Folklore

One major strand of Pierre Bourdieu’s work involved revealing the interests, struggles, and structures of domination underlying apparently disinterested values and ideals. This article discusses the set of values and ideals surrounding folklore and reconstructs Bourdieu's analysis of the idea of “folk” or “popular” (“populaire”), showing that Bourdieu regarded the use of the term populaire as an instance of misrecognition or mystification. Bourdieu’s formulation implies, in other words, that the popular and the ideals attached to it – mere mystifications – are less real than the relations of domination that they conceal. This article, by contrast, asks what kind of critical analysis might enable social scientists to adequately account for the reality of ideals even while also understanding the complex role that ideals play in social struggles – struggles for domination as well as for solidarity and liberation. The guiding question of the article is thus at once methodological, ontological, and political: how can researchers criticize their objects of research while still respecting the legitimacy of these objects as things in the world, and without placing researchers' own analytic categories in a world apart from the categories that structure their objects of research?

Article in Slovak.

Full citation: Feinberg, Joseph Grim. “Má folklór právo existovať? K teórii a metodológii ľudového realizmu.” In Teória Pierra Bourdieua ako inšpirácia pre sociologický výskum, ed. Miroslav Tížik, Bratislava: Institute for Sociology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, 2013, pp. 120–136.

Full text of book volume: http://www.sociologia.sav.sk/cms/uploaded/1771_attach_Pierre_Bourdieu_2013_fulltext.pdf

In the municipality of Temixco, State of Morelos, there is a Nahuatl and a Spanish version of a tale of the Devil and the Jumil Hill. That folktale could be judged a fantastical or a wonder tale, but when we carefully examine its context and mode of production, we realize of that tlahtolli belongs to an oral tradition that makes a different sense to this tale-type, nearer to religious, social and realistic tale. It is a narrative made by collectivity whose aim is raising awareness of the threats that the community suffered and its responsibility for creating a cohesive, harmonious and sustainable place between the human beings and the noumenic-natural environment

This paper is a preliminary study into the nature of popular belief in the witch's ... Until recently, historians have tended to assume that the ... English and Scottish familiar beliefs has still not been examined in ... ISSN 0015-587X print; 1469-8315 online/00/020283-23; ...

Un misterioso rito, retaggio vivente di epoche remotissime, si rinnova ogni anno all’interno delle celebrazioni del carnevale di Castelnuovo a Volturno, in Molise. Un essere fantastico, Gl’ Cierv, furioso e selvatico Uomo Cervo, muore e rinasce ciclicamente, simbolo solare e della rigenerazione della natura, testimonianza viva di un antico mito cosmico-agrario. Seguendo le sue orme, un viaggio lunghissimo attraverso il tempo e lo spazio ci conduce in un reame magico nel quale sciamani in estasi, contadini e cacciatori sono i custodi dell’arcaico culto del dio cervo.

ENG: A mysterious ritual, a living legacy of ancient times, is renewed every year within the celebrations of the Castelnuovo a Volturno carnival, in Molise (Italy). A fantastic being, Gl ’Cierv, furious and wild Deer Man, dies and reborn cyclically, a solar symbol and the regeneration of nature, living testimony of an ancient cosmic-agrarian myth. Following in his footsteps, a very long journey through time and space leads us to a magical realm in which ecstatic shamans, farmers and hunters are the keepers of the archaic cult of the deer god.

Link per l'acquisto:
https://www.stamperiadelvalentino.it/product/luomo-cervo/

ISBN: 979-12-80721-08-2

Musical Culture and Art of the Arctic Peoples is  collection of scientific papers by Yu. Sheikin, O. Dobzhanskaya, Z. Ivanova-Unarova, S. Ode, T. Ignatieva, V. Dyakonova, L. Kardashevskaya. It consists 21 articles which are devoted to describing of musical instruments, different genres of musical folklore, ritual musical traditions and different aspects of musical culture of Arctic peoples (Evenks, Nganasans, Sakha, Yukaghirs and other Siberian peoples).
Papers are in English, French, German.
This is textbook for students of Arctic State Institute of Culture and Arts (Yakutsk).

