Ideas of childhood and signs of ancient embroidery

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The changes taking place in our modern society, caused by the course of history, lead, on the one hand, to the unification of the surrounding reality, on the other hand, they tear off the veils from the sacred world, the world of secret and deep meanings, blur the boundaries of what is permitted, make available the knowledge that was previously entrusted not to everyone and at a certain time of human life. In particular, this concerns the world of childhood, which is rapidly losing its boundaries, is deprived of its protected status; the world, into which adult life rushes in with a tough onslaught, is often extremely unsightly. The desire to protect oneself from this influence makes us seek salvation in the past, in history, to remember the tradition, the primordial folk culture, which makes a person's life solid, meaningful and whole.

The purpose of this study is to clarify the image of childhood in Russian folk culture through the study of embroidery on children's clothing.

The research objectives can be formulated as follows: firstly, to clarify the place and role of embroidery in Russian folk life, and, secondly, to determine which signs and symbols accompanied the time of childhood.

K. D. Ushinsky is an outstanding Russian teacher and writer, author of the work “Man as a subject of education. The experience of pedagogical anthropology "wrote that" education in the close sense of the word, as a deliberate educational activity - school, educator and ex officio mentors are not the only educators of a person and that just as strong, and perhaps much stronger, educators are unintentional educators: nature, family, society, people, their religion and their language, in a word, nature and history in the broadest sense of these broad concepts”[18, p. 12].

The outstanding Soviet educator and innovator V. A. Sukhomlinsky drew his inspiration from the folk traditions, from his native Little Russian peasant culture, to find new tools to influence the “spiritual world of the child”. So, he was introduced into the education system of the school, where he worked four cults: Motherland, mother, native word, books. He wrote: “The powerful spiritual power of upbringing lies in the fact that children learn to look at the world through the eyes of their father, learn from their father to respect, honor their mother, grandmother, woman, Man. The wife, mother, grandmother in the family are - one might say - the emotional and aesthetic, moral, spiritual center of the family, its head”[17, p. 462]. It is from the woman - the source of life - that the child receives the warmth of the mother's hands and the hearth, and that worldview that she passes on to the children.

Researchers M. V. Zakharcheno and G. V. Lobkova, reflecting on the meaning of folk culture, points out that “the principles of traditional culture, which naturally ensured the consistent and creative development of the“human in man”[11, p. 59] are currently violated. The basis of folk culture is knowledge of the means and methods of preserving and constantly renewing the vital force of man and nature. This knowledge is the most valuable and vital in our time, with its environmental problems and inhuman relationships. Traditional folk art is part of the culture. According to I. N. Pobedash and V. I. Sitnikov, one of "… the main ideas of the value-semantic content of traditional folk art are the harmony of man and nature, the sacralization of the experience of ancestors and tradition" [15, p. 91].

Culture speaks in the language of signs and symbols passed down from generation to generation. The continuity of culture is a key factor in its preservation. P. I. Kutenkov believes that if “the original signs disappear, the existence of cultures and the life of the peoples who created them cease,” and the importance of studying the origins of “sociocultural existence is also due to the fact that they belong to the number of disappearing phenomena of Russian culture, which are preserved only in the memory of older generations., as well as in the materials of museums and certain types of artistic creation”[9, p. 4]. The preservation of the cultural heritage, its study and the search for original meanings are important for understanding our national character, which is associated with it, and as a person grows up, he absorbs its values, behavioral characteristics, attitude to the world and people, the ability to overcome adversity, the idea of the universe and his place in him. In this regard, it is important to study signs and sign systems, which “form the basis of the language of culture … Sign systems are classified according to the types of their constituent signs: verbal (sound-speech), gestural, graphic, iconic (pictorial), figurative. … Figurative (from - an image, an outline) are signs-images. Their defining characteristic is the similarity to what they stand for. Such similarity can have varying degrees of identity (from distant similarity to isomorphism) …”[9, p. thirteen]. Thus, signs-images are presented in embroidery, which, according to researchers, is basically archaic, although it has layers of later eras.

In psychology, there is a concept introduced by L. S. Vygotsky, within the framework of the cultural-historical theory of the development of consciousness, is a "psychological tool" that is a part of culture. With the help of this psychological tool, one person influences another, and then on himself to control his mental processes. Within the framework of this theory, the position was developed that signs are symbols that have a certain meaning developed in the history of culture. These include language, various forms of numbering and calculus, mnemonic devices, algebraic symbols, works of art, diagrams, maps, drawings, conventional signs, etc. Using signs, a person mediates his reactions and behavior with the help of these signs. Thus, the signs, and not the current situation, begin to influence the person, the manifestations of his psyche. He comes to a more complex system of self-regulation and regulation of the external world: from material mediation to ideal mediation. According to L. S. Vygotsky, the general path of individual development of a person is not the deployment of what is naturally inherent, but the appropriation of the artificial, culturally created [6].

