Category: Folkloor

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3. Vol 12 No 2 (2018) /
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/jef-2018-0012 Yuri Vella (1948–2013) was a well-known personality in Western Siberia’s indigenous world.Unlike most Western Siberia indigenous inhabitants, Yuri Vella was exceptionally skilled with words. He used words in everyday life in order to achieve his goals, among which the main one was to protect his kin and neighbours in the forest from the destructions induced by the oil industry. He was able to hold his own in discussion with the oil industry representatives and to have the last word with them.But how did Yuri Vella use words in private life? That is what months of fieldwork sharing the hut he lived in with his wife allowed me to ascertain. I shall concentrate on patterns of speaking – how? with whom? – and silence in everyday life, outside the attention of an audience. Or was my presence in the hut enough of an audience to change his patterns? These reflections are what this article is about.

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3. Vol 9 No 1 (2015) /
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This paper explores the material culture of ‘karakat’ (Russian karakatitsa) hybrid vehicles in the town of Kallaste, east Estonia. It focuses on the social factors that allow karakat culture to change. The region of study was part of the Soviet Union so the phenomenon of self-assembled vehicles implies socialist and communist considerations. Local people are still surrounded by the material legacy of that time. Technological assemblages from the past therefore continue to live in the present. It was popular in the USSR to maintain off-road vehicles, which were put together with the owner’s own hands. Such a bricolage technique has been preserved since the middle of the 20th century and is something that is used as a marker of local identity. The distribution of spare parts was problematic in former Soviet times and this has influenced the way men now make karakats. Current owners spend a lot of time servicing their vehicles. The issue of masculinity is highly relevant here because dealing with technology is seen as a masculine activity. Moreover, because it is increasingly open to tourists, karakat culture is becoming a tradable commodity.

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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.

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3. Vol 5 No 2 (2011) /
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The object of this paper is to examine the contemporary wedding meal in Latvia, focusing on one particular social group of well situated young couples who choose fine dining restaurants or rented venues for their wedding celebrations because they considered restaurant weddings more elaborate and modern. The desire to embrace a modern lifestyle is the way in which to obtain a new identity in a rapidly changing post-socialist world.The aim of present research is to reveal how different traditions intertwine in the wedding meal – new or borrowed, with ancient and national or Soviet traditions. While followers of a modern lifestyle are emphasising a challenge to traditions, it is nevertheless the wedding meal and symbolic practices connected with it that indicates a more or less intentional respect for tradition.I argue that the wedding ceremony reveals the shift from rites of passage to social distinction. This argument is developed by analysing how social and family relationships, value systems and the ethos as a whole have changed recently in Latvia. The use of the symbolic capacity of wedding food, denoting fertility and prosperity, provides the stability of the structure of the wedding feast, which also affects the structure of the marriage ceremony as a whole. 

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This paper argues that researchers doing ethnography can fail in their commitment to take what their informants say seriously. This often occurs, despite ethnographers’ best intentions, when informant statements depart radically from Western distinctions between what is real and what is imaginary. When informants talk about things like ghosts, witches and magic, there is a tendency to apply analytic strategies which translate these informant statements about the world so they conform to Western understandings about what is possible in the world and what is not. This article describes for example some commonly applied interpretive moves used in dealing with informant statements about other-than-human persons. The analytic models and categories we use in these cases are equivalent to often tacit and taken-for-granted Western strategies for dealing with ‘non-existent things’ and these make it impossible to take native statements at face value. We could turn the situation around in ethnographic analyses if we put under the microscope our own Western taken-for-granted assumptions and did so by taking definitions of reality, community, and the person radically different from our own seriously.

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In our paper, we have developed a list of modes for audience engagement on social media on the basis of the Facebook posts of selected museums in Latvia and Estonia. Within the frame of our study, the museums’ Facebook posts covering a timespan of one year have been analysed using the method of close reading and applying the principles of grounded theory. A multi-dimensional approach to various modes of engagement is proposed in order to involve different visitors in the activities of the museum, and considering different functions of the message. The results of the paper are applicable when considering diverse repertoires for modes of engagement with the museum’s audiences on social media, as well as when engaging with them on-site. The paper contributes to the trend of democratisation within the museum context by exploring the potential of museums when forging their relationships with their visitors.

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3. Vol 13 No 2 (2019) /
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This article provides an insight into ethnographic research during the Soviet occupation of Latvia, viewed in the context of national self-consciousness. Ethnographic research in Soviet Latvia was conducted by the ethnographic sector at the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic (LSSR). By successfully using phrases appropriate to the political situation as well as the right quotations from Soviet ideological works, it was possible to maintain ideas and attitudes developed in interwar independent Latvia, for example, regarding Latvian national costume – in the works of Mirdza Slava. In turn, Aina Alsupe managed to carry out substantial new studies of the history and development of weaving in Latvia, and collect materials on the development of applied art in Soviet Latvia. The studies conducted by both Alsupe and Slava allowed researchers to keep applied folk arts and the folk costume topical, and in doing so to help maintain Latvian cultural identity.

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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.

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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.

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Estonian ethnography as one of the Estonia-related disciplines was tied with Estonian nationalism from the very beginning. Defined as a science investigating mainly the material side of vanishing traditional peasant culture in the 1920s, it fitted rather well with the Soviet understanding of ethnography as a sub discipline of history. Thanks to the major cooperation projects initiated and coordinated by ethnographers from Moscow, Soviet Estonian ethnographers could continue studying Estonian traditional peasant culture. Their favourite research topics (folk costume, peasant architecture and traditional agriculture) supported Estonian national identity, but also suited the framework of Soviet ethnography. Studying contemporary (socialist) everyday life was unpopular among Estonian ethnographers because the results had to justify and support Soviet policy. They did so unwillingly, and avoided it completely if possible. Despite of some interruption during the Stalin era, ethnography managed to survive as a science of the nation in Soviet Estonia.

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This paper discusses the role of Oromo proverbs in conflict resolution and/or management as a peace-making verbal communication principle in the cultural context. The lesson from proverbs, which contain traditional morsels of wisdom, consists of cultural value and rhetorical effectiveness helping to enforce reality in the context in which they are used. Data for this paper is generated from primary sources. In data gathering, we used interview and focus group discussion. The analysis shows that proverbs have persuasive power to advise, guide and influence conflicting parties to settle their case peacefully. The proverbs tell their truths about conflict situations and devise a resolution and management approach through metaphorical and symbolic representations. Proverbs are also an integral part of Oromo culture, handing down and imparting norms, values, rules and the worldview of the community to guide people to live in customary ways.

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