Once viewed as an embarrassing superstition, the theatrical religious performances of Korean shamans—who communicate with the dead, divine the future, and become possessed—are going mainstream. Attitudes toward Korean shamanism are changing as shamanic traditions appear in staged rituals, museums, films, and television programs, as well as on the internet.

Contemporary Korean Shamanism explores this vernacular religion and practice, which includes sensory rituals using laden altars, ecstatic dance, and animal sacrifice, within South Korea's hypertechnologized society, where over 200,000 shamans are listed in professional organizations. Liora Sarfati reveals how representations of shamanism in national, commercialized, and screen-mediated settings have transformed opinions of these religious practitioners and their rituals.

Applying ethnography and folklore research, Contemporary Korean Shamanism maps this shift in perception about shamanism—from a sign of a backward, undeveloped Korea to a valuable, indigenous cultural asset.
https://iupress.org/9780253057174/contemporary-korean-shamanism/

Abstract
Sīrat Sayf ibn Dhī Yazan is a late-medieval Egyptian popular epic that tells the story of the foundation of Egypt and conquest of the world by its hero, the Yemeni king Sayf. It is one of a group of narratives known as the siyar shaʿbiyya, Arabic popular epics or romances. As a genre, their core concerns are issues of identity, the collective anxieties of the social unit, and that unit's struggle to maintain its integrity. Sīrat Sayf explores these issues in large part through the thematic use of gender, according to which the male, patriarchal forces of order are in tension with the female forces of chaos in an unstable and perpetually shifting balance that must be kept in equilibrium. In this context, open displays of strong emotions by its main protagonists can take on a particularly threatening aspect in the text. This article investigates the representation of anger in Sīrat Sayf, focusing first on the extent to which it can be described as gendered, and the significance of this for an understanding of both how male and female anger are conceptualised in the text and their respective roles in its textual dynamics. It then explores the part played by anger in an episode in which King Sayf offers the choice of conversion to Islam or death to a defeated enemy. In this small but key extract, the normally formulaic ‘conversion narrative’ becomes a highly emotionally charged encounter, during which characters are driven by anger to break with narrative conventions and behave in unexpected ways. This ‘emotional manipulation’ of literary conventions, which is achieved partly through the manipulation of gendered emotional codes, is one of the ways in which the narrative is able to give voice to the tensions surrounding issues of self and other, and communal identity, but also has implications for our understanding of the social codes depicted in the text.

Lucrarea de faţă îşi propune să prezinte câteva aspecte structurale, funcţionale şi de conţinut ale dinamicii colindelor dedicate tinerilor aflaţi la vârsta căsătoriei. Textele culese prin două metode – actualizarea variantelor la cererea cercetătorului, în afara contextului genetic şi, respectiv, observarea directă a tradiţiei colindatului – sunt analizate prin raportare la colecţii elaborate în Transilvania între anii 1888 şi 1977 şi la tipologia românească a colindelor de Crăciun (1981). Am urmărit prin acest tip de analiză pe de o parte o explicare a fenomenelor la care a fost supus în timp repertoriul ceremonial, iar pe de alta, reevaluarea lucrărilor de specialitate şi mai ales capacitatea lor de a surprinde dinamica acestuia prin mijloacele şi procedeele de culegere şi selecţie specifice acelor epoci.

