Function of stove in childbirth rituals and children's diseases treatment practices of the Karelians

The traditional culture of the Karelians has long been the object of ethnographic studies. Childbirth rituals and traditional medicine addressed by this paper are not an exception. The aim of the study is to comprehensively determine the function of the stove in the childbirth rituals and children's diseases treatment practices of the Karelians using comparative-historical, ethnolinguistic and comparative-contrastive methods. The article presents for the first time the data obtained from various sources (i.e., dictionaries of the Karelian language and samples of Karelian oral language), as well as the field research materials collected by the authors. So far, there have been no comprehensive studies on the semiotics of the Karelian stove, which determines the relevance of this research. The study revealed the symbolic significance of the stove in Karelian childbirth rituals and traditional medicine (namely, the treatment of infants during the first year of their life) using folklore, linguistic, and ethnographic materials.