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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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3. Vol 8 No 1 (2014) /
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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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In this methodological article the question of authenticity of folklore material is discussed. The article deals mainly with the research history of Nenets folklore studies and examines critically two of its paradigms, namely the so-called Finno-Ugric paradigm and the Soviet studies. It is argued that in these paradigms there existed biases that prevented the students to study certain kind of folklore material. The biases were related to the language and the form of the material: due to these biases folklore performed not in Nenets and not in forms defined traditional were left outside collections and research. Furthermore, it is shown that Russian speech and narratives embedded in speech are part of Nenets everyday communication and thus also material worth studying and collecting. Instead of the criticised paradigms the Nenets discourse is examined within the notions of communication centered studies that have gained attention since the 1980s.

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3. Vol 1 No 1-2 (2007) /
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This article analyses the change of articulation of ethnic boundaries on the coastline and the fjord areas in Finnmark, Northern Norway in the post-World War II period. From being a ‘social stigma’ in the 1950s a Sámi identity is today something that can be expressed in certain cultural constructed spaces. This change can be described as a result of socio-economic changes in the region, the populations’ firmer integration in a Norwegian culture and the ethno-political struggle of some Sámi that corresponded with a general development in the view on indigenous people in the Western world. Even if great changes have occurred there are still some resemblances with ethnic processes 50 years ago. A spatial ordering of ethnic boundaries and pragmatic assumption of Norwegian culture being neutral norm are among those features perpetuated until today.

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In summer 2009 I carried out initial field research for my dissertation project in the Erzgebirge, a mountain range divided by the Czech-German border – which separates it into a Saxon and Bohemian side – and which is famous for handmade wood arts. Initially my research concerned the question if, and if so how, property claims on wood arts are negotiated in international, national, and local contexts. The ongoing preparation for Montanregion Erzgebirge (the Erzgebirge Mining Region) to be nominated as a UNESCO Cultural Landscape widened my interest. Using this example of World Heritage in the making I enquire who the initiators are, what possible resistance there is, how the selection processes for entry onto the preliminary list of artefacts unfolds, and how the selected elements are interpreted.

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4. Notes and Reviews

Book Review:
Aleksandar G. Marinov. 2019. Inward Looking: The Impact of Migration on Romanipe from the Romani Perspective. Romani Studies 2. Oxford; New York, NY: Berghahn Books.

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30 years after socialism many groups of Evenki reindeer herders failed to survive in the suboreal taiga of East Siberia. By making reference to two case studies from the northern part of the Zabaikal region and southern part of the Republic of Sakha, this article shows how the successful continuation of reindeer herding is based on the ability of charismatic leaders mobilising Evenki communities around reindeer herding and subsistence economies. This success also relies on connection to different agents of power in local administrations, large cities and governments and the use of all of the available opportunities that infrastructure or economic agents can offer.

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The Karelian Isthmus belonged to Finland until 1939. The period between the World War I and the World War II was a time of rapid contextual change and ended the difficulties caused by modernisation aggravated in the year 1918. Divine-like authorities were posed in a new light and the Civil War of 1918 set the whole nation before direct aggression and “Red” revolutionism. The ”Whites” won the war at the expense of the ”Reds”. Young nation (Finland gained independence in 1917) was compelled to define its relation to Reds and Whites – Whites were chosen. Also the Lutheran church was officially against Red anarchy and bolshevism. The situation around the reminiscence concerning the Red victims of the Civil War 1918 in Finland is complicated. The question of the problem of meaning and publicity plays a central role in the logic concerning the ritual performance and memory of the Civil War 1918 in the city of Vyborg. There is public and private silence and even prohibition to be connected with deaths, memory and places. It has continued until these days. At the same time the official history was put on a favourable form and there were clear limits for the official narratives. The victory of the “Whites” was interpreted as a victory for the independence of the Finnish nation. The history of the “Reds” became a national anomaly: forgotten and invisible. The atmosphere of concealing continued until the 1960s, when especially Finnish literature took pioneer steps towards the more open minded interpretation of history. On the other hand, the inheritance of concealing still exists – especially when it comes to oral history.

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