En el año 1889 se comercializaron en EEUU los primeros cilindros de cera que contenían grabaciones musicales. Estas grabaciones podían escucharse con auriculares de tubo mediante el fonógrafo de Edison en salones fonográficos y otros espacios urbanos ubicados en las zonas de ocio de numerosas ciudades del país. Sin embargo, fue a partir de 1896 cuando estos reproductores musicales comenzaron a tener un uso doméstico. Aprovechando la presencia de artistas españoles en el continente americano, la National Phonograph Company y la Columbia Phonograph Company realizaron numerosas grabaciones que contienen música extraída de la zarzuela, el género chico,  la canción de salón y el folclore regional.
Con el título De cera y Goma Laca. La producción de música española en la industria fonográfica estadounidense (1896-1914), Kiko Mora, profesor de semiótica audiovisual de la Universidad de Alicante, elabora un estudio preliminar, con entronque cuantitativo e historiográfico, de la producción musical española de carácter comercial en la primera mitad de su etapa acústica en los Estados Unidos de América.
¿Cuál fue el volumen total de producción musical y cuáles fueron los años más relevantes? ¿En qué ciudades se grabaron las piezas musicales y cuáles fueron sus contextos de producción? ¿Quiénes fueron los artistas y los compositores españoles más prolíficos? ¿Qué géneros y piezas musicales fueron los predominantes? Este libro ofrece respuestas a estas preguntas y abre un nuevo itinerario para otros estudios relacionados con la presencia de la música española y su interacción con otras músicas en los inicios de la industria discográfica más más influyente del siglo XX.

The present study scrutinizes the outlawry and outlaws that appear in the Icelandic Family Sagas. It provides a thorough description about outlawry on the basis of extant law and saga texts as well as an analysis of referential connotations attached to it. The concept of outlawry was fundamental for the medieval Icelanders conceptions of their past. Indeed, understanding outlawry is essential for understanding many of the Family Sagas. Outlaws appear in saga texts in significant roles.

The Icelandic Family Sagas comprise a group of prose narratives that were written down in the 13th and 14th century Iceland. They are based on events and personae that belong to the 10th century Iceland. These narratives introduce many outlaws, out of which some 75 are named.

The Family Sagas are studied here as one corpus and special emphasis is given to those narrative features that repetitively appear in connection with outlawry and the outlaw characters. Therefore, the eventual objects of this study are the medieval Icelanders general conceptions of the historical outlawry as well as the variations of these conceptions throughout the period of saga writing. The medieval Icelanders general conceptions about the 10th 11th century, which are reflected in the Family Sagas, are here referred to as the Saga World. The Saga World is the historically based taleworld to which all of the Family Sagas refer.

The medieval law texts, which were derived from centuries old legislative traditions, reveal that outlawry meant banishing from the society and being denied all help, and that the outlawed person lost the protection of the law. In practice, outlawry was a death sentence.

However, outlaws occupy many differing roles in the saga narratives even in connection with recurrent narrative motifs. These roles reflect the social and spatial structures of the Saga World. The inspection of outlawry within these structures reveals that the definition of outlawry as it appears in the law texts is insufficient for understanding outlawry in the saga texts.

The social and spatial structures also provide a basis for the connotations of outlawry. In this study, these connotations are inspected primarily from the referential connections between outlawry in the Family Sagas and corresponding phenomena in other concurrent literature. This is done by studying the implementations of the basic elements of outlawry in the Family Sagas marginalization, banishing, rejection and solitariness within other literary genres and the taleworlds to which they refer. It is argued that these taleworlds reflect the same ideas that were associated with outlawry in the Family Sagas albeit in different forms and that these different forms reciprocally contributed to the conceptions of outlawry.

The variety of denotations and connotations of outlawry that is visible in the medieval Icelandic texts reflects the ambiguity of outlawry in the Family Sagas. This ambiguity may shed light to questions such as why an outlaw could be perceived as a hero in a literary genre that predominantly promoted law and order and why the same outlaw could be perceived as a villain on another occasion.

A filmografia concede acesso a mundos distantes, e, por vezes, imaginários e desconhecidos. O cinema de terror tem vindo a evoluir numa trajetória paralela à pop culture, traçando contos e mitos perdidos no curso da história, e que levantam temáticas interessantes, para as quais o público não está consciente. Midsommar é um desses filmes, onde o folclore medieval nórdico é explorado na sua essência mais crua, e são levantadas morais transponíveis para o mundo contemporâneo. O conhecimento que se detém sobre estas culturas encontra-se num núcleo demasiado reservado, quer seja ao nível dos connaisseurs, ou das fontes historiográficas, que, na maior parte dos casos, se reduz a sagas, cuja linearidade histórica é incerta, ou a mitos que remanescem em manuscritos tardios, e após séculos de tradição oral. O cinema, acaba por ser uma fonte, que para além de contemporânea, nos permite analisar estas culturas com outro olhar, e acessibilidade. Do século XVI em diante, iniciaram-se estudos e compilações sobre a «Idade das Trevas», fazendo transcrições, e interpretações de cultos provenientes de mundos sobre os quais pouco ou nada se sabia, principalmente, naquele período em específico.

