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There are testaments from the 16th century preserved in Kremnica state archive. They are written in Latin, German and in one sample also in Slovak language. Last wills prepared a man for a death in spiritual and secular (division of property) way. Testaments eliminated conflict between secular property and desire for an eternal life. Formally testaments consist of several parts – invocation, intitulation, profession of faith, passages about human mortality, composing of the last will and redress of sins, heritages of property, confirmation, corroborating and date formulas. The content of the testaments is an important historical source for economic, law, culture, regional history and also history of material culture and everyday life.
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In the last decades, despite some pessimistic prognoses, shamanism is experiencingrevival. In the course of this process, shamans are adapting their practices to theclients’ expectations and new profile; as a result their own traditional view of theБългарска етнология, world is undergoing significant changes. One of the newly-emerged features ofcontemporary shamanism in Buryatia is dividing the inhabitants of the sacred worldinto „prestigious“ and „non-prestigious“ and offering them gifts corresponding tothis new status, all this with the active participation of the shamans themselves. Thearticle presents such practice which the author observed and assumes that there is alsoa process of transmission of respective ideals and values in the sphere of the sacredworld.
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The Areca nut is one of the products found in South Asia, Southeast Asia, andSouthern China. In China, being an exotic product that can be grown only in tropicalclimate, the Areca nut used to be highly appreciated and considered as a precious giftamongst the nobles in the past, especially during the Tang and Song dynasties. Whilein Vietnam, throughout its history, the Areca nut, because of its inherent spiritualvalue, has been an indispensable object of sacrifice in Vietnamese ancestral worshipas well as their lifetime rituals such as weddings, funerals and during childbirth. Apartfrom being an essential offering in rituals and ceremonies, the Areca nut traditionallywas also a means of mobilizing Vietnamese people’s social interactions (includingcourting between young boys and young girls).After doing a short description on how the Areca nut was used as a gift and as asacrificial object respectively in China in the past and in Southeast Asia, this article,from a historical point of view and with the author’s first hand materials from herfieldwork in Vietnam, attempts to show and explain both why and how the Arecanut has been functioning as a core indispensable object in sacrifices as well as ritualsand also as a means of social interaction in Vietnam. Thus, the article emphasizesthe important role that the Areca nut plays in Vietnamese people’s spiritual life andculture.
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The article analyses the process of choosing different strategies of identification bythe Bulgarians in Ukraine. The present state of the “identification processes” againstthe background of the “war of memory” and the “invented traditions” places themamong the priority problems of science and politics.The subject of analysis are the specifics of the formation of collective memorywhich are at the root of the choice of identification strategy: commemorative practices,mechanisms for memorialization of the past, the correlation between the localgroup history and the national strategies of Bulgaria and Ukraine. The conclusionis that the choice of identification behaviour is influenced by the efficiency of thesocial adaptation under the specific historical circumstances. The social resources atdisposal of the group in any particular moment influence the choice of vectors of thecollective memory and predetermine the formation of defensive practices aiming topreserve the group.
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According to Wahrig Deustsches Woerterbuch the concept of the “road” refers to a place which you have to walk in order to obtain your wish, to change some life situation in a positive or negative way; there the desired result of the act is achieved. Therefore, in our traditional culture the road is the place where people most often perform all sorts of magical actions including “white” and “black” magic. The crossroad has the same meaning; in a sense, it outlines the model of the horizontal division of the world which finds expression in four main directions – east, west, north, south. The article shows some of the most common “white” magical actions which aim at positive results – mostly various healing practices against diseases such as “gorska mayka” and “vankashna bolest” as well as customs dedicated to the mythical master-guardian of the village such as “Kokosha cherkva” and customs against drought. The article also examines some “black” magical actions aiming at doing harm: “binding” of newlyweds, stealing the milk of somebody else’s cows.
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This article aims to trace the migratory movements of Bulgarian population from the Western Outlands to Bulgaria from the Spring of 1941, when as a result of the accession of Bulgaria to the Tripartite Pact, the country regain some of the ethnic Bulgarian territories lost during the Balkan wars (1912 – 1913) and World War I (1915 – 1918). The main factors that determine the migration process are outlined: economic and financial difficulties; voluntary labor migrations; forced economic mobilization and others
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The paper offers a new interpretation on Rousseau in the context of Richard Rorty’s concepts on the philosophy of language and the linguistic turn developed at the end of the 20th century. The classical interpretation of Rousseau’s ideas of freedom in view of upbringing as a rule juxtaposes nature and culture. The present paper argues that this opposition can be overcome through the application of the metaphor approach to both upbringing and the value-neutral character of language. In this sense the question to be answered is how the languages of the teacher and of the student co-exist in Rousseau’s ideas and what the mechanism is that turns these languages into means of upbringing. The research employs arguments in favour of the hypothesis that in terms of the metaphor of “upbringing” created by Rousseau in Emile or on Education, the concepts language of nature and language of society overlap.
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This work is focused on customs and rituals associated with pregnancy and childbirth of inhabitants of 16 villages in Kubrat area. Using the published materials and ethnograpfical materials collected during field work (2007 – 2013) the author reveals in a comparative terms birth customs of various ethnic and confessional groups – Bulgarians, Turks ( Alevi and Sunni ) and Roma ( Christians and Muslims ) . The author compare the rituals connected to infertility , pregnancy, birth and 40 – day postpartum period .
