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The 50th anniversary of the National Folklore Festival in Koprivshtitsa is a good occasion for sharing of memories and considerations about its creation, nature and way through the years. The festival offers a stable model for the preservation and representation of the folk heritage – a model which has its multiple reproductions for the purposes of the other local and regional initiatives. The festivals of folklore or the singing competitions preceding it, as well as the numerous folklore galas, reviews and meetings which sprang up after it demonstrate a remarkable development of forms ranging from representations of “authenticity” to folklorism and finally to new mixed and hybrid cultural forms influenced by the contemporary forms of network communication. Special attention is also paid to the different institutions, persons and facts related to the general social and political context which were of an utmost importance in the development of the National Festival.
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By investigating the origins of the festivals of folklore the author seeks to find an answer to this question which was only recently posed by the specialists in folklore studies. Basing himself on the theory of festivity and on the analysis of the condition of traditional culture in the Bulgarian villages during the 1950s, he comes to the conclusion that the singing competitions/festivals of folklore had come into life as a compensation for the Christianity based village fête, quickly disappearing under the strong pressure of atheism. Folklore itself was part of the rites in traditional culture, but in this particular situation it appeared as consecrated hyper-value changing the transcendental or its sacred substitute. During the festival folklore finds its exposure either as playing the life itself (by the participants who have managed to see the old tradition still functioning) or as an appreciation of artistic heritage (by the generation which learned them later); or as marking of action-concepts – an ideographic type of presentation that follows the structure of the ethnographic description, being at the same time practically synonymous with the idea of the living museum. The core in such cases is to represent the earliest possible layers of traditional heritage and, quite like in the case of the feast, aim at the closest possible following of the act of initial creation. There are two different structures of the festive within the festivals of folklore: from the one hand, the essential, grounding one connected with the scene, which creates the canonical nature of the feast; and, on the otherhand, the aspect of merriment, which belongs to the feast as an excess. The natural loss of most of the bearers of folklore and the drastic decrease of the village population brought forth the necessity of restoration and reconstruction as well. Thus the new conditions of individualization, de-traditionalization and marketing of experience triggered a difficult question: Had traditional heritage (for whose safeguarding the festival of folklore was creates) to be remembered and sanctified as it were or was it to be allowed to turn into a real event and a postmodern form of festal experience?
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The National Festival of Folklore in Koprivshtitsa has created many documental traces. The article lists systematically all the relevant data, which was preserved in the different branches of the Archives State Agency. Reviewing various types of documents, the author outlines as well the fundamental elements and changing principles of preparation and realization of the festival through the years and traces the basic elements and principles of organization. The article also notes some problems, connected to the representation of traditional folklore on the scene of the Festival, the differences in the ideological usage of the Koprivshtitsa Festival in the years of the socialist and post-socialist development of Bulgaria, etc.
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Memories about the Festival of Folklore
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The article represents the National Festival of Folklore in Koprivshtitsa in the context of a particular local community of the village of Bistritsa, Sofia Region. The work is based on an investigation done in January 2015 in the local chitalishte (community cultural centre) by way of semi-structured interview method. The general idea was to offer to the local people the possibility to express their own understandings and interpretations of folk heritage. The authors also pays detailed attention to the processes of transformation in the village tradition easily observable in the 1930s and in the 1940s when they substantially contributed to the processes of transformation of some elements of the local culture into heritage. The text outlines the processes in the local community, the ways by means of which the community presents its culture and understands the necessity of its contemporary safeguarding as a living practice. The influence of the local and national cultural institutions is duly marked, including the influence of the local chitalishte and the National Festival of Folklore in Koprivshtitsa. Special attention is also paid to the contribution of these institutions for the conceptualization of the different elements of the interviewees’ local culture as a resource for the construction of different nets of identities – cultural, local and national. The text also highlights the basic accents and interpretations in the narratives of the interviewees who discuss the National Festival – its importance as a place for the representation of the elements of their traditional village culture, its role for their preservation, the scenic nature of the Festival and the changes through the years, as well as their personal experiences during the Festival.
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It is a common understanding that once the fête of the city or village was a feast. Yet, the solving of the problem about the degree of festivity of the contemporary folklore festivals and their inscription in the contemporary festive calendar needs a careful approach, especially in relation to their organization in the context of the contemporary understanding of festivity. Of an utmost importance in this respect is the understanding that the festival is a form of reproduction of cultural heritage. This explains the structuring and (supposedly) the proper balancing of its elements: the theme of the festival (rites, singing, dances, music); status; local specifics; chronotope; competitions; jury. All that is a prerequisite for its “being” as a matter related to principles which have to be adequate to the nature of this heritage and the society’s aspirations towards a type of festivity adequate to the contemporary cultural situation.
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Memories about the Festival of Folklore
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Janika Oras and Taive Särg provide an overview of the 8th runo song conference held at the Estonian Literary Museum on November 26 and 27, 2014.
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An overview of the winter school held in Tartu on February 2–6, 2015, is given by Reet Hiiemäe and Kristin Kuutma.
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Iivi Zajedova recalls Estonians’ friendship days organised on board Ruby Princess in January 2015, with the participation of 580 Estonians from 15 countries.
