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This article is the first study that researches the combination of three components: humour, food and fashion. It is based on an analysis of three unique fashion shows whose designer is the American Jeremy Scott; two under his brand, and the third as an art director for the Italian brand Moschino. The three shows connect these three components, while presenting the culmination of a food-humour theme in contemporary fashion, which had started with Moschino’s brand founder, Franco Moschino, in the nineties. Combining food and fashion is relevant in contemporary culture as it compares consumption of fast food to that of fast fashion. The link between laughter and food is ancient. A few days after birth, there are buds of a smile on a baby’s face, expressing its satisfaction with food. Smiles and even laughter often occur throughout a person’s life in the context of delicious food. The uniqueness of the above-mentioned fashion shows is not humour in itself, but rather its combination with food and fashion, the two seemingly different. The combination of these three components creates a cognitive challenge for the fashion spectators. We thus argue that this threesome constitutes an important, creative breakthrough in fashion. One of humour’s important functions is to challenge social, cultural and aesthetic norms. As thus it has been infiltrated into fashion shows since the 1980s, as a norm-breaker, but also as a marketing strategy. This article discusses the cultural function of food and humour in fashion shows, from a cultural semiotic methodology.
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Internet humour flourishes on social network sites, special humour-dedicated sites and on web pages focusing on edutainment or infotainment. Its increasing pervasiveness has to do with the positive functions that humour is nowadays believed to carry – its bonding, affiliative and generally beneficial qualities. Internet humour, like other forms of cultural communication in this medium, passes along from person to person, and may scale (quickly or gradually, depending on the comic potential and other, sometimes rather elusive characteristics) into a shared social phenomenon, giving an insight into the preferences and ideas of the people who actively create and use it. The present research is primarily carried by the question of how the carriers of Internet humour, that is, memes and virals, travel across borders, to a smaller or greater degree being modified and adapted to a particular language and culture in the process. The intertextuality emerging as a result of adapting humorous texts is a perfect example of the inner workings of contemporary globalising cultural communication. Having analysed a corpus of 100 top-rated memes and virals from humour-dedicated web sites popular among Estonian users, we discuss how humour creates intertextual references that rely partly on the cultural memory of that particular (i.e. Estonian-language) community, and partly on global (primarily English- and Russian-language) cultural influences, thus producing hybrid cultural texts. The more interpretations are accessible for the audience (cf. polysemy Shabtai-Boxman & Shifman 2014), the more popular the text becomes, whereas the range of interpretations depends on the openness of the cultural item to further modification.
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Between December 2011 and May 2012, the public television channel (RTVC) in the Canary Islands (Spain) aired, in prime time, the first locally produced situation comedy. Titled La Revoltosa (henceforth LR), it was the most ambitious production in the channel’s more than 14 years of existence. This series was said to display a humorous interpretation of Canarian society. Indeed, according to the executive producer, the characters reflected ordinary Canarian families. One of the attractions of the series was the inclusion of popular Canarian comedian Manolo Vieira as the main protagonist. In this paper, I briefly outline the strategies typically used by this important figure of Canarian humour before I discuss two episodes of LR to explore the resources they employ to provoke humour. Particularly, I study the role played by language, and analyse how characters and situations are portrayed, thus examining universal humour in contrast to regional or ethnic humour. This comparison between the humour strategies used by Manolo Vieira and the ones employed in LR will enable us to determine to what extent this sitcom favours the Canarian (ethnic) humour traditionally represented by Vieira or rather resorts to more general (universal) humour strategies and stereotypes.
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The aim of this paper is to compare the appreciation of humor that a sample of citizens in Spain has expressed about two different types of ethnic humor produced by two successful television programs from two autonomous communities in Spain: the Basque Country and Catalonia. Both regions are well-known in the Spanish society for their specific cultural and political features, which are seen as different from the rest of the country. To some extent, their particular character is fixed in the Spanish collective imaginary by some particular stereotypes, represented in stupidity and canniness jokes, following the model investigated by Christie Davies. In contrast to these jokes, the present study focuses on the ethnic humor circulated in these two regions, a kind of humor that is based on their specific identity and where it is possible to combine elements of self-deprecating humor and elements of aggressive humor towards Spain. More specifically, this work tries to test if the political background that these two regions represent in Spain –societies that dares the cohesion of the Spanish identity, even fighting for nationalist recognitions of political rights- could influence or not in the appreciation that the Spanish citizens as a whole have of this ethnic humor that Basques and Catalans produce.
