“God’s Stone Has Fallen down from the Sky”: Functions of Oral Stories and Contemporary Dynamics of Local Tradition

Abstract

This article considers folk ideas about boulders as significant objects of the natural landscape. The article mostly refers to the records made by the authors in 2005 and 2021 in the village of Oshib, Kudymkar District, Perm Region. Although the ethno-local tradition of Oshib was formed in a stable community, it has its own internal dynamics. As a result of this process, the plots of oral stories update and their functions change. The article considers the case of the Oshib stone in a broad context, i.e. in comparison with other cult stones. This approach helps highlight significant coincidences and shows the features of Komi-Permyak “vernacular mineralogy”. Folklore narratives and the proper names of stones reveal that the large size of the object becomes an important reason for the mythologisation of the boulder. It is believed that large single stones have a “heavenly” origin. One of the forms of ritual interaction is visiting stones as part of calendar rites. The Oshib boulder is found in a “dangerous” forest, so the inhabitants endow it with an ambivalent character: it is associated with demonic spirits and is used to frighten children. In the middle of the twentieth century, the folklore tradition of Oshib slowly disappears, but in the twenty-first century, its re-actualisation begins. At the same time, the actional code is completely changed, and the plots and motifs of oral stories update. In contemporary stories, there are two lines of mythologisation: one of them continues the theme of the “dangerous” stone, while the other one is a kind of adaptation of natural scientific knowledge. An important factor in the development of the tradition is the inclusion of the cult boulder into school project activities and the villagers’ intention to turn it into a tourist site. Folklore plots become a symbolic resource with the help of which the new “agents of tradition” solve this task.