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Andriy Nahachewsky Brazil collection
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2009-2010 (Creation)
- Creator
- Nahachewsky, Andriy
- Place
- Brazil
Physical description area
Physical description
250+ audio interviews
12,000+ photographs
53 video recordings
200 publications
small number of artifacts
field notebooks
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Archival description area
Name of creator
Biographical history
Andriy Nahachewsky is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta. He holds a B.A. in Ukrainian Studies (University of Saskatchewan, 1979), a B.F.A. in Dance (York University, 1985), M.A. and Ph.D. in Ukrainian Folklore (University of Alberta, 1985 and 1991, supervised by Bohdan Medwidsky). He has an extensive background in Ukrainian dance, as a performer, instructor, choreographer, workshop leader, critic, adjudicator, and authour. He has taught a wide variety of courses at the university level in many aspects of Ukrainian and Ukrainian Canadian traditional culture. His research interests and publications deal with Ukrainian dance, Ukrainian Canadian identity, material culture, ethnic representation, and dance theory. He has conducted fieldwork in Canada, the U.S.A., Brazil, Ukraine, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Poland, and other countries. His most recent book is Ukrainian Dance: A Cross-Cultural Approach (McFarland Press, 2012).
Andriy served as the Director of the Peter and Doris Centre for Ukrainian and Canadian Folklore and Curator of the Bohdan Medwidsky Ukrainian Folklore Archives since their inception and until summer of 2016. Dr. Nahachewsky retired in the summer of 2018, but continues his research and actively participates in the international dance research community.
Custodial history
Scope and content
Andriy Nahachewsky travelled to Brazil for 6 months (Nov 2009 – May 2010), and worked intensively to document the traditional culture of the Ukrainian community there (some 400,000 people, rural and urban). He visited some 40 communities with a significant Ukrainian population in the states of Parana, Sao Paulo and Santa Catarina. He recorded over 250 interviews, took approximately 12,000 photographs and recorded 53 hours of video recordings. He collected a small number of artifacts of traditional life, and amassed a library of approximately 200 books (either hard copy or electronically as pdf). Research methods included audience/participation, unstructured, and semi-structured interviews, as well as work in personal and institutional archives.
Since this was the first substantial ethnographic/folkloristic documentation of this community, Andriy cast the project’s mandate quite broadly, collecting diachronic and synchronic information on material culture (farming practices, foodlore, traditional crafts, folk architecture, religious painting), as well as oral traditions (dialectal speech, songs, legends, personal experience narratives), customary lore (particularly weddings, Christmas, Easter and other calendar holidays), spiritual culture (formal religion as well as folk beliefs, folk medicine, etc), performing arts (music and dance) and local history. In all cases, he was interested in continuity from the European heritage, but also particularly in hybridity and change in the community’s traditions.
The main goal of the project was to collect materials to write a book comparing Ukrainian traditional culture on three continents. People from western Ukraine emigrated to both Canada and Brazil from the same villages (mostly from the province of Galicia in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire), at the same time (largest wave of migration from 1891 until 1914), and for the same reasons (scarcity of farmland in Galicia, while Canada and Brazil were both hoping to settle newly opened agricultural territories quickly).
The traditions of the community in Brazil are rich and conceptually interesting. They are similar to Canadian traditions in many ways, but also quite different. The data raise numerous issues in ethnic symbolism, cultural continuity, and the relationship between traditions and their environment. Key strengths in the data relate to wedding traditions, personal history narratives, ethnic dance traditions, religious art, and calendar customs. There is good new information on regional diversity within the Ukrainian communities in Brazil.
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UF2009.028, UF2009.032, UF2010.033