Some of the most recent articles from open access anthropology journals (beta)
As traditional encyclopaedias appear to be loosing the favour of the general public, the current paper investigates the extent to which encyclopaedias are still presented as authoritative texts. Here, authority in texts is mostly construed from the the…
Encyclopedias present and contain knowledge, but historically they have also been commercial commodities, produced for sale. In this article, we study the self-presentations of a selection of Norwegian encyclopedias, as these are expressed in the form …
Information increasingly flows from smart online knowledge systems, based on ‘collective intelligence’, and to the more traditional form of knowledge production that takes place within academia. Looking specifically at the case of Wikipedia, and at how…
The death of the encyclopaedia is increasingly reported in connection with the abandonment of hard copy reference publishing, the dispersal of library reference collections and the preference for end-users to seek information from search engines and so…
Through the integrated framework of participation theory and political economy, this article analyzes participatory opportunities in the virtual world Habbo Hotel, and how participation is constrained and framed by the producer’s commercial strategies,…
Store norske leksikon (SNL) [Great Norwegian Encyclopaedia] is an edited, online encyclopaedia that strives towards radical transparency. Our aim is for as many parts of text production as possible to be visible to everyone, much like in the model that…
Though digital media have unquestionably affected the features and functions of modern encyclopedias, such works also continue to be shaped by factors thoroughly conventional by the end of the historical Enlightenment. As William Smellie, editor of the…
Shunta Mori Introduction In the 1980s and the early 1990s there were three camps competing for representation of women’s roles in Japan: the Neotraditionalists; “New Women”; and Radical Egalitarians. Neotraditionalists promoted the idea that women’s pr…
Introduction Anthropologist Harumi Befu claims that the appreciation of “diversity within diversity” is essential for twenty-first century Japan (Befu 2008, p. xxiv). The immensity of this c…
John Clammer (Photo by FreeDigitalPhotos.net coward_lion) Social scientists are wont to announce “crises” in the societies that attract their scholarly attention. While it might be stretching the evidence a little too far to suggest that co…
Wolfram Manzenreiter, Department of East Asian Studies, University of Vienna Introduction The 2002 FIFA World Cup Korea/Japan was the first to be staged on the world’s most populous continent, Asia, and it was the first to be co-hosted by two nations. …
The present paper examines interethnic and interreligious values in Turkish and Crimean folk legends. The folklore of both Crimea and Turkey has a multicultural background, which makes both corpuses of texts suitable for research. In the co…
The aim of this paper is to examine how the Albanian epic known as the ‘Cycle of the Frontier Warriors’ has been presented in Albanian folklore collections. I will examine seven written versions of the song ‘The Wedding of Ali Bajraktari’, …
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…
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 …
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 …
This article examines lessons which can still be learned from Professor Lauri Honko’s research and writings, particularly for those working at the interstices of folklore and religious studies who appreciate the mutually enriching relations…
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-…