Interview with Hungarian folklorist and ethnologist Mihály Hoppál on the occasion of his 70th jubilee
Interview with Hungarian folklorist and ethnologist Mihály Hoppál on the occasion of his 70th jubilee. Interviewer Nikolay Kuznetsov.
More...We kindly inform you that, as long as the subject affiliation of our 300.000+ articles is in progress, you might get unsufficient or no results on your third level or second level search. In this case, please broaden your search criteria.
Interview with Hungarian folklorist and ethnologist Mihály Hoppál on the occasion of his 70th jubilee. Interviewer Nikolay Kuznetsov.
More...
This paper discusses Jarold Ramsey’s classic article, The Wife Who Goes Out Like a Man, Comes Back as a Hero: The Art of Two Oregon Indian Narratives. It analyzes Ramsey’s arguments against the backdrop of Alan Dundes’s work in Native American folklore as well as more recent controversies in this field. Some scholars, such as Dundes, have attempted to vindicate Native American folklore against Eurocentric criticism by fitting it into Western literary molds. Ramsey, on the other hand, brings to light the distinctive aesthetic qualities of two tales from the Pacific Northwest by recognizing the ways in which these narratives often stray from the literary expectations of Western readers. In this respect, Ramsey’s approach is preferable to that of Dundes, and it provides a model for the careful, aesthetically oriented analysis of the idiosyncratic features of individual folklore traditions.
More...
Artem Kozmin (March 15, 1976 – February 1, 2013) On February 1, 2013, at the age of 36, Artem Kozmin, young Russian folklorist and anthropologist, researcher of the Centre of Folklore Typology and Semiotics at the Russian State University for the Humanities, died in Ulan-Bator.
More...
The article concentrates on jokes that appeared immediately after the dismissal of Yury Luzhkov, Mayor of Moscow, in 2010. As soon as he was fired after eighteen years in the same position of mayor, the Internet was flooded with jokes about his dismissal as well as numerous discussions on internet forums and blogs. I collected the jokes as well as opinions from the discussions, categorised them by their themes, and tried to understand how these two phenomena (jokes and discussions on the Internet) correlate with each other, in order to understand whether the axiom that folklore is a mirror of society is true.
More...
Irina Sedakova gives an overview of the Eighth Annual Conference of the SIEF (International Society for Ethnology and Folklore) Working Group “The Ritual Year”, which took place in Plovdiv (Bulgaria) on June 26–29, 2012.
More...
The article focuses on chain posts that were collected in the years 2010–2012 and spread predominantly among girls of ten to twelve on Facebook (facebook.com) – a social network that has a membership of over 450,000 in Estonia. The source material comprising approximately 220 texts is similar by form and content to chain letters known from earlier tradition; yet, the web environment with its specific technical structure allows the texts to turn into a peculiar Facebook-like phenomenon. The author takes a closer interest in the changes in form adapted to chain letters as a genre in Facebook environment as well as thematic categories of these letters. The analysis of the epistolary cultural phenomenon focuses on the socio-folkloric nature of texts with its communicative and socio-cultural aspects. The main focus is on how socio-cultural environment influences changes in the genre, what kind of global and local impacts occur in Estonian-language chain posts and how this everyday genre reflects the realities of the era and the values intrinsic to this age group. The levels of personal and collective identity construction of chain posters as a special age group have been analysed against the identity motivation theory known from social psychology.
More...
This article studies the way the meaning of a tradition has changed over time. It is based on four text samples, all representing similar motives. The story reflects a former popular belief that if you hold on to a wild animal’s tail, the animal will jump clean out of its skin. The Man Nails the Tail of a Wolf to a Tree (ATU 1896) is a popular folk tale with an international distribution. Texts of this type have also been called Munchausen tales. The changed message of similar traditions reflects the change in our attitude towards nature, but also the growing distance of man from nature.
More...