Đổi mới giáo dục đã và đang là một trong những vận động chủ lực trong xã hội Việt Nam đương đại, được đưa vào Nghị quyết Trung ương và được toàn dân hưởng ứng. Đổi mới giáo dục đã sớm xúc tiến ở các nước Âu-Mĩ, thu hút hàng trăm nhà nghiên cứu chuyên nghiệp với nhiều công trình hữu ích về cả lí luận lẫn thực tiễn. Kinh nghiệm cho thấy, cải cách, đổi mới giáo dục học đường bắt đầu từ việc xây dựng nền tảng lí luận văn hóa học đường hợp lí, tiến bộ, làm kim chỉ Nam cho toàn bộ quá trình thiết kế, vận hành cuộc vận đổng đổi mới giáo dục ấy.
Bài viết này vận dụng phương pháp phân tích - tổng hợp trên cơ sở so sánh - đối chiếu thành quả nghiên cứu, xây dựng văn hóa học đường Âu-Mĩ làm nền tảng cho việc xây dựng nội hàm khái niệm văn hóa học đường ở Việt Nam hiện nay. Nghiên cứu cho thấy, văn hóa học đường chia sẻ phần lớn nét tương đồng giữa các nền văn hóa, vốn là những đặc điểm do tính chất ngành nghề (ngành giáo dục) tạo nên; song cái quan trọng cốt lõi lại là yếu tố nội sinh của từng nền văn hóa: đó là quan điểm, mục tiêu, chủ trương, chính sách, cung cách quản lí và tính chất của nền giáo dục truyền thống.
Educational innovation has been and is one of the key advocates in contemporary Vietnamese society, being included in the Central Party Resolution and positively responded by the people. Educational innovation was early taken place and has been continuously promoted in European and American countries, attracting hundreds of professional researchers who have published many useful works in both theory and practice. The experience of these countries shows that, education reform and renovation strongly require the building of a reasonable, progressive and theoretical basis for school culture, making it a guideline for the whole process of designing and operating that campaign of educational innovation.
This paper applies the method of document analysis under the comparative perspective to investigate the theoretical and practical experience of the US and European countries in building school culture for the sake of renovating school culture in Vietnam today. The study shows that school culture shares most of the similarities among cultures, which are characteristics created by the nature of the field of education itself; however, the intrinsic factors such as the viewpoint, goals, guidelines, policies, management practices and the nature of traditional education in each country, etc. play an even more important role in the whole process

Published in La voz y la noticia: palabras y mensajes en la tradición hispánica. Urueña: Fundación Joaquín Díaz y Junta de Castilla y León, 2007: 17-25.

Myths have always been present in Western culture, they have been transmited either as part of learned culture in artisctic or scientific allegories, as history, assimilated to christian legends or as elements of folk tales. Mythic thought has been revalued in the last two centuries thanks to the development of academic disciplines such as Psychology, Anthorpology, Folkloristics or Comparative Religion. After Postmodernism, all forms of human thought have gone through a process of demythicfication which has blurred the frotiers between mythic and other kinds of thought. As a consequence of this myths is being studied according to nrew parameters, archetypes, symbolic systems, looking for new formulas and metaphors that help explain the changes of belief programs in the process of cultural evolution.

