Some of the most recent articles from open access anthropology journals (beta)
Oral Tradition, 35/2 (2022):21-60 1. Today’s Performance of the Long Liturgy The Long Liturgy (later LL) is the main Zoroastrian ritual. The central part1 consists of the recitation of the Gāϑās and the Yasna Haptaŋhāiti, a series of texts in Old Avestan, an Iranian language older than the one of the rest of the liturgy. […]
The post On the Edge between Literacy and Orality appeared first on Oral Tradition.
Oral Tradition, 35/2 (2022):9-20 Most readers of Oral Tradition may not be overly concerned with the oral transmission of premodern compositions. Those who study the religious texts of the ancient Zoroastrian religion, however, must now take the long period of oral transmission of these texts, and its implications for our understanding of its contents, very […]
The post Early Zoroastrianism and Orality appeared first on Oral Tradition.
Oral Tradition, 35/2 (2022):1-2 The contribution that various branches of “Oral Studies” could make to the study of non Western scriptural religions is as yet largely unexplored. In the Iranian cultural sphere—where languages are spoken that belong to the Iranian branch of Indo-European, such as Persian and Kurdish—we find a number of religious traditions that […]
The post Editors’ Column appeared first on Oral Tradition.
Introduction The great astronomer and social commentator Adam Frank says: “We are fundamentally storytellers . . . . Every society . . . has had a system of myths, a constellation of stories that provide a basic sense of meaning and context” (2018:8). So what is this constellation of stories for the Ahl-e Haqq (AH) […]
The post Religious Musical Knowledge and Modes of Transmission among the Kurdish Ahl-e Haqq of Gurān<a name=”_ftnref1″ href=”#_ftn1″>1</a> appeared first on Oral Tradition.
Oral Tradition, 35/2 (2022):3-8 Whilst the study of “oral verbal art” in the literary sphere is now receiving a certain amount of academic interest, much less attention has so far been paid to the dynamics of orality in the sphere of religion, not least in non-Western traditions.1 Many specialists in such fields as religious studies and […]
The post Introduction appeared first on Oral Tradition.
Oral Tradition, 35/2 (2022):419-40 The field studies of Neo-Aramaic dialects that have proliferated recently have yielded many folklore texts.1 During the author’s fieldwork (together with Christina Benyaminova) with one speaker of Neo-Aramaic, the sophisticated plot of a folk story with a hero named Mirza Pamat attracted his attention. A comparison of this story with other […]
The post Mîrza Mihemed / Mirza Pamat appeared first on Oral Tradition.
Oral Tradition, 35/2 (2022):407-18 A group of dervishes known as ʿAjam belonged originally to the dervishes without an order (bi-selsele). They are closely related to the Khāksāriyya and are considered as one lineage of this order today. The Khāksār order, as one of the three Shiʿi dervish orders of today’s Iran, used to have three […]
The post Men of Speech appeared first on Oral Tradition.
In this Field Note piece, I use my clinical and research experiences in the UK and Uganda during the COVID-19 pandemic to explore the contrasting ways it unravelled in each setting during the period between January 2020 and October 2021. In the UK, wor…
Ethical issues are an essential part of research and need to be considered throughout the process and in its aftermath, especially when including vulnerable groups. This Field Notes revisits some ethical tensions that emerged during fieldwork with a ‘v…
What counts as a ‘crisis’? How do we determine an ‘emergency’? Who gets to do so, and what exactly is at stake? Scholarly examinations of ‘crises’, including, most notably, seminal work by Janet Roitman (2013), frequently underscores how the ‘crisis im…
These field notes are based on my research study which aims to understand the recent changes and developments in childbirth practices in India that propagate natural birthing practices as a childbirth choice available to birthing women. Drawing from th…
Fat, in the context of dissection, is a nuisance, an obstruction to anatomical order and orientation. Yet it makes up a large part of the human body, and in the practice of dissection becomes one of the most prominent materials in the room, as it stick…
‘Breathing trouble’ refers both to a biopolitical process and a metaphor for the current global condition. This Position Piece draws inspiration from the ‘universal right to breathe’ frame suggested by Joseph-Achille Mbembe (2021a) to discuss pandemic …
This is an account of a procedure of organ donation after circulatory death (DCD) that took place in July 2019 in a French hospital. Based on an ethnography in the neuro intensive care unit (neuro-ICU) of this hospital, I describe the impressions that …
The mass production of antibiotics in the 1940s enabled their travel beyond Europe and America, but to date the significance of the ways in which these medicines co-constituted colonial regimes at the time has not been systematically described. Through…
Editorial to the September issue of 2022.
What does it mean to call something complex? This Review essay describes three recent books which take up complex problems and the problem of complexity: philosopher Angela Potochnik’s Idealization and the Aims of Science (2017); science and technology…
Epidemic infectious diseases like HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, Ebola, and more recently COVID-19, have persistent and devastating impacts in human populations across the globe. In this Review essay, we consider together the monographs Epidemic Illusions (Ri…
Following Ann Stoler’s (2016) idea of colonial and (post)colonial history as recursive, a history which folds back upon itself, emerging in new shapes and forms yet still carrying the formations that they are folded into, and Achille Mbembe’s argu…
Dear Colleagues!
The CAES editorial team waits for your contributions for CAES Vol. 8, № 4 that is going to be published in the middle of December 2022. The deadline for submission of papers is December 5.
Alternative food structures, despite their core sociocultural justice values, experience difficulties in attracting members from diverse backgrounds. This article attempts to gain insight into the reasons for this paradox by assessing the findin…
Editor’s foreword Articles: How closely the Neolithic people of the site of Okhta 1 were related to the Neolithic people of the sites of Sarnate and Šventoji 43? Alexander Akulov The Pit-Comb Ware from the Neolithic site Okhta 1 is much alike that from the Neolithic sites located on the territories of the Baltic states. […]
Within the context of datafication, participatory surveillance capitalism, and prospering rhetoric about scientific insight from big data exists the practice of data shadow donation. This relational activity refers to the digital gifting of pers…
An introduction to the special issue, this article sets the stage for the essays that compose it. It addresses the transformations that have been taking place in the recent decades in the terrain of image-making, visual culture, visual technolog…
Creating our own image, whether it is in research or in art, is a constant conversation with the images already in our heads. In the case of refugees, these images are shaped by mediatised and politicised realities that obscure the capacity to s…