The idea of childhood, its image is inscribed in archaic culture and corresponds to its system of traditions, norms and values. Researcher D. I. Mamycheva writes that in archaic culture “children under a certain age are excluded from the usual processes of social life and constitute a certain group with a specific symbolic status” “… the child was referred to the other world. People did not notice the child until he crossed the symbolic border of two worlds …”[13, p. 3]. Thus, people of the era of archaic culture embodied their ideas about the beginning of life. In folk culture, the value of childhood did not exist, and the transition to the time of adulthood, equalization with other members of the community went through a symbolic death-birth and the associated initiation procedure.

O. V. Kovalchuk writes that the idea of childhood and children was present in the public consciousness in the form of a concept that included cultural and ideological meanings and was embodied in the so-called “code of childhood” and manifested “… in various forms: from cultural artifacts and behavioral technologies to ritual - bodily practices, sign-symbolic systems and lifestyle "[8, p. 44].

Kutenkov P. I. in his works, he gave a detailed description of the law of the Russian spirit, which is made up of five times, the Rodokons of the existence of a person belonging to the East Slavic culture. These are the threshold and spiritual transitions of the sad rhodokon of the woman in labor and infancy, the wedding threshold transitions of the bride and young woman and the time of her rebirth, the threshold transition to another world and posthumous time, as well as transitional states in the foreign sadness of girls, women and women. The researcher has shown that in folk rituals and customs, the soul is a spiritual reality with several independent hypostases. The original originality of the Russian folk spiritual culture is the cultivation of the soul, and only then the body [10].

Originality and ritualism required the presence of a certain household arrangement, marked with symbols and signs. This manifested itself in decorating one's life and oneself, not so much for the sake of beauty, as for the sake of establishing a certain order in their decoration. So, the signs of the owner's belonging to a certain age, gender, position in society and services to him were important. Part of what was depicted was understandable to different communities, part - was a kind of secret cipher and was read only by people from a particular community. A special role was assigned to giving, through symbols and signs, special strength to its owner, protecting him from various evils. Designations of higher powers were used as protective symbols and signs: gods and associated natural phenomena and elements of peasant life. A. F. Losev defined the symbol as "the substantial identity of an idea and a thing" [12]. According to him, the symbol contains an image, but is not reduced to it, since it contains a meaning that is inherent in the image, but is not identical to it. Thus, the symbol consists of two inseparable parts - the image and the meaning. A symbol exists as a carrier of an image and meaning only within interpretations. Therefore, it is possible to understand the symbols of protective embroidery only by knowing the system of man's ideas about the world, his cosmogony.

Sacred, protective and identification properties were extended to clothing, as an important element of not only human existence, but also a means of determining it in society. Clothes were made from different materials and decorated in different ways.

One of the possible means of decorating clothes for realizing these properties is embroidery. Embroidery is a pattern made with threads, different stitches. For folk embroidery, the decoration of the product and the product itself, its purpose were connected in a special way. Researcher S. I. Valkevich points out that the pattern as an art form could appear then, “… when man discovered order in the world” [5], she also writes that artistic embroidery, in particular, in costumes organically “combined two methods of cognition and transformation of reality - intellectual and artistic, in which they found a way out and merged together from time immemorial inherent in human nature aspirations of the soul and mind”[4, p. 803]. People not only conveyed their idea of the world, but also magically tried to influence the world around them through symbols and images. These images, symbols and signs were organic to those ideas of people about the cycle "life-death", about time and space, about the relationship "body-soul".

The famous researcher of Russian folk clothing N. P. Grinkova noted that “the Russian peasantry until the XX century. retained some traces of the most ancient type of family organization in a tribal society, which resulted in a tendency to delimit certain age groups. " According to the materials she studied, the following groups were identified: children; wives (before the birth of the child); mothers; women who have ceased to have sex. One way or another, it can be seen that the status of a person (woman) was manifested in clothing until reproductive, reproductive and post-reproductive age. Thus, children (their presence or absence), on the one hand, determined the position of a woman in the community, on the other hand, the status of a child (non-adult) determined his status as an expectation of procreation from him [6].

