Apotropaic Practices in the Car Owners’ Milieu: A Big City Experience

Abstract

The car ceased to be a luxury and became an ordinary means of transportation throughout the world by the mid-70s. At the same time, a large percentage of the world’s population became urban dwellers. Therefore, automobile practices, including apotropaic ones, are inextricably linked with urban culture, although some features are semantically attributed to rural community rituals. Most often, the apotropaic rite is performed when purchasing a new car or after repairing an old one. As rituals of this kind, it is aimed at eliminating the dangers and disasters associated with the car. Despite the cultural differences, the rite structurally repeats the everyday ritual practice generally accepted for each region under consideration. Based on the materials of field studies in the cities of Moscow and Tehran, as well as on the analysis of Japanese, Thai and Korean Internet resources, it is shown how elements of the modern post-industrial culture of a large city are introduced into the ritual space.