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DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/jef-2019-0006 Missionary work by Pentecostal Finnish Roma (Kaale) started among the Roma in Estonia during the 1980s. These mission activities, carried out by both Finns and local Roma, intensified over the next two decades and continue today. The article looks into a specific case of how converted (Pentecostal and Baptist) and non-converted (Russian Orthodox, Lutheran, Catholic) Roma women in Estonia conceptualise the practice of fortune telling. For this purpose, the role of fortune telling as a traditional Roma skill and occupation is discussed as a part of the conceptualisation, together with the possible efficacy of fortune telling and its relation to beliefs in magic that also shape the women’s attitudes towards it. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the article argues that although fortune telling is considered satanic by born-again believers and is therefore abandoned, its condemnation is not straightforward in less controlled narration situations, thus posing an extra challenge for Roma women in the conversion process.

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@article{JEF, author = {Helena Ruotsala}, title = { Does Sense of Place Still Exist?}, journal = {Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics}, volume = {2}, number = {1}, year = {2011}, keywords = {place; locality; Lapland; landscape; tourism}, abstract = {In this article my aim is to discuss place, locality and their role and changed significance in the ethnological studies. I argue that although the meaning and role of place have been changed, place still is an important concept in ethnology. Researches are now paying more attention to the changed nature of the concept, e.g. for the multivocality of places. The anthropological literature on space and place forms my theoretical framework, with which I study some empiric cases from my familiar environment, from Finnish Lapland and from Kola Peninsula. ‘Place’, in my examples the sieidi of Taatsi, Lake Seidjavr, the Pallas fells or the tourist centre Levi, can have a unique reality for each inhabitant and visitor. While the meanings may be shared with others, the views of the place are often likely to be competing, and contested in practice. According to Margaret Rodman (2004: 207), researchers should empower place by returning control over meanings of place to the rightful producers, and empower their own analysis of place by attending to the multiplicity of local voices found about place.}, issn = {2228-0987}, pages = {43–54}, url = {/index.php/journal/article/view/36} }

@article{JEF, author = {Liina Paales}, title = { On the System of Place Name Signs in Estonian Sign Language}, journal = {Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics}, volume = {4}, number = {2}, year = {2011}, keywords = {Estonian Deaf community; Estonian Sign Language; signlore; name signs; Estonian place name signs}, abstract = {A place name sign is a linguistic-cultural marker that includes both memory and landscape. The author regards toponymic signs in Estonian Sign Language as representations of images held by the Estonian Deaf community: they reflect the geographical place, the period, the relationships of the Deaf community with hearing community, and the common and distinguishing features of the two cultures perceived by community’s members. Name signs represent an element of signlore, which includes various types of creative linguistic play. There are stories hidden behind the place name signs that reveal the etymological origin of place name signs and reflect the community’s memory. The purpose of this article is twofold. Firstly, it aims to introduce Estonian place name signs as Deaf signlore forms, analyse their structure and specify the main formation methods. Secondly, it interprets place-denoting signs in the light of understanding the foundations of Estonian Sign Language, Estonian Deaf education and education history, the traditions of local Deaf communities, and also of the cultural and local traditions of the dominant hearing communities. Both perspectives – linguistic and folkloristic – are represented in the current article.}, issn = {2228-0987}, pages = {31–54}, url = {https://www.jef.ee/index.php/journal/article/view/54} }

@article{JEF, author = {Risto Järv and Mairi Kaasik}, title = { Estonian Fairy Tales Up the Beanstalk into Heaven and Coal Porridge: Two Tales of Growing Up}, journal = {Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics}, volume = {12}, number = {1}, year = {2018}, keywords = {children’s tale; folktale; tale of magic; Seto}, abstract = {The article focuses on two Estonian fairy tale types that have been recorded among the Orthodox Seto minority in the south-eastern corner of Estonia. In the index of Estonian folktales they have been described under tales of magic (fairy tales) as tale types Ee 328C* and Ee 327H*. One of the tale types observed is a masculine folk tale (one with male protagonists), the other can be considered a feminine folk tale with female protagonists despite it seemingly having two main characters of different genders. In both tales the protagonists reach a hostile place after moving through liminality, and both tales can be interpreted as tales of growing up.}, issn = {2228-0987}, pages = {7–20}, doi = {10.2478/jef-2018-0002}, url = {https://www.jef.ee/index.php/journal/article/view/278} }