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Smart living is a trend promising more comfort, security, and energy efficiency in our everyday life through digitalization and the inter-connectivity of devices. From driverless cars to smart thermostats, from movable office to ecosystem of smart home, all of them are smart “objects” on which smart living and smart cities rely, involving original and innovative solutions aimed at making life more efficient, more controllable, economical, productive, integrated, and sustainable. Nowadays, these objects are not single products anymore but a series of integrated products, which can be tied or bundled. However, the bunding and tying are not traditional one, like ordinary merchandise or software tying in the landmark case Microsoft. It can be between software and hardware, as well as with a more complicated structure. For the smart objects the bundling and tying may be not limited in bilateral ones but also can be multilateral. This paper aims to discuss bundling and tying products in a smart city life, and mainly the commercial reality of such smart products on how the components are bundled and tied. After, it analyses the structure of bundling and tying in some smart products to confirm whether there is a main product, which can be either a hardware or a software, or net-shaped like in the ecosystem of smart home. Based on these commercial realities, this paper discusses whether multilateral bundling and tying related to smart objects may be a threat to a competition order and mainly to violate Articles 102 TFEU.
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The article presents a lesson, which main purpose was to present data by tables and diagrams using computer program Excel. A test for defining the personality type of each student was made in advance by the school psychologist. On the basis of the collected data, the students had to make tables with the personality types of the class and also fill in the results during the lesson. The students also had to prepare column diagram using the information from the table deciding the design on their own. The purpose of this exercise was to check the ability of the students to use in practice their knowledge about the type of diagram they had already learned in previous lessons. The second type of diagram that they had to prepare was the pie. They had to use a format that shows the percentage of each sector. The goal of this exercise was to bind their knowledge from 5th grade with a future material they will learn in 6th grade about the pie diagram, and how to draw it. At the end of this exercise the students had to check if the percentage of the sectors coincides with the real number of people with that personality type and to conclude by themselves if the percentage was rounded or not.
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The objective of the present study is to evaluate the communication needs of the parents of children with cancer from the perspective of the semantic values of the morphological units used and integrated into sentence structures or sentence segments (with response status to open questions) and from the perspective of the factual analysis of the percentages of closed questions. We believe that the results we have reached, processed with interdisciplinary tools of psycholinguistics, morphology, syntax and semantics of the Romanian language and psychological analysis, can provide data that can contribute to the identification of the best strategies for ensuring emotional well-being and increasing the quality of life of families where there is a child with cancer.
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The report examines issues related to sectarianism in Pakistan arising from the unequal position of the minority Shia groups in the society. The main reasons are examined, as well as the activities of local terrorist groups and organizations like the Movement of the Pakistani Taliban and the so-called Local Taliban to destabilize the security environment and create ethnic ten-sion. Some of the measures taken by the Pakistani military and state leadership to regulate problems and create religious harmony and social security are also analyzed.
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The text discusses the most important events in the development of the Internal Macedonian-Odrin Revolutionary Organization, the activities before and during the uprising, and gives a chronology of the Ilinden-Preobrazhenie uprising. The events of the chronology are presented in a condensed form, without their detailed description, and are traced in chronological order from their outbreak to their suppression.
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In the focus of the article are the stories of three Bulgarian women who moved back to Bulgaria in the period 2020-2021, influenced by the pandemic of COVID-19. The ethnographic study was done in October-November 2021, exploring return migration and self-identification processes among Bulgarian returnees within which, in these three particular cases, COVID-19 is given as the key trigger for the return or the permanence of the return. The stories are interesting because they elaborate on the correlation between the emigration motives, migration stories, return motives, and the self-actualisation of the women upon return, synthesising one core motive for their return – caregiving. The complexity of return decisions is typologised around the three objects to which the caregiving is addressed – the personal, extended, and larger family, seen as a community/country. The article concludes that return could be explained as a mix of the women’s responsibility to closer or larger circles and structures and triggered and initiated by the COVID-19 pandemic through their strong female will and agency.
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Conspiracy thinking has always been part of our lives, but nowadays, it is almost the default way of understanding the world. When the disease associated with the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS CoV-2) emerged, causes and culprits were sought and found wherever the public imagination perceived a concentration of power and resources. Conspiracy theories about the virus’s origin as a bioweapon, the 5G technology connection, the ongoing plans of a New World Order, or Bill Gates’s scheme to microchip everyone with the COVID-19 vaccines became extremely popular around the globe. The paper discusses the conspiracy ideas and notions of the COVID-19 pandemic on Bulgarian social media, where they circulate in interactive conversational contexts via verbal texts, shared links, or images. It focuses on the local reception and interpretation of globally spread conspiracy narratives and their use to articulate underlying political, social, or public healthcare problems. The Facebook discussions examined here – respectively expressing COVID-19 scepticism (from April 2020) and COVID-19 vaccines/vaccination criticism (from April 2021) – are interpreted as discourses of distrust and perceived corruption in at least three major public spheres: the professional media, the political establishment, and the healthcare system.
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