Between everyday life and a holiday: collective works and public duties in the don cossack community

Introduction. The article presents the analysis of the practice of organizing collective works and duties in the traditional community of Don Cossacks. The relevance of the research is due to both small exploration degree of this problem and possibilities of using some traditional forms of organizing working community life in modern conditions. Methods and materials . The base of the article is the analysis of periodic printing data of the late 19th century and ethnographic expeditions of the 20th - early 21st centuries. The paper presents the practice analysis of organizing collective works and social duties in the traditional community of Don Cossacks. Different varieties of field works, hunting, neighbour mutual help in constructing houses and preparing products for winter, improving settlements, maintaining churches etc. were related to collective works and duties. Such duties as keeping horse producing herds, being on duty at stanitsa administration, convoying, securing settlements were determined by the features of the Cossack militarized mode of life. Social works and duties were distributed by sex and age. Analysis and Results. By the structure and functions revealing this practices and by analyzing people’s terms for their designation the author determines that the most part of these works and duties (in view of their social importance and ways of organizing, and due to the connection with the term of common share) were related more to the sacral scope than the profane one and in fact represented varieties of rite forms. Such attitude to the labor sphere of life was connected with shared worldviews of Cossacks, their ideas about harmonically arranged social life. The relevance of the presented materials is determined by small exploration degree of this problem and possibilities of using some traditional forms of organizing working community life in modern conditions.