Some of the most recent articles from open access anthropology journals (beta)
The Sundarbans, which stretches from the Bay of Bengal over parts of India and Bangladesh, is the largest mangrove forest in the world, constantly in flux due to the erosion and cyclones that can drastically reshape the land. This article explores how …
This study analyses the rules of circulation of money (and wealth in general) in Qing-era (1644–1911) Chinese texts on the supernatural. It is based on the popular collections of stories by writers Pu Songling, Ji Yun and Yuan Mei.Ever since the 19th c…
This article investigates a religious group in contemporary northeast China. The group is formed by ritual experts and adherents of a traditional folk belief in animal spirits. The group runs as an institution providing aid to those who need psychologi…
The article aims to unsettle the meaning of gender assignment for Ukrainian variants of the dragonslayer wonder tale of ATU 312D, “Kotyhoroshko”, which is represented by a child hero through a post-structural deconstruction on four levels: language, jo…
Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics Feed
The image of Steppe Ukraine as a historical region has mainly been constructed based on narratives originating from urban centres that are often perceived as alien to this territory and people. Being one of the most industrial and urbanised parts of Uk…
Forests are one of the most commonly recurring settings of folktales and oratures. In the popular imagination, forests are often seen as the site of the unknown, the non-human, enchanting and, mystifying, however, in the northeastern cultures of India,…
This article reads Finnish linguist and ethnographer Matthias Alexander Castrén’s published letters as travel writing influenced both by imperialist discourses and the tradition of Finnish travel writing. The article examines the letter formulae and th…
The Sundarbans, which stretches from the Bay of Bengal over parts of India and Bangladesh, is the largest mangrove forest in the world, constantly in flux due to the erosion and cyclones that can drastically reshape the land. This article explores how …
Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics Feed
This study analyses the rules of circulation of money (and wealth in general) in Qing-era (1644–1911) Chinese texts on the supernatural. It is based on the popular collections of stories by writers Pu Songling, Ji Yun and Yuan Mei.Ever since the 19th c…
The article aims to unsettle the meaning of gender assignment for Ukrainian variants of the dragonslayer wonder tale of ATU 312D, “Kotyhoroshko”, which is represented by a child hero through a post-structural deconstruction on four levels: language, jo…
The image of Steppe Ukraine as a historical region has mainly been constructed based on narratives originating from urban centres that are often perceived as alien to this territory and people. Being one of the most industrial and urbanised parts of Uk…
This article reads Finnish linguist and ethnographer Matthias Alexander Castrén’s published letters as travel writing influenced both by imperialist discourses and the tradition of Finnish travel writing. The article examines the letter formulae and th…
Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics Feed
This article examines the role of media in the process of religious communalization (Vergemeinschaftung), drawing on the example of the Evangelical Association of Vineyard Churches. It argues that a direct connection between media production…
Understanding a videogame requires attention to the social dimensions of its production, its material form and its reception. Games are produced in communities of designers, played by communities of gamers, and accepted into families, househ…
This article introduces the special issue, “The Dynamics of Religion, Media, and Community”. It examines the shifting faith in the concept of religious community in the social studies of religion and calls attention to the normative expectat…
Since the rise of the Internet, traditional religious communities have either embraced or struggled with new media. At the same time, a significant number of believers turns to new media as a substitute for or supplement to offline communiti…
This article – framed within digital religion studies – analyzes the online religious activities of a non-denominational Christian multisite church, LifePoint Church (LPC). A multisite church is a church with a central location that serves a…
Drawing on the example of Jehovah’s Witnesses, in this contribution I will explore the role of media in the production of religious commitment. I will argue that, while providing important insights into the relationship between media interpr…
Monasticism is characterized by community life in a specific place (stabilitas loci), but also by local and translocal networks that correspond to different functions of the monastery (religious, cultural, commercial, etc.). Although Max Web…
In this article, we examine the question of religious communalization on the micro-blogging service Twitter. Twitter has only relatively recently been adopted as a field of research by scholars of media and religion, and the question of reli…
Dishonored is not only one of the most popular and original game series on the market, but from a religious point of view it has one of the most complex and original fictional belief systems. A character that particularly stands out is the O…
The Chinese born spiritual teacher “Dr. Zhi Gang Sha” makes up part of a growing global healers market and provides various techniques of purported ancient Chinese origin in his centres in Canada and in Europe. Most of his teachings belong t…