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No appropriate research on regional identities, especially a qualitative one, has so far been conducted in Slovakia. Given the fact that Slovakia can be considered an extremely suitable area of interest in terms of a research on regional identities, this fact is quite striking. In particular the north of Slovakia with traditional regions characterized by a relatively high level of institutionalization represent an excellent area of interest. The paper seeks to overcome at least partially the existing gaps in the debate on Slovakia’s regional identities. It is based on in-depth interviews with mayors of several municipalities from northern Slovakia, which is delimited as the area of the Žilina and Prešov self-governing regions. The study understands region as a social construct which can acquire different geographical scales; regional identity is therefore discussed at several geographical levels. The major problem in Slovakia in connection with regional identities is the discrepancy between the borders of self-governing regions and the borders of traditional regions.
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The Contribution of Božena Filová to the Development of Ethnography in Slovakia: BURLASOVÁ, Soňa: New Research Trends in the Work of Božena Filová BENŽA, Mojmír: Božena Filová as Director SALNER, Peter: Family as a (Personal and Professional) Priority of Božena Filová
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What is it that makes rites important in our individual and community lives? What can this role be? Is it to make occasions more festive? What makes an occasion festive? Does celebrating mean to live with rites and use rites? How does the use of rites or rituals make an occasion more festive? What is the role of the feast and celebration at the level and in the life of the individual and the group (family, settlement, state, nation)? Why is it that we can feel our times to be an age of festivals (=special feasts)? What does this increase mean? These questions already point to the possible direction for answers, namely that rites can be the vehicles of important elements of content that make them necessary in all ages and all social systems: this content characteristic at the same time also emphasises the social role and function of rites. At this point the world of rites and feasts is connected to the levels of public life, power and politics. Rites and feasts are in constant movement and change. Rites have become a subject attracting multidisciplinary interest with many new approaches. Among the functions of rites it is mainly their expressive, social and renewal role that enables the creation of individual and community identities. Here the rite may be connected with the feast that breaks away from the routine and frame of everyday life and offers the possibility of practising it. The English expressions ‘holiday’ and ‘feast’ reflect the dual nature of the concept: a ‘holy day’, a time of freedom, time that is not controlled, as well as the excesses that accompany such events. It lifts the person celebrating it out of the everyday, weekday routine, and makes them part of this special time. Today we are witnessing the desacralisation, fragmentation and individualisation of rites and feasts. Their religious/Christian nature is pushed into the background and new desacralised feasts have appeared and are taking shape. Since the turn of the 19th to 20th century national and state days have come to increasingly predominate in the order of feasts and the dominance of civil and ideological celebration can be observed. The religious, state and national days have been shaping and dividing communities since the 19th century. The mobility appearing at all levels of society also opens up a new possibility for integration along which new feasts can appear creating what are now a whole series of local festivals. The social acceptance of the new order of feasts reflects the acceptance of the social order. Science has also become a force shaping identity, celebrating itself and its institutions with the rites of scientific conferences. In this way the feast with its rites can shape religious, national, political, regional and local, group and individual identities.
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The increasing digital mediation in the field of ethnographic inquiry is undeniable. Through the engagement of individual users, governments, corporations, and even grassroots organizations, the ubiquity of computational technology has a farreaching impact on social life. Scholarship on digital ethnography has fallen along a continuum between theory and methodology. By shifting the focus of the digital from a subject to a method of research, this article contends for a methodologically centered framework of digital ethnography that can transcend the digital/physical binary that is more fraught in discourse than it is in the human experience of contemporary culture. Within this framework, ethnographers can leverage the digital affordances of scalability and intermodality to uncover new perspectives on field observations and document social and cultural processes with empirical specificity and precision. Ethnographers can use data and new informational discoveries to extend of their field-based knowledge, achieving what I refer to as “augmented empiricism.” In this article, I examine how working with a variety of digital tools, including webscraping, mapping, and sound visualization, could widen the scope of ethnographic work and deepen our practice. Part two focuses on the process of interpreting field data and the value of geospatial visualizations. The last part explores digital methods that magnify the perception of physical senses like sound, sight, and space.
