Funeral Folklore-Ethnographic Complex as a Ritual Text (On Example of the Local Erzya-Mordovian Tradition of Siberian Existence)

Within the framework of popular Orthodoxy in the 20 th century, there were and still exist types of funeral and memorial practices, in which Church and folksy elements are fused. The analytical description of the funerary folklore-ethnographic complex proposed in the article is based on field records in the Erzya-Mordovian villages of the Zalesovsky district of the Altai territory in the period from 2008 to 2017. The characteristic of the local ritual tradition is presented based on the analysis of a large array of oral stories of participants of the ritual. These oral sources are evidence that allows get an idea about the opinions of informants, carriers of the tradition about death, sin, moral norms and ritual rules, about the general principles of the funeral rite, its structure, and the actional, personal, spatial, temporal, subject, verbal and musical components of the complex. As a result of the research, the authors come to the conclusion that the local funeral ritual can be considered as a single multi-layered text, in which different types of cultural models are organically combined and interact: archaic folk and Christian, oral and written.