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3. Vol 1 No 1-2 (2007) /
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Museums constitute an important cultural and social resource. The main objective of museums is making certain objects in the collection visible or, on the contrary, leaving them invisible. In contemporary society the institution serves many important roles, being a place for displaying historical and contemporary values, an institution for preserving and displaying personal and collective memory, cultural values, for collecting tangible and intangible values, an institution for creating identity and ethnic kudos, a work place, an educational environment, a framework for promoting ethnic handicraft and art, a place for integrating different folklore festivals, exhibitions, shows; they are connected to tourism patterns and museum business. The article reflects the changes in the development of museums in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, focusing on the main key words being multifunctional museum, the museum as an open classroom, presentation of tangible and intangible history, the relation and mergence of permanent and temporary exhibitions. The issues of digitalization and preservation and the role of the exhibition curator and the person represented on displays have increased in the museology of the past few decades. The museums’ tradition of self-replication and an increased interest in museological anthropology indicate that museums fulfil an important role in society.

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This paper will explore the relationship between humans and place mediated in first-person narratives. By focusing on episodes that reveal the change in the ordinary role of the person, we examine how they describe the place and how they perceive the environment in their changed role. Drawing on interviews with a man who has walked a pilgrimage/hiking trail as well as a written life story from the collections of the Estonian Cultural History Archives, we analyse the description of modern journeys and the journeys that took place in the vortex of events during World War II. We suggest that the descriptions of place-making under consideration are related not only to subjective experiences and storytelling skills, but also to more general contexts, such as historical-political, economic, or religious frames. Comparing various kinds of place-making description we attempt to find the universal and context-sensitive aspects of journey descriptions. Finally, based on studies of oral history and cultural borders on the one hand, and pilgrimage studies on the other, a methodological question is asked: how should one apply these research methods and results to place-making research? Combining these research methods has turned out to be fruitful in creating a dialogue between experiences that have been formed in different circumstances, and through this to understand better the factors determining one’s sense of place.

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Authors retain the following rights:

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This article deals with the concept of tradition and the interpretation of the Vedic past in Russian intentional communities. The movement is based on the book series The Ringing Cedars of Russia (Zveniaschie kedry Rossii) by Vladimir Megre published in the 1990s. The main heroine of these books is Anastasia, who shares with the author her knowledge of the ancient ancestors. Some readers take her advice and build a new kind of intentional community – ‘kin domain’ settlements (rodovyye pomestiya). The Anastasians tend to restore lost traditions, which are usually associated with Russia’s pre-Christian past. Traditional culture is understood as a conservative and utopian lifestyle that existed in the Vedic Age during the time of the Vedrus people. The commodification of local culture and tradition is one of the resources that ecovillagers try to use. The ‘traditional’ and ‘organic’ labels increase the price of many of their goods and services. One of the most popular products made by intentional communities is Ivan-chay (‘Ivan tea’), declared an indigenous and authentic beverage of the Russian people.

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Authors retain the following rights:

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Various schools of tale research manifested the relationship of tales of the sacred based on their ideological preconceptions: the relationship between tales and the sacred is refused or accepted. In this article tales are investigated not from the perspective of the possible sacral referent(s) but rather it looks at them as a kind of communicational subsystem that is part of human culture. The focus is on revealing the specific features of sacral communication in the communication system of tales. Sacral communication is a special form of communication in which the elements of the communication model are transformed. The goal of sacral communication is exactly this kind of identity creation. This may be oriented towards creating a personal or a communal self-identity. Among its characteristics we may find the special type of language forms in which the predominance of linguistic elements pushes the sense conveying possibilities more into the background than usual, and those linguistic forms that restructure consciousness become emphasized. In this communication the tale telling is transformed by a language use characteristic of sacral communication (rhythm, repetition and rhetorical forms). Various examples explain that traditional tale telling creates a complex effect related to the visual, auditory, and kinetic senses: a modification and transformation of the self-understanding and self-identity that connect the world of tale telling to sacral communication.

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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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Manasā is a very important goddess of the eastern part of India, particularly for the lower castes of Bengal, West Assam, some districts of Odisha, Jharkhand and Bihar. She is the main goddess for the majority of Rajbansis of North Bengal. The fluid border between deities, witches and human beings is an essential part of both her myth and cult. Being a tantric deity, Manasā has an extremely ambivalent character: according to the narratives and ritualistic practice she is at the same time both welcomed and unwanted. Her worship involves negotiation with dangerous divine power, which generates insecurity and uncertainty, but at the same time rewards adepts with wonderful abilities. This paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted by the author in rural places in the Jalpaiguri, Koch-Behar, Goalpara and Darrang districts of West Bengal and Assam, India, among Rajbansis, Bodo Kachari and Assamees. The details of Manasā worship, Behula dance and storytelling by Bengali Monośa gidal, and in a form of Assamese suknāni ojha-palli (with deodhani dance and trance) will reveal a peculiar local knowledge system, directly aimed at overcoming and transforming mundane life crises.