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The article deals with the way history is experienced today. In Bulgaria it tends to move from the high rituals of the nation-state towards the realm of popular culture, being consumed in the form of entertaining fantasy plots, amateur science, touristic kitsch or historic reenactments (the latter are at the centre of the present text). Such consumerist attitude operates an invisible turn: it is not the past that ethically predetermines present actions, it is the contemporary consumer who chooses a past to experience.
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This paper explores the interactions between Thracians and Romans visible in historical reenactments in Bulgaria. Situated at the periphery of Classical Antiquity, Bulgarianhistoriography is strongly interested in the indigenous past. The idea of an alternative national Antiquity where autochthonous Thracians are imagined as equally important as Ancient Greeks and Romans has been promoted intensively through academic and cultural activities since the late 1960s. Beyond the official discourse, however, the Roman past appears to be more common among reenactors in Bulgaria than the Thracian one. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork during thematic festivals in several heritage sites, the article traces some of the contemporary representations of the Thraco–Roman relations. It examines the simultaneous heritagization of Classical and native Antiquity, and questions how modern identities are connected to living history and its ambivalent dependency on cosmopolitism and ethnonationalism.
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The paper is focused on historical reenactments of the so-called Bulgarian NationalRevival Period. The main approach is history-based, using the well-known periodization. It starts with the first documented historical reenactments, following with later history reconstructions, which can be observed nowadays. Historical reenactments are studied in close relation with their history narrative versions – official, unofficial, popular, banal, academic while being largely based on the official-unofficial dichotomy, putting it into question. The empirical material is drawn from the initial footsteps of the historical reenactments, which took place after the co-called Liberation (3.3.1878) to the First World War, following the interwar period, socialist nationalism, and the post-socialist decade sat the end. Numerous interviews, made by the “Historical reenactments as a cultural phenomenon” research project team are involved. A set of questions are raised: which episodes of Master narrative of the NationalRevival are subject of particular interest by reenactors; why they prefer them; howreenactors conceptualize processes of globalization of society and deconstructiveapproaches in social sciences; how they consider their own reenactments ideas – asofficial, or as unofficial, alternative ones; when they claim for alternativity, how thisnotion is regarded and what they see as official; why narrative for history, seen byreenactors as official, is perceived as unsatisfactory; how their claims unofficiality paradoxically leads to reinforcing the official Master narrative. One of the main points of the research is tracing the history the relation between popular nationalism and institutionalized one from the last decades of 19 c. to the first 20 years of 21 c.
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In recent years, so-called historical reenactments have become quite popular. Over time were formed groups of its “fans“ as well as critics. Thus, different research views on this phenomenon are a logical fact. By coincidence of life circumstances, I am in a position to allow a specific study of historical reenactments “from within“, because, in addition to being an ethnologist and museum curator, I am also an active historic reconstructor who participates in reenactments. In this study, I am looking through six historical reenactments in which I have directly participated, recreating three types of personalities – an ordinary unmarried young man from pre-industrial Bulgarian society, a clergyman from the Middle Ages and the Revival and a Bulgarian volunteer from the Russo-Turkish Liberation War(1877 – 1878). My target is, based on the “experience“, to look for the parameters of merging the present with the past in historical reenactments. What is the main reason for a modern person like me to look for a merger with a person from a bygone historical period and is it possible to do more than “playing“ in two events happening simultaneously – “once there“ and “here and now“. To answer this question, I use the method of personal history and critical self-reflection, analyzing the personal experience.
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Expansion of contemporary trade and information exchange relations does not seem to alter significantly the multi-layered requirements of inter-cultural communication. In a very important sense of this term, many individual decisions related to communication in a multi-cultural environment are inevitably narrowed to a single-context world. Only to some extent, this unavoidable limitation of communication on the verge of heterogeneous cultures may be overridden by omnipresent stereotypes and ad hoc generalizations. On a more advanced level of communication, it is the stereotypes that may foster the instances of miscommunication and lead to serious misunderstandings. In the paper, a short account on stereotypes in inter-cultural communication is going to be presented, with some examples of actual instances of miscommunication in the Japanese-Polish corporate environment. A proposal of a systematized approach towards the issues and intricacies of Japanese-Polish communication will follow.