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This article presents two methods of digitisation, digital data processing and digitallocalisation applied in field ethnography. The Atlas.ti tool was used as an exampleof analyses of digitised textual, numerical, audio and visual data for subsequent co-ding in programmes (CAQDAS). The authors focus on coding and the creation of co-ding sheets. Through the examples from research conducted in the Northern Malo-hont region, they present the possibilities and limits of the use of coding incomputer interfaces. The links between ethnographic findings and field localisationare presented through the application of geographical information systems (GIS).Cultural configurations and diffusions are illustrated at precise geographic locationsof the region being explored. Many of the current limitations in the disseminationof these techniques can be overcome by a wider use of digital technologies, the crea-tion of common digital ethnographic databases and by projects suppo
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In 2015, the National Centre of Culture and Further Education (NOC)as one of thememory and archive institutions joined the single platform for the preservation,long-term archiving and disclosure of the information potential of cultural heritagecollections. The text deals with the digitisation project NOC– Digitisation and mul-timedia presentation products of the National Centre of Culture and Further Educa-tion.The main purpose of the text is to present this digitisation project and high -light the process of digitisation of cultural items from the NOC archive and relatedissues and observations from the perspective of the project ́s expert sponso
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Our paper presents a general description of the linguistic landscape of six villages. We present a village in southern Slovakia, Szeklerland, and Transcarpathia, where the language of oral communication within the settlement is exclusively Hungarian. Furthermore, some villages characterized by oral bilingualism. The results are compared to each other and to previous researches. In the second part of the study, the types of texts that appear in a non-Hungarian language are briefly analyzed, and most of them appear only in Hungarian language. We also examine which areas are best characterized by the use of bilingual signs in the examined villages. Finally, we compare the results with the general image that can be made on the basis of other sociolinguistic researches on the use of the Hungarians living in the given regions.
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Our purpose in the present analysis is to approach two cultural gestures pertaining to two different fields of study: poetry and laughter in its largest sense, without focusing on its different, so various forms. We are therefore staying at a crossroads of literature, on the one hand, and cultural anthropology and philosophy, on the other, borrowing mainly from Vladimir Jankélévitch our threads of argument for the latter segment. Our approach is meant to briefly expose some similarities between these two deeply human cultural attitudes, through the prism of one dimension they share, i.e. freedom and divergence in relation to a behavioural code that one could label as neutral.
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The Old Believers movement is an example of a cultural phenomenon that, although internally rich, is so different from the rest of the world that its single, homogeneous depiction cannot be established. One can only attempt to define its essence and outline its mode of functioning, for the elements that are constant and common across different communities are so specific that they cannot be mistaken for anything else. Providing a historical account of the entire history of the Old Believers movement is rather impossible. However, what can and should be described are its “cells,” i.e. territorial communities, viewed from the “process” perspective, i.e. viewed as they are functioning in the course of time.
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The aim of the article is to analyse the contemporary status of culture in its post-dialogic dimension. Current world thus comes in opposition to hermeneutics understood here in particular as real readiness for dialogue, the result of which may consists at least in the protocol of discrepancies. The current world is fed on post-dialogism, i.e. apparent dialogue in order to found another illusion represented by metautarky. In this context, Polish reality on the map of the world does not constitute anything special, and what increasingly matters is tribal rooting in a given place – even if it was supposed to be of temporary character: up to the border of my territory, which is long gone, to the mental border of what is “mine,” and not necessarily “ours.”
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The Calusari dance, also known outside Romania, is a reminiscence of an ancient cult. This popular dance brought together two mythological representations: one concerning the veneration of the Iele and the other concerning the worship of the horse. The dance contains mythical gestures and magic formulas of a group made up only of men. We believed in their power of recovery that was done by a gesture of a ritual known by their own. The very complex traditional custom has eliminated the magic elements and this dance is today a grandiose popular spectacle.
