Kunt Ernő szerk.: Kép-hagyomány – Nép-hagyomány (Miskolc, 1990)

I. RÉSZTANULMÁNYOK - Lyubomir Mikov: Rituális emberábrázolás - Jel: jelkép: művészi hasonmás

the course of their production and as ready forms in the process of their functioning, is an important and fundamental prerequisite for the complete realization of this type of images in the context of ritual aesthetics. On this basis anthropomorphic images incarnate a number of aesthetic values and exude a specific emotional expressivity, being transformed from necessary tools into aesthetic and artistic structures and gaining ground in the ritual genre of folk art as synthetic artistic generalizations and as artistic images. The final formation of anthropomorphic plastic images as semantically identical, functionally universal and socially meaningful signs, as well as their emotional and aesthetic interpretation, can be dated back in principle to the Slav national revival period. This was in fact the period when ritual systems and folklore cultures in general acquired their completed form. Irrespective of whether that period would be qualified as traditional or classical, it covered the time when folkloric culture and rituals in particular were strongly subordinated to collective norms, to the complex of universally valid ideological postulates, to established ethnic and cultural traditions, and ideological platforms. It is important to stress that precisely during that stage in their historical development athropomorphic images were above all socially significant signs, whereas their identical, universal, aesthetic and artistic nature was manifested predominantly as immanent characteristics. At the present-day latest socio-cultural stage in the historical development of Slav peoples there occurred essential changes in the sign function of the anthropomorphic ritual plastic art, with considerable transformations of its former sign-cultural dimensions. The semiotic and sociological sign values of this type of images, in the process of their updating, raise a number of new problems before visual anthropology, requiring an essentially new approach to them with a view to their present-day perception, reproduction and dissemination among the various peoples of the Slav community. The present-day interpretation of the anthropomorphic images is characterized above all by their establishment in an aesthetic and artistic plan, or as synthetic aesthetic and artistic structures, i.e. their differentiation as artistic generalizations of the individual consciousness, of a marked subjectivism in improvisation, of an outlived normativity in the ritual practice and in general - in the social life of the Slav peoples. The language of the ritual-applied genre in folk art, similar to the language of folk art in general, of the plastic folklore or of the folk material artistic culture, is of the non-pictorial type.

4 The sign nature of anthropomorphic ritual plastic art is no exception in this respect either, because the images representing it are secondarily reproducible sign structures devoid of any concrete pictorial values. In principle, this results from the fact that anthropomorphic plastic images incarnate and exude a rather generalized information, containing the entire complexity and load of their ritual dimensions and of their nature as types. Moreover, they are the materialized expression of various collective technical skills, views, notions, beliefs, moods, feelings, emotions, etc. In this case, as in plastic folklore in general, the concretely unique nature of the material, the concretely expressive imagery of the form and the concretely individual intepretation of the creative act give way before the collective aesthetic interpretation of the starting material, of the creative act and of the ready form, with a view to its functional purpose. It should be pointed out that this specificity remains in force even during the process of updating the classical plastic folklore - anthropomorphic ritual plastic art included - because, irrespective of the priority of the individual consciousness and of the subjectivism in the improvisation, the updating of the classical forms of folkloric culture has failed to surmount the sign generalization of a folkloric nature. At technological, game and semantic levels anthropomorphic ritual plastic images are differentiated in a social and natural plan as symbols of the male and of the female