Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics

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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-2019-0004 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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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.

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This article considers Votian village feasts that evidently belong to the sphere of Christian folk religion. Village feasts are analysed as expressions of collective activity in pre-industrial rural society that enclosed certain religious, social and economic functions. This phenomenon of celebrating collectively certain days of church calendar, which included ritual activities in village chapels or other local sanctuaries, common meals and heavy drinking as well singing and dancing in the course of 3–4 days, was a part of common Russian Orthodox tradition shared by several ethnic groups throughout North-West Russia in the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. Despite the fact that this phenomenon was familiar to the wider community of Russian Orthodox believers, there were obviously certain local characteristics and variation typical to Votian tradition. However, Votain village feasts are studied in the article in the context of Russian Orthodoxy, without favouring assumed pre-Christian elements of the Finno-Ugric religions.

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When a research deals with researcher’s own family history, a significant challenge is presented: “What is the significance of the familiarity the researcher has for their object of research? What is the researcher’s role and how their own memories influence their work?” In this article I explore the possibilities my own family history offers by observing a fratricide that took place in my family, as well as the narrations it has created. My grandfather’s brother Veikko, while drunk, stabbed and killed his brother Väinö in Kauhajoki in 1974. In my family, the event has been handled in various ways, and due to its uncommonness it has also been the theme of many stories which unveil our family’s history and present lives as well as the relationships inside the family. I have chosen three interviewees as an object of closer inspection. With these interviews, I explore Väinö’s death and the attitudes towards it: “How has the killing been interpreted inside the family and what has it meant to the family” I also examine the reactions towards the death in the society and the South-Ostrobothnian culture. Because the examined manslaughter is also inside my family viewed as an unusual death, it is interesting to raise conversation on divergent deaths in general. I will thusly also observe the point of views presented in the interviews and examine them in correlation with the researches done on divergent death.

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/jef-2017-0011 Sport has become increasingly popular with recreational athletes over the last couple of decades. This has only gained minimal attention so far from scholars interested in the relations between recreational sports and everyday culture. With this paper, we seek to contribute to this field by scrutinising the sensory dimensions of recreational sport. Rather than probing into or highlighting isolated senses, we look at sensory dimensions understood as a combination of different, non-separable sensory experiences featured in recreational endurance sports. We are interested in how senses play a role for recreational endurance athletes in running, triathlon and cycling both in training and competition. We start by examining how cultural and social dimensions are inextricably linked to doing sports. Secondly, we show how different configurations of the senses and their communicative mediation are contingent on sport disciplines, specific settings, technology, development and change as sensory careers over time. Thirdly, we discuss the kinaesthetic dimensions of doing sports in relation to the senses and the role of atmospheres. We conclude by arguing that highlighting specific senses by athletes is a cultural practice that calls for a holistic analysis of senses in sport, and outline some methodological implications for research on the senses.

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This paper discusses the initial findings of on-going research with Mexican migrants and immigrants to Alaska. The paper outlines the historical and on-going connections between Alaska and Mexico and explores how and why those connections have been obscured or ignored. Powerful imaginaries are associated with places: Alaska, and ‘the north’ more generally, and Latin America, and Mexico specifically. My research shows how interesting things happen when they are brought together through movement. People from Acuitzio del Canje, Michoacán began travelling to Alaska (Anchorage, and elsewhere) to work in the 1950s, and movement between Mexico and Alaska has continued across generations since then. Today, many Acuitzences who live in Anchorage maintain a close relationship with friends and family members in Acuitzio, and travel back and forth regularly. However, this movement is obscured by ideological work that makes Alaska seem separate, isolated, wild, and a place where Mexicans are not imagined to be. Mexican movements into Alaska over time disrupt this vision, showing how Alaska is connected to multiple other geographies, and making the US-Mexico border a salient reference point in everyday life in Anchorage. When the South moves into the North, it can make us think about both ‘Alaska’ and ‘Mexico’ in different ways. When the US-Mexico border is relocated to Anchorage, if only for a moment, it can elicit a reaction of humour or surprise. Why is that? And what does this have to do with how people actually live in an interconnected place?

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/jef-2016-0010 The article is dedicated to the analysis of alcohol consumption practices within the Koryak ethno-cultural community. The aim of the article is to understand how the reasons for alcohol consumption are explained within the framework of the community. The analysis is based on the ideas of Durkheim’s social theory. The author of the article claims that the practice of consuming alcohol is essentially connected with the more archaic practice of mushroom consumption since both have a grounding in the Koryak perception of the world. The analysed models of behaviour stem from appropriate Koryak epistemology and ontology, which themselves are based on the notion of the ‘other world’ and communication with supernatural entities (spirits). The isomorphism of consuming alcohol and amanita intoxication reflects the inner core of this connection: the Koryak believe that an entity enters the human body and controls their actions. The transition from one type of intoxication to another is accompanied by drastic transformation of the materiality of the consumed product, which, in turn, leads towards social transformations. Such social changes are qualified as anomie by the author of the article. The visual materiality of the amanita mushroom dictated its symbolic anthropomorphism and creation of special rules for the treatment (amanita codex). The physical amorphousness of vodka does not imply the same intellectual work. The author claims that this factor was one of the reasons why the Koryak do not have social regulations about vodka consumption – which leads to mass alcoholism. It is possible that indigenous communities have difficulties in working out the required social regulations because of the complexities surrounding the non-utilitarian treatment of the unusual materiality of vodka.

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/jef-2016-0009 Although the notion of responsibility is often invoked by mass-media reports, activists and lay people when discussing alcoholism and suicides, anthropological discussions of this topic seem to deliberately avoid the notion. Based on the example of the Taz Nenets of western Sibera, this paper explores how cross-cultural differences in the notion of responsibility, if approached in a non-moralising way, can enrich our understanding of several aspects of the drinking and suicidal behaviours of native northerners. The Nenets seem to believe that both positive and negative events in their lives happen more due to chance or for highly localised reasons that they do not control rather than being caused by their own informed and wilful actions (external locus of control). Particularly, acts of suicide and binge drinking episodes just happen to people and, therefore, people cannot be held responsible for them. This attitude can be a compensatory mechanism for the flat attribution style observed among Nenets in previous studies. It should be taken into account in programs of suicide prevention and the treatment of alcoholism.

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In this article I try to analyse some aspects of heritage management in the Turya village of the Republic of Komi, Russia. I attempt to demonstrate how the local museum curator, Olga Shlopova, treats her fairy tales, museum exposition and collection of local heritage. My aim is to interpret some dialogue situations between local village people, scholars and officials which indicate how people manage differences in understanding of heritage administration. I presume that local people’s ideas and methods of dealing with cultural phenomena and institutions may obtain their own specific value in the course of culture processes. The question is, how flexible can official cultural specialists be in adapting and reflecting these, sometimes, slightly unconventional approaches. I suppose that an ethical approach helps a researcher to distance him or herself from possible prejudices or, at least, to be more conscious about stereotypes or pre-settled patterns of thinking. Unconditional recognition of an indigenous way of understanding local phenomena also helps a researcher to reach a more culture-specific model of interpretation.

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