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The article regards and analyses examples from the new musical creation, inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic. Those examples are published on the global network and contain some intrinsic features of folklore. The most important among these features is the reaction to events or occurrences from the current life of society. Object of analysis is also the activity of certain cultural institutions, such as community centres (chitalishta), schools, dancing or hobby clubs, retired people’s clubs and schools for folklore singing and folklore instruments, during the pandemic. The author also features some cases of postponing or cancellation of festival activities on local level and the performance of local non-professional artists in such shows.
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The article focuses on certain “points of contact” between the theories of dream interpretation developed by Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung and modern cognitive linguistics. The author underlines the relevance of linguistic transformations such as metaphor, metonymy, symbolization, paronymy, homonymy, paronomasia, and associative networks for Freud’s theory. Attention is also paid to the mechanisms of dream interpretation used by C. G. Jung: associative, metaphorical, and metonymic. The interpretation of symbols is a focal point in the study.
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The article presents the development of the theoretical interest in dreaming as an object of anthropological analysis. The focus of attention is on dreams per se, along with dream interpretation, narration of dreams, and perceptions related to dreams in different cultures. Beyond their psychoanalytic interpretation, dreams are examined as a specific type of ethnographic material and a means of communication within the community and between the researcher and the researched. Dreaming is a universal human characteristic, but at the same time, the importance attached to dreams in different societies varies significantly. Based on the ethnographic examples presented in the article, the author have sought to answer the question what factors make dreams in some cultures to be considered an important source of information and even a field of action, while in others they are perceived as imaginary fragments with no relation to everyday life.
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The article describes the National Festival of Folklore in Koprivshtitsa in through the eyes of a particular local community, that of the village of Bistritsa, Sofia region. The study is based on fieldwork conducted in January 2015 at the local community centre. The main method of investigation is the semi-structured interview, which offers local people the opportunity to select the most significant moments in their narratives and to express their own understanding and interpretations of folklore heritage. The authors pay particular attention to the processes of transformation of local tradition into cultural heritage, which became especially visible after the 1930s and the 1940s. The text outlines the processes and means by which the local community presents its culture and understands the necessity of its contemporary safeguarding as a living practice. The influence of local and national cultural institutions is duly marked, including the influence of the local community centre and the National Festival of Folklore in Koprivshtitsa. Special attention is also given to these institutions’ contributions towards the conceptualization of different elements of the respondents’ local culture and the ways in which local culture becomes a resource for the construction of different networks of identities: cultural, local and national. The text also highlights the basic accents and interpretations in the narratives of the respondents who discuss the National Festival; the Festival’s importance as a place for the representation of their traditional village cultural elements; its role in their preservation; the character of the Festival stage and changes to it through the years; as well as the personal experiences of the community members during the Festival.
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The dumb blonde figure is very popular in the repertoire of international jokes and is characterized by two main qualities: stupidity and promiscuity. These features are also shared by jokes which have circulated in Bulgaria since the 1990s. Researchers view dumb blonde jokes as a consequence of the increasing presence of women in professional and public life in positions which were traditionally considered ‘male’ spheres. The jokes are a reaction to radical transformations in social values and also a specific response to problematized male identities. Over the course of time, the image of the blonde has undergone certain changes as the sexual innuendo has faded and stupidity has become the main object of ridicule. In this way, the blonde has become a version of the classical personage of the fool whose role has always been substantial in the processes of self-identification, whether they be national, social, ethnic, local, or regional in character. In this respect, the blonde represented in such jokes has the potential to become a universal archetype, since her image combines two major identity markers: gender, and more generally, cultural affiliation.
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This study is aimed at identifying the most noticeable Slavic elements in the calendar rites of Bukovyna. It analyzes material collected by Romanian researchers in the second half of the 19th – early 20th century (E. Niculiță-Voronca, T. Pamfile, L. Bodnărescu, А. Fochi, A. Zașciuc), documents from the Central Scientific Archive of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Moldova, the New Linguistic Atlas of Romania, Moldova and Bukovyna (1987), as well as personal observations recorded by the authors of the study in Ukraine and Romania during ethnographic expeditions. In the calendar rites of the Romanians of Bukovyna, some clear Slavic elements can be identified, such as some names of calendar holidays, Ukrainian elements in such rites as koliada, the Christmas star, shchedruvannya. Ukrainian motifs of musical folklore in winter rites, as well as the use of the names of Ukrainian opryshky and haidamaky, the adaptation of the “walking with vertep”, the use of the term vidma of Ukrainian origin, the penetration of the name and main text of the Ukrainian Malanka, etc.
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This paper aims to reconstruct the way in which the Romanian written culture from the second half of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth gradually built the image of the Russian Enlightened monarchy with three of its most famous representatives: Peter II, Catherine II and Alexander I. By means of translating from Italian and German historiography, these texts served a double goal: on the one hand they satisfied the reader’s need for knowledge and understanding of the contemporary events, and on the other they contributed to a political discourse that viewed Russia and the Russian Orthodox monarchy as potential saviours of the Romanian principalities from the oppression of the Muslim Ottoman Empire. By means of translation analysis, we have attempted to illustrate how the Western image of an Eastern monarch, guided by a blend of Western philosophy and Eastern Orthodox tradition, was transferred in the Romanian culture as a scientific base for political and cultural decisions.
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In her novels, Ananda Devi has always known how to immerse us in texts ennobled by local paintings where matrix India appears through the representation of a Cosmogonic universe dominated by magico-spiritual symbolism. Certain homogeneous interpretations, the fruit of historical constructions, obscure, even sometimes neglect, the deeply rooted heterogeneity of Indian traditions in Mauritius. This “bipolar contrast” (Sen, 2007), the sum of imaginary splices and cultural inter-fusion, nevertheless constitutes the humus of the Mauritian identity built over the course of colonial history. The author then illustrated herself through her writings as a major figure in this form of binary representation of the Mauritian universe. Our study aims at revealing the imaginary amalgams that circulate in Devis texts, starting from forms of discourse and knowledge surreptitiously disseminated in motifs such as the “sari” and “the hair”. By relying on an ethnocritical analysis grid, we will show how the Devi’s ethnotexts (Motsch, 2000), manage by a meiotic effect, to shape a “new humanism” at the antipodes of “orientalist representations” (Said, 1978) and ethnocentric of India as seen by the West.
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The article studies the winter masquerade custom of Turka, as the central object of investigation is its variant from the Romanian village of Cuciulata in Transylvania. In the course of more than a century, the outlook of this mask has remained almost unchanged. The author offers analyses on the altering functions of the mask as an artefact playing the roles of a ritual object and a museum exponent.
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This article explores the changing approaches to the preservation and socialization of cultural heritage. The analysis of the normative documents of the leading international organizations in the field of cultural heritage – from the 50s of the twentieth century to the present day – shows a slow transition to the integration of people and communities in the processes of its preservation. This transition has three main phases: from separation of people and communities from the heritage, through awareness and access to it, and finally, to inclusion in the decision-making process concerning cultural heritage protection. The article also examines where Bulgaria is in this process and how these changes in cultural policies affect the mechanisms of protection of our cultural heritage.
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