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The current article deals with the reflection of the holy groves of the so-called Curonian ķoniņi (kuršu ķoniņi) in historical sources and contemporary folklore. The Curonian ķoniņi constituted a special estate of freemen who enjoyed the same status as other vassals of the Livonian Order in Courland. On the one hand, there is quite a rich collection of written evidence concerning the holy groves of the ķoniņi, possibly dating even from 1414. On the other hand, there is a vivid contemporary oral tradition concerning the holy grove of one of the villages of ķoniņi – Ķoniņi Elka Grove. Both sources have been examined in the article in order to find out the reasons for the atypically strong local oral tradition concerning the holy grove and the motives used in the stories told about the grove.
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On the basis of post-war rumours, interviews and memoirs the article analyses the manifestations and possible reasons of the Estonians' self-identification as well as of their attitudes towards and opinions of their neighbours. The rumours of the time and the contextualized memoirs provide a simplified popular reflection of immigration and the establishment of a totalitarian state apparatus, as well as of the contours of the social relations network emergent due to the colonial policy of the new regime. Although most of them developed in the Estonia of the 1940s, many of the prejudices of the time were rooted in earlier tradition and historical circumstances. The ethnocentric attitude of the rumours communicated the feeling that the community had ceased to be homogeneous, at the same time pointing to the stranger. The cultural codes of the ethnic relationships of the time were manifested in the triad Estonians-Russians-Germans and the Estonian-Jewish and Estonian-Estonian pairs. The figure of an enemy stood out on a political and ideological rather than ethnic background. Such an attitude indicates that many Estonians had developed a simplified world model, which was stereotypical to the extreme as all immigrants were identified with occupants and proponents of the communist regime. The people's ideas of the "others", rooted partly in fact, partly in fiction, tell of an ideological, physical and cultural split between the immigrants and the natives.
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Memorial websites on the Internet constitute a new form for expressing grief and for remembering deceased relatives and friends. In my sample of memorial websites, I have studied those that are open to the public. Such memorial sites have had an explosive development during the 2000s. The messages become a virtual, social meeting place by giving mourners an opportunity to express themselves and avoid remaining alone with their grief. In this study the all-inclusive issue has been how mourners express their emotions and concepts of belief regarding the deceased person. The question focused upon is the belief in something posthumously supernatural. Memorial sites on the Internet are also set up for dead pets. The boundary between humans and animals as spiritual beings is discussed in the study. In Norway the vision is primarily directed backwards, relating to traditions, and in Sweden forwards, in the direction of changes. In Sweden there is a greater tendency to adopt innovations and to leave the long-standing. This study can, in addition, play a part in the contemporary discussion about greater outspokenness concerning death, compared to the prevalent silence and taboos of the 1900s.
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This article examines the core idea of poverty proverbs as hints of cultural knowledge in old Finnish rural countryside. Until World War II, most of the Finns lived in a high-risk society with only few institutions to guarantee their safety and well-being. The continuous threat of absolute poverty was evident for the majority of the Finns. The basis of this research is 204 proverbs that contain the words poor, poverty, pity or unfortunate. The proverbs analyzed and classified here were collected in the Folklore Archives of the Finnish Literature Society between the years 1885 and 1950. The ideational level of the proverbs in the context of social history is crucial in revealing the schematic structure that people use to communicate about rural poverty.
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Jokes, ethnic slurs and parodies often occur in Internet comments, as the general feeling of anonymity allows for and even favours balancing on the verge of the acceptable and the unacceptable. Thus, a humorously intended comment can be perceived as aggressive by other Internet users. This possibility is further enhanced by the fact that the electronic media in general and computer mediated communication (CMC) in particular lacks non-verbal conversational cues that would signal the intentions of the communicator with greater, though not absolute, accuracy. The interrelations between online humour and aggression have so far escaped the attention of researchers, although scholarly discussions concerning these two phenomena in face-to-face interaction have been frequent. This paper analyses comment sequences in the Delfi news portal (www.delfi.ee) from 2000 to 2007. Delfi is an Estonian online news website known for its liberal attitude towards commenting. The aim of the article is to describe the boundaries between humour and verbal aggressiveness and address the notion of failed humour through its occurrence in online communication. In addition to presenting the patterns of humorous and aggressive modalities in comment sequences, some cases in which humour changes into aggressiveness are analysed.
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Christie J. H. Davies 2011. Jokes and Targets. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 314 pp.
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Toms Ķencis: A Disciplinary History of Latvian Mythology. Dissertationes Folkloristicae Universitatis Tartuensis 19. Tartu University Press, Tartu 2012, 218 pp.
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Gilgameši eepos. Akkadi keelest tõlkinud ja seletused kirjutanud Amar Annus 2010. [The Epic of Gilgamesh: Translated from the Akkadian language and commented by Amar Annus.] Bibliotheca Antiqua, Tallinna Ülikooli Kirjastus, 242 pp.
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