<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> The Punjabi postpartum tradition is called sawa mahina (‘five weeks’). This study investigates infant health care belief practices in rural Punjab and looks at the social significance of infant care beliefs practiced during sawa mahina. During six months of fieldwork, using participant observation and unstructured interviews as primary research methods, the study explored the prevalent postpartum tradition from a childcare perspective. A Punjabi child holds a social value regarding familial, religious, and emotional values. The five-week traditional postpartum period provides an insight into mother-child attachment, related child care belief practices, and the social construction of infancy. A child’s agency is recognised in the embodied mother-child relationship, and a child is seen in a sympathetic connection with the mother. Establishing an early foundation of ascribed identities is another important part of postpartum belief practices.</abstract>

The Postpartum Tradition of Sawa Mahina in Rural Punjab, Pakistan

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
This article* situates folklore studies in relation to the approach to social research known as world-systems analysis. In doing so, the work also serves as an evocation of world-systems analysis of potential usefulness for the practice of folklore research and for further thinking about the articulation of the field with others in the human or social sciences. Even if folklorists choose not to embrace a world-systems framework, it is valuable to position folklore studies within the matrix of social science disciplines that this perspective sees as important to the rise of the modern capitalist world-system. This positioning relates to interpretations of world history, but also to debates about the future status of the disciplines. While world-systems analysis is only one among several approaches to exploring the human experience in broad greater-than-local contexts, it offers a useful instance for a larger effort to work out more far-reaching modes of work in folkloristics.
</abstract>

Towards Wider Framings: World-Systems Analysis and Folklore Studies

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>In this article* I describe the process of developing of Mari ethnic religion based on the tradition of animistic beliefs. I aim to consider two areas of contemporary Mari religion, the activities of the official religious organisation and the vernacular tradition as practiced by people in the countryside. The Mari vernacular belief system has been seen as one of the components of Mari ethnic identity. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mari religious tradition has played a role in strengthening national identity, and so the religious organisation has been officially registered. Today there is an attempt to adapt Mari religious practices to the conditions of the religious market, in the face of which vernacular tradition seems to lose its connection with the ethnic worldview and rural way of life. My analysis of research material from fieldwork conducted shows the existence of belief rituals that are followed independently from the official Mari religious movement. Contemporary Mari religious tradition has two layers and can be described as a process of transformation from vernacular belief to ethnic religion with its religious institutions and group of experts.</abstract>

Contemporary Mari Belief: The Formation of Ethnic Religion

Sufis, Shrines, and the State in Tajikistan

The Revival of Sacred Sites in the Urals: the Local and Beyond

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>When I conducted fieldwork among the Darhad of northern Mongolia my informants repeatedly asserted that after a good singer’s performance even the most badly intoxicated lad stands still and keeps silent. In this article, I make three points in order to explain why this claim was made. In the first one, I show that the main concern about singing performance at social gatherings is not about revealing the singer’s inner emotional realm but rather about crafting a collective feeling that has the ability to make people temporarily shed their otherness and converge. The problem with drunkards lies in the fact that they are unable to participate and even noisily impede this rite of convergence. The main reason is that they are not sufficiently detached from their own inner realm. I then put the concept of noise in context, arguing that it forms the repulsive pole of a Mongolian sonic continuum. In my last point, I stress the fact that according to Mongolian linguistic ideology, noise brings misfortune to the entire community. That is why good singers must win their battle against drunkards.</abstract>

Drunkards and Singers: A Mongolian Battle of Sounds

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
In a novel by a Chinese author, Yu Hua, the birth of the main character takes place in a train toilet. He falls down on the track and survives. During the last 30 years news stories with this content have been reported several times. The event is generally said to have taken place in China or India. From a folkloristic perspective the story can be defined as a newspaper legend. Like contemporary legends in oral tradition newspaper legends often are about accidents where babies are involved. As opposed to the orally transmitted legends they generally have a happy ending; they are published as a counterbalance to all the real accidents that daily papers have to report. The oldest version of “The Baby on the Track” was published in 1888 in a medical journal. The author, the famous physician William Osler, had a reputation for being a practical joker, and today it is difficult to judge if his story is based on a real case or if Osler invented it.
</abstract>