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Piret Voolaid writes about the training seminar on the Estonian language for kindergarten teachers, which was organised by the Estonian Literary Museum on December 4 and 5, 2014.
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Piret Paal 2014. Halltõbi. Eesti muistendid. Mütoloogilised haigused. Monumenta Estoniae Antiquae II. Tartu: Eesti Kirjandusmuuseumi folkloristika osakond, Eesti Kirjandusmuuseumi teaduskirjastus. 453 pp. An overview by Kristel Kivari.
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As an ongoing tendency in Western cultures the body has gained more importance both in mundane and transcendent issues. Contrary to the Christian (and, in Estonian context, especially Lutheran) understandings of body and flesh as obstacles, “spiritual approach makes the body itself the site of the sacred: the contemporary person relates to transcendence and the divine on the basis of the experience of his/her own body” (Giordan 2009: 233). Physical dimension is also an important element for Estonian spiritual practitioners. For instance, popular practices like yoga or taijiquan, although in Western forms taken often as mere physical training, cultivate different body perception and lead to a spiritual experience through physical means. Participation in alternative medical and spiritual practices increases people’s bodily awareness, making the body more ‘present’. The practices of new spirituality often emphasise the role of the body and its sensations. For example, in some teachings, the body has something that can be seen as its own ‘consciousness’ and/or ‘language’, which mediates the ‘inner’ and ‘natural’ knowledge. Practitioners try to establish a dialogue with the body, to hear its voice and interpret its signs properly. The body is seen as an ‘intelligent’ partner, dissolving the rigid dualism of the mind as a conscious subject and the body as a material object. Based on fieldwork observations, in-depth interviews and conversations as well as an Internet-based questionnaire, the article observes the different roles that the body and body-communication take in the Estonian spiritual milieu. It is visible how spiritual practices lead to different body-awarenesses and conceptualisations of the body. New spirituality offers both physical means and specific meanings for novel embodied experiences and understandings of the role of the body.
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Ülo Tedre (12 February 1928 – 9 March 2015) The eulogy is written by Arvo Krikmann.
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The article gives an overview of the formation and origin of two food-related rumour cycles that have circulated in Estonia, various viewpoints and opinions about present-day consumption and trade, which have been highlighted in these rumours, discussions, comments in discussion forums and articles, as well as of people’s problems, fears, and stereotypic beliefs. The first commercial rumour about salad rinsing and other commercial frauds is of Estonian origin. Namely, in 2006 a rumour started to circulate in Estonian social networks and later on also in newspapers that local store chains were selling salads past the expiration date, with the spoiled dressing washed out and replaced with fresh. The second rumour, most probably of USA origin, was associated with international market and trade and began to spread in Estonia at the beginning of 2013, through a chain letter disseminated in social networking sites, warning people about the harmfulness of baby carrots.
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The article discusses Siberian Estonians’ opinions about the dishes unique to them and the changes that their food culture has undergone throughout time. The majority of Estonians living in Siberia today are descendants of the people who migrated there in the last decade of the 19th and in the early 20th centuries. Many Siberian Estonians continue to live in small Estonian village communities, but also in larger cities and district centres, and their families and social circles are increasingly multicultural. Settling in another country requires adaptation to a new natural environment, which inevitably brings about changes in the customary choice of food. Estonians have mainly settled in the region suitable for farming and animal husbandry. Today, Estonians in Siberia often refer to themselves as siberlased (Siberians), which gives evidence of their adaptation and integration in Siberia. Throughout time, the food culture of Siberian Estonians has undergone changes due to various factors: the transformation of forms of ownership, multicultural environment and mixed marriages, urbanisation, growth in health awareness, media influences, etc. The younger generation is more susceptible to changes: they exchange recipes, and acquire new ideas and cooking tips also from the media and literature. The closer the communication with the neighbours, the more the Estonians took over from their neighbours’ food culture, often also borrowing and Estonianising the names of the dishes. For Estonians in Siberia, including those who live in cities, own food often means that meals are prepared from self-grown produce. Self-grown food is perceived as healthy and opposed to imported goods and the produce grown in Chinese and Korean greenhouses that have been built in Siberia in the last few decades. The term own food also covers traditional Estonian dishes, thus helping to draw a line between ‘us’ and the ‘others’.
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The article focuses on sharing nightmare experience on Internet forums. The author discusses how people, who, as a rule, are not active carriers of a consistent nightmare lore, speak about this phenomenon, how and on the basis of which sources they define and interpret their experience, and which dynamics become manifest in solving ideological arguments. One of the objectives of the article is to find out if we could, in spite of the fact that nightmare forum users are rather random and with very different backgrounds, regard them as a lore community, who, in their interaction, verbalise and interpret an individual’s experience as consistent with the existing tradition. Also, the material obtained from the forums is compared with older nightmare texts, in order to highlight the features inherent in present-day material. It could be noted that even if many motifs known from older Estonian lore were repetitive in forum conversations, the specificity of forum conversations created a novel group dynamics (for instance, certain patterns in opposing other users). Unlike older texts, forum discussions present also parallel discourses of modern science and medicine; however, the main emphasis still lies on magical and supernatural nightmare experience.
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