Arts & Culture: Black Comedy Uncovers Dark Place in Romanian History
Radu Jude’s movie didn’t just arouse debate, it also did good box office.
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Radu Jude’s movie didn’t just arouse debate, it also did good box office.
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Healing with water – drinking, washing, bathing or sprinkling – is a well-known method already in Antiquity: often the sacred places of Asclepius were nearby springs, considered curative. This tradition is preserved through the Middle Ages and Modernity up to the very present day. Water healing being still actual, springs are now devoted to various saints and stories are told explaining the origins of that devotion or presenting numerous real cases of the spring’s curative effect. In Christian art there is an iconographic scene which visually explains the miraculous power of water: The Virgin Zoodochos Pighi (also: The Virgin Life-Giving Sourceor The Virgin Spring of Life). Depicted in the center of the spring, Virgin Mary sanctifies the water and gives it the miraculous power to heal various diseases: blindness or immobility, but also insanity.
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The presence of nature in a city, especially one growing so spontaneously, has always aroused ambivalent feelings in its residents. Although, the city bears a yearning for “wild” nature (whose classic realization are English gardens), urban actions are aimed at keeping a safe distance from it. In contemporary cities “wild” nature appeared in the post-war ruins, post-industrial wastelands, peripheral cemeteries, etc. For many people, they are a symbol of degradation and oblivion, therefore, are often subjected to intensive restoration and conservation, which brings about liquidation of wildlife. But is it right? Have these places really lost all the power of recalling memories — these private and collective? In my speech, I will try to answer these questions, based on the study of a luna park in Coney Island (New York), Weißensee Jewish Cemetery (Berlin) and Spreeinsel — historical centre of Berlin.
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The subject of this article is culinary trends observable in Polish cities during the past few years. They include both the rediscovered practices, directly related to the cultural (culinary) heritage of a particular area, and these which have become popular only recently. According to the author, characteristic culinary fads are: the promotion of local delicacies on a large scale, growing interest in shopping in farmers’ markets offering organic produce (bio-markets) and traditional goods, growing popularity of street food (including street food festivals and picnics), and organizing the so called “breakfast on the grass” events.
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For the residents of Cieszyn Silesia, especially Czech, the establishment of national boundaries along the course of the Olza River in 1920, meant that they had to form a new picture of the world and determine their own place in the community, which also had to be redefined. For Zaolzie residents, the process of constructing their own identity depends on mechanisms of competition, negotiation and power (media, education and administration). It also is a consequence of the recognition of the boundary as something natural and “ever” existent. The clash of different self-identifications is seen on the symbolic level, especially linguistic.
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This paper studies the patterns of communication among the ethnic groups living in the Transylvanian rural district of Caţa, aiming at identifying the people’s willingness to communicate and the non-conflictual nature of the dialogue in this rural area. The framework employed in the analysis is Dell Hymes’s (1974) interactional S-P-E-A-K-I-N-G schema. The study is based on data collected by the first author during two periods (August – September, 2012 and January, 2013), using two instruments: the direct, participant observation and the interview. The participants are representatives of four ethnic groups, namely Romanians, Hungarians, Germans and Roma people. The findings of the analysis show that the inter-ethnic communication in Caţa is non-conflictual and non-exclusive due to the people’s openness to adapt to the others and that the limitations of the intercultural dialogue are rather suggested by the administrative authorities and the national ethnic organizations.
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In July 1844, on route to the Catskill Mountains in New York, Henry David Thoreau climbed Saddleback Mt. (now Greylock), the highest natural point in Massachusetts. Situated in the northwestern part of the state, the mountain is traversed by a network of hiking trails, including the tail end of the Appalachian Trail. Thoreau later described this experience in his first published book A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, whose manuscript he wrote during his stay at Walden Pond between 1845 and 1847. In my paper, I analyze Thoreau’s description of the climb and cast the ascent as a meditation in the Romantic tradition of the quest for the sacred and for the sublime.
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Transylvania was for centuries a cultured, influential and prosperous region. Today, after decades of poverty and depressed rural economy, it is best known for its rich heritage of traditional rural life and biodiversity. Conservationists, by protecting the natural environment and assisting the economic development of farming communities, are working to protect and enhance the natural wealth of plants and animals. This richness was the basis for much of the region’s former prosperity, particularly in the Saxon Villages area of southeast Transylvania. Most Saxons have now left, but their agricultural heritage can be a sound basis for future economic growth. For both people and nature, this should combine the best of traditional farming practices and innovative technology to achieve an enhanced rural economy that can provide a good livelihood again for farming families.
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This paper looks at eight towns in the southern Blue Ridge section of Virginia, USA, during their formative stage, circa 1880-1920. It asks why they were built and why some persisted while others faded. Three major factors seem to predict their creation and longevity: 1] the availability of an appropriate transportation system, 2] their level of economic complexity, and 3] the proximity (or distance) to their source of investment capital. Towns based on single resource extraction, financed by distant capital fared the worst, while locally developed, economically diverse communities did well. The results tend to re-enforce Helen Lewis’s Internal Colonial Model. This story of creation and collapse in southern Appalachian America offers a cautionary tale for post-Soviet Eastern Europe.
