PREDSTAVA O POSTAVE SMRTI – ŠTÚDIUM KULTÚRNEHO JAVU V SLOVENSKEJ A NEMECKEJ JAZYKOVEJ SKUPINE NA SLOVENSKU

This paper addresses the personification of death (a being in human or animal form) as a public representation. The public representation of death is traced among respondents from the Slovak and German language group who are residents of the town of Medzev. The author examines the nature of the individual and group representations of death held by respondents in the selected samples. She poses the research question whether there exists a cultural or long-term shared representation of death in the selected language groups, or overall in this ethnically and linguistically heterogeneous locality. Finally, she asks whether the postulated divergent representation of death between Slovaks and Germans (more precisely, the local group known as Mantaks) in Medzev functions as a differentiating cultural code, on the basis of which symbolic boundaries are formed between groups.