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The Ethnology Notebooks. 2026. № 3 (189), 791—802

UDK316.7­054.73(477.86):355.48(470+571:477)

DOI https://doi.org/10.15407/

PERCEPTIONS OF HOME IN THE TESTIMONIES OF INVOLUNTARILY DISLOCATED PERSONS IN THE IVANO­FRANKIVSK REGION: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACH

KOLOMYICHUK Oleksandr

  • ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000­0003­2865­2396
  • a Ph.D. in History, a research fellow
  • at the Ukrainian Ethnological Centre Department
  • of the M Rylskyi Institute of Art Studies, Folkloristics
  •  and Ethnology of the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences,
  • 4 Hrushevskoho Str., Kyiv, 01001, Ukraine,
  • Contacts: e­-mail: kolsasha7@gmail.com

Abstract. Continuing contemporary anthropological and oral­historical research of scholars, this study focuses not so much on the objectively defined living space as on the individual «sense of home» as a complex psycho­emotional and social phenomenon shaped in the experience of involuntarily dislocated persons. A phenomenological perspective on this issue allows us to view the home as an intentional object of experience — that is, one that acquires its meaning through a person’s interaction with space, time and their social environment. Accordingly, the aim of this inquiry is to trace the specific features of individual perception and experience of home, the situations of its loss, and its mental­value reconstruction, as well as the ways in which a newly found domestic space is endowed with familiar meanings and everyday practices under new life circumstances.

The empirical basis of this article consists of the author’s field materials, collected during face­to­face fieldwork in the Ivano­Frankivsk region between 2022 and 2024, as well as materials recorded during remote interviews with displaced persons. In total, 34 interviews with 45 interlocutors were conducted between 2022 and 2025. Some of these testimonies have already been introduced into scholarly circulation and published in the corpus of expeditionary folklore and ethnographic materials «Ethnographic Image of Modern Ukraine», in particular in Volume 12, «Everyday Culture in the Time of the Russian­Ukrainian War» (Kyiv, 2024), while the rest of the recorded oral sources are being published for the first time. The analysis of the articulated narratives made it possible to identify several forms of perceiving and self­defining home: its identification with one’s own family («Home is where my family is»); with one’s family and the wider (ethnic/national) community («Wherever Ukrainians are, that’s my home»); the abandoned home as anostalgia for family happiness; the abandoned «reborn» home.

The methodological framework of the study is based on oral history and ethnographic (expeditionary) methods, through which a series of in­depth semi­structured interviews were collected. The narrated life experiences of eyewitnesses to the full­scale Russian­Ukrainian war were analysed using methods of content analysis, typologization, and phenomenological and psychological approaches.

Keywords: full­scale Russian­Ukrainian war; involuntarily dislocated persons; Ivano­Frankivsk region; home; sense of home; phenomenological approach.

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