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The article presents the history of documentation of multi-part singing in Poland and the state of research on this subject. The multi-part singing as the musical and culture phenomenon is regionally limited and can be recorded in Carpathian Mountains and in the north-eastern borderland where the multi-part singing remains in some parishes the common heritage of Poland and Lithuania till today. There are also numerous examples of spontaneous heterophony in Polish-Belorussian and Polish-Ukrainian musical traditions, but the singing in parallel thirds prevails, particularly among members of the Orthodox Church. The prerequisite of the multipart singing is a slow tempo, not typical of folk songs in ethnic Poland. The review of sources and living practice allow to discuss three historical layers of multipart singing in Poland: 1) the oldest one – heterophony or diaphony in fifths documented since the 15th century, 2) three-part mixed choir influenced by the church practice since the 18th century (north-eastern part of Poland) and 3) parallel thirds in female groups wherever the school-youth-choirs were introduced and the mixed choir movement e.g. in Silesia since the 19th century. Thus the multi-part singing has become both a sign of regional-ethnic specificity and the result of the cultural development.
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The author discusses the issue of extreme socuio-cultural attitudes observable in the city milieus associated with traditional and folk music in Poland. He presents them in the context of two categories: those of “homeliness” and “multiculturalism”, pointing to the signs of a hermetic stance towards some universal values derived from the musical heritage, as well as to the ideologization of those values and an instrumental approach to them. He also discusses the problem of the superficial nature of the knowledge concerning the sources of both native and foreign musical traditions that constitute the inspiration and the basis for artistic practices. He also gives examples of “good practice” in the area of intercultural dialogue in the areas of traditional music and music inspired by it.
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In this article, the primary focus is the tradition of brass bands and orchestras in the lifestyles of Samogitia’s towns and villages in the 20th–21st century. This music-making fromLithuania’s western region (Lith. Žemaitija) is no doubt related to the development of Lithuania’s musical culture as a whole. Therefore, on the basis of historical sources, the author briefly covers the development of ensembles in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The formation of brass ensembles’ tradition was particularly impacted by the celebrations of Catholic Church holidays and solemn processions (particularly in the 17th–18th century), and later – manor orchestras and music schools (end of the 18th–19th century). It was in Samogitia that music-making with brass instruments thrived until the very beginning of the 21st century. The author, on the basis of data collected mainly during fieldworks, reveals the role of brass bands in this region’s folk piety, family and community customs, this tradition’s changes.
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The article is devoted to the issues of the traditional musical culture of Poles living in the western part of the Republic of Belarus, in Grodno region. Based on the analysis of the repertoire recorded during her own field research, the author distinguishes the most important of her musical characteristics. The musical culture of the studied community is captured from the perspective of the remembered repertoire and currently practiced. Part of the traditional repertoire with its depositaries goes to the world of the past, while the surrounding reality determines thefunctioning of the musical culture and the forms of its presentation.
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This paper deals with the issue of brass bands’ contests in Poland and is analysed using both the diachronic and systematic approaches. The sources for this inquiry are the international literature relating to the working class contest phenomena and the outcome of my ethnomusicological field research conducted in 2001–2005 in the Mazovia region (Central Poland). I briefly examine the history of contests of brass bands in Poland since the interwar period. The systematic part deals with different aspects of contesting, which include motivations of musicians, organisers’ assumptions, performed repertoire, as well as evaluation criteria. I explore the structure of brass band contest and its roles in bands’ development. The national, multileveled format of musical contest, is described in relation to the fireman band movement, which was being animated by the Main Board of Voluntary Fire Brigades – a non-musical organisation, and corresponds with the well-researched phenomenon of brass band movement in Great Britain.
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The director Andrzej Barański can be seen as portraying local, mundane life. His oeuvre presents a personal vision of our reality. It is a vision devoid of emotions, Polish myths andRomantic clichés; instead, it is delicate and filled with a detached humour. The artist interprets the world from afar, so to speak; like an anthropologist. Niech gra muzyka (Let the music play) is a 72-minute film consisting of six etudes relating the fortunes of provincial musicians. The narration is unusual, partly realistic, partly fairy-tale; it presents strange happenings in the lives of the protagonists, village musicians, as if they were heroes of folk tales or creatures from folk belief.
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