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@article{JEF, author = {Lili Di Puppo and Jesko Schmoller}, title = { Sacred Geographies and Identity Claims: The Revival of Sacred Sites in the Post-Soviet Space}, journal = {Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics}, volume = {13}, number = {2}, year = {2019}, keywords = {}, abstract = {}, issn = {2228-0987}, pages = {124–127}, url = {https://www.jef.ee/index.php/journal/article/view/340} }

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This paper argues that researchers doing ethnography can fail in their commitment to take what their informants say seriously. This often occurs, despite ethnographers’ best intentions, when informant statements depart radically from Western distinctions between what is real and what is imaginary. When informants talk about things like ghosts, witches and magic, there is a tendency to apply analytic strategies which translate these informant statements about the world so they conform to Western understandings about what is possible in the world and what is not. This article describes for example some commonly applied interpretive moves used in dealing with informant statements about other-than-human persons. The analytic models and categories we use in these cases are equivalent to often tacit and taken-for-granted Western strategies for dealing with ‘non-existent things’ and these make it impossible to take native statements at face value. We could turn the situation around in ethnographic analyses if we put under the microscope our own Western taken-for-granted assumptions and did so by taking definitions of reality, community, and the person radically different from our own seriously.

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In our paper, we have developed a list of modes for audience engagement on social media on the basis of the Facebook posts of selected museums in Latvia and Estonia. Within the frame of our study, the museums’ Facebook posts covering a timespan of one year have been analysed using the method of close reading and applying the principles of grounded theory. A multi-dimensional approach to various modes of engagement is proposed in order to involve different visitors in the activities of the museum, and considering different functions of the message. The results of the paper are applicable when considering diverse repertoires for modes of engagement with the museum’s audiences on social media, as well as when engaging with them on-site. The paper contributes to the trend of democratisation within the museum context by exploring the potential of museums when forging their relationships with their visitors.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license, the author(s) and users 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:

– copyright, and other proprietary rights relating to the article, such as patent rights,

– the right to use the substance of the article in future own works, including lectures and books,

– the right to reproduce the article for own purposes, provided the copies are not offered for sale,

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Under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license, the author(s) and users 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:

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This article provides an insight into ethnographic research during the Soviet occupation of Latvia, viewed in the context of national self-consciousness. Ethnographic research in Soviet Latvia was conducted by the ethnographic sector at the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic (LSSR). By successfully using phrases appropriate to the political situation as well as the right quotations from Soviet ideological works, it was possible to maintain ideas and attitudes developed in interwar independent Latvia, for example, regarding Latvian national costume – in the works of Mirdza Slava. In turn, Aina Alsupe managed to carry out substantial new studies of the history and development of weaving in Latvia, and collect materials on the development of applied art in Soviet Latvia. The studies conducted by both Alsupe and Slava allowed researchers to keep applied folk arts and the folk costume topical, and in doing so to help maintain Latvian cultural identity.

Under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license, the author(s) and users 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:

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The article seeks to illuminate the ideologically motivated circumstances of Latvian folklore studies during the period of unconditional Soviet totalitarianism. With the strengthening of the Soviet occupation regime in Latvia in the late 1940s, many interwar folklorists became victims of ideologically motivated disdain and subsequent career limitation. ‘Bourgeois’ scholarship and the methods applied in folklore studies during the interwar period were denounced and recognised as harmful to the new Soviet order. The central part of the article presents a case study of one individual folklorist of the time, Anna Bērzkalne (1891–1956). Both increasing criticism of Bērzkalne’s folklore research approach (the historical–geographical method) and her efforts to accommodate the requirements of the Soviet regime have been analysed.

Under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license, the author(s) and users 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:

– copyright, and other proprietary rights relating to the article, such as patent rights,

– the right to use the substance of the article in future own works, including lectures and books,

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The lives of Indonesian waria (transgender women) are substantially shaped by spatial dynamics. As a result of social and spatial exclusion, subsequent migration and economic needs, a lifestyle pattern around daily work in beauty salons and street nightlife tied to transactional sex has evolved in many parts of urban Indonesia. Drawing on ethnographic research in the Indonesian regions of Java and West Papua, I demonstrate that despite tremendous spatial abjection, salons and street nightlife are also productive, transformative and conjoining spatialities that foster waria subjectivity in affective relations with their intimate partners, the community, the phantasmic promise of the transnational mediascape and Indonesia as a nation. The places that waria occupy may spark moral prejudice and targeted violence, but simultaneously they are sites of agency at which waria experience self-affirmation and a sense of belonging while embodying through gendered performance the envisioned mobility at both national and transnational scales. The paper thus foregrounds how spaces and subjectivities are mutually constitutive, forging one another, as well as how certain spatialities hold potential to disrupt the sense of marginality.

Under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license, the author(s) and users 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:

– copyright, and other proprietary rights relating to the article, such as patent rights,

– the right to use the substance of the article in future own works, including lectures and books,

– the right to reproduce the article for own purposes, provided the copies are not offered for sale,

– the right to self-archive the article.

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3. Vol 13 No 2 (2019) /
4. Notes and Reviews

Under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license, the author(s) and users 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:

– copyright, and other proprietary rights relating to the article, such as patent rights,

– the right to use the substance of the article in future own works, including lectures and books,

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This study, based on archive document research and analysis of publications by Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic (LSSR) ethnographers, discusses the process of invention and implementation of Socialist traditions and the role of scientists in this. The introduction of Soviet traditions in Latvia did not begin immediately after the Second World War when the communist occupation regime was restored. The occupation regime in the framework of an anti-religious campaign turned to the transformation of traditions that affect individual’s private sphere and relate to church rituals – baptism, confirmation, weddings, funerals, Latvian cemetery festivities – in the second half of 1950s, along with the implementation of revolutionary and labour traditions. In order to achieve the goals set by the Communist Party, a new structure of institutions was formed and specialists from many fields were involved, including ethnographers from the Institute of History at the LSSR Academy of Sciences (hereinafter – LSSR AS). Ethnographers offered recommendations, as well as observed and analysed the process, discussing it in meetings of official commissions and sharing the conclusions in scientific publications, presentations, etc.

Under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license, the author(s) and users 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:

– copyright, and other proprietary rights relating to the article, such as patent rights,

– the right to use the substance of the article in future own works, including lectures and books,

– the right to reproduce the article for own purposes, provided the copies are not offered for sale,

– the right to self-archive the article.

@article{JEF, author = {Simon Young}, title = { ‘Her Room Was Her World’: Nellie Sloggett and North Cornish Folklore}, journal = {Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics}, volume = {11}, number = {2}, year = {2017}, keywords = {Cornish folklore; Cornwall; Enys Tregarthen; fairies; theosophy}, abstract = {Nellie Sloggett (1850–1923) was a Cornish novelist and, under the name Enys Tregarthen, a folklore writer. This article has four aims. First, to bring together all the biographical information about Sloggett. Second, to make the point that Sloggett’s writing is useful for folklorists: she has, since her death, been neglected even by south-western scholars. Third, to situate her work in the broader British and Irish folklore movement: her corpus offers some unique challenges. And, fourth, to provide a hand-list of her books and her other writings to facilitate further research. It is hoped, too, that some of the reflections on the geography of folklore collection will have a wider application.}, issn = {2228-0987}, pages = {101–136}, doi = {10.1515/jef-2017-0016}, url = {https://www.jef.ee/index.php/journal/article/view/233} }