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@article{JEF, author = {Konstantin Zamyatin}, title = { Official Status As a Tool of Language Revival? A Study of the Language Laws in Russia’s Finno-Ugric Republics}, journal = {Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics}, volume = {7}, number = {1}, year = {2013}, keywords = {official language; language revival; language laws; Finno-Ugric peoples; Russia}, abstract = {This study explores the legal and institutional position of Finno-Ugric languages according to the language laws of the national republics in post-Soviet Russia. The aim is to understand whether the republican authorities intended to use the official designation of state language as a policy device with which to ensure the revival of titular languages. The approach of the study is to test revivalist theories that establish a link between official status and language revival by comparing the number of institutionalised elements of official status in the republics. For the purpose of comparison, the study focuses on education and work environment among the domains within the public sphere of language use. The results demonstrate that the framing of official status in these sectors provided only some additional opportunities for the expansion of language use, while the extent of their institutionalisation directly correlated with the level of political representation of ethnic elites.}, issn = {2228-0987}, pages = {125–153}, url = {https://www.jef.ee/index.php/journal/article/view/139} }

@article{JEF, author = {James Kapaló}, title = { Folk Religion in Discourse and Practice}, journal = {Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics}, volume = {7}, number = {1}, year = {2013}, keywords = {folk religion; vernacular religion; Romania; Bourdieu; Riesebrodt}, abstract = {‘Folk religion’ is a contested category within the study of religions, with scholars increasingly advocating its abandonment. This paper encourages a new critical engagement with ‘folk religion’ as both a category of analysis and as a field of practice. I argue for a renewed attentiveness to the ideological dimensions of categories deployed by scholars and to the relationship they bear to the field of practice they seek to signify. Firstly, I explore the discursive nature of the construction of ‘folk religion’ as a category of analysis and how its semantic loading functions to ‘pick up’ distinctive practices from the religious field. Secondly, drawing on the work of Bourdieu and Riesebrodt, I characterise the ‘folk religious field of practice’ as relational, a shifting site of competing agencies. My argument is illustrated with empirical examples drawn from ethnographic research in Romania and Moldova.}, issn = {2228-0987}, pages = {3–18}, url = {https://www.jef.ee/index.php/journal/article/view/116} }

@article{JEF, author = {Kristel Kivari}, title = { Energy as the Mediator between Natural and Supernatural Realms}, journal = {Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics}, volume = {6}, number = {2}, year = {2013}, keywords = {energy; folk beliefs; place-lore; dowsing; healing}, abstract = {This article discusses contemporary vernacular theory about the elusive energies that emanate from the ground. These energies are reported to be the ultimate reason for different remarkable occurrences, both natural and supernatural. The hypothesis of special energies is expressed in local tourism, in ecological debates and healing practises, driving the curiosity of amateur science. In these expressions knowledge as a form of engagement with the supernatural plays an integrating role between the individual and the forces beyond. Dowsing reveals the ‘energetic’ nature of reality, which will be discussed using three examples. Tuhala Nõiakaev (the Witch’s Well) as a peculiar natural sight in the north of Estonia has drawn together many reports of energy columns that are linked to underground rivers and cultic stones. Another place under discussion is also famous for healing energy points: Kirna Manor works as a centre for spreading knowledge of the interdependence of physical health and the search for a spiritual path with the help of energies that the next example, the Society of Dowsers, attempts to discover using scientific methods. In these examples ‘energy’ designates the position of the individual, in which the participative relationship with the environment works as a form of folk epistemology within the limits of cultural understanding.}, issn = {2228-0987}, pages = {49–68}, url = {https://www.jef.ee/index.php/journal/article/view/98} }

@article{JEF, author = {Piret Koosa}, title = { Gendered Rural Spaces}, journal = {Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics}, volume = {7}, number = {1}, year = {2013}, keywords = {book review}, abstract = {Book review for the publication Gendered Rural Spaces. Studia Fennica. Ethnologica 12. Edited by Pia Olsson and Helena Ruotsala. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society 2009, 158 pages.}, issn = {2228-0987}, pages = {154–156}, url = {https://www.jef.ee/index.php/journal/article/view/135} }

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Donatas Brandišauskas. 2017. Leaving Footprints in the Taiga: Luck, Rituals, and Ambivalence among the Orochen-Evenki. New York, NY: Berghahn Books.

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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@article{JEF, author = {Aivar Jürgenson}, title = { The Departure of an Era in Estonian Ethnology. Commemorating Dr Ants Viires (December 23, 1918 – 18 March 18, 2015)}, journal = {Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics}, volume = {9}, number = {1}, year = {2015}, keywords = {Ants Viires; obituary}, abstract = {Obituary to Dr Ants Viires.}, issn = {2228-0987}, pages = {154–157}, url = {https://www.jef.ee/index.php/journal/article/view/198} }

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The paper describes the features of the Simēk ritual (compare semik in Russian) in different ethnic and religious (Orthodox Christian, ‘pagan’, Muslim) and ethnic and territorial groups of Chuvash. The author shows the key role of Simēk in the structure of rituals of the semik and Trinity block and reveals its links with funerary, commemorative and wedding rites. Simēk is one of the main rituals on the Chuvash ritual calendar. Traditionally, it is associated with commemoration customs of the people and is one of the three compulsory days of commemoration of family ancestors. It corresponds to semik in the Russian ritual calendar and is held either on Thursday (for unbaptised Chuvash) or on the Saturday before Trinity (for the majority of Orthodox Chuvash). Today Simēk is performed in the villages as a commemoration ritual with a visit to the cemetery, which involves both villagers and those family members who live in cities. After visiting the cemetery family members conduct visits, turning a commemoration ceremony into a festival. Thus, Simēk strengthens family links between villagers and city dwellers. With increasing levels of religiosity in society the importance of Simēk as a means of preserving and spreading ethnic traditions has also increased. In modern rituals there is some structural transformation of Simēk among the Orthodox community, but at the same time it is possible to trace the actualisation and expansion of the ritual together with the general trends in unification of the Chuvash ritual complex.

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 = {Ilze Boldāne-Zeļenkova}, title = { The Role of Ethnographers in the Invention of Socialist Traditions in the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic}, journal = {Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics}, volume = {13}, number = {2}, year = {2019}, keywords = {socialist traditions; ethnographers; soviet culture and lifestyle; tools of influencing society; anti-religious campaign}, abstract = {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.}, issn = {2228-0987}, pages = {33–47}, url = {https://jef.ee/index.php/journal/article/view/319} }

@article{JEF, author = {Benjamin Gatling}, title = { Sufis, Shrines, and the State in Tajikistan}, journal = {Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics}, volume = {13}, number = {2}, year = {2019}, keywords = {}, abstract = {}, issn = {2228-0987}, pages = {128–130}, url = {https://jef.ee/index.php/journal/article/view/341} }

@article{JEF, author = {Terje Toomistu}, title = { Between Abjection and World-Making: Spatial Dynamics in the Lives of Indonesian Waria}, journal = {Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics}, volume = {13}, number = {2}, year = {2019}, keywords = {waria; transgender; Indonesia; space; abjection; subjectivity}, abstract = {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.}, issn = {2228-0987}, pages = {90–107}, url = {https://jef.ee/index.php/journal/article/view/335} }