Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/jef-2017-0004 In this article, we outline the meanings modern Wixárika institutions, such as the school and the museum, may receive as parts of ritual landscape and how the community-based videos shot in the context of these institutions may increase our understanding of ritual landscapes in general. We discuss how ritual landscape can be researched using community-based documentary video art in a way that takes the ontological conceptions of the human and non-human relations of the community seriously. In this case, we understand community-based video art as artistic research in which the work is produced with the community for the community. The making of art, discussed in this article, is a bodily activity as it includes walking with a camera in the Wixárika ritual landscape, interviewing people for the camera, and documenting the work and rituals of the pupils, teachers, and the mara’akate (shaman-priests) planning the community-based museum.

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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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The article focuses on (re)constructing the local memorial landscape in a post-Soviet military base in Poland and the process of forging the local identity of its new inhabitants in the years 1993–2015. These processes, which occurred after the withdrawal of Russian Federation forces from the base and the establishment of a civilian town, find their reflection in the urban space of Borne Sulinowo and are written into a broader context of state policies and national debates about the past. The aim of the article is to present how the initiative in these processes has gradually shifted from the national level to the local, causing fragmentation and pluralisation of the collective memory. In this context certain significance can be attributed to the need to comply with EU standards, and to the progress of commercialisation of the past related to the development of tourism.

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This paper gives an overview of collective identity issues among the Udmurt people, stressing the importance of the historical background since 1552, up to and including current Udmurt ethnic activity. The first section of the paper considersthe foundations of the Udmurt collective identity (linguistic family and the significance of the territory). The second section focuses on occasions when Udmurt identity markers were at stake as a consequence of official policies or legal affairs during the Tsarist and Soviet periods. The third section presents the paradoxical role of the capital of Udmurtia, Izhevsk, the place where assimilation into Russian culture is more important than anywhere else, and which is also the centre of linguistic and cultural official planning where institutional structures are devoted to minority preservation. The last section will be dedicated to Udmurt contemporary ethnic activity in the context of globalisation.

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Ethnography of religious ceremonies by theBashkortostan Udmurt. A short introduction based on fieldwork.

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Power in our life can certainly be expressed in a variety of ways. One of them is power transmission through life cycle rituals. Soviet rule denied “religious traditions” and tried to form a new atheistic communist culture (and traditions). The new rituals were expected to replace older religious rites because communist morality and socialist internationalism was expected to overpower bourgeois nationalism. As indicated by scholars investigating into Soviet rituals and by my fieldwork data collected in 1999 in Northeast Lithuania and in 1998 in Southeast Latvia, the mission of creating communist traditions has not always been successful. I shall try to examine this process in my article by analysing the cases of “traditional” baptism as well as the phenomenon of the so-called “modern” name-giving ritual in Latvia and Lithuania.

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One of the most central findings of recent heritage research in cultural anthropology points to heritage as a social process and as the result of a metacultural operation. This article discusses the metacultural nature of heritage by focusing on the history of heritage both as a concrete social practice and as a powerful concept of cultural policy. For heuristic reasons, the article tends to put the conceptualisation of heritage as a metacultural product in question and proposes to translate concepts from ritual studies into heritage research.

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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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In the article the gendered motifs found in Anne Vabarna’s Seto epic Peko are analysed. Besides the narrative telling of the life of the male hero, the motives regarding eating, refusing to eat or offering food, and the aspect of the female body or its control deserve to be noticed. These scenes do not communicate the main plot, they are often related to minor characters of the epic and slow down the narrative, but at the same time they clearly carry artistic purpose and meaning. I consider these motifs, present in the liminal parts of the epic, to be the dominant symbols of the epic where the author’s feminine world is being exposed. Observing these motifs of Peko in the context of Seto religious worldview, the life of Anne Vabarna and the social position of Seto women, the symbols become eloquent and informative.

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Heritage is today actively implemented in policies globally, and yet the categorisation and instrumentalisation of the realm of cultural heritage entails rather contradictory aspects. In the discourse of culture, heritage is an abstraction, and what it signifies is subject to interpretation. This contribution gives a brief overview of the contemporary discussion of the epistemological and ontological premises of cultural heritage. It has been stated that heritage is a social construction, and a mode of cultural production that emanates from a metacultural relationship. The critical assessment and theorisation of heritage includes an enquiry into tangible and intangible heritagisation, knowledge production, heritage politics, and the question of ownership.

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