The present article is elaborated on the grounds of the text of a paper which was delivered in 2001 at a conference dedicated to the hundredth anniversary of Halina Turska’s birth. The paper has not been published so far. Besides working on the general concept of volume VII of Belorussian People Professor Halina Turska, as a member of the editorial board, elaborated Dictionary of difficult Belorussian vocabulary with a commentary and linguistic annotations which appear in Michał Federowski’s texts. The dictionary consists of c.a. 550 entries. The author of the article presents the method of analyzing entries and deducting their meanings as well as correcting mistakes committed by copyists who had prepared fair copies. Scrupulosity of the analysis of the vocabulary included in the Dictionary of difficult Belorussian vocabulary… is acknowledged by providing vocabulary unrecorded in a dictionary of literary Belorussian. Turska’s dictionary is the first Belorussian-Polish dictionary based on folk poetry. Halina Turska was also the author of linguistic commentaries and annotations for volumes V and VI of songs collected by Michał Federowski. Her considerable and important contribution is extremely valuable for it was based on good knowledge of Belorussian folk rites.
More...
This paper will deal with two traditional characters of Irish folk tradition: the Parish Priest and the Witch. Both two characters feature in historical narratives including a range of legends, fabulates and memorates. In this article, I will look particularly closely at two discrete legend types which are categorised by Reider H Christiansen as; ML 3015 The Cardplayers and the Devil and ML 3055, The Witch that was Hurt while referring briefly to other aspects of tradition or, more specifically (after Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, MLSIT 3056, The Witch as Hare, an Irish adaption of the internationally known narrative.
More...
Some of us may recall the story about the Chinese man who asked the world-record sprinter how he would make use of the extra hundredth of a second he won in the race. Although we often talk about using our time wisely or foolishly wasting it, time is hard to reify; after all, in a way, time itself is non-existent – instead we have a process, movement, and change. We can only conceptualize time by comparing it with something else. Time is most easily described by measurement: years determine age; weeks and months make up the calendar year; as a stretch of time, the brevity of a nanosecond is just as inconceivable as the length of a geological era such as the Cambrian Period. The way we assess human achievements bears some relation to chronology.
More...
The majority of peasants in late nineteenth century Russia believed in the power of magic and its ability to affect their lives in both beneficial and harmful ways. An important aspect of this outlook was witchcraft, which can be defined as “the attribution of misfortune to occult human agency” (Thomas 1971: 436). Nearly any personal misfortune, including impotence, illness, death, crop failure, and the death of livestock, could be construed as an act of witchcraft, or “spoiling” (porcha). Peasants, however, could attempt to defend themselves against witchcraft by turning to magical practitioners who lived in and around their villages.
More...
This paper discusses the traditional songs, dances and musical instruments of Croats in western Herzegovina. It discusses the types of songs, occasions in which they are implemented and their content which clearly testifies their creators to the intelligence and ability to improvise. There is a mention of folk music instruments and how the people used plants and animals that they had in their surroundings for instrument production. Every dance in Hercegovina people called kolo, and the kolo was occasion for conversation, laughter, joy, and acquaintances. The authorities systematically suppress all national and Christian traditional, but there’s a lot of goods are preserved. Unfortunately, a lot of the songs fall into oblivion, but after the democratic changes and the dissolution of the former state it began the revival of this culture. The songs and dances are the memory of our ancestors and they are linguistic, ethnological, anthropological and theological traditional treasures of a nation today.
More...
The brothers Vladimir and Mitko Mitev from Vladaya Village are a duet, performing authentic twovoice songs from the Shopluk region. This circumstance throws new light upon the research of many specialists in folklore who have found up to this moment that in the Shopluk region the two-voice song is performed only by women. On the other hand, the Mitev Brothers are firm in their position that this type of singing has always existed and is the result of preserved family traditions. Mitko Mitev sings first voice and according to the local terms is called "okach", meaning "the one who calls". Vladimir Mitev is second voice and he is the so called "vlachach", or "helper". The repertoire of the Mitev Brothers is extremely rich and includes different Shops' customs, labor songs, table songs, horo songs and others. They add sometimes their own created songs, which have the style and the typical sounding of the Shops' song. It is characteristic that the Mitev Brothers sing with the same love and devotion for one person as for a. big audience, which makes the contact with them unique — as they themselves are.