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Tematem artykułu jest zbadanie wpływu jaki może wywierać wydawca na sposób i zakres odzwierciedlenia w tekście przekładu elementów trzeciej kultury. Omówione zostaną kolejno: kwestia obcości w przekładzie, zjawisko elementów trzeciej kultury oraz zagadnienie funkcjonowania patronatu w systemie literackim. Badanie będzie miało formę analizy translatologicznej. Za materiał badawczy posłuży opowiadanie „The Room in Le Dragon Volant” ze zbioru In a Glass Darkly, autorstwa XIX-wiecznego, irlandzkiego pisarza Sheridana Le Fanu oraz przekład utworu na język polski, „Pokój w gospodzie Le Dragon Volant”, autorki artykułu, pochodzący z tomu W ciemnym zwierciadle. Omówiony zostanie sposób przekładu wybranych wtrętów francuskojęzycznych, zwrotu adresatywnego i dwóch realogizmów oraz zalecenia redaktora dotyczące sposobu ich transpozycji w języku polskim, jak również wynik uzgodnień pomiędzy redaktorem i tłumaczką oraz wpływ ostatecznego rozwiązania na poziom obcości tekstu docelowego. Artykuł zakończy prezentacja wniosków odnośnie wpływu wydawnictwa na przekład elementów trzeciej kultury i roli jaką tłumacz odgrywa w procesie ich adekwatnego odzwierciedlenia w języku docelowym. // The subject of the article is a research into the influence exerted by the publisher on the way and scope of rendering third culture elements in the translated text. The concept of the foreign in translation, idea of third culture elements and the issue of patronage in the literary system will be discussed in turn. The research material is a story in English titled “The Room in Le Dragon Volant” from a collection In a Glass Darkly, written by the 19th century Irish writer, Sheridan Le Fanu and its translation into Polish by the author of the article, published under the title “Pokój w gospodzie Le Dragon Volant”, in a collection W ciemnym zwierciadle. The research will involve an analysis of translation of selected examples of third culture elements, a term of address and two proper nouns in French and the discussion of recommendations from the editor regarding their transposition in the Polish language. The result of negotiations between the editor and the translator and the consequences of the adopted solution for the achieved level of foreignness in the target text will be presented. Finally, conclusions regarding the influence exerted by the publisher on the way of translation of third culture elements and the role of translator in the process of their rendering in the target language will be formulated.
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The traditional folkloric substratum of different cultures and the mythological one are still very noticeable nowadays, and the modern person cannot disregard them, as they are intensely reinterpreted, reimagined, and promoted in a vast array of fantasy books, fantasy films, etc. The protagonists of fantasy culture are the imaginary, supernatural, magical, demonic beings, the totemic animals, the fantastic objects, etc. In relevant literature they are defined as mythemes. Moreover, another present-day function was assigned to folkloric, mythological elements (the mythemes) through their animated metamorphosis into the realm of video games, already being annotated, listed online. The present paper aims to emphasise the role of realia-mythemes in traditional and current culture on one hand, and on the other hand to present a series of means of conveying, mainly in Romanian, the fantasy (i.e., folkloric, mythological) realia-words with Russian cultural characteristics (cf. Ба́ба-Яга́ [Ro Baba-Iaga], [En BabaYaga/Jaga]; Богаты́рь [Ro bogatîri], [En bogatyr]; Васили́са Премудрая [Ro Vasilisa Premudraia], [En Vasilisa Premudraya]; Жар-пти́цa [Ro jar-ptița], [En zhar-ptitsa]; Русáлка [Ro rusalca], [En rusalka], etc.). The transfer of realia elements constitutes a complex process that has been drawing the attention of researchers for a long time, especially since there is no “sole” translation solution, and the “ideal” rendering of these units is performed by considering certain intra- and extralinguistic, intra- and extra-translational aspects.
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The analysis of sociocultural responses and behavioral strategies to address the consequences of local disasters is aimed at supporting the development of models of rational and socially adequate behavior to prevent and limit the effects of disasters,which could be useful in documents and policies of an official nature among local and central authorities and increase their effectiveness.
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Due to the rise of urbanization and globalization over the last few decades, people have become in a way less protected from natural, technological or biological disasters. Suchcalamities are predetermined by the historical and cultural background of the specific affected area and its inhabitants, which form the model and the degree of vulnerability –geographical location, infrastructure development and the level of productivity. The article studies the quality of life after the flood in Varna’s Asparuhovo district and its complex consequences, reflecting at the same time on the attitude of the locals towards various aspects of life, as well as the public health of the people in the affected area. This research presents the different viewpoints of locals, who ponder upon the changes in their lives six years after the flood of 2014. The acquired conclusions can serve both researchers and institutions for the evaluation of the strategies applied in the overcoming of the crisis, and to create new, if necessary,as well as the proper allocation of funds, socio-political reorganization and so forth.
