Space of perception of holidays by Ukrainians: towards the possibilities of conceptualization

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of the perceptual space of the functioning of the holiday in Ukrainian society. The authors refer to the materials of the multi-year survey-omnibus KІIS with the aim of analyzing the differentiation of distances and relationships between a number of religious, secular, and state holidays in Ukrainian society using the method of multidimensional scaling. The article proposes its own conception of the space of perception, built on a number of known concepts of social perception. Proposing hypotheses regarding the potential axes of spatial structuring is carried out using the work of such sociologists and anthropologists as representatives of the College of Sociology (J. Bataille, R. Caillois), classical sociology (E. Durkheim) and carnival theory (M. Bakhtin). At the conceptual level, the authors take into account the dialectic of unity and struggle of individual and collective, sacred and profane, rational and irrational, public and intimate, etc. in the holiday. Within the framework of the analysis, the authors identified and described the axes that are stable and reproduced in all years of the KІIS omnibus survey, which the authors designate as "rational modernity - irrational archaic" and "publicity - privacy". The authors pay special attention to the dynamics of the holidays selected for analysis; they refer to the holidays that demonstrate the greatest "movements" in space over the years. Considerable attention is paid to attempts to explain the reasons for such dynamics, which the authors look for in externalities relative to public awareness of holidays (political events, pandemic (self) isolation, cultural processes, social phenomena, etc.). Among the holidays, the authors receive special attention Trinity, Victory Day (May 9), Independence Day of Ukraine, Defender's Day, New Year, Christmas, International Women's Day, which, firstly, turned out to be the most sensitive to the factors of dynamics specified by the authors, and - the second - the most dynamic and sociologically demonstrative. A number of prospects for further research of this topic are proposed, starting from what the authors have already achieved in this article.