This article discusses peasants’ attitude to cows, the foundations and mechanisms of this attitude’s semiotization, and the mythological and poetic interpretations of the images of the cow (and of the calf) in various types and genres of Belarusian traditional spiritual culture. Inna Shved examines folkloric and ethnographic material recorded in the Brest Polesie region in the period 1990–2018. She identifies and describes the “cow-bull code”, which covers a wide range of phenomena in the spiritual and material culture of peasants and relates to objects of peasant life. Deriving its origin from mythology, this code is reflected in ritual terminology and in folklore texts used in rituals and otherwise.
English
Русский
Język Polski