The Baby on the Track: A Newspaper Legend with Roots in the 19th Century

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
This article examines the oral recollections of Leonida Stanislavivna Panchyk, born in 1939 in Makariv district, Kyiv region, where she has lived all her life. The oral recollections were recorded from February 26 to March 5, 2022, during the beginning of the active phase of the Russian-Ukrainian war. The uniqueness and special value of the presented records lies in the fact that they demonstrate the living life of the Ukrainian narrative tradition. The recorded narrative is a direct reaction to the war. The analysed material and the study of the living situation gave grounds to distinguish the following three groups of reasons that caused the emergence of a memory: characters, events, place. The associative logical sequence of plots in memories is described. All the stories are a child’s memories and primarily describe events that are important to the child. Panchyk’s memories are sustained in one ideological, thematic and genre direction, they are not diluted by other themes or genres.
</abstract>

Two Wars for One Life: Verbalisation of Experience During the War

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
This article* examines experiences of invisible others considered uncanny in the context of secularity in contemporary Finland. Drawing from experience-centred theories of religion and spiritual belief by Ann Taves and David Hufford, the article analyses how uncanny experiences are differentiated from other kinds of experience and how they are justified as real in first-person narratives written by Finnish experiencers. The empirical analysis distinguishes four characterisations of experience the authors consider uncanny, which also serve to convince them of the realness of their experience. By conversating these findings with studies of experiences deemed religious or supernatural, the article seeks to reinforce dialogue with research on similar experiences that people rather consider in scientific and everyday terms. The article then suggests a framework for <italic>cross-secular enquiry</italic> that would allow scholars in different fields to address differences in how secularity manifests in different locations. Such a methodological framework may create possibilities to juxtapose and compare similar kinds of experience that people may or may not consider supernatural in different secular societies.
</abstract>

“That Must Have Been Uncanny!” Experiences of Invisible Others in Contemporary Finland

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
Written as a response to professor Simon Bronner’s critical analysis of the concept vernacular and its uses, published in the <italic>Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics</italic> (2022), the article highlights the functionality of the term ‘vernacular’. It has become a folkloristic category, binding conceptual domains such as ‘folk’ and ‘institutional’, ‘folkloric’ and ‘authored’, ‘oral’ and ‘literary’, ‘belief’ and ‘knowledge’, which have often been set apart in former scholarship. The main focus of the article is on vernacular religion as a concept and methodology, introduced by Leonard N. Primiano in the 1990s, which opened up a new perspective in the study of religions. The article considers ‘vernacular’ as a flexible concept, instrumental in developing folkloristics in its trans-disciplinary dialogues. Projected on the history of folk-loristics as a multilingual field of studies with roots in multiple national, regional and ethnic traditions, vernacular as an outlook enables us to think of folklore as a transcultural concept and disconnect it from colonial legacies.
</abstract>

The Instrumental Vernacular

Living Uncertainty: The 16th Congress of the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore (Sief)

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
This article gives an overview of wolf extermination endeavours in Soviet Yakutia as part of state ideologies of human dominance over nature in the process of modernisation of the Russian North. The proclaimed wolf extermination was a large-scale operation planned and launched by state authorities in Yakutia involving bureaucratic, finance and human contingents, as well as the available infrastructure. Based on ethnographic research among game managers, wolf hunters and Eveny and Evenki hunting-herding communities, as well as archival materials on Soviet Yakutia, we demonstrate how state goals to eradicate wolves were sometimes unsystematic in practice due to the misuse of state resources as well as the difficulty in accomplishing this objective in remote and difficult to access taiga landscapes. Furthermore, while being involved in wolf eradication campaigns Indigenous communities also retained their vernacular notions of wolves as non-human persons with whom they were inclined to maintain neighbourly relations rather than pursue extermination.
</abstract>

Wolves as Enemy of the Soviet State: Policies and Implications of Predator Management in Yakutia

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title> This article examines rituals of mourning in the digital mediascape in the case of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, 2015. The idea of the digital mediascape draws on Arjun Appadurai’s (1990) seminal work on mediascape and develops it further in the current framework of digital media. Rituals of mourning are approached as a response and a reaction to the anxiety and distress caused by the unexpected violent death of global media attention. The phenomenology of ritual practices in Charlie Hebdo is characterised as multi-layered, relational and coexisting. The article looks in particular at the ritual mourning in association with the message and the meme “Je suis Charlie”. The ‘imagined worlds’ created around the digital circulation of this ritual message are discussed in relation to the idea of the politics of death formed around such fundamental value-laden questions as whose life counts as life and is thus worthy of public recognition of mourning, as Judith Butler (2004) has asked.</abstract>