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In the discourse on the Habsburg Monarchy, two opposing attitudes prevail. Depending on one’s perspective, which can be nationally exclusive or nostalgic, the Monarchy is perceived either as a “peoples’ dungeon” (Völkerkerker) or “unity in multiplicity” (Einheit in der Vielheit). A group of researchers has recently invested much effort to overcome this discursive gap, by applying a theoretical paradigm called the Habsburg Postcolonial. This theoretical approach relies on Anglo-Saxon postcolonial studies and recent research into Central European cultural phenomena, and analyzes opposing cultural forces in the Danube Monarchy (a multinational state formation of questionable colonial importance), by focusing on: the intertwining of language, culture and politics; images of the self and others; dynamics between the center and periphery; and particularism and universalism. Unlike overseas colonialism, dichotomies such as that of center and periphery do not appear in pure forms in complex empires such as the Habsburg Monarchy, so there is a strong tendency among scholars to use postimperial theories when researching this area. This article is concluded with a short case study that shows how the same historic material—a story about medieval Hungarian nobleman Bánk—was transposed in a variety of (supra)national contexts in the turbulent nineteenth century.
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Kuzman A. Shapkarev has left very interesting records of traditions, beliefs and mythological stories for the antiquity in Macedonia in the huge collected folk material funds. For the earliest history of the Macedonian spaces he recorded the tradition of the old ethnic population Ezerci which inhabited the coastal area of the Ohrid Lake. Attached to it are also the folk beliefs for the giants as very tall and mighty heroes and for the Emperor Alexander III of Macedon as the inventor of the wars, which is actually a small fragment of the well known motif for the quest of live (immortal) water in the Alexander Romance. Shapkarev announces that he heard the stories for Alexander III of Macedon from his father Anastas which he certainly learned from someone older in his family. The traditions of the Ohrid settlement Hermeleia, where the Christian saint St. Erasmus preached as well as the tradition of the Prespa villages Istok and German as ostensible birthplaces of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian and his regiment commander Velizarius, are particularly interesting.
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This detailed interpretation of the ban-lexeme and its poetological variations Bana krale, banove, Banin den from texts of the two-volume song collection Veda Slovena aims to arouse interest on some significant, but unexplored elements of the songs. The ban-construction is considered as a constitutive part of the leading story of the Resettlement from Krajna zeme to the Danube. It also has a crucial role for “decoding” the songs about Orphen-Orpju (a folk version considered as Orpheus). The study proposes to read Bana krale as a special character construction of a sacred king and a ruler, as a settler with a golden pipe, who also acts as a traveler to the afterworld and is therefore similar to the high priest or the shaman, widely present in the Bulgarian medieval culture. Attention is also paid on the interesting connection between Bana krale and Vodin junak, both characters of the “Resettlement”-story, being lexically and/or poetologically connected to the rituals of “crossing water boundaries” (like crossing the Danube river), as well as to “water”- motives exemplified by motives of transforming/freezing the water or getting, drinking and sprinkling with a special kind of water called zhiva.
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The text presents unpublished archival field materials for villages, which were displaced with the construction of the Iskar Dam. The basic data is from the archives of Christo Semerdziev and Christo Vakarelski along with personal field recordings. Highlighted are the basics of ethnological character of the settlements – temples and votive seats, memory for historical events, livelihood and labor migrations, as well as the attitudes of the local population related to its deportation. The text outlines the specifics of individual villages, relations between them and some aspects of the typical naming of communities and groups.
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This article is part of a broader study of local families in the village Shipochane in the period from the late 17th to the late 20th century.
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Bulgarian ethnology pays special attention to the characterization of the communities and personalities, which are its object of description and research. To a much lesser extent has been studied the problem about the socio-cultural origin and status of the recorder of field information, being one of the most unexplored territories in the theory and practice of the field ethnological research. The present article presents an attempt to fill in this void in two ways. First, by an autobiographical description of a part of the city background, in which the author formed as a personality between 1960 and 1970. Second, by the memoires for his first folklore expedition with the Workshop for Bulgarian folklore in Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, which happened in 1981.
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Lyrics in popular music are an important site of language contacts, of hybridization and of symbolic and ludic use of linguistic material. They are a source and a vehicle of linguistic innovations. However, the study of lyrics mostly focuses on their relation with the global expansion of English, although various historically existing language practices in the receiving societies can shed additional light to the topic: in the case of Croatia, this would concern the contact points with Italian and German. The paper analyses examples from various music genres, and shows analogies with early modern and post-modern macaronic poetry and the linguistic witticism of popular and élite cultures, including the use of phonetic analogies and other selected features to create linguistic metonymy. On that basis, the paper argues that popular music should be both synchronically and diachronically integrated into culture, and proposes a typology of linguistic interpolations and interferences.
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