Key words: myths, transmission, mentifacts, symbols, western culture, interpretation, archetypes, belief programs

Babası gibi kendisi de Çuvaş bir papaz olan V. İ. Lebedev, Çuvaş dili ve kültürü üzerine makaleler yayımlamıştır. Rusya'da 1852 yılında, Jurnal Ministerstva Vnutrennih Del'de [İçişleri Bakanlığı Dergisi] yayımladığı "Çuvaş Dili" adlı makalesinde, kendi ifadesiyle "genç" Çuvaş edebiyatının ilk örneklerinden sayılabilecek bir şiir bulunmaktadır. Çuvaş kimliği, yaşam biçimi ve şartlarını konu edinen şiir Çuvaşça kaleme alınmıştır. Lebedev makalesinde Rusça çevirisine de yer verdiği şiirin "Ruslaşmış bir kâtip"e ait olduğunu yazar. Ancak yapılan çalışmalarla şiirin Lebedev'e ait olduğu anlaşılmıştır. Lebedev, şiirin kendisine ait olduğunu gizlediği gibi Rusça çeviride de şiirdeki temel fikri ortaya koyan bütün mısra ve ifadeleri sansürlemiştir. Bu yazıda, Çuvaş dili ve edebiyatı açısından büyük bir öneme sahip olan bu şiirin metin tespiti yapılarak bu şiir örnekleminde bir yazarın kendi eserine nasıl otosansür uyguladığı ortaya konulmuştur. Böylece, Rus hâkimiyeti altındaki bölgelerde yazarların hem eserini hem de kendini koruma yöntemi olarak otosansüre başvurabildikleri ve bu durumun Türkoloji araştırmalarında göz önünde bulundurulmasının gerekliliği vurgulanmıştır.

"Guavas for Dummies, American Jíbaras, & Postnational Autonomy: When I Was Puerto Rican in the Hemispheric Turn" (2019) re-engages this text after I taught it in Puerto Rico four years. In this 2009 essay, Santiago’s memoir is said to bridge U.S. and Caribbean lit. WIWPR begins with a remembered Puerto Rico, and ends in the author’s adulthood in the USA. Studying Santiago’s text within a trajectory of immigrant narratives familiarizes the text to readers who are often processing their own entries into the US / its cultural orbit. This essay examines Santiago’s representation of jibaros, a subculture whose place in in Puerto Rico parallels the conflicted relationship many Jamaicans have with Rastafarians. Also, the theme of “Translating and Resisting Imperialism” is developed through a close reading of the chapter “The American Invasion of MacÚn.” Santiago’s treatment of gender roles in her family is also explored.

Alevi inanç sisteminde dem, dolu gibi isimlerle adlandırılan ve Alevi cemlerinde önemli bir yere olan içki kültü üzerine oluşturulan ritüeller ve inanç pratikleri mevcuttur. Alevi inanç sistemindeki içki kültüne bazı yayınlarda değinilmiştir. Fakat bu yayınlar doğrudan konuya odaklanmadıkları için geneli ortaya koymaktan uzak bir tablo çizmektedir. Mevcut yayınların temel eksikliklerinden biri de görsel unsurlarla desteklenememiş olmasıdır. Bu çalışmada Anadolu ve Balkan coğrafyasında yerleşik Alevi topluluklarında yaşamaya devam eden dem merkezli ritüellerden tespit edilenler farklılıkları ile birlikte analiz edilerek sunulacaktır. Dem kültü merkezli icra edilen ritüellerden biri olan “Dem Geldi Semahları” makalede farklı yörelerden örneklerle görsel unsurlarla desteklenerek analiz edilecektir. Dem Geldi Semahları farklı yerleşim birimlerinde cem ritüeli içerisinde dem hizmeti ile birlikte icra edilen semah ritüellerinden birisidir. Çalışmada Türkiye’nin muhtelif yerleşim birimlerinde yaptığımız alan araştırmalarında kayıt altına aldığımız Dem Geldi Semahları, semahların icra şekilleri, ritüel içerisindeki yeri, icra edilen eserler ve notaları ile mukayeseli bir şekilde verilecektir. Analizlerde, sadece semah merkezli bir bakış açısı ile odaklanılmadan inanç zümresinin içki kültüne bakışı da gerekli yerlerde içki ile ilgili diğer inanç pratiklerine atıflar yapılarak ortaya konulmaya çalışılacaktır.

