the same time, churches play the role of an administrative institution in organizing rituals associated with the most important life changes such as with births, weddings, and death. The church assisted in giving a voice to women's groups and associations that were mostly silenced at that time. These were often church-based and, thus, a counterweight to government policies of assimilation. One assimilative feature was the sometimes dramatic name changes: Lesia to Elsie Kawulych, Nazarii Haras to Norman Harris, Dmytro to Metro Radesh, Frank Cedar’s father’s shift from Woitovych to Cedar, and Petro Kuleba to Peter Kule.
The administrative power of the church included the exclusive right of burial of the dead, and the practice of excluding unbaptized children and suicides from church cemeteries was seen as excluding them from the community and was in some cases strongly resisted, as shown in the case of Nellie Holowachuk in chapter 7. The church's administrative functions have been taken over by state institutions that now supervise and assist the processes of birth and dying, and this change brought with it the fading away of certain traditions and customs, and weakened the sense of community belonging, now a feature of family life rather than community life.
For the Ukrainian Canadian community, historically immigrant-based, it was natural to build ties with the old country in making or sustaining a tradition or custom, and the author shows how people sometimes looked with nostalgia at an imagined old rural Ukraine. For example, in chapter 5, the church's position against cremation is presented as an institutional, faith-based concept, even though churches in Ukraine had already started setting a columbarium in church yards or inside the church building. The characterization of Ukraine as having pregnancy taboos that have been abandoned in Canada is not accompanied by examples collected in this author’s fieldwork; the same is true of a statement regarding stricter adherence to old traditions in weddings. There is room here for a comparative research project for other folklorists and ethnologists, looking at rural and urban places in both countries to assess the shades and flavors in current practices and thinking on both sides of the Atlantic.
The most important question that Ukrainian Ritual on the Prairies raises for me has to do with the focus on nationalism as the book’s analytic backbone. The rich ethnographic data that wonderfully describes the life of the Ukrainian community on the Canadian prairie, based on the author’s respondents’ memories of the earlier practices they witnessed, provides firsthand the material of everyday life of a community that is rooted in at least two identities, one tied to the land of their ancestors, the other to their new land, which is typical of migrant groups in North America. In the face of strong assimilation policies, a migrant group might not maintain ties to the far-away wider community, as Canada’s Ukrainians have done through foodways, dress, dance, celebrations, and rituals for life-changing events. The author does not discuss her respondents’ political views or attitudes, nor does she mention the politically leftist segment of the community, which manifests its identity through these same material objects and practices. This raises the question: which examples of cultural expression should be seen through the lens of nationalism? Spending almost a decade in Canada for graduate research, I felt the pressure to evoke Ukrainian nationalism while addressing topics related to Ukraine. Is it a residue of coloniality that requires us to view the places that previously constituted imperial Russia with the same wariness of imperial aspirations today? Could we think of introducing a wider framework using other cross-disciplinary analytical tools to account for the data in this ethnographic account?
Let me cite one example. Kononenko states that, while talking about crop-oriented practices described as magical rituals, she restrained herself from asking deeper questions as to whether people believed they could achieve the desired result through these rituals. She observes, “in today’s society, such a question would have been somewhere between uncomfortable and inappropriate” (198). This reflection resonates with me, as I see the book as being in search of a comprehensive analytical framework. But I worry about academic self-censorship and current taboos that might put limits on in-depth exploration of a topic the researcher is keen to investigate. Hopefully, the complex and multilayered ethnographic material we encounter in this book can open additional approaches for scholarly interpretation. Natalie Kononenko’s Ukrainian Ritual on the Prairies is an enjoyable read, and it offers fruitful material upon which to enlarge academic discussions.
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[Review length: 1472 words • Review posted on October 25, 2024]