Some of the most recent articles from open access anthropology journals (beta)
For both Jews and Muslims the Temple Mount and the Old City of Jerusalem constitute highly important religious, cultural, political and national centres. For centuries Jews in the diaspora prayed in the direction of Jerusalem, vowed never t…
This study demonstrates how profoundly Turkey’s main social clevage –Islam versus Secularism – is produced and reproduced by political parties in their attempts to form coherent sociopolitical bloc as a basis of mass support. The main purpo…
This article has two aims. The first is to show that the search for ethnicity in archaeology is dependent on the way ethnicity is defined and on written sources. The second is to review studies of Iron Age I ‘ethnic Israel’. There is an ong…
The myth of the reborn nation’ was one of the results of my recent research on figurines, the history of the religion of Yehud, and the rise of monotheism. The purpose of this paper is presenting a discussion about ‘the myth of the reborn n…
Turkish environmentalism is gaining ground but has not yet become a serious source of influence in society. The environmental movements have long been held as left wing politics and less religious, but today environmental awreness is also r…
This article focuses on contemporary interpretive knowledge projects that engage critically with Islamic religious sciences, and which are driven by the question of gender justice. These projects, which have been loosely termed as Islamic F…
This article intends to contribute to the understanding of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem. The author studies the entry, which is found in all the Gospels, in its Jewish context. The author argues that Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem on an ass is …
Jesus’ antagonistic encounters with the Pharisees serve traditionally as a basis for the poor relationship between Christianity and Judaism. The conflict stories epitomized by Jesus’ parables have been assessed as descriptions of how he eit…
This article argues for the importance of a dialogue for strategic engagement and presents an analytical approach to it with reference to three different peacebuilding strategies in terms of conflict resolution theories. As a case study exa…
Dr Faye Miller Queensland University of Technology, Australia Over the past year I have had the privilege of being involved in the development of the open access journal Global Ethnographic. So far the work-in-progress has been a virtual collaboration …
Japan’s Possible Futures: Pivots of Social Transformation SPECIAL COLLECTION Edited by Bruce White Photo by Jeremy Keith ‘Tokyo horizon’ Papers & Thematics Re-thinking Japanese Society Gender Collaboration or Equality? The Past, P…
Nostalgia for ‘Asian’ Traditions and Energy – Encounters with Chinese and Koreans in Japanese TV Dramas Hilaria Gössmann, Griseldis Kirsch Photo coffee shop Aizen by m-louis Introduction—Television Dramas and the Myth of Japanese Homogeneity Since 1953…
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. …
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…
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…
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’, …
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…