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/jef-2018-0002 The article focuses on two Estonian fairy tale types that have been recorded among the Orthodox Seto minority in the south-eastern corner of Estonia. In the index of Estonian folktales they have been described under tales of magic (fairy tales) as tale types Ee 328C* and Ee 327H*. One of the tale types observed is a masculine folk tale (one with male protagonists), the other can be considered a feminine folk tale with female protagonists despite it seemingly having two main characters of different genders. In both tales the protagonists reach a hostile place after moving through liminality, and both tales can be interpreted as tales of growing up.

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/jef-2019-0002 There are two types of joke that can be described as fairy tale jokes: those with punchlines that include fairy tale characters, and fairy tale parodies. The paper discusses fairy tale jokes that were sent to the jokes page of the major Estonian internet Web Portal Delfi by Internet users between 2000 and 2011, and jokes added by the editors of the portal between 2011 and 2018 (CFTJ). The joke corpus has had different addresses at different times, and was a live ‘folklore field’ for the first few years after creation.Of all the characters, the Goldfish appeared in the largest number of jokes (77 out of a total of 256 jokes), followed by Little Red Riding Hood (73). Other fairy tale characters feature in a dozen or fewer fairy tale jokes each.Several fairy tale jokes circulating on the Internet varied over the period observed. Fairy tale jokes generally get their impetus from the characters and from plots with unexpected outcomes. A seemingly innocent fairy tale character is often linked to a sexual theme: sexuality holds first place as the source of humour in fairy tale jokes, although this may be caused by the so-called genre code of jokes.

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/jef-2019-0001

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.

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/jef-2019-0003 This paper is an attempt to study combinations of tale types using a networks approach and calculating the centrality index of each type (degree, betweenness, eigenvector centrality). The network of tale types seems to take the form of a ‘small world’ with a few types serving as bridges between highly connected sets of tale types. The centrality of each type also seems to depend more on its age than on how widespread it is.

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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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DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/jef-2019-0004 The term ecotype was first introduced to the field of folkloristics by Carl Wilhelm von Sydow (1878–1952), who proposed the idea that folktales develop from base forms due to transformations triggered by specific environmental conditions before eventually stabilising within cultural districts. The general analogy was popular amongst folklorists who readily invoked the concept to deconstruct a wide range of genres including rhyming couplets, folk ballads, folktales, fairy-tales, personal narratives, legends and urban legends. It is unfortunate, however, that ecotypes have largely been ignored by scholars working in the fields of paremiology, especially when one considers not only the established inter-relationships between proverbial material and other folkoristic genres, but also the recent pioneering cross-cultural analyses of idiomatic expressions in European languages and beyond.This paper will provide a template for the analysis of folk expressions by examining the life history of an Irish ecotype, tied stones and loose dogs. It will show that folk expressions are a fertile area of research that can be deconstructed using literary and historical research based on the historic-geographic method. At the heart of this template, I argue, is the need to read texts within their contemporary cultural, historical and socio-economic frameworks to decode meanings according to instantiation, the motivations for their use, and the question of agency in folk groups. By collecting, examining and construing inter-relations between folkloristic texts across a range of cultural products – folklore collections, popular culture periodicals and political discourse – and by informed cultural contextualisation of its instantiations, we can re-construct the extensive cultural underpinnings that inform a range of everyday folk expressions.

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Authors retain the following rights:

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@article{JEF, author = {Emese Ilyefalvi}, title = { Witchcraft and Demonology – Topics, Methods and Trends in Witchcraft Research in Hungary, 2017}, journal = {Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics}, volume = {13}, number = {1}, year = {2019}, keywords = {}, abstract = {Gábor Klaniczay & Éva Pócs, eds. 2017. Witchcraft and Demonology in Hungary and Transylvania. Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN: 978-3-319-54755-8 978-3-319-54756-5.}, issn = {2228-0987}, pages = {155–161}, doi = {10.2478/jef-2019-0008}, url = {http://www.jef.ee/index.php/journal/article/view/326} }