Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics

The wedding is an integral part of family life. The ways in which it is organised can differ not only between representatives of different religious groups, but also between members of the same denomination. By applying cultural-historical, ethnographic and qualitative data processing method, the paper focuses on transformations in Old Believer wedding rites between the first half of the 20th century and the present. Analysis of interviews conducted in the south-eastern region of Latvia reveals that there have been several variations in Old Believer weddings (traditional, religious and civil) which interacted and overlapped, thus creating new hybrid forms. The transformations depended on urbanisation and economic processes, political conditions, and the development of the community in interaction with other ethnic and religious groups under conditions of globalisation.

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Tradition has been claimed to be a keyword in the folklore lexicon. Yet the word has not proved central to the thinking of many folklorists. More often, the term is simply used to mark territory. By characterizing certain songs, tales, dances, or customs as traditions, such expressions and behaviors are declared to be part of the discipline’s proper subject. But the term is usually theoretically empty. It is rarely defined, and it raises no critical questions. In this essay, tradition is defined, the critical questions evoked by this definition are specified, and some of the ways that folklorists might go about answering these questions are delineated.

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Preface to the Special Issue Anthropology of New Age Culture in Post-Soviet Russia

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Starting from 1960 traditional birth attendants were forbidden to deliver in Romania and pregnant women found themselves forced to give birth in hospitals. The highly respected village figure became a cultural phenomenon that made her more of a legend character. A village from Galaţi County experienced an uncanny event that activated the cultural information on midwives, as a continuation of the stories of her qualities. In hospitals, however, rituals are maintained under the intention of purifying nurses from unclean birth, while granny-midwife became a role, a character usually played by the mother of the woman in parturition. Customs evolve against the loss of this important social persona and we face an artificial scenario. We are now able to witness the last social effects of banning homebirth.

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Lajos Ámi (1886–1963) was one of the most talented Gipsy storytellers in Hungary whose repertoire includes more than 250 tales. In his stories, Ámi applied a lot of autobiographical elements (also in fairy tales) and so the question arises, what does the term autobiographical mean in the context of folk tales? The question is unfolded in relation to both the role of the storyteller him/herself and to storytellers operating as public intellectuals in their local communities. The distinction, and also the relationship between these roles, are significant and have implications to what is revealed autobiographically, on what grounds and in what way. This article outlines the analysis of autobiographical motifs and their roles in Ámi’s interpretation and presentation of himself in his storytelling.

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I discuss in this article some key narratives of women I interviewed in Ingria 1992–1993. The narratives of those women were about dramatic stages of their lives during the World War II. The main themes of the life stories were forced transfers and deportation suffered by the Ingrian Finns. I examine with some examples how various paralinguistic devices, such as speech tempo, emotional outbursts or silence, were tied in with the verbalisation of experiences. The three factors I discuss here are woven into the narratives of the women I interviewed. The first factor is “impassioned narrating”, which shows how a narrator reveals how she is reliving the event, she told about. The second factor is weeping and we may ask how the tears affect the narrator. The third factor is silence and reticence. In retrospect I have thought about the therapeutic effect of speaking, forgetting and remaining silent.

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This paper is a study of the traditional use of a special kind of wood in bow construction in Eurasia and North America. This special kind of wood, called compression wood and coming from coniferous trees, has unique qualities that makes it suitable for bow construction. Bows made using this special wood have been referred to as Finno-Ugric bows, Sámi bows, Two-Wood bows and Eurasia laminated bows. These bows appear to have developed from archaic forms of compression wood self bows that were made from a single piece of wood. Recently features similar to the Eurasian compression wood bows have been discovered in bows originating from Alaska, and the use of compression wood for bow manufacture has been known to some Canadian Inuit groups. This paper addresses the origin and possible diffusion pattern of this innovation in bow technology in Eurasia and suggests a timeframe and a possible source for the transfer of this knowledge to North America. This paper also discusses the role of the Asiatic composite bow in the development of bows in Eurasia.

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This article will analyse the many challenges that creating, storing and using digital heritage has brought to the memory institutions and their professionals. We look at the interrelationship between the potential users of the museum collections, the collections themselves and information and communication technologies as intermediaries to these relations. By analysing survey data, we look at the average Internet user in order to find out who could be the current and future users of the online collections. In addition that, we analyse interviews conducted with 12 members of different Estonian memory institutions in order to understand their perspective on online cultural heritage. Third empirical pillar of the article comes from the two focus group interviews to understand what are users percieved needs for the digital cultural heritage. The data will be analysed through three key functions of the memory institutions in order to understand how digitisation helps with preservation, opening access to the collections and inviting audiences to become active participants and increasing their involvement with cultural heritage.

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The article analyses the marking of song text patterns by means of musical devices in the performances of Estonian regilaul. The article examines which variants of musical rhythm and melodic contour are preferred by four singers in their performance of verses that have different functions within the song structure. In both the text and the musical rhythm, a greater number of syllables, and the attendant changes in musical rhythm, mark the verses that have an initiating function and which communicate entirely new information. In performing such verses, rather than the extension verses of parallelism groups or verse repetitions, in the short melodies with narrow pitch range, the singers prefer more “intense” variants of melody contours in which the higher notes of the scale are predominantly used. In two-line melodies, the singer’s patterning of the song text is largely determined by the musical logic, attempting to align the beginnings of the melodic strophes and verse groups.

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The Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics is the joint publication of the Estonian Literary Museum, the Estonian National Museum and the University of Tartu. Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics (JEF) is a multidisciplinary forum for scholars. Addressed to an international scholarly audience, JEF is open to contributions from researchers all over the world. JEF publishes articles in the research areas of ethnology, folkloristics, museology, cultural and social anthropology. It includes both studies focused on the empirical analysis of particular cases as well as those more theoretically oriented.

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The non-commercial use of the article will be governed by the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license as currently displayed on http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.  Under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license, the users (other than authors) 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. Authors retain the following rights: 1. copyright, and other proprietary rights relating to the article, such as patent rights, 2. the right to use the substance of the article in future own works, including lectures and books, 3. the right to reproduce the article for own purposes, provided the copies are not offered for sale, 4. the right to self-archive the article.