Around the Bloc: Uzbek Female Mullahs Make Comeback
Uzbekistan is one of the few Muslim countries where female Islamic teachers, known as otins, play an important religious role.
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Uzbekistan is one of the few Muslim countries where female Islamic teachers, known as otins, play an important religious role.
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This article presents a creative and destabilising function of art created in urban public space. This public space is here seen according to the view of belgian philosopher Chantal Mouffe as agon — battleground and confrontation of hegemonic projects. Public art is one approach to take the floor in a public debate this is why it has a political character. Krzysztof Wodiczko is a creator of this type of art who postulates creation through democratic public space art and promotes public domain. This article particularly shows his concept contained in “The Abolition of War” publication.
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This paper focuses on an African street experienced as profoundly contradictory. It departs from Adeline Masquelier`s observation that this landscape is an object of both fascination and terror, and a space of both fear and desire. The street offers jobs, goods and economic opportunities, but it can also lead to isolation, marginalization and fatalities. The paper is based on field research undertook in Omdurman in 2013 and granted by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education.
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The paper is a voice in the current of research on ludic behaviour realized within the social and cultural space of the contemporary city. The object of study is a phenomenon known on the Internet as shoefiti. The article approaches the practice of throwing shoes tied together with shoe strings onto electric or telephone cables as a category of ludic behaviour. I present the results of existing studies and indicate further research possibilities.
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This article is concerned with the importance for urban studies of the role of the sonic environment in making the dwelling space familiar, developing a sense of belonging and building a community. We analyze three selected interviews with Wroclaw residents conducted within a project on the audiosphere and the soundscape of Wroclaw. The analysis attempts at determining what sounds our respondents described as specific for their place of residence, and what emotions, meanings and values were connected with this soundscape. Our study reveals an active role played by acoustic phenomena in the process of domesticating. R.M. Schafer’s conception of soundscape and B. Latour’s actor-network theory are the theoretical background for our analysis.
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On the territory of Poland, one can find numerous buildings, which became desolate as a result of the political transformation in 1989. Many have already been demolished to make room for new housing estates. Nevertheless, some still exist, and they are only visited by people specializing in their exploration. This article concerns these explorers, whose main goal is remembering the vanishing world. This world is vanishing for good right before our eyes. The article focuses on the similarities and differences between explorers. It also presents main ideas and principles of the movement, as well as the results of a recent stage of quantitative research.
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The centuries-old Balkan custom allowed women to dress as men and take on the privileges of manhood – except sex.
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How the bizarre eccentricities of the country’s leaders and a wealth of new customs are contributing to the creation of ‘invented traditions.’
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The text presents in a popular scholarly style the most characteristic features of the personality and works of Kuzman Shapkarev. He was a Bulgarian revival activist, ethnographer, publicist and public figure, educational propagandist, awakener of Bulgarian self-identification, advocate of the truth about Bulgarians in Macedonia, fighter for the renouncing if the spiritual yoke of the Greek Patriarchate and founding of an independent Bulgarian church, one of the first members of the Bulgarian Literary Society, now Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Author of the biography is the granddaughter of Kuzman Shapkarev – Mrs. Ekaterina Shapkareva-Koleva.
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The most popular song of Momchil belongs to the heroic epos, but has kept the features of the myth-ritualistic complex, which also turns it in a ballad. All of the more important characters (the hero, his wife and sister) are situated in the epic Periphery, but they are rather in a “strong position“ only in their relation with the Center (Tsarevgrad) and the figure of the Tzar.
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The text analyzes an international plot (1009 according to Aarne- Thompson’s catalogue), which is spread not only in Europe, but also in Asia. The goal of the paper is to show that the interpretation of the episode as a play on words reveals only one aspect of its meaning. The plot is compared to some ritual practices amid the Slavs. An attempt is made to analyze its initial semantics, as well as its subsequent transformation and interpretation as an intellectual inadequacy. On the basis of this plot and some other anecdotal tales the question of the definition of the anecdotal genre in folklore is raised.
