The semiotic space of wedding rituals: religious canon and socio-cultural context

Relevance of the study: today it is extremely important to study the genesis and key characteristics of the wedding ritual, which determined the ability of it to function as a way of constructing social movements and acquiring a new social status. Considering the phenomenon of ritual as a cultural system, the authors largely proceed from the semiotic understanding of culture itself as a system focused on the generation and preservation of meanings. In this regard, the theoretical and methodological basis of the study is the concept of the American anthropologist and sociologist K. Girtz. The works of foreign (A. van Gennep, B. Malinovsky, V. Turner, etc.) and domestic (N.V. Ermakova, N.V. Zorin, Yu.M. Lotman, L.V. Timofeeva and others) researchers. The authors come to the conclusion that the wedding ritual is a complex semiotic complex, the constitutive moment of which is the fixation of the religious-symbolic, social, psychological transition that the bride and groom make. Entering the sphere of human existence, the wedding ritual integrates various contexts in its symbolic field: religious, cultural, social. Being a communicative socially significant event, the traditional religious wedding ritual is inevitably associated with the processes of secondary semantization occurring within certain sociocultural situations.