A01=Maria Mayerchyk
Author_Maria Mayerchyk
birth
body and embodiment
Category=JBCC6
Category=JBGB
Category=JBSL
Category=NHD
death
Eastern Europe
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethnography
folklore and mythology
forthcoming
marriage
ritual symbolism
semiotics
traditional customs
Ukrainian culture
Ukrainian rituals
Product details
- ISBN 9780674307797
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 15 Dec 2026
- Publisher: Harvard University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Ritual and the Body explores how people experience life’s most profound transitions: birth, marriage, and death. Drawing on Ukrainian folk traditions, Maria Mayerchyk shows how rituals mark changes in social status by shaping how the body moves, speaks, eats, hears, and even feels itself to exist.
From christenings and weddings to funerals, the book follows key figures and moments of ritual life—the newborn child, parents, newlyweds, and the deceased—and reveals how bodily states, clothing, sound, food, light and darkness, joy and grief all carry meaning. With clarity and insight, Mayerchyk invites readers to see the human body as a powerful cultural language, one through which communities make sense of loss, transformation, and belonging.
Maria Mayerchyk is a professor at Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences in Germany and a senior research fellow at the Institute of Ethnology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. She is the author of Coloniality of the Indecent and co-author of Lena and Thomas Gushul: Life in Front and Behind the Camera. Andriy Nahachewsky is a folklorist, professor, and Huculak Chair of Ukrainian Culture and Ethnography Emeritus at the University of Alberta.
