The Nature of Culture: Rites of Interaction Between Ukrainian Refugees and Latvian Society (2022)

Abstract

The article deals with the challenge in migration studies to find a solution to the problem of how to analyse the rapidly emerging and increasing immigration of Ukraine war refugees, which started in 2022 in Latvia as well as in other European Union countries. This topic is important in migration studies to provide national and municipal decision-makers with a scientific perspective and rationale for informed decisions. In Latvia, the humanities, including philosophy, have not yet been used to understand migration processes, although they do supply a wider context, which is necessary to understand the culture, attitudes, values, and peculiarities of an immigration group. The task of integrating and including the immigrant group presupposes knowledge and recognition of its uniqueness, which is best researched with the methods of the humanities, and significantly complements the approaches of economics, sociology and human geography. Thus, the research presented in this article uses a wide range of social science research findings, ritual phenomenology, topological hermeneutics, and solutions from micro-group sociology as data sources to complement the understanding of migration as an object with a perspective that also includes human experience and the intersubjective space in which people meet to create community. The objective of the study is to explore the research hypothesis, based on previous studies and daily observations, that a new social reality is emerging that can be called the newly emerged community of Ukraine in Latvia. This means that communication and reciprocity between most of Latvian society and refugees from the Ukrainian war has been, and is being, established. The article analyses to what extent Latvian society was ready for the reception and inclusion of refugees from the Ukrainian war; how the inclusion of the concept of place can help to address the issue of the formation of new communities; how rituals reveal a new step towards the creation of communion on both sides of the newly formed community; and how rituals and interactivity interact in rituals involving micro-groups and micro-group forming rituals. Thus, factors affecting the genesis of the Ukraine in Latvia community were discovered in the analysis of the interactive rituals that confirm the existence of a social reality aimed at integration and inclusion. Thus, the study reveals the perspectives on the use of resources rooted in culture at the national and municipal levels.