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The periods of crisis that certain societies go through change the already established order. They provoke a rethinking of existence and the need to seek protection from above against what cannot be driven away by any means known to man. The late medieval post-Byzantine Balkan churches fully illustrate this. Some of them, especially those in the places directly affected by a certain epidemic, appear after such critical moments, and in their collection of images, the disease itself finds its own place, acquiring at the same time a set of anthropomorphic features. The protection of God or some of His saints is sought after when it comes to acting against the plague. The article tries in an interdisciplinary way (combining history, culturology and theory of art) to emphasize on the image of the plague in the Orthodox Christian image system. The motif of the Dance of Death (Danse Macabre), in which rulers,clergy and peasants are involved, was influenced by the “procession” of the infection throughout Europe and has been repeatedly discussed in the scientific literature.Within the Balkan Orthodox Christian folklore, the plague appears as a strange girl who is constantly scratching herself, or as an old crone - in most cases presented as a witch. People turn to St. Charalambos to be their intercessor before God and to relieve them from the trouble that befell them. The vernacular idea of St. Charalambos as a victor over the plague, which he captured and chained, is reflected in the church’s visual tradition.
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After 1944, both the Bulgarian society and economy began to undergo rapid transformations, one of which was the accelerated industrialization. With its development there was a steep increase in industrial mischances and serious accidents at work. This phenomenon became an essential element of the everyday life of the rapidly growing working class in Bulgaria during the 50s and 60s. Naturally, the increasing number of incidents also provoked certain public perceptions, which the ruling Communist Party was extremely concerned about, fearing that they would undermine the image of the regime that state propaganda was trying to implement.For this reason, the tried to monitor, control and direct in a certain direction the public perception of all misfortunes at the workplace. During different periods of its rule, the communist regime used various schemes, methods and means to influence the development of the population’s attitude to industrial incidents, accidents and catastrophes. Although this constant pressure from the authorities and the propaganda have played a significant role in the public point of view, they have not fully achieved the results desired by the party. Without finding an official public expression, society’s attitude to the industrial accidents for the most part did not coincide with that of the regime, which further reinforced the authorities’ fears of a possible wider disclosure of serious industrial catastrophes. This, in turn, further complicated the efforts to minimize such failures.
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On April 26, 1986, the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Soviet Ukraine occurred and it is known as one of the greatest disasters in the history of nuclear energy. Immediately after the accident, dozens of people lost their lives, hundreds developed the so-called radiation sickness, hundreds of thousands have been evacuated and displaced, and the surrounding flora and fauna were severely affected. The resulting cloud of radioactive particles passed through a number of countries in Northern, Eastern and Southern Europe and led to long-term negative consequences in the health of a significant part of the population. The following article introduces the primary results of a joint historical and ethnological study, conducted both in Russia and Bulgaria, on the memories of contemporaries of this technological disaster which had global consequences. The aim is to analyze how the population today in both countries is reflecting on the Chernobyl accident in terms of its awareness and the degree of the impact; its reaction and preparedness; the measures applied by the responsible institutions; short-termand long-term consequences. The methodology of the study at this stage includes a comparative analysis of the results of in-depth interviews among Russians and Bulgarians conducted in early 2021.
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Since the 1980s, the cosplay phenomenon has become a significant aspect of popular culture mainly in Japan, but also in other parts of Asia and in the Western world as well. Nowadays, cosplay events are the most common feature of various fan conventions and there are also dedicated conventions, such as local and international competitions. Websites, social networks, and other forms of social media centred on cosplay activities are just as popular places for the presentation of cosplayers work, and also for cosplay fan conventions. We encounter the definition of this phenomenon mainly in sociological studies, but in its definition from a marketing point of view, and also in term of art studies is less frequent in an academic environment. In the presented study, we look at the cosplayer as an artist with the possibility to become a brand. Cooperation with cosplayers is attractive for different categories of products, not only directly connected with popular culture, e.g., cooperation with bank institutions. On the other hand, it is really necessary to underline the connection with products and texts of popular culture. In the case of self-promotion of cosplayers, games, movies and other pop-culture festivals and events take really important place. This study aims to present a theoretical reflection of the cosplay phenomenon from the perspective of art marketing, as a potential basis for the further research in this area. The situation is illustrated by practical examples.
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