Every person interacts with society through these dimensions in a continuous recreation of
both the person and the society in which the person is found.
Everyday reality is constructed through processes of typification, objectivation and
signification. “The reality of everyday life contains typificatory schemes in terms of which others
are apprehended and “dealt with” in face-to-face encounters.” The notion of typifications can be
understood in some manner as stereotypes. Everyone turns to previous knowledge, and to
prototypical or typified patterns, in order to face new situations. “Human expressivity is capable of
objectivation, that is, it manifests itself in products of human activity that are available both to their
producers and to other men as elements of a common world.” “A crucial case of objectivation is
signification, that is the human production of signs. A sign may be distinguished from other
objectivations by its explicit intention to serve as an index of subjective meanings” (Berger 1989:
30-37). Our point is that this set of variables may differ in a specific way when the environment is
one related to
jurodstvo.
The construction of everyday reality in a Russian cultural environment contains the
typification of what is a
jurodivyj. A person
with a particular behavior, wearing rags,
walking naked
in the snow through streets and markets, insulting people because of their sins, would easily fit in
the typification of a holy fool because all those features are objectivations with cultural meanings.
For example, as Challis and Dewey (1974, 1987a) stated, the particular perceptions of mental
disorders in old Russia could contribute to the development of
jurodstvo. The diversity provided by
mental diseases in terms of communication and emotion could be understood as a positive
interrelation for the construction of
jurodstvo. Constructions in terms of representation and self-
reference would be determined for the historical and religious background of the environment. The
presence and recreation of the Byzantine culture, specially the hagiographies of Byzantine
salos,
constitute a positive interaction for the emergence and the continuation of the tradition in Russia.
This situation may interfere in the process of reality evaluation providing, and at the same time
dependent, on concrete mental schemes that conform with what we previously referred to as
knowledge, and in a more general plain, it may modify the system of meanings that constitutes a
culture and its worldview. The specific system of meanings in a concrete moment in a given society
may be called
imaginary. A
jurodivyj as a member of a group would interact with a certain role
recognized by the society surrounding him. At the same time, this role is self-perceived and played
in an active way (Pančenko 1984). Decision theory and game theory have shown us the
convenience of being able to incorporate in our analyses a rethinking about how people reach their
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goals. The analysis may also be focused on intentions and their consequences. A religious person in
old or present Russia with the intent to process a severe asceticism would probably consider the
option of
jurodstvo, as far as is part of his
imaginary, and how it is accepted as “a role in his society,
has previous references as a model and is part of his historical and religious worldview” (Berger
and Luckmann 1989, Luhmann 1990). This manipulation of the role and concept of
jurodstvo itself
presents as very useful in understanding, for example, the ethnographies of Pryžov, where the
academician described how certain figures played the role of
jurodstvo in order to reach certain
financial goals (Pryžov 1996).
As we indicated above, every
jurodivyj may have a second temporal dimension in terms of a
“social reconstruction of the past” (Johnson & Sherman, ibid). “Memory of the past” is an exercise
of “construction” (Ramírez 2007: 205). The construction of the past related to a
jurodivyj can
change: at times disappearing, at times being re-formulated, or recollected and “formalized” within
the process of canonization. A
vita may be written using previous patterns found in byzantine or
oldest Russian hagiographies. Centuries later, the same figure could be transformed into a national
symbol (the figure of the holy fool in Boris Godunov or the Legends of Basil), become a reference
figure in the national literature (different characters in Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky), a way of self-
representation of the national essence in art (
jurodstvo is present in Nesterov's and Surikov
paintings) or an object of criticism for ideological writers (the figure of the beggar in Gorki's tales),
a motif in Russian cinematography (from the recent Ostrov or Eisenstein works) or as an academic
construct (in the last years
jurodstvo has become a productive topic for scholarly investigations)
converting our
object of study into an etic construction.
All these considerations are encompassed and summarized immediately below while
describing this hypothetical model. The proposed model is a fictitious representation, which
attempts to cover all the possible or the most representative manifestations (given above, in brief) of
the phenomenon to which it is related. This signifies that in its totality, the model construct can
neither be proven to exist as such, nor shown to represent an actual case that completely fits in
terms of all aspects reflected in the diagram provided. Every single case of
jurodstvo is constituted
in terms of its own conditions and may be described by its own means.
The model is a systemic representation of the components and interactions of my
understanding of a prototypical
jurodstvo, illustrating both “daily reality” and the “construction and
reconstruction of the past” as a heterochronic phenomenon.
jurodstvo and its manifestations interact
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