This book examines the relationship between Ukraine’s Galician Hutsuls and the Carpathian landscape between 1848 and 1939. The author analyzes the intersections of ecology and culture in the history of the Carpathian Mountains, with a focus on the region’s economy and biodiversity.

The Stark Carpathians: Ritual, Text, and Authority Among Ukraine’s Hutsuls addresses rituals and texts in a small mountainous area located in today’s Ukraine. The residents of this remote region are known as the Hutsuls. This book argues that Hutsul rituals and texts, cast as ancient and extraordinary, had more mundane roots. They formed out of contact between the region’s residents and lowland institutions, and they became foundations for everyday life. Words and symbolic action had an inherent tension that stemmed from contests over authority. The nature of these contests was such that distant officials, willful locals, and diverse sources of information were often as important as collective traditions in shaping rituals and texts. Prolific producers of texts, Hutsuls carried on discussions that included diverse topics, such as agriculture, astrology, mass gymnastics, divine punishment, and witches and vampires. This volume covers these and other discussions in their small and exact particulars, and it investigates texts and rituals in their fullness and irreducible complexity. By crossing traditional lines of inquiry and following the region’s winding trails to their divergent ends, this book offers insight into a larger Hutsul world. Ultimately, the study of Hutsul creations informs the study of rituals and texts in many elsewheres far from the Carpathian Mountains.

This Handbook examines the diverse ways in which climate change impacts Indigenous Peoples and local communities and considers their response to these changes. While there is well-established evidence that the climate of the Earth is changing, the scarcity of instrumental data oftentimes challenges scientists’ ability to detect such impacts in remote and marginalized areas of the world or in areas with scarce data. Bridging this gap, this Handbook draws on field research among Indigenous Peoples and local communities distributed across different climatic zones and relying on different livelihood activities, to analyse their reports of and responses to climate change impacts. It includes contributions from a range of authors from different nationalities, disciplinary backgrounds, and positionalities, thus reflecting the diversity of approaches in the field. The Handbook is organised in two parts: Part I examines the diverse ways in which climate change – alone or in interaction with other drivers of environmental change – affects Indigenous Peoples and local communities; Part II examines how Indigenous Peoples and local communities are locally adapting their responses to these impacts. Overall, this book highlights Indigenous and local knowledge systems as an untapped resource which will be vital in deepening our understanding of the effects of climate change. The Routledge Handbook of Climate Change Impacts on Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities will be an essential reference text for students and scholars of climate change, anthropology, environmental studies, ethnobiology, and Indigenous studies.

Ukrainian Cinema: Belonging and Identity during the Soviet Thaw is the first concentrated study of Ukrainian cinema in English. In particular, historian Joshua First explores the politics and aesthetics of Ukrainian Poetic Cinema during the Soviet 1960s-70s. He argues that film-makers working at the Alexander Dovzhenko Feature Film Studio in Kiev were obsessed with questions of identity and demanded that the Soviet film industry and audiences alike recognize Ukrainian cultural difference. The first two chapters provide the background on how Soviet cinema since Stalin cultivated an exoticised and domesticated image of Ukrainians, along with how the film studio in Kiev attempted to rebuild its reputation during the early Sixties as a centre of the cultural thaw in the USSR. The next two chapters examine Sergei Paradjanov's highly influential Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1965) and its role in reorienting the Dovzhenko studio toward the auteurist (some would say elitist) agenda of Poetic Cinema. In the final three chapters, Ukrainian Cinema looks at the major works of film-makers Yurii Illienko, Leonid Osyka, and Leonid Bykov, among others, who attempted (and were compelled) to bridge the growing gap between a cinema of auteurs and concerns to generate profit for the Soviet film industry.

The aim of this monograph is to present the current situation of Rusyns in those European countries where, according to official or estimated statistics, their number is the highest - Ukraine, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary and Serbia. In presenting the situation of the Rusyn population in these countries, an attempt has been made to indicate the number of Rusyns in the countries under study and at the same time to point out the problems of obtaining accurate data on Rusyns. Another aim of the research was to find out what the main elements of Rusyn ethnic identity are - here, regardless of geographical differences, religious affiliation or Byzantine rite (Catholic or Orthodox) stood out in the first place. The research also focused on the use of the Rusyn language and changes in its status, the possibilities of teaching the Rusyn language and the interest in teaching it among the Rusyns themselves. In addition to these two main aspects of Rusyn identity, other key elements of Rusyn material and non-material culture were also investigated. Emphasis was placed on the use of primarily qualitative methods to refine the available quantitative data. The results presented in this publication are based on both field research and research with Rusyn respondents conducted remotely via electronic communication in 2014-2019. Although this is a five-year period, it is possible to compare the individual Rusyn communities in the five countries studied, at least in part, synchronically (i.e. here and now).

Scientific Essay from the year 2016 in the subject Russian / Slavic Languages, grade: 2,0, , course: Lehrstuhl für germanische und orientalische Sprachen, language: English, abstract: The article presents the author’s considerations regarding the origin of Hutsuls, which is believed to stem from Galician tribes in the Carpathian region. After their migration to the island of Rügen, part of the Galicians returned to the Carpathians and went up to the mountains. They are traditionally referred to as Hutsuls-highlanders (shepherds) as opposed to Podolyan Galicians (Ruthenian). The oldest studies on the origin of the word hutsuly include the article written by Polish researcher K. Milevskiy, who derived this ethnonym from the verb ʻroamʼ. In this situation, in our opinion, a special approach is required, which would give us the opportunity to extract the semantic units from the existing form hutsuly, and allow us to view their origin from primary sources. In our observations, we follow three positions on ethnonim hutsuly, to which R. F. Kayndl drew attention. Based on the research done by V. T. Kolomiec and our observation, we conclude, that in ancient times the structure of words matched morphemic and phonetic (syllable) limit. In the relation to the reviewed ethnonym we can distinguish the syllables hu-tsul in which under the stress is prefix hu-. Since in ide. linguistics it is believed that prefix forms of lexemes are secondary to the root forms, we can assume the existence of a derivation of meanings in the ethnonym hutsuly: ‘farmers’ → ‘mountainous (farmers, shepherds)’. Previous remarks give us a reason to examine the origins of protoname of tribe of Hutsuls from the initial ide. root *ƙṷel-, which could be seen in the ancient ethnonym Halychany (without prefix hu-), related to the said root in the word hutsuly.

A new edition of the most comprehensive guide to Ukraine, featuring practical information and in-depth culture and history.