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Lajos Ámi (1886–1963) was one of the most talented Gipsy storytellers in Hungary whose repertoire includes more than 250 tales. In his stories, Ámi applied a lot of autobiographical elements (also in fairy tales) and so the question arises, what does the term autobiographical mean in the context of folk tales? The question is unfolded in relation to both the role of the storyteller him/herself and to storytellers operating as public intellectuals in their local communities. The distinction, and also the relationship between these roles, are significant and have implications to what is revealed autobiographically, on what grounds and in what way. This article outlines the analysis of autobiographical motifs and their roles in Ámi’s interpretation and presentation of himself in his storytelling.

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I discuss in this article some key narratives of women I interviewed in Ingria 1992–1993. The narratives of those women were about dramatic stages of their lives during the World War II. The main themes of the life stories were forced transfers and deportation suffered by the Ingrian Finns. I examine with some examples how various paralinguistic devices, such as speech tempo, emotional outbursts or silence, were tied in with the verbalisation of experiences. The three factors I discuss here are woven into the narratives of the women I interviewed. The first factor is “impassioned narrating”, which shows how a narrator reveals how she is reliving the event, she told about. The second factor is weeping and we may ask how the tears affect the narrator. The third factor is silence and reticence. In retrospect I have thought about the therapeutic effect of speaking, forgetting and remaining silent.

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This paper is a study of the traditional use of a special kind of wood in bow construction in Eurasia and North America. This special kind of wood, called compression wood and coming from coniferous trees, has unique qualities that makes it suitable for bow construction. Bows made using this special wood have been referred to as Finno-Ugric bows, Sámi bows, Two-Wood bows and Eurasia laminated bows. These bows appear to have developed from archaic forms of compression wood self bows that were made from a single piece of wood. Recently features similar to the Eurasian compression wood bows have been discovered in bows originating from Alaska, and the use of compression wood for bow manufacture has been known to some Canadian Inuit groups. This paper addresses the origin and possible diffusion pattern of this innovation in bow technology in Eurasia and suggests a timeframe and a possible source for the transfer of this knowledge to North America. This paper also discusses the role of the Asiatic composite bow in the development of bows in Eurasia.

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This article will analyse the many challenges that creating, storing and using digital heritage has brought to the memory institutions and their professionals. We look at the interrelationship between the potential users of the museum collections, the collections themselves and information and communication technologies as intermediaries to these relations. By analysing survey data, we look at the average Internet user in order to find out who could be the current and future users of the online collections. In addition that, we analyse interviews conducted with 12 members of different Estonian memory institutions in order to understand their perspective on online cultural heritage. Third empirical pillar of the article comes from the two focus group interviews to understand what are users percieved needs for the digital cultural heritage. The data will be analysed through three key functions of the memory institutions in order to understand how digitisation helps with preservation, opening access to the collections and inviting audiences to become active participants and increasing their involvement with cultural heritage.

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The article analyses the marking of song text patterns by means of musical devices in the performances of Estonian regilaul. The article examines which variants of musical rhythm and melodic contour are preferred by four singers in their performance of verses that have different functions within the song structure. In both the text and the musical rhythm, a greater number of syllables, and the attendant changes in musical rhythm, mark the verses that have an initiating function and which communicate entirely new information. In performing such verses, rather than the extension verses of parallelism groups or verse repetitions, in the short melodies with narrow pitch range, the singers prefer more “intense” variants of melody contours in which the higher notes of the scale are predominantly used. In two-line melodies, the singer’s patterning of the song text is largely determined by the musical logic, attempting to align the beginnings of the melodic strophes and verse groups.

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The Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics is the joint publication of the Estonian Literary Museum, the Estonian National Museum and the University of Tartu. Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics (JEF) is a multidisciplinary forum for scholars. Addressed to an international scholarly audience, JEF is open to contributions from researchers all over the world. JEF publishes articles in the research areas of ethnology, folkloristics, museology, cultural and social anthropology. It includes both studies focused on the empirical analysis of particular cases as well as those more theoretically oriented.

