The Ethnology Notebooks. 2024. № 2 (182), 360—374
UDK [39:728.6](477.83/.84+86)”19/20″:930.2
DOI https://doi.org/10.15407/
TOLOKA (COLLECTIVE HELP) DURING CONSTRUCTION WORKS IN GALICIA: TECHNOLOGICAL AND RITUAL-CUSTOMARY ASPECTS (based on materials from Pokuttya, Western Podillya, and Opillia)
RADOVYCH Roman
- ORCID ID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1900-8948
- Doctor of Sciences in History, Senior Researcher
- of the Institute of Ethnology
- of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine,
- in the Department of Historical Ethnology,
- 15, Svobody Avenue, 79000, Lviv, Ukraine,
- Contacts: e-mail: radovychroman@gmail.com
Abstract. Mutual assistance during construction («toloka») was extremely widespread in the Ukrainian ethnic lands. This particularly applied to the construction of buildings that involved significant use of clay (or clay-straw mixtures), which required a lot of time and labor. Unfortunately, this issue, both across Ukraine and in specific historical and ethnographic regions, as well as in ethnographic districts, is still relatively underexplored in the special ethnographic literature. Therefore, a more detailed examination of labor mutual aid during construction is quite important, which also defines the relevance of the proposed study.
The author of the work aims to determine the features of collective assistance during the construction of rural homes in the territories of Pokuttya, Western Podillya, and Opillia.
The object of the study is traditional construction, and the subject is the specific features of collective assistance («toloka») during construction work.
The methodological basis of the study is the principle of historicism, and methods of field ethnographic research, as well as general scientific (analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction) and specialized scientific methods (retrospective, comparative-historical, statistical methods, typological analysis, and others), were used.
The research area covers the territories of Pokuttya, Opillia, and Western Podillya (within parts of Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Ternopil regions). The chronological boundaries of the study are defined by the source material, which covers the 20th and early 21st centuries.
Labor collective mutual assistance during construction work, both in Galicia and generally in Ukraine, is still rather superficially covered in the special ethnological literature. Some features of «toloka» are considered in the works of I. Greben, Y. Taras, and R. Tarnavskyi. Therefore, the primary source base for this study consists mainly of the author’s field materials and some published field materials by R. Tarnavskyi.
Keywords: Pokuttya, Opillia, Western Podillya, construction, collective assistance, clay-straw mixture, valls.
Received 1.04.2025
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