More...
The article discusses the relation between music players and the dancers of the ring chain dance ("horo") in traditional culture through the eyes and experience of the folk musicians. The information collected in field interviews about the music playing for the "horo" outlines diverse means of communication, defined by the social normative requirements for the specific communicative situation on the part of the community as well as according to the fine mechanisms of "happening" of the communicative act during shared participation in the horo as a creative proceeding event. The article elaborates the social necessity to have a music player at the horo, the principles of mutual exchange of skills and values for the benefit both of the individual position of the music player of the horo and the dancers, who lay their conditions as a cultural commission. A next stage of extending the relationship is the correlation between the language of music and movement in the process of immediate communication in the horo. Comprising and structuring the instrumental horo music challenges the players and gives them freedom to sophisticate the language of the dance. On the other hand, the morphology of the horo melody depends on the mood of the dancers. The mutual commitment seems to be a result of accumulation of united dancing-and-musical energy. Within the minds of the participants in the dance event the instrumental music and the rhythmicand- movement activity are inseparable. The musician and the horo-dancers are two parties with equal participation in a wholesome process. The relation between them manifests in two types of behavior at different levels — in social perspective and as "musical" proceeding of the music-and-dancing act.
More...
The heritage of traditional dance has been object to diverse ways of teaching and practicing dancing skills. The article traces the traditional forms of dance training, which play a decisive role in mastering, transmission and developing of dance culture. Dance training in folk culture passes through different stages so that every one can take part in the horo during holidays — imitating the grown-up and almost daily dancing. Specific situations to teach and perfect dancing skills can be outlined: from the typically childish plays of the girls and boys to the transition to the youngsters' neighborhood horo and dancing out of village. Examples are given from the village Gorni Bogrov in the Sofia region, connected with the traditional training in dancing activities, valid to a great degree for the Bulgarian village from the beginning of the 20th century.
More...
The article elaborates some of the folk concepts about "life" of man after physical death and their parallels with the Chuvash people, Balkartsi and Bulgarians on the Balkans. This is a part of a research work on the ancient Bulgarian religious beliefs (along the traces from the Bulgarian state formations in North Caucasus and the Volga River), which cannot be unlocked without attending to folklore material. The present text is based on material both published by observers and collected by me, mainly among the Chuvash people, whom science accepts to be a substratum population from Volga Bulgaria, having preserved to a maximum degree their kinship with the language and the traditional culture of Bulgarians. It is known that within the intensively active zones of ethno-cultural contact (such as the Volga River, the Balkans, North Caucasus etc.) multiple components within the sphere of the folk tradition are manifested in similar contents and in similar ways. Today many of them "show" new context and conceptual level. The common worldview, on which many customs and rituals are founded, including the rites of transition and their symbolism, is a result of a century-old, synchronistic process of formation and functioning of the so called Indo-European ethno-cultural model. Many of its components are not a matter of specific origin and national belonging, but a specific way of manifestation of ritual behavior and concepts as a synthesis of cultures. The mainstay for their understanding is the conservative and ancient character of many inherited folk evidence as well as the social and political destiny of the population. The connection between burial and memorial rituals of the Chuvash people and the Bulgarians is found in concepts, actions and ritual practices, in material and space parameters and their semantics, in the typical anthropomorphic view of the permanent memorials and the recurrent forms of temporary memorials etc. The manifestation of those parallels at different levels in rituals and faith points to unity of ritual thinking and system and to the religious type, which keeps them in the memory of generations (under the form of continuity of ideas, ritual behaviors etc.)
More...