Some of the most recent articles from open access anthropology journals (beta)
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 …
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…
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…
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 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…
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…
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…
This is the editorial for the special issue ‘The Legacy of Lauri Honko: Contemporary Conversations’.
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 …
Greed, or avarice, is one of the cardinal sins. Protestant Swedish Finn folklore demonstrates expressions of greed, even if the actual term is not mentioned. In folk religion Christian norms and values are combined with elements of folk bel…
This article uses social-movement analysis to understand the rituals, memory-work and spatialties of Waffen-SS veterans and their sympathizers. Most social-movement analysis focuses on left-wing protesters; our concern is with the marginalized counter-…
This article focuses on the identity work that takes place on the biggest Polish Internet forum for infertile people (www.nasz-bocian.pl). It is an example of a wider trend of “digital groupings created by and for those who struggle with the physical a…
The vernacular online videos produced by the Arab revolutions constitute an un-precedented (though not unproblematic) historical resource for understanding the subjective experience of the ordinary people who find themselves on the front line of revolu…
This is a paper on the transformation of campus activism in Japan since the 1990’s. Japan’s so-called freeter movements (movements of young men and women lacking regular employment) are often said to have emerged as young people shifted their base of a…
Many scholars have noted that secular belief systems, despite lack of a spiritual base, can possess qualities and display features similar to religion. The most well-known and forceful formulation of this is, arguably, Durkheim’s claim that elementary …
No abstract available.
This article focuses on the strategies of protest employed by the climate-change activist network Klimax (circa 2007-10). My questions are: What, in their view, was the main threat to our environment? How did they protest against it? The study is based…
The goal of this article is to explore the website communication of urban activist gardeners by focusing on the concept of ritual as a heuristic category. In contrast to the majority of those doing research on ritual, I use a systems-theoretical approa…
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Gender Identities, Human Rights, Female Farmers, Gender Analyses, Women’s Movements, Female Migrants, and more.
African Studies Quarterly
Notions of Kulturkritik stemming from twentieth century accounts of mass con-sumption present culture as an effect of the mode or relations of production. Culture becomes the means by which capitalism imposes itself as an ideological system. This paper…
In the aftermath of the great bailout of capital in 2008 (and still ongoing) finance has often been seen as external and parasitical to the real economy. Instead, finance and other forms of capital have become more closely articulated and interwoven. A…
Cultural policies in Europe were designed, albeit in significantly different ways national and ideological lines, as an additional component of the Welfare State. They were supposed to bring about democracy in cultural consumption by removing the obsta…
The task of this paper discusses the role of Marx in analysing media, communica-tion and culture today. An analysis of three contemporary Cultural Studies works – Lawrence Grossberg’s monograph Cultural Studies in the Future Tense, John Hartley’s monog…