Svetlana Petrova will be giving a Brown Bag Lunch presentation on Wednesday, December 9, 2015, from 12 to 1:30pm, at Bard Graduate Center in New York City. Petrova’s talk is entitled “An Ancient Wedding Dress in the Ritual Culture of Sakha (Yakut) People.”

Svetlana Petrova is Associate Professor of Folklore and Culture at North Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk. She received her PhD in History from the Institute of Archeology and Ethnography, Novosibirsk, Russia, where her doctoral research focused on Sakha ritual clothing. She is the author of numerous articles and monographs, including How Did the Yakuts Fortify Themselves against the Cold? (Open Journal of Social Sciences 3 (3), 2015) and Clothing in Yakut Traditional Wedding Rituals (19th-20th Centuries) (Archaeology, Ethnology & Anthropology of Eurasia 38 (2), 2010).

During the last seventy years, the material culture and rituals of the Sakha (Yakut) people indigenous to Siberia were nearly forgotten due to Soviet propaganda. However, after perestroika, Sakha people started to restore and revitalize their culture by studying museum artifacts around the world. Professor Petrova’s work has focused on reconstructing a forgotten tradition, an ancient wedding ceremony from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She will focus on the wedding dress—the most valuable attribute of the ceremony—which indicated the social status of the newly wed couple. The wedding dress consisted of various elements including a coat and hat, and silver jewelry such as earrings, a headdress, pectoral and back adornments, and bracelets. Reconstruction of this ancient wedding ceremony was based on archival and literary sources.

Coffee and tea will be served; attendees are welcome to bring their own lunch.

RSVP is required.