The ethnographer talks about the germaphobes scared of the coronavirus, the “barbarism” of Vardavar and our attempts to adopt Russian “blinchik”, and the world covered with concrete.
“If back during Soviet period people paid much attention to those who were granted with prizes, their names would become popular, while during independent years this attitude from the society has been somewhat strange. There is an ignorance from their part and it seemed like the prize was more an individual achievement only”. Ethnographer, psychologist, candidate of historical sciences Lilit Simonyan received a President Prize in 2018 for her book titled “The Trees and Flowers on the Flock”. The collection is dedicated to Armenian traditions and beliefs connected with flowers, plants and trees.
Many of us do not wonder what the significance of this or that flower is, what their symbols are, and it seems that it is only enough to know that you should take even numbers of flowers to a funeral, and odd numbers to happy occasions. Lilit Simonyan feels sorry that every year people’s respect towards the nature gradually vanishes and the nature turns into mere decoration.
“Well, this will eventually lead to natural disasters. I happen to meet people obsessed with cleanliness to such extent as if scared of evil. This attitude towards the coronavirus is the peak of such cultural attitude. By being afraid of germs or a variety of viruses, they disinfect everything to a point that it destroys the nature around them. People do not keep plants or pets at home. They prefer to have an environment covered with asphalt, so that their shoes do not get dirty, they prefer that no leaf falls form the trees, so that no insects fall, and these germophobes start their attack towards the nature. I failed to explain to these people that if people hang some clothes on tree branches, the trees are still ok, but once you cover the roots with concrete, they really get endangered”.
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According to the psychologist, the fight against the coronavirus has an extreme manifestation, similar to that in the past, when people would fight invisible evils or spirits.
“There has been an insane increase of people turning to psychologists now, because they get to see things that cannot be controlled, and they do not think well, what’s the point? If I should get infected, let it be so. There is a horrible fear of an individual, rooted kind, which is really resembling the panic towards invisible evils, rather than a conscious caution, which is the right method to fight any type of diseases. Those who have plants at their homes, who have gardens, they get to see the spring blossom and they are psychologically much more protected”.
Lilit Simonyan thinks that we lack the feeling of a miracle, and this is why a human being does not want to live and they start complaining.
“It started still back in the second half of the 19th century, when religion and science were almost brutally torn apart. The science’s approach should be a tough one – there are no miracles, there are phenomena that we have not discovered yet. But even if we know how a person is born, a birth still remains a miracle. Even if we read the genetic codes like we read a newspaper, a person’s birth will still remain a miracle, and we should view the world surrounding us in terms of joining an aesthetic miracle. But now this seems to be considered dreaming, which is too bad. The feeling of a miracle feeds a person’s emotional field, and a person lives with emotions. To leave means to have emotions, if we do not have emotions, it seems like we do not live; what’s the point of living, a person should have a motivation to create, to try hard. When a person starts to convert that to a monetary equivalent, they become degraded”.
Today many speak about the Armenian gene, our customs, traditional values, but the moment we dive into it, we get to see that our perceptions have changed a lot. From Lilit Simonyan’s perspective one cannot quit everything.
“If we have acquired something, we have domesticated it and adopted us our, as Armenian. The same is with “blinchik”, we have borrowed the word from Russian, but in fact this dish is no ways similar to its Russian counterpart. We have our own version of Armenian type. We do get to wear clothes in our own unique way, although we have borrowed them from others. The issue here is a bit different – do we do all these by a national consciousness?”
Nowadays, spiritual holidays like the Easter and Vardavar are celebrated “roughly”.
“If we view Vardavar from the perspective of the germophobes, this is barbarism. Well, to throw water onto someone’s expensive clothing bought from a brand shop, while the latter has ironed it neatly, while you go ahead and throw water and put them in an awkward position. Or if a person had spent money at a salon and did their hair, and you still make them wet, this is barbarism. But when you consider this holiday from the perspective of the nature, then you water a human being in a way that you would water a tree and there is no barbarism here. If we live in our concrete houses, what is the point of having Easter, Resurrection? People would follow every step of the nature in the past. While we, given our TV and internet era, do not even care, we would rather spend time in a random website to check the weather forecast. While there was a time when people would read the nature as they read a newspaper, and naturally all these holidays belonged to those people, while now they remain foreign to us. If we refer ourselves to that culture, which can be disconnected from the switch, just imagine, that there is no electricity for a year and all this culture dies out and the people get back to the habit of following the nature. I do not know why, but when people are well-off, they think it will always be like that. But the 90s played a great lesson to us”.
Hripsime Jebejyan
The President Prize to the Republic of Armenia is initiated and funded by the Boghossian Foundation (Belgium-Switzerland). The Award Ceremony is organized by “Hayastan” All-Armenian Fund. The prizes are conferred by the RA President and the representatives of the Boghossian Foundation annually.
“Aravot” daily
07.05.2020
