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Organization

Besides this About section, this site is split into two categories: interpretation and craft. This structure was chosen as it roughly follows interpretive performance autoethnography, which I am using for my MA project. Very briefly, this means that I studied myself by analyzing my own experiences, interpreting them, and then performing those interpretations. In this case, I am interpreting my experiences with my Ukrainian heritage and then “performing” it by crafting my folk dress. For a much clearer, detailed example of interpretive performance autoethnography, I highly recommend Black Metal, Trauma, Subjectivity and Sound by Jasmine Hazel Shadrack (I have listed a link to this book on my Sources page). Since this method has two parts (analyze / interpret + performance), that is how I have approached this website. I also felt that this would be a strong organization for a public site. It keeps any single page from (hopefully) becoming too crowded with details, and I’m not mixing heavy personal narratives with topics like the silyanka – I’m hoping to somewhat avoid the same reputation as a food blogger here. But I’ll give some brief explanations below for context.

Interpretation

Briefly, this section follows the first part of interpretive performance autoethnography: reflecting on experiences and drawing conclusions. The purpose of this section is to reflect on the breaks and lingering trauma in my Ukrainian identity and my personal need to re-establish that connection. It is made up of pages wherein I reflect on my Ukrainian heritage and identity as well as how it coexists (or conflicts) with other facets of my identity. More information about my fieldwork is also given in this section. Pages are written independently, so jumping around and skipping pages is certainly possible.

Craft

The craft section is technically the 2nd part of this process, but understanding this section is not dependent on having already read the 1st part. So, if someone just wants to read about the different parts of my dress, that’s certainly possible. The pages here deal with different parts of the Sniatyn-based dress and how I approached making or obtaining them. More theoretically, for this part of the autoethnographic process, the goal is to take my realizations from the previous section and enact them through crafting. That is, by embarking on the journey of crafting my own Sniatyn-based folk dress, I am repairing the intergenerational breaks in my Ukrainian heritage and giving it a significant role in my own life, effectively strengthening my Ukrainian identity. Most of this section, however, will focus on the individual components of the folk dress and providing information about them in the Sniatyn context.