Dance in the Local Cultural Heritage of Anatolia Circassians: its Genre Identification and Social Function

The article is dedicated to the history of one of the most popular with the young Circassian diaspora dancing genres - the shcheshchen. The author of the article tries to study the ways of correlation between the local exhibitions of the dancing genre and its trivial terms, local folk tunes, social taboos and the precepts of a definite diaspora society using the shcheshchen as an example. The purpose of the study is the synchronous description of the genre features of the endemically formed choreographic phenomenon called “adyghe shcheshchen” (the Circassian shcheshchen), tracking of the universal analogues (the terminological, musical, choreographic ones), detection of its social and semantic functions in the definite local culture. The subject of the study is the discursive practices about public merrymaking traditions, and also the context relations between the archival explorative texts and the historical sources which give the narrative description of the choreographic phenomena of the “metropolis” - the Caucasus - analogous with the shcheshchen. The object of the study is a verbal (oral) and non-verbal text (collected in the folklore field of Turkey and in the Internet) which actualize the information about the dance called shcheshchen. The field methods: the participant observation and informal conversation, the method of memory boosting established by the author of the article, the online poll. The methods of analytical processing of the materials: structural/functional, pragmatic analyses, discourse analyses. The shcheshchen acts as a cultural complex which equalizes people according to the rules of a public merrymaking and maintains the civilizational identity of Anatolia Circassians at the same time. The author of the article explains the reasons of some inconsistency of the deliberations about the ‘little prestige” of the shcheshchen and its popularity simultaneously. These conclusions would be useful for theoretical researches of the history of folklore genres, the culture of Circassian diaspora, and also for applied purposes: the ethnographical information collected by the author of the article and the complex theoretical observations data about the forms of the folk dances included in the article are published for the first time and would be interesting for specialists engaged in searching of the traditional ethno-choreographical styles and stage performances.

ethno-choreography, Circassians, Adyghes, diaspora, Uzun-Yayla, dance, shcheshchen, aristocracy, etiquette

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