“Je Suis Charlie” and the Digital Mediascape: The Politics of Death in the Charlie Hebdo Mourning Rituals

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>This article<xref ref-type="fn">*</xref> concentrates on the material side of religious intimacy in Afro-Brazilian Umbanda through an ‘ontographic’ perspective as well as looking at materiality as evidence. It is based on an eleven-month fieldwork period among devotees, clients and individual practitioners of Umbanda in Southeast Brazilian metropolises, especially in São Paulo. In people’s experiences of spiritual work (<italic>trabalho</italic>) and spiritual development (<italic>desenvolvimento</italic>) carried out with Exús – guardians, guides and protectors who have, after their death, returned in order to work for people’s wellbeing – ritual objects (such as bodies, clothes, beverages, herbs, cigarettes, candles, songs) are seen as constitutive in knowledge production and life transformation. The central claim in this article is that diverse material and immaterial objects through which Exús interact and materialise, are neither primarily symbolic nor representative, but are re-configurative.</abstract>

Exú’s Work – The Agency of Ritual Objects in Southeast Brazilian Umbanda

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>Sport has become increasingly popular with recreational athletes over the last couple of decades. This has only gained minimal attention so far from scholars interested in the relations between recreational sports and everyday culture. With this paper, we seek to contribute to this field by scrutinising the sensory dimensions of recreational sport. Rather than probing into or highlighting isolated senses, we look at sensory dimensions understood as a combination of different, non-separable sensory experiences featured in recreational endurance sports. We are interested in how the senses play a role for recreational endurance athletes in running, triathlon and cycling both in training and competition. We start by examining how cultural and social dimensions are inextricably linked to doing sports. Secondly, we show how different configurations of the senses and their communicative mediation are contingent on sport disciplines, specific settings, technology, development and change as sensory careers over time. Thirdly, we discuss the kinaesthetic dimensions of doing sports in relation to the senses and the role of atmospheres. We conclude by arguing that highlighting specific senses by athletes is a cultural practice that calls for a holistic analysis of senses in sport, and outline some methodological implications for research on the senses.</abstract>

Sensing Athletes: Sensory Dimensions of Recreational Endurance Sports

Editorial Impressions: Feelings of Hybridity

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>Traditionally, the curator’s work has been in close connection with the main functions of the museum - preservation, research, and communication. The changes that have occurred at museums over the past few decades have also influenced the profession of curator. Specialisation has taken place inside the museum, and so the curator’s functions have also changed. This article focuses on the curator’s field of work at national museums in Finland and in the Baltic states. The analysis is mainly based on interviews conducted with curators and other museum professionals at the Estonian National Museum, the Estonian History Museum, the National History Museum of Latvia, the National Museum of Lithuania, and the National Museum of Finland. Emanating from the PRC model provided by the Reinwardt Academy as well as the global changes induced by the new museology, the focus is on the curator’s connection with museum collections. The analysis shows that the curator’s role is not similar in all the museums under discussion; there are regional differences in structure, curatorial duties, and priorities. While at some museums the curator is regarded as a collection keeper who can also do some research, at others they are rather researchers and have only infrequent contact with collections.</abstract>

Curators With and Without Collections : A Comparative Study of Changes in the Curator’s Work at National Museums in Finland and in the Baltic States

<abstract><title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>In this paper, I present two very different and yet very similar ethnographic examples of mountain-related pilgrimage and sacrifice ritual performed by the present-day highland Maya. The question I ask is why the sense of sacredness, animation and power of the mountains endures among the traditionalist as well as Pentecostal Maya in spite of the extensive transformations of the world today. In so doing, I examine the native concept of the mountain not merely as a social or cultural representation, but as an expression of everyday lived experiences and existential relationships between people and the physical and spiritual world they inhabit. Finally, I argue that the experience of interaction, communication and intimacy between the Maya and their mountain deities can be best defined as a dynamic participation in the course of the world – an existential economy of ‘working the world’.</abstract>

Maya Intimacy with the Mountains: Pilgrimage, Sacrifice and Existential Economy

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The Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics (JEF) is the joint publication of the Estonian Literary Museum, the Estonian National Museum and the University of Tartu. JEF is an...

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The Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics (JEF) is the joint publication of the Estonian Literary Museum, the Estonian National Museum and the...