Last lecture Todays lecture

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Last lecture Todays lecture

• Intro. to course
• Difference between this and other courses
• Professional rather than what is accessible to
  all
• Mechanics of course
• Intro. to minstrels
• Ambivalent attitudes

• Artist as magic person
• Culturally different attitudes to art and its
  functions
• Issues of talent East and West
• Body integrity and access to the spirit world

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Understanding art as a magical activity use
distancing

• Ukrainian artists of a certain type (minstrels)
  are peculiar
• HAVE to be blind
• What is stated is artist has to have physical
  stigma, be crippled
• Talent does not matter
• Blindness gt apprenticeship
• Cause of blindness
• From birth
• Accident
• Illness

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Attitude toward artist based on attitude toward
art

• Art is good and powerful
• Brings blessings, brings spiritual good
• You DO NOT do it for money
• Do it for the blessings and the spirit
• Earning money from art ONLY for the crippled
• This is a form of begging
• Giving money to a beggar gives blessings like
  those that come from art

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Time frame

• Starts 13th, 14th century? Maybe earlier
• We know for sure late 19th century on
• Ends with Stalin and the massacre of minstrels in
  1939
• Modern times only a few a blind
• Talent is the basis for deciding who will sing now

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Reconciling talent and handicap

• Some singers are VERY good
• If choice is on basis of blindness, not talent,
  how is this possible
• Song samples

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Reconciling talent and physical defect

• Assume talent comes FIRST
• Singer made blind with herbs over the course of
  apprenticeship
• SURVEY

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Explanation 1 handicap fosters talent

• Compensation for organ inferiority
• Certain amount of sensory ability in each person
• Some faculty lost another compensates
• Blind people hear better, have better sense of
  touch, smell, taste (Suprun joke)
• Better hearing, touch, might well help with music
  
• Minstrels mention better memory
• Basis in fact? Suprun does remember better

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But minstrel is a beggar and paid for spiritual
good

• What makes giving him money such a good thing
  (one line of reasoning) is his handicap
• Issue of body integrity
• Proper life should have body integrity
• If body integrity goes, person is special
• Either special good or special bad

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General body integrity issues

• What to do with amputated arm or leg?
• Throw away?
• Keep? If so, where?
• Bury? If so, where?
• What about soft tissue?
• What to do with uterus removed during
  hysterectomy?
• What about hard stuff that comes out naturally?
• Teeth, hair, nail clippings

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Slavic (Russian, Ukrainian) ideas

• Life is a cycle
• Person dies and becomes one with the soil
• Crops grow from the soil/body
• Nourish new people
• This is a pre-Christian belief
• Officially not stated official statement in
  line with religion, biomedicine

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Evidence for belief in practices

• Commemoration of the dead
• As a specific deceased person at times tied to
  date of death
• As an ancestor (category of dead as a whole) tied
  to holidays in calendar year
• Easter, Ascension
• Person goes from specific dead person to ancestor
  after one year
• Importance of ONE YEAR connected to body decay

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Pre-Christian beliefs affect attitudes toward
monks, saints, relics

• To purify the soul, certain types of monks
  practice mortification of the flesh
• A kind of burial while alive the cave
  monasteries
• When a monk dies, cell sealed
• Remains examined after one year
• Either decay or not

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If decay sorted by bone type

• Picture of the skull room in the Kyivan crypt
  monastery
• No longer an individual part of GROUP of
  ancestors
• Evidence of double burial one death of the type
  we know second death after decay of flesh

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Flesh does not decay sainthood