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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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Asen Balikci was one of the founding fathers of modern visual anthropology. He was part of the generation that established the subdiscipline in the 1950 to 1970s period. Along with Jean Rouch, John Marshall, Robert Gardner, Timothy Asch and others he contributed to the formation of modern ethnographic film and its use of cinematographic means to study and represent culture. He was an anthropologist who used his expertise in visual anthropology and the cultural knowledge he gained in fieldwork to curate film projects aimed to achieve cross-cultural understanding. He chose the subject matter of the films and supervised cameramen, sound recordists and film editors to work according to the principles he had learnt from Margaret Mead.

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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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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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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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This contribution analyzes the interplay of ethnographic and poetic agendas, the negotiation of synergetic or conflicting objectives in the production and editing of a seminal representation of the Sámi, Muitalus sámiid birra. My main focus is on the collaborative effort of the publication process, to investigate the emergence and negotiation of representational authority, of cultural poetics, of social and cultural critique, in order to defy the preconception of a passive informant of a cultural experience. The Sámi narrator Johan Turi is discussed, instead, as an active agent in providing a voice to the Sámi people in the collaborative process of ethnography writing. My approach is interdisciplinary, being inspired by different inquiries in anthropology and cultural history, while adding a subjective interpretation in discerning the production of a multifaceted ethnographic representation, both by the cultural insider and the inquisitive outsider.

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/jef-2016-0003 This article concentrates on the material side of religious intimacy in Afro-Brazilian Umbanda through an ‘ontographic’ perspective as well as looking at materiality as evidence. It is based on an eleven-month fieldwork among devotees, clients and individual practitioners of Umbanda in Southeast Brazilian metropolises, especially in São Paulo. In people’s experiences of spiritual work (trabalho) and spiritual development (desenvolvimento) carried out with Exús – guardians, guides and protectors who have, after their death, returned in order to work for people’s wellbeing – ritual objects (such as bodies, clothes, beverages, herbs, cigarettes, candles, songs) are seen as constitutive in knowledge production and life transformation. The central claim in this article is that diverse material and immaterial objects through which Exús interact and materialise, are not primarily symbolic nor representative, but are re-configurative.

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Review of the publication A Companion to the Anthropology of the Body and Embodiment, edited by Frances E. Mascia-Lees. Blackwell Companions to Anthropology, Vol. 19. Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. xxv+529 pages.

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Four contexts are identified in Bengali folklore where the word mā (meaning ‘mother’) is used. The first involves a situation of basic and biologically prompted kinship. The second and the third describe situations within the extended family and the community, where the use of the same word contributes to ambiguity reduction and creation of sexual boundaries. The fourth uses the word for honoring goddesses who offer protection from evil outsiders, famines, poverty, ignorance, and from snakes and diseases. The fourth context includes referring to the landmass of Bengal (before 1947) as a mā. It is then suggested that the use of the word mā is multifunctional in Bengali culture. Further, the attribution of motherhood empowers human women somewhat in a highly patriarchal society, and the storylines developed give appearances of logic in popular form.  

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