Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/jef-2018-0014 Traditionally, the curator’s work has been in close connection with the main functions of the museum – preservation, research, and communication. The changes that have occurred at museums over the past few decades have also influenced the profession of curator. Specialisation has taken place inside the museum, and so the curator’s functions have also changed. This article focuses on the curator’s field of work at national museums in Finland and in the Baltic states. The analysis is mainly based on interviews conducted with curators and other museum professionals at the Estonian National Museum, the Estonian History Museum, the National History Museum of Latvia, the National Museum of Lithuania, and the National Museum of Finland. Emanating from the PRC model provided by the Reinwardt Academy as well as the global changes induced by the new museology, the focus is on the curator’s connection with museum collections. The analysis shows that the curator’s role is not similar in all the museums under discussion; there are regional differences in structure, curatorial duties, and priorities. While at some museums the curator is regarded as a collection keeper who can also do some research, at others they are rather researchers and have only infrequent contact with collections.

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This article relates to the studies of roads and engages with the experience of driving in Sakha (Yakutiia), Siberia. The article intends to contribute to the broad corpus of literature on mobility and argues that an alternative perspective on roads and road-users from a geographical area beyond the West might better inform and add another dimension to our notions of roads and our movement along them. The article examines the fluid nature of roads in Siberia and the social significance the roads carry by focussing on truck-drivers and their perception and engagement with the so-called winter roads through their sensory experiences. The article analyses narratives of the truckers who frame their experiences of the road with close reference to time and money and where notions of agency of the road become prominent.

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3. Vol 9 No 1 (2015) /
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Obituary to Dr Ants Viires.

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3. Vol 1 No 1-2 (2007) /
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The article focuses on the conflict between Karula National Park in South-Estonia and a local tourist entrepreneur, caused by restrictions due to the heritage protection of the national park. The conflict is regarded as a dialogue between different ways of interpretation of cultural heritage or heritage representations in which different ideological contexts, convictions and coping strategies are intertwined. The article describes the representational practices of both dialogue partners or the implementation of conceptual worlds through concrete behaviour and demonstrates how such actions can express certain social relations, as well as the use of the notion authenticity as an ideological argument in order to legitimize specific heritage representations or, on the contrary, prevent them.

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This article examines public letters as an expression of everyday household problems and practices. The sources used are those letters from among the archival materials of the Tartu Retail Trade Association and the Tallinn Markets Administration that have survived from the 1960s and 1980s. Using qualitative thematic analysis, I examine the points of criticism that have arisen in connection with retail trade and the (deficit) reality behind it, along with specific behavioural practices. In addition, my aim is to show the relations between individuals and the state, and their dynamics, by presenting criticism with the help of discourse analysis.

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3. Vol 5 No 2 (2011) /
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This article discusses recent developments in the home-based lifestyle business featuring the example of two cases: Tammuri farm restaurant near Otepää in South Estonia, and home restaurant MerMer in Kolga-Aabla in North Estonia. We study the restaurants from a Goffmanian performance perspective, focusing on the lifestyle entrepreneur’s viewpoint of creating a restaurant experience in their homes. Accordingly, the home and its surroundings are considered a setting in which food has an important role as a performance medium and multiple roles are enacted by a single entrepreneur as a performer. Freshness, quality and locality of food, homeliness and personalised service are used for creating a special home restaurant meal experience. The two cases also shed light on the dynamics of the concepts of home and lifestyle entrepreneurship in contemporary Estonia, challenging the understanding of restaurant cuisine and home cooking as oppositional practices of food preparation and consumption.

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Structuralism in folklore studies was in many ways a reaction against the previous scholarship and the historic-geographic method in particular. In this paper the relationship between the two is analysed through a comparison between Walter Anderson’s historic-geographic and Alan Dundes’ structuralist treatment of chain letters. Anderson published his article on types of Estonian chain letters in 1937, whereas Dundes dealt with chain letters repeatedly in the 1960–70s. Drawing on T. Kuhn’s concept of paradigm as a “way of seeing the world”, the article examines the concept of folklore and folklore studies proposed by either scholar in his discussion of chain letters and seeks to interpret his reasons for taking interest in such a phenomenon. It argues that rather than being incommensurable, the historic-geographic method and structuralism as represented by Anderson and Dundes share an understanding of folklore as a collection of classifiable single items characterised by simultaneous variation and stability.

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The protest of the North Ossetian nativist religious movement against discourses of dominant institutions in the public sphere involves as its necessary component ‘re-description’ of religion in general and ‘re-constructed’ religious systems in particular. Usually, this means revealing allegedly forgotten ancient meanings of indigenous customs, rituals and folklore texts through the use of various concepts taken from esotericism and/or practical psychology. The language for this re-description is provided by conceptual apparatus developed by New Age movements. Of particular interest in this respect is the language of ‘new science’, ‘alternative history’, ‘transpersonal psychology’, etc., employed as a tool for criticising the established system of Christian-centric understanding of what religion is and what its social functions are.

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The article presents a study of the use of family humour in public comedy and the mutual influence of family humour and public humour on comedians’ performances and everyday life.  The interrelations between these domains lie at the level of the content of humour, its format, its performance and the interaction between humour producers and their audience. Family and public humour often overlap and interweave in various ways, especially in the experience of those who engage in humour production both in public and in private spheres. The study is informed by interviews with UK-based comedians on their family humorous folklore and its interrelation with their public humour performances. The interconnection between public and family humour was identified on several levels: textual, communicative, personal and conceptual.

This multidimensional interplay indicates that family humour is contingent on the context, but at the same time is often conditioned by comedians’ public personae and cannot be fully separated from the humour they perform publicly. The study illustrates the vagueness of the dichotomy between public comic performances and family humour and points to multiple ways in which the boundaries between these domains can become blurry.

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