Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics

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3. Vol 14 No 1 (2020) /
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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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3. Vol 6 No 2 (2012) /
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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 2 No 1 (2008) /
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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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3. Vol 10 No 1 (2016) /
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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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3. Vol 6 No 2 (2012) /
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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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3. Vol 9 No 1 (2015) /
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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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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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