A Small Town in the Cultural and Anthropological Dimension: Zhmerynka

The cultural and anthropological analysis of the town of Zhmerynka as a local sociocultural space is carried out in the article. The relevance of the study is caused by the insufficient scholarly attention paid to small towns in Ukrainian cultural anthropology and ethnology, despite the fact that a significant part of Ukraine’s population lives in such settlements. The choice of Zhmerynka is motivated by its representation in the Ukrainian cultural and informational space as a typical provincial town. The article is aimed at detecting transformations in livelihood strategies, cultural practices and forms of local identity among Zhmerynka’s residents in the context of contemporary social challenges. The methodological framework of the research is based on an interdisciplinary approach combining cultural anthropology, ethnology and urban studies. The methods of field ethnography (participant observation and semi-structured interviews), analysis of oral narratives, visual and material sources, as well as local historical materials are used. The peculiarities of the town’s symbolic space are considered in the study, including the processes of decommunization, local memorialization practices, urban legends and the mythologization of the railway as a core element of urban identity. Particular attention is paid to the town’s polyethnic composition, transformations of religious life and the preservation of elements of intangible cultural heritage. The role of migration in shaping new social ties, economic strategies and patterns of everyday life is analysed. The changes in the town’s population life in the conditions of the full-scale war are also considered. The scientific novelty of the study consists in introducing contemporary ethnographic materials on Zhmerynka as a sample of a town with a distinct historical memory and multicultural heritage into academic circulation. It is concluded that a town appears not as a peripheral space, but as a dynamic sociocultural organism in which traditional practices, global influences and local modes of adaptation to contemporary challenges are combined.