JEF is indexed by Sciendo (De Gruyter Open), Elsevier – SCOPUS, Anthropological Index Online, Central and Eastern European Online Library (C.E.E.O.L.), Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), ERIH PLUS, MLA Directory of Periodicals (EBSCO), International Scientific Indexing (ISI), MLA International Bibliography (EBSCO) and Open Folklore Project.

From March 31, 2016 the Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics has been published in partnership with Sciendo (De Gruyter Open), the world‘s second largest publisher of Open Access academic content, and part of the De Gruyter group which has over 260 years of publishing history. Sciendo closely cooperates with the majority of abstracting and indexing services, universities and libraries, providing a wide availability of journal‘s content and increasing its visibility. Journal‘s full-text articles, starting from issue 10, can be found on the Sciendo‘s platform at https://content.sciendo.com/view/journals/jef/jef-overview.xml.

JEF has neither article submission nor article processing charges.

Rejection Rate 50%

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The editorial board is participating in a growing community of Similarity Check System’s users in order to ensure that the content published is original and trustworthy. Similarity Check is a medium that allows for comprehensive manuscripts screening, aimed to eliminate plagiarism and provide a high standard and quality peer-review process.

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JEF is issued two times per year, both in print format and online. The journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. 

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Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics is a peer-reviewed journal. All submissions are reviewed initially by the editors. Submitted research articles that meet the scientific and journal’s editorial standards will be read by two anonymous referees. Based on the reviewers reports, the Editor-in-Chief can accept, reject, or request modifications to the manuscript.

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The non-commercial use of the article will be governed by the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license as currently displayed on http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.  Under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license, the users (other than authors) are free to share (copy, distribute and transmit the contribution) under the following conditions: 1. they must attribute the contribution in the manner specified by the author or licensor, 2. they may not use this contribution for commercial purposes, 3. they may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Authors retain the following rights: 1. copyright, and other proprietary rights relating to the article, such as patent rights, 2. the right to use the substance of the article in future own works, including lectures and books, 3. the right to reproduce the article for own purposes, provided the copies are not offered for sale, 4. the right to self-archive the article.

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Folklore has been linked to national identity formation. In this article, informed by Johann Gottfried Herder’s romantic nationalism and following Alan Dundes’s (1965) method of folklore studies, it is argued that Indonesia has historically followed this trail, and its recent movement of collecting and disseminating Indonesian folk narratives from across the archipelago is a culminating point in this endeavour. Although the move was claimed to support the national literacy and character building movement, the rigorous endeavour of the government in garnering folktales from all 34 provinces can also be read as part of the national political agenda of strengthening the national integrity, promoting unity in diversity and disseminating so-called national values. Examining further the contexts and procedures of how the narratives were collected and selected for publication, the study reveals an effort to inculcate national values targeted at students in formal education, but more particularly young children as the future harbingers of national values.

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This article analyses Finnish Roma experiences of interaction with Roma in Estonia, in the period after the historic fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 through to the present. The research data rely on semi-structured interviews and informal conversations, as well as indirect observations of Finnish Roma missionising activities. The results show that Roma identity was seen as a unifying factor and a source of a feeling of belonging, but not as the major factor driving mission. The driving force of the mission stems from the urge to evangelise, inherent in how Pentecostal teaching is lived and directed. This study contributes to the understanding of the interplay of ethnic identity and spirituality in Roma communities in the context of missionising, as well as the role of missionising for the missionaries themselves.

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Fink, Jella. 2020. Voices of Weavers: Textile Cultures, Craftsmanship, and Identity in Contemporary Myanmar. Munster; New York: Waxmann.

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4. Inspirational Insights

This article situates folklore studies in relation to the approach to social research known as world-systems analysis. In doing so, the work also serves as an evocation of world-systems analysis of potential usefulness for the practice of folklore research and for further thinking about the articulation of the field with others in the human or social sciences. Even if folklorists choose not to embrace a world-systems framework, it is valuable to position folklore studies within the matrix of social science disciplines that this perspective sees as important to the rise of the modern capitalist world-system. This positioning relates to interpretations of world history, but also to debates about the future status of the disciplines. While world-systems analysis is only one among several approaches to exploring the human experience in broad greater-than-local contexts, it offers a useful instance for a larger effort to work out more far-reaching modes of work in folkloristics.

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