Nação, simbolismo e revolução na Ucrânia: experiência etnográfica tensa na/da liminaridade

Abstract

In Ukraine, a former colony of the Russian Empire, as well as a former republic of the Soviet Union, between November 2013 and February 2014, thousands of people took the streets of the main towns of the country, mainly the Maidan Nezalejnosti, the biggest square of Kiev. The demonstrators were pacifically demanding the signing of a free trade agreement with the European Union. As the president decided to postpone the signing of the agreement in favor of closer ties with Russia, the demonstrators moved to demand the resignation of the government. The revolutionary process thus triggered, known as EuroMaidan or the Revolution of Dignity, represented a liminal moment, during which symbolic forms and actions were negotiated in order to shape of a new nation-building ideology, marked by a strong distancing from historical ties with Russia. I will present here some ethnographic reflections on the symbolic forms and actions of a nation under reconstruction, using for that my own experiences in Kiev in the first half of February 2014.

Keywords:
Nation; Symbolism; Sociation; Liminality; Euromaidan