Category: English

Africa Spectrum, Ahead of Print. The call to decolonize African Studies has a profound influence on the field, with varying degrees of success. This article addresses this topic in relation to the author’s personal experiences in the publishing industr…

The aim of this article is to analyse a local expression of the transnational Ahbash Sufi movement in light of recent scholarship on the relationship between Salafism and Sufism as well as Islamic neo-traditionalism. Some researchers have reacted again…

In the present article, the authors argue that the study of Salafism as a contemporary Islamic new religious movement could benefit from an analytical perspective separating fundamentalism into the modes of inferentialism and deferentialism. The basics…

The article examines the Finnish branch of Chabad Lubavitch as a fundamentalist and charismatic movement that differs from other branches of ultra-Orthodox Judaism in its approaches to outreach to non-observant Jews. Whilst introducing the history of C…

The Anthroposophical Society in Sweden is, in the view of many of its members, going through tough times. Times of crisis and the search for a collective identity often inspire the formation of ideological rifts within a larger religious community. One…

Bhaktivedanta Swami (1896–1977), the founder of ISKCON, had a complex relationship with science and modernity, and many of his followers have consequently allied themselves with various kinds of critiques of the modern project. A favourite enemy has be…

Editorial for Vol. 12, Issue 2

Africa Spectrum, Ahead of Print. The African “youth” population is growing at a fast and steady pace, attracting attention from scholars, policymakers, and politicians. Yet, we know relatively little about this large and heterogeneous segment of the po…

This article analyses Finnish Roma experiences of interaction with Roma in Estonia, in the period after the historic fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 through to the present. The research data rely on semi-structured interviews and informal convers…

The article presents the results of textual studies of the early recordings of the Yakut heroic epic Olonkho, recorded from the second half of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century. The relevance of the study is due to the fact tha…

Fink, Jella. 2020. Voices of Weavers: Textile Cultures, Craftsmanship, and Identity in Contemporary Myanmar. Munster; New York: Waxmann.

In this essay, I describe and discuss the ways in which tradition is demonstrated, staged and understood in Kosova restaurants. After the 1999 war in Kosova, restaurants emerged as new places, privately public and publicly private, that display local a…

This article examines the changing meaning and status of colostrum in Estonian food culture, relying on data drawn from ethnographic archives and historical sources, cookbooks, and the media. From seasonal food consumed by both Estonian peasants and th…

In this case study I offer an insight into the activity of an association for local traditions in a Hungarian village. In addition, I provide some general analytical frames for the examination of such tradition-based locality projects. The field o…

Folklore has been linked to national identity formation. In this article, informed by Johann Gottfried Herder’s romantic nationalism and following Alan Dundes’s (1965) method of folklore studies, it is argued that Indonesia has historically followed th…