In the Alevi belief system, there are rituals and belief activities known as dem or dolu formed around the cult of drink which has an important place in the Alevi cems. Some publications have mentioned this cult within the Alevi belief system. However, those publications are far from revealing the overall of this subject because they aren’t focusing directly on the subject. Also, one of the basic lacks of available publications is that they don’t include visual elements. In this paper, determinations from dem based rituals that are continuing to live in the Alevi communities in Anatolia and Balkans, together with differences between them will be analyzed and presented. It will be made an analysis of “Dem Geldi Semahs”, one of the rituals that are dem based practiced, supported with examples from different regions and visual elements. “Dem Geldi Semahs” is one of semah rituals which are performed together with dem service within cem ritual on different locations. In the study, “Dem Geldi Semahs” which we recorded during our fieldwork on the various locations in Turkey, and the forms of semahs performance, its place in the ritual, musical works with notes will be presented comparatively. In the analyses, without just focusing on the semah basic aspect, it will be also presented the view of the belief community on the cult of drink by referring, when it is necessary, to other belief activities related to drink.

Este libro busca compartir algunas historias en torno a la complejidad e importancia de un campo de actividad creativa que en el Perú y otros lugares de America Latina se denominó «folclor» hacia principios del siglo XX. Mediante un estudio detallado del arte llamado folclorico —que incluye la música, la danza y el teatro, principalmente— trataré de mostrar el papel protagónico de sus expresiones en la formacion de la identidad regional, las identidades etnico-raciales (concepto que explico más adelante) y las propuestas de identidad nacional y continental que los cuzquenos materializaron durante la primea mitad del siglo XX.

Since the 1990s, artists and art writers around the world have increasingly undermined the essentialism associated with notions of "critical practice." We can see this manifesting in the renewed relevance of what were previously considered "outsider" art practices, the emphasis on first-person accounts of identity over critical theory, and the proliferation of exhibitions that refuse to distinguish between art and the productions of culture more generally. How Folklore Shaped Modern Art: A Post-Critical History of Aesthetics underscores how the cultural traditions, belief systems and performed exchanges that were once integral to the folklore discipline are now central to contemporary art’s "post-critical turn." This shift is considered here as less a direct confrontation of critical procedures than a symptom of art’s inclusive ideals, overturning the historical separation of fine art from those "uncritical" forms located in material and commercial culture. In a global context, aesthetics is now just one of numerous traditions informing our encounters with visual culture today, symptomatic of the pull towards an impossibly pluralistic image of art that reflects the irreducible conditions of identity.

Transhumance of livestock away from the home farms during the summer months played an important role in the subsistence economics of small farms in Iceland since the settlement in the ninth century. However, the role of summer pastures (shielings) went beyond being an important feature of the farming economy. Shielings were also places which transcended the boundary between the social world of the farm and unknown world of the wilderness, and as such they played an important role in shaping (and breaking of) traditional social relationships. The ambiguity of shielings was reinforced by their association with women whose place was traditionally in the safe and socialized space of innangarðs (‘within the enclosure/inside the fence’) and not in the uncontrolled and dangerous útangarðs (‘outside the fence/enclosure’). At shieling sites women enjoyed immense social freedom, away from the watchful eyes of their male relatives, but at the same time they were also removed from the protection of their families, and according to Íslendingasögur and later folktales they were under constant threat of attack by feuding men, outlaws, and supernatural beings that were believed to have frequented these remote locations. The unclear status of shieling sites and their role in shaping female identity in the Viking and Medieval Iceland will be the main focus of this paper. By examining artefactual assemblages at Viking and Medieval shieling sites and high-resolution sedimentary histories of shieling occupation contextualised against a review of saga and folk literature I will explore the nature of gendered activities at shieling sites and the role of Icelandic women as shieling keepers.