Being a child at a certain age also presupposed a peculiar attitude towards him on the part of the people of the community, the community as a whole. There was a “ritual practice of“humanizing”and socializing a child; after the prescribed rituals, the child was considered an adult, albeit an incomplete one. The peasant culture, which survived until the middle of the last century, demonstrates these values and norms [14]. In a society whose foundations were preserved by the peasant culture, children were under the protection and care of not only their parents, but the whole clan.

A baby up to a year old belonged to the other world, his body was considered soft, tender, it could be shaped, "baked", changed. Due to the fear of replacing the baby, relatives were instructed to observe various rituals, especially protective ones to protect him from evil forces. It was customary to sew children's clothes from the old clothes of the parents. They sewed clothes for the boy from the father's, the girl from the mother's. It was believed that she kept the baby from evil and endowed with male or female strength. The embroidery on the clothes did not change, but the original, inherent in their parents, was preserved. To the main protective function was added the function of the continuity of generations, kinship, the transfer of the power of experience in the craft of ancestors. The guard symbol placed in the cradle was: the mother of the family - the woman in labor. The woman in labor guarded the baby as an older clan. At the end of the first year of the child's life, there was a holiday of the only birthday celebrated among the people. By the age of three, the grown-up children were making their first shirt from new, unworn material. It was believed that by this age children acquire their protective power. Flowers and figures were embroidered on new clothes, bearing a protective meaning and symbolizing friendly magical creatures: silhouettes of a horse, dog, rooster or a fairy-tale bird with a woman's face.

At the age of twelve, a boy and a girl dressed in clothes that showed their gender: ponyevu and pants-ports, but still in a teenage version (it is believed that until marriage, the clothes remained childish, it was only possible to girdle). The change of clothes was associated with the next turning point - the time of the beginning of entry into adulthood, the end of which was at 15, when a warrior boy from a noble family was considered suitable for both war and for creating a family union, like a teenage girl brought up as a comrade-in-arms of a warrior and the keeper of the home in his absence.

For teenage girls, embroidery was located on the hem, sleeves and collar. She was protected by the symbols of the patron goddess of fate, clan, tree ornaments, the patron saint of her birthday, the earth (again, different from the female symbols of the earth) and female crafts. Images of symbols of fertility appeared in embroidery, and military symbols appeared in young youths. The main symbols protecting boys were: solar symbols, images of totem animals, patron clan and patron spirit of the birthday and men's crafts. Protective embroidery could be common until adulthood.

The most common clothing among the Slavs was a shirt. Embroidered shirts were an item used in magical rites and rituals from a person's birth to death. The embroidery on clothes, which has survived to this day, contains archaic pagan signs and symbols: "… in the sewing of maidens, the knowledge of the sacred symbols of that old, and therefore dear faith, which the people lived for thousands of years, was equally important for the population" [4, p. 808].

So, the age of the shirt was determined by the amount of embroidery. For example, children's clothing, up to the 19th century, represented one shirt. This shirt was made of a rougher fabric and was decorated with very little, in contrast to the girl's shirt, which was decorated with a lot of embroidery with intricate patterns.

The idea of childhood, its image changed from one life stage of a small member of the community to another. These transitions were reinforced by re-vesting - dressing him in other clothes, trimmed with signs and symbols that corresponded to his new position. So a newborn from a practically otherworldly creature with a plastic body, gradually strengthened, was established in a new quality - as a future successor not only of the clan, but also of the parents' craft, and with the onset of puberty and the passage of initiation, he entered a different age category, becoming a full member of the community …

The signs and symbols of embroidery served, on the one hand, as certain amulets, depending on the place on the path of life, on which the child is, on the other hand, as signs defining this place. The main symbols and signs that accompanied the child on the path of growing up were associated with the gods, personifying natural phenomena and giving people the qualities necessary for life by faith, as well as signs associated with the labor functions of his parents and signs of procreation.

Most modern people are attracted by the outer side of the Slavic symbolism associated with the ancient history of the country. Wanting to obtain the magical properties attributed to certain symbols and signs, people do not comprehend the deep, sacred meaning of embroidery, which changes during the transition from one age period to another, thus not assimilating and appropriating the codes embedded in it that connect us with folk culture. our history, without strengthening the lost "connection of times".

Moskvitina Olga Alexandrovna. PhD in Psychology, Associate Professor. FSBSI "PI RAO" - Federal State Budgetary Scientific Institution "Psychological Institute of the Russian Academy of Education". Moscow.

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