No 2 (2023)

The article examines religious, ritual, and moral contexts in the history of semantics and social trajectories of the Russian obscene vocabulary and phraseology known as “mat”. Transhistorical representations of the “Russian mat” as a steady set of lexemes and formulae do not seem to be correct. Moreover, it is possible to discuss not only historical transformations of the concept, but its genealogy and, so to speak, invention. One of the few concepts explaining religious and mythological meanings of “mat” was formulated in the 1980s by Boris A. Uspenskii who argued that pre-Christian Slavic obscenities were related to agrarian magic of fertility. This article presents an alternative hypothesis and argues that the “invention” and religious interpretation of the “Russian mat” as a specific and blasphemous type of obscenities took place in Muscovy in the 16^th and 17^th century as a part of attempted “disciplinary revolution” aimed at popular religious and ritual culture. Local “visionary epidemics” in the 17^th century that involved condemnation of “mat”, tobacco, and drunkenness can be viewed as moral panics stimulated by the state and church elites. At the same time, the panics led to the establishment of new cults of miracle working icons and sacred sites. Popular beliefs and prohibitions related to “mat” in the 19^th and 20^th centuries were informed by a number of different factors and did not go back to any single pre-Christian source.

The article examines more than 100 cases of “desecration” of the Eternal Flame in Russia in the 2010s-2020s. In the context of criminal cases involving blasphemy and desecration of holy places, starting with the “Pussy Riot case”, the cases of the “desecration” of the Eternal Flame allow us to see, first, how the arguments and language used by the media and law enforcement in the legal discussion regarding the secular sacred are shaped; and second, how the shift from the symbolic to the material occurs in relation to symbols of memory in contemporary Russian society. The article shows how and on what grounds perpetrators of such behavior are prosecuted in contemporary Russia, and what penalties are imposed on them. Despite the presence of special norms on such deeds in the Russian criminal law, they are in some cases qualified by law enforcers with their use, in others as vandalism or desecration of the bodies of the dead and their burial places, in still others as administrative offences. Law enforcers in all cases clearly read their meaning (as an attempt on the sacred), but the Russian law lacks a legal definition of “desecration” (if the term itself exists), which apparently leads to the use of different norms to punish those responsible. Since these actions are interpreted by law enforcers as sacrilegious, it seems appropriate for us to propose for them the general term “memorial sacrilege”, by which we mean unconventional actions with memorial complexes and their elements, in particular the Eternal Flames, entailing the use of repression.

The article deals with the moral implications of the practice of public apologies, based on the case of modern Dagestan. Unlike most studies in linguistics and political science, in this article, we are interested not in the structure of official apologies as speech acts and the conditions of achieving their communicative effect, but rather in the variability of pictures of the moral order that may stand behind the need for public apologies in a particular cultural context, and the type of moral subject that can be constructed through such public acts. The material for the analysis included the public apologies that are relevant within Dagestani society, the apologies by Dagestani people living outside the republic, and the cases of apologies to Dagestanis themselves. The article demonstrates how the spread of the practice of public apologies has problematized the boundaries of collective responsibility in Dagestani society, the notions of the subject, its qualities and agency associated with the institution of reputation, as well as the possibility of subordination and resistance to the social structure.

The paper focuses on the two most common models of organization of the Immortal Regiment. We call the first the “social order” model. Its aim is to demonstrate the local community in its ideal condition. Such a procession is clearly structured, its participants are often uniformed, and the place of each participant depends on his or her belonging to one or another professional/age group. The second type of organization of the procession is called the “cult of ancestors” model. In this case, the order of the columns and the appearance of the portrait bearers do not matter, since the main participants in the procession are not the living, but the dead. The success of the procession organized according to this model is measured by the strength of its emotional effect: ideally, participants and spectators cry in catharsis. Describing these two models in detail, we examine the conflicts between their adherents, as well as analyze the motivations of the organizers and ordinary participants in the processions.

The aim of the study was to investigate specific morphological and psychological characteristics of representatives of leisure communities focused on taking high risks, compared to the control group of men. We studied facial and body anthropometric parameters - presumable markers of prenatal androgenization and masculinization - as well as the tendency to search for sensations and aggression in race car drivers (n=36), alpinists (n=52) and students (n=56). We were also interested in possible associations between the studied morphological and psychological parameters. It was revealed that the faces of the representatives of all three groups differed significantly in the facial shape. All three groups differed from each other in the fWHR index (the bizygomatic width/the height of the middle part of the face), with the race drivers having the lowest values and the highest for the controls. Race drivers differed significantly from controls in the relative lower jaw height. The maximum average values for the handgrip strength on both hands were noted in the race drivers, and the minimum in the control. We did not find significant differences in the digit ratio on the right and left hands between the groups. The result of the analysis of psychological profiles showed that alpinists are more prone to risk and sensation seeking, as well as more sensitive to the monotonous daily activities compared to race drivers and the control group, while the maximum level of hostility was found for the control group.