October 10, 2023 update.
After an effort of many years, I have prepared a comprehensive timeline of UFO history that will be useful to UFO researchers and historians. “UFOs and Intelligence” is an up-to-date retrospective of UFO history (from Agobard of Lyons to the newly appointed US investigation agency UAPTF), intertwined with events in US and world history concerning military and civilian intelligence agencies and the cult of secrecy. It is now 679 pages and more than 555,000 words (including a substantial “Sources and Further Reading” appendix). Readers will discover or rediscover many events, people, and UFO cases they may not be familiar with. Some will find it useful for current or planned research projects. Military cases, those involving commercial aircraft, close encounters involving physical traces and other evidence, reports involving occupants or entities, and events surrounding military and sensitive nuclear sites are emphasized, but this timeline covers the full spectrum of UFO history, from contactee experiences to misidentifications of mundane phenomena and notorious hoaxes. Links to online sources are given, and links to biographical information are provided when available. A timeline like this allows us to view events from a different perspective, letting us make connections we might not otherwise see. It forces us to view the big picture, amid the grand flow of UFO cases, military security decisions, a vast swathe of personalities, and world history.

The present volume responds to the rising boom of interest in folklore and folklore research in the study of Old Norse mythology. The twenty-two authors of this volume reveal the dynamism of this lively dialogue, which is characterized by a diversity of perspectives linking to different fields and national scholarships.

The chapters open with a general overview of how the concepts of “folklore” and “mythology” have been understood and related across the history of Old Norse studies, which is followed by a group of chapters that discuss and present different approaches and types of source materials, with methodological and theoretical concerns. The interest in folklore is bound up with interests in practice and lived religion, which are brought into focus in a series of chapters relating to magic and ritual. Attention then turns to images that link to mythology and different mythic agents in studies that explore a variety of usage in meaning-making in different forms of cultural expression. The next group of studies spotlights motifs, with perspectives on synchronic usage across genres and different media, cross-cultural exchange, and long-term continuities. The volume culminates in discussions of complex stories, variously in oral traditions behind medieval sources and relationships between accounts found in medieval sources and those recorded from more recent traditions.

Individually, the chapters variously offer reflexive and historical research criticism, new research frameworks, illustrative studies, and exploratory investigations. Collectively, they illustrate the rapidly evolving multidisciplinary discussion at the intersections of folklore and Old Norse mythology, where the transformative impacts were recently described as a paradigm shift. They open new paths for scholarly discussion with the potential to inspire future research.

This paper investigates the relationship between psychoactive substances and so-called paranormal phenomena falling within the study of parapsychology. It is primarily concerned with extrasensory perception (ESP)—telepathy, precognition, and clairvoyance—as well as out-of-body experiences (OBEs) and near-death experiences (NDEs). Psychokinesis (PK), aura vision, encounter experiences, and sleep paralysis only make a very limited contribution to this review as they are seldom related to psychoactive drugs within the parapsychological literature. The paper borrows widely, but by no means exhaustively, from parapsychology as well as transpersonal studies, anthropology, ethnobotany, phytochemistry, psychiatry, psychotherapy, psychopharmacology, and neurobiology, particularly neurochemistry. It is organized into neurochemical models of paranormal experience (section 1), field reports of intentional and spontaneous phenomena incorporating anthropological, historical and clinical cases, and personal accounts (section 2), surveys of paranormal belief and experience (section 3), experimental research (section 4), and a methodological critique of the experimental research with recommendations for further work (section 5).

