Some of the most recent articles from open access anthropology journals (beta)
This paper aims at reopening the debate regarding ‘religious diversity’ in religious studies. A review of (recent or ancient) literature demonstrates that we have not finished with the complexity of the issue of ‘diversity’, whether in acad…
This is the editorial for the special issue ‘Pentecostalism around the Baltic Sea’.
Since the mid-90s, archaeology has been a powerful tool for changing landscape and narrative in the Old City of Jerusalem and the village of Silwan – the “Historic Basin of Jerusalem”. As archaeological excavations relate directly to the ap…
The myth of the reborn nation’ was one of the results of my recent research on figurines, the history of the religion of Yehud, and the rise of monotheism. The purpose of this paper is presenting a discussion about ‘the myth of the reborn n…
Turkish environmentalism is gaining ground but has not yet become a serious source of influence in society. The environmental movements have long been held as left wing politics and less religious, but today environmental awreness is also r…
This article focuses on contemporary interpretive knowledge projects that engage critically with Islamic religious sciences, and which are driven by the question of gender justice. These projects, which have been loosely termed as Islamic F…
This article intends to contribute to the understanding of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem. The author studies the entry, which is found in all the Gospels, in its Jewish context. The author argues that Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem on an ass is …
Jesus’ antagonistic encounters with the Pharisees serve traditionally as a basis for the poor relationship between Christianity and Judaism. The conflict stories epitomized by Jesus’ parables have been assessed as descriptions of how he eit…
This article has two aims. The first is to show that the search for ethnicity in archaeology is dependent on the way ethnicity is defined and on written sources. The second is to review studies of Iron Age I ‘ethnic Israel’. There is an ong…
This is the editorial for the special issue ‘Concord, Conflict and Co-existence: Religion and Society in the Middle East and North Africa’.
This article argues for the importance of a dialogue for strategic engagement and presents an analytical approach to it with reference to three different peacebuilding strategies in terms of conflict resolution theories. As a case study exa…
The Arab revolts that erupted in late 2010, forcing from power the rulers of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen, and dragging Syria through a ferocious civil war, reactivated the public debate on government in Islamic countries. In all those c…
Hezbollah has been an important political and military actor in Lebanon and the Middle East since the mid-1980s. Its popularity grew especially after successfully deterring the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006. With the emergence of the …
The purpose of this article is to study cubas – small architectural structures known for their whitewash-painted domes – and specifically, those located in the kûra of Beja in Portugal. Although we can pinpoint the existence of many of thes…
For both Jews and Muslims the Temple Mount and the Old City of Jerusalem constitute highly important religious, cultural, political and national centres. For centuries Jews in the diaspora prayed in the direction of Jerusalem, vowed never t…
This study demonstrates how profoundly Turkey’s main social clevage –Islam versus Secularism – is produced and reproduced by political parties in their attempts to form coherent sociopolitical bloc as a basis of mass support. The main purpo…
This is the editorial for the special issue ‘The Legacy of Lauri Honko: Contemporary Conversations’.
This article aims at tracing the roots of the theoretical concepts developed by Lauri Honko in his research on epic: what were his main sources in theoretical thinking, how did he apply and develop concepts formulated by authors such as Alb…
In this article the author briefly examines three cases that represent Lauri Honko’s views on the textualisation of oral epics. Furthermore, these examples offer an insight into the concept of the paradigm, which was a key concept for Lauri…
In Ireland the creation of one of the world’s largest collections of oral traditions by the Irish Folklore Commission (1935−70) was intimately bound up with the declining fortunes of the Irish language as a spoken vernacular and the young i…
This article aims at defining a privately-owned manuscript from the end of the eighteenth century; a notebook of charms, recipes and ritual prescriptions, presumed to be connected with known manuscripts of magic, that were kept secret and h…
In this article some aspects of Tolkien’s work with regard to his relationship to folklore and nationalism are presented. It is also argued, contrary to Lauri Honko’s view of literary epics, that pre-literary sources constitute a problem fo…
The article presents the object and results of a study which combines the psychology of religion and folkloristics in the form of a qualitative analysis of empirical ethnographic material compiled from sources in a local neo-charismatic con…
Vernacular religion connected with the clan was expected to adapt in the context of globalisation and the vanishing ideals of traditional (tribal) societies. But at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries a revival of European …
Lauri Honko (1932–2002), the Finnish professor of folkloristics and comparative religion was a prolific and multi-talented researcher, whose topics of research ranged from the study of folk beliefs, folk medicine and Ingrian laments to the …