THE SEMANTICS OF GIFT EXCHANGE IN THE SOUTH RUSSIAN WEDDING CEREMONY

Understanding the history of any nation is impossible without knowing and understanding the peculiarities of the central part of its national culture – folk traditions. Being extremely multicomponent, the complex of traditional folk culture includes many components, the most important of which is the wedding ceremony. The article highlights one of the most stable elements of the South Russian wedding ceremony of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – the wedding exchange of clothes between the bride and groom, as well as gift exchange between newly–born relatives. An attempt has been made using the results of the author's field research in a number of villages in the Voronezh, Lipetsk and Tambov regions (2005-2024) to identify the degree of preservation of the main traditional components of this rite, as well as their possible modifications under the influence of various factors.