Before today Todays class

1
Before today Todays class

• Week ago matriarchy
• Tues. Martin Prechtel on Mayan ideas of
  indigenous culture and babies and the community

• Russian and Ukrainian baby beliefs
• Importance of children
• Pregnancy and its taboos
• Delivery
• Baptism

2
Importance of children

• Soviet era children on privileged class
• Children and status of father
• Father as term religious, political power
• Children and womans status
• She cannot be sent back to parents
• Becomes full member of household of marriage
• Kin name changes

3
Pregnancy and its taboos

• Taboos on woman
• Stealing
• Being frightened
• sewing
• Taboos on dad
• Chopping wood, cutting on holidays

• Power of mom-to-be
• Can affect crops adversely if you dont do what
  she asks
• Throw water after her to cleanse the area

Pregnancy predictions sex of child Influencing
sex of fetus
4
Work taboos

• Start about 5th month when pregnancy starts to
  show
• No hard labor practical as well as symbolic
  importance
• No work with milk symbolic and the blood-milk
  ties to cow, to wet nurse
• Witch beliefs

5
Evil eye beliefs and jealousy issues

• Jealousy of unmarried women
• Of married women without children
• No baby showers and no buying gifts BEFORE the
  baby is safely born opposite of American custom
• Done to protect the child

6
Delivery in the bathhouse

• Bathhouse as the boundary point spirits enter
  here
• Bathhouse as a medical facility of sorts
• Use of bathhouse to protect family, cattle, crops
• Practical issues cleanliness, water, heat
• Does heat help delivery?

7
The delivery

• Women in attendance first versus subsequent
  pregnancies
• Midwife
• The role of men calling midwife
• Other male roles naming, cutting the umbilical
  cord
• Couvade
• Sex differentiation right at birth cutting the
  cord

8
The medical side

• Is midwife delivery good or bad?
• Relieving pain (no pain killers NOW)
• Locks and knots doors of house, iconostasis
• Stove pieces
• Dads clothes
• Heat, massage, towel
• Attack on midwifery midwife replaced by rod dom,
  medpunkt
• The ceremonial midwife now

9
Ukrainian delivery

• In the home use of towel, central beam
• Male participation and couvade (male assumes some
  of the pain male jealousy of the birth process?)
• Tying the umbilical cord with unspun hemp
• Gender differentiation here also
• Ritual bath symbolic and medicinal herbs

10
After delivery

• Burial of the afterbirth
• Sequestering of the mother and child (3-7 days)
• Midwife does the work of the young mother
• Dad pays the midwife through water cannot touch
  her hand
• Ukrainian welcome of mother and child attack on
  grandma (mother of father)

11
Reintegration back into society

• Baptism sometimes done right away midwife will
  baptize critical baby
• Baptism after 40 days and the issue of milk
• Prohibition on parents in church at baptism
• The mothers re-entry into the church and blood
  taboos
• Gender differentiation in the vyvodyny

12
Godparents

• Social bonds, alliances between the parents and
  god parents
• Obligations of the god parents to the child
• Selecting the god parents how many pairs?
• Selecting god parents when infant mortality is
  bad the first-met god parents and foregoing
  social alliances