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Folk narratives are one of the mechanisms by which humans form their cultural reality; and space is an important part of this reality. In the majority of examples, contemporary legends do not explicitly refer to individual elements of the local space, however the messages that they convey are always placed in the local environment, i.e. the space that the legend-bearers directly perceive and evaluate. This placement of the folklore material is enabled by the process of the localisation of motifs. Legends that are treated as migratory due to their general geographical extensiveness can convey their message, and thus fulfil their role, only by the inclusion of an element occurring in actuality of the given space. On the level of content, in contemporary legends the local space is presented primarily as the backdrop of the events, and the fact that it is stated at all creates the impression of the apparent closeness of the events described, which enables an even stronger effect. Thus, the contemporary legends about foreigners in Velenje, which at their core are stories about the Other, are also characterised by their experiential backdrop.

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3. Vol 15 No 1 (2021) /
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This article presents the transcription, translation, and annotation of an original performance of hta, a traditional form of oral poetry in Sgaw, the language of the Pgaz K’Nyau (Karen) people of northern Thailand. This performance was recorded during ethnopoetic fieldwork carried out in two villages in the province of Chiang Rai. The hta is then analysed to understand the operations of ecopoetic symbolisation that bring particular nonhumans into the domain of human language. This analysis reveals that a metaphorical mode of symbolisation is extensively used throughout the hta to overcome human/nonhuman allotopies by means of implicit or explicit semic transformations. This seems to indicate that a naturalistic mode of identification underlies the whole poem, a conclusion that calls into question the essentialising and mythifying portrayal of the Pgaz K’Nyau as pre-modern and animistic indigenous stewards.

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Descriptions of Seto culture written at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries mentioned both exhausting Orthodox fasts and heavy drinking on church calendar holidays remarkably often. The incorporation of the Seto areas into the Republic of Estonia, established in 1918, soon revealed some conflict due to cultural differences. The religious rituals of the Seto came to be regarded witha fresh eye: traditional fasting was associated with the discourse of health care, food sacrifice with economy and religious feasts with criminal activities and alcoholism.Estonians measured the economic profit and loss of religious practices and their effects on health, but failed to understand that for the religious Seto, the observance of traditional ritual practices was the only possible conduct, and such practical considerations were irrelevant. Fasts and feasts were stigmatised in both popular and academic representations of Seto culture. Seto religious piety and feasts were regarded in the young Republic of Estonia as an attack on a common national identity, something that subverted the ideals of abstemious and secular nationalism.

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3. Vol 2 No 1 (2008) /
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The understanding of sickness and health depends on culture and age and is a part of our worldview. Sickness and health are thus in a central position in human life. Tuberculosis, for example, was formerly a common disease in Finland. Before the Second World War there did not exist medicines that cured people of tuberculosis. The first concord of antibiotics was received in 1947. Vaccinations against tuberculosis started on a mass scale in the following year. The article focuses on one person, who suffered from tuberculosis. He was a village cobbler called Juho Mäkäräinen (1892–1967). The study draws on a variety of sources including the villagers’ interviews, Juho Mäkäräinen’s autobiography and letters. All sources deal with the writers’, their relatives’ or neighbours’ health. Life in a village society was concentrated on health and its care. Very much attention was focused on hygienic education, as well. Because infectious diseases like tuberculosis were feared, most people tried to hide their disease in order not to be ostracised. Thus tuberculosis and its influence on the course of human life is a part of our common history of everyday life.

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In cultural and regional politics in the European Union, and in practice for instance in the Southwest-Finland Archipelago, local culture and cultural heritage are considered resources. Global boundlessness, heterogeneity and change are basic qualities of culture. However, in regional development, culture is seen and used as a number of different local cultures with their own essential cultural heritage. The culture of local everyday life is opposite to, and in tension with, the construct of cultures used in regional development. Accordingly, culture should primarily be safeguarded as a heterogenic, dynamic and interactive process of everyday life. This process is the most important resource of local culture. In addition, culture should be safeguarded as value-based cultural constructions, such as brands or common identities of certain cultures, with for instance cultural heritage as a part of it. In the latter case, a common, transparent definition of these brands, identities and cultural heritages with their different values, is needed.

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Authors retain the following rights:

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