The Seven Seals of medieval Islamic magic, which are believed to constitute the Greatest Name of God, also feature in Jewish Kabbalah from the same period. While many Seal symbols make sporadic appearances in early Islamic amulets bearing Kufic script, the source of the symbols and their eventual ordering remains a matter of legend. As this topic was first – and last – examined systematically by Dr. Hans Winkler in 1930, a wider-ranging and more modern review is long overdue. The present survey focuses on potential sources for the symbols rather than on their exegesis. It first examines the possibility that a precedent for the Seal series exists in an undecipherable “seven signs repeated seven times” inscribed on a Late Babylonian amulet. It then considers the possibility that the Seals’ origins lie in other cuneiform symbols from ancient Mesopotamia; in Egyptian hieroglyphs or scripts; in paleo-Hebrew characters or the letters of ancient South Arabian scripts; in Libyco-Berber or Tifinagh letters from North Africa; or in the symbol repertoire of Late Antique magic, including the highly potent seven Greek vowels. The review also explores the possibility that at least some of the symbols originated in numerological ciphers or religious emblems, canvassing sources as diverse as Indian Hinduism and Byzantine Christendom. The article concludes by considering the recent suggestion that the Seal series may have acquired its privileged status because its symbols reflect “shape archetypes” that are hard-wired into the human nervous system.

As is common in many Bantu societies, Zambian names come from the natural environment, circumstances of birth and the social setting. Names from circumstances of birth include physical appearance, position of birth, place of birth, and so on. Those from the natural environment include names from plants, animals and other natural phenomena. Nevertheless, the broadest category in Zambian nomenclature is the socio-psychological environment. My recent unpublished quantitative analysis of selected publicly available school registers in Kitwe and Lusaka showed that between 2013 and 2017, 71% of the 13 thousand students sampled used foreign first names-the remaining meagre percentage used local language based first names. This chapter is, however, descriptive rather than structural, of traditional Zambian anthroponyms as they exist at present.

This is an extract from the book, showing the table of contents, the introduction and Chapter 1. Published September 2015 by Avalonia. In this unprecedented work, Christopher A. Smith has meticulously studied no less than 6 original Icelandic manuscripts dating from 1500 to 1860 to extract a picture of the aims, tools and techniques of Icelandic sorcerers. Set against the context of the harsh economic, social and environmental conditions of this North Atlantic island, the book gives a detailed account of the types of spells that were used and the motivations behind them. Hundreds of items from the six books of magic have been analysed to present the reader with a clear idea of the methods that were used, including incantation, invocation of deities and use of the enigmatic magical staves (galdrastafir).  Furthermore, the book goes into great detail concerning the physical tools used by magicians and the kinds of objects that might have been found in a sorcerer’s ‘toolbox’.

The book is lavishly illustrated with images from the original manuscripts. Although it is not intended by any means as a book of instruction, one chapter does focus on workings of certain types and gives suggestions for those brave enough to try them out.

All in all, this work will be an indispensable item for anyone interested in the history of magic in general and of Icelandic magic in particular.

Müntehab-ı Âliye, Seyit Ali Rızâ Bey tarafından XVIII. yüzyılda tertip edilmiş bir tıp eseridir. Bu bildiride, tıp yazmalarıyla ilgili araştırmalara katkı sağlamak amacıyla daha önce üzerinde bir çalışma yapılmamış olan bu eser tanıtılmıştır. Bunun için Türkçe tıp metinleri ile ilgili kısa bir giriş yapılmış, Rızâ Bey’in biyografisi ve eserin tespit edilebilen nüshalarıyla ilgili bilgiler verilmiş ardından da eser, muhtevası yönünden incelenmiştir. İncelemede eserin başında yer alan kasidenin şekli ve türü ile ilgili bilgiler verilmiş, ardından eserdeki ilaç terkiplerinin neler olduğu, faydaları ve kompozisyonu belirtilmiş ve eserin sonunda yer alan halk hekimliği ve halk inanışlarına dair kültürel içerikler örneklenmiştir. Sonuçta, Müntehab-ı Âliye’nin kaynaklarının çeşitliliği, tıp ve eczalık tarihine katkı sağlayabileceği ve Türk dili, edebiyatı ve kültürü açısından da değerlendirilebilecek bir eser olduğu vurgulanmıştır.

В статье исследуется состояние изучения анекдота в зарубежной науке 2-й пол. ХХ – нач. XXI вв. В поле зрения находятся работы ученых из стран Западной Европы, Америки, а также постсоветского и постсоциалистического пространства. Анализируются объекты исследований и подходы к анекдоту как материалу изучения.