Foreword
Par Sanja Boskovic et Galina Subbotina
Publication en ligne le 13 mars 2024
1The eighth issue of the Review of the CEES brings together the papers presented at the two multidisciplinary study days: the first, focused on "Liminality and mediation" was organized on November 17, 2022 by the MIMMOC UR 15072 laboratory at the MSHS of the University of Poitiers; while the second, entitled "Woman, body, health" held on May 27-28, 2021 at the MSHS of Poitiers, was set up by the MIMMOC UR 15072 laboratory in collaboration with the CREE EA 4513 laboratory of INALCO.
2The topic of the first study day explored the notion of liminality, a concept already developed in the work of ethnographer Arnold van Gennep, who sees "rites of transition" as social practices that structure and accompany changes of place, state, position, age, etc., in the context of social and collective life. Arnold van Gennep distinguishes three precise moments in the evolution of this kind of ritual behaviour: the first stage implies the process of detachment from a stable environment or context, the second represents the transition or the crossing period, while the third stage indicates the finalization of the passage process and the acquisition of a new situation of certitude and stability. In this sense, the "liminal period" corresponds to the second stage of van Gennep's rituals of transition.
3When applied to the teaching of Slavic languages and cultures, the theory of "rites of transition" can be used to analyze a learner's learning process, understood as a phase in the constitution of a new perception of both the individual and the society. The questions that arise in this context are many and varied: first of all, what are the starting points for learners of Slavic languages? What are the difficulties and moments of instability in the transition phase of the learning process? How do the different origins and heterogeneous cultural and linguistic backgrounds of learners influence the transition phase? As intercultural mediators, how can teachers of Slavic languages and cultures comfort learners and make the period of instability, ambiguity and uncertainty in the learning process more comfortable and productive for learners?
4In their papers entitled "The study of colloquial lexicon in the advanced stage of teaching Russian as a foreign language" and "To whom, how and why to teach? Slavic studies today: liminality and mediation (case study: Department of Slavic Studies, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Sarajevo)", Amela Ljevo-Ovčina and Adijata Ibrišimović-Šabić address the organizational issue of teaching Russian in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The evolution of Russia's place in the international context, as well as the new geopolitical environment, are indeed imposing a new approach to teaching, which may go as far as a complete rethinking of university curricula. The need for some sort of transition is linked to the need to attract new learners of Russian and give new impetus in the study of the Russian language and culture.
5Maintaining the focus on liminality in the linguistic context, Kirill Ganzha's article entitled "Production of the Russian lexical accent by French-speaking learners: origins of difficulties and remedial approaches" examines the problem of teaching Russian pronunciation to French-speaking learners, while Višnja Višnjevac's work on "Difficulties associated with teaching Russian spelling to Serbian audiences. Essai de classification" explores the specific nature of learning Russian in the Serbian linguistic environment.
6Remaining in the context of liminality in the linguistic field, the article of Elma Durmišević and Mehmed Kardaš, entitled "Standardization of the Bosnian language from the 1990s to the present time" analyzes the evolution of norms in the Bosnian language. The works of Vera Ćevriz Nišić, Ognjen Kurteš, on the one hand, and Borjan Mitrović, on the other, explore the notion of liminality in the area of Slavic cultures. The first paper, entitled "Some observations on vocabulary growth in European Commission reports for Bosnia-Herzegovina", addresses the issue of linguistic transformations in contemporary Serbian language in a specific context of political and official communication. While Borjan Mitrović's article on "Rites of transition, imaginary and euphemization of death in a selective corpus of Serbian folk laments" attempts to explore the understanding of death and of centuries-old commemorative rituals in Serbian culture. This kind of cultural custom and practice is associated with the moment of transition - the passage between life and death - and evokes the distinct boundaries between the two worlds - the world of the living and the world of the dead - as well as the process of metaphysical transition.
7The final chapter of the eighth issue of the Review of the CEES is dedicated to the study day on "Women, body and health". As the body is equally exposed to the phenomenon of liminality in both the physical sense - the body and the world - and the metaphasic sense - the transformation of the body going hand in hand with spiritual metamorphosis - the works in this part of the issue aim to analyze the full complexity of the notion of the body. Michel Foucault considered that the body is the central object of all politics, and that the various social systems form particular ideological concepts in relation to the body and health. For instance, we need only remind ourselves of theories of "national health", or the glorification of "healthy bodies" in fascist and Stalinist regimes. Health and the body, the health of the body and of the bodies, is becoming a subject that is as delicate as it is important. It demands multi-layered reflection, and occupies minds on many levels: political, religious, ethical and aesthetic. Despite the sometimes radical differences in approaches to the concept of health that exist in different national contexts, the idea of the healthy body remains a powerful instrument of regulation and even normalization at all stages of the development of societies and cultures.
8In the article entitled "Women's prose in post-Soviet and contemporary Russia: seeing madness differently", Anna Scherbakova attempts to analyze this kind of phenomenon, which affects not only the female body in a new and changing society, but also the transgressing of the Russian cultural imaginary. These questions are also addressed by Yulia Sioli in her work entitled " The body in gestation: "splendours and miseries" of Russian babas" as well as by Kataryna Tarasiuk in her article on “Locked up, dispossessed, purged: the female body in hospital in Russian women's prose of the 80s and 90s". An examination of liminality in a very specific context provides a new perspective on the evolution of the female body’s presentation and its illnesses in twentieth- and twenty-first-century in Russian literature.
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