Cultural models of society in Western Ukraine

Abstract

Ukraine’s democratization that started after the disintegration of the Soviet Union is an ongoing effort, accompanied by incremental political, social, and ideological transformations as well as tumultuous events—the Orange Revolution (2004–2005), growing authoritarianism during the presidency of Yanukovych (2010–2014), the Revolution of Dignity (2013–2014), Russian annexation of Crimea (2014), and Russia’s ongoing military aggression in Eastern Ukraine (2014-present). This study is concerned not with the actual political and social transformations in the country, but with mental representations of society that these transformations generated. The cultural models theory and method offered a toolkit for examining people’s implicit ideas and taken-for-granted assumptions through the analysis of spoken discourse. I conducted 32 semi-structured interviews with people in Western Ukraine, identified recurrent ideas and conceptual metaphors in the interviewees’ discourses, and propose three cultural models of society underlying them.