Ways of Everyday Food Semantization in the Eastern Slavic Culture

Abstract

Relevance of the research. Food is not only of great importance in the human existence physiological support, it also acquires some additional meanings in each culture. The food becomes symbols and codes through which the people’s cultural orientations are revealed. The author provides insight into the new connotations and symbols of the everyday food that contributes to a broad understanding of a particular ethnic group worldview.The aim of this paper is to highlight the ways of symbolizing the main elements of the Eastern Slavs’ food tradition.Research methodology. The complex of the following methods was applied: comparative, logical and analytical, diachronic. The semiotic approach necessary to identify the semantics of the Eastern Slavs’ gastronomic culture elements was also used.Results. The author identifies significant aspects of food semantization in the East Slavic’s cultural tradition. Food is shown to be a channel and means of communication between the human and divine worlds, between the profane and the sacred. The Slavs bread is proved to be a metaphor for vitality and have a positive semantic content. Salt is shown to possess an ambivalent meaning. The qualities of an apple which also has the property of giving beauty and health as well as being a symbol of love and fertility are revealed. Everyday food is noted to get the semantic load and sacred meaning in the Eastern Slavs’ culture.Novelty consists in attracting rich ethnographic, folklore, mythological, historical material to the cultural studies analysis of culinary symbols and relevant metaphors. They are among the basic means of assimilating and describing the most significant fragments of a person’s relationship with the environment (a person’s life scripting in general, acquiring knowledge, determining moral categories, relationships between the world of the living and the dead, gender relations, treating diseases, protecting against hostile manifestations etc.).The practical significance. The research has important implications for studying people`s food poetics, for explaining how this poetics elements can be symbolic not only within the profane routine, but also within the rites.