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The article presents weddings in the town of Vratsa in XX century. Tendencies connected with the changes in the age of entering a marriage, the choice of nuptial partner, prenuptial socializing and marriage ceremonies have been portrayed. An outline of wedding features of town people with different professional, educational and social status has been made along with the interrelations between historic contend and changes in weddings.
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The article refers to the poetics of East Slavic wedding songs defined as songs lamentations, songs praise, but also to the ritual formulas in matchmaking. Presented is their sustainable verbal repertoire and symbol code associated with these semantic circles: culinary symbolism (marriage consumption), agricultural and cattle-breeding symbolism (marriage plowing, etc.), hunting symbolism (marriage hunting), trade marks (marriage purchase), warrior symbolism (marriage capture and captivity), royal symbolism and titulatura (marriage enthronement) and others.
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Many colleagues are probably asking themselves what is the role of design in a symposium aimed at the link IMAGE – MYTH – TEXT. At first glance, such a connection really is relatively difficult to find. Design products build a kaleidoscope that surrounds us in the material environment of life. Often they are hardly noticeable and people are so used to utilizing them, that it all takes place in an intuitive and unconscious basis. Some of them (cell phones, computers and digital cameras) are changed almost as handkerchiefs, and others have been companion of more than one generation of the family. Authors most often remain anonymous or their manufacturer has been accepted as an author. An avalanche of design objects that surround us and build our physical environment, communicate with us by using the language of forms, lines, spots, facture of surface and not least the colors that even form their own symbolic language. Messages of this „language“ can bring additional information, can rejoice us or make us sad, cheer us up, etc. These processes are accompanied by awareness of the involvement of the general public (culture, ethnicity, family, social group). The object embodies the process of objectivation of the society as a whole, as a semantic environment, in which every individual reconstructs his relationship with her. The designer is also included in this process of social integration. Moreover – society has appointed him as a spokesman of the overall, general sense of things. The designer achieves the meaning of the object in the same way that it manifests itself in the culture – through its signifying function, communicativeness, inclusion into the cultural and artistic program of the epoch (ritual, game, style of behavior, communication). He is like a director of a play, in which he himself successively plays all the roles. When the product of the creativity of the designer gets into the user, the latter becomes a director and performer of roles (including designer’s one). In this „spectacle of things” user demonstrates its ideals of beauty, prosperity and happiness.
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The Anthropocene, a new geological era – this is a proposition which in recent years has been increasingly discussed in the scientific world, among scholars of culture, as well. McKenzie Warka’s books "Molecular Red" and "Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene" analyse the new situation in which humanity finds itself in the early twenty-first century, and proposes we start searching for new theories, practices and ethics that would be adequate for the Anthropocene era. These books also show how the Anthropocene is a cultural text, and its impact on literature, film and the visual arts. It raises the all important question of how new theories, ethics, and, above all, politics of the Anthropocene can become a force for real potential change.
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The postscript, through the anthropological researches and the analysis of autobiographical story-telling, made on request, is meant to prove the evolution and carrier of the cantors/clerks in the 20th century’s Transylvania. Who were the Levites, clerk-tutors, masters in the Calvinistic reformed church, what they did, what was the difference between this jobs and functions, what was the scope of theirs duties since 17. Century? What was the cultural and social impact when the confessional schools have been closed in Transylvania, what happened with these jobs, how the cantor carrier changed in a precise moment of history, before the 2nd World War, when the confessional schools have been nationalized (have been taken under the state control) for example, or after under the communist regime. Through the content analysis of these introspective story-telling we investigate the personal motivations and achievements of cantors in crucial moments of their lives, the inter human relationships but also the life standards ensured by this carrier. The case-study presents the biography of reformat cantor Magyarosi Sándor from Filpișu-Mic (Mureș county - Romania) born in 1912. To reconstruct the biography was very helpful his daughter Csernátoni Klára. Through the guided questions of researcher is highlight the professional aspect of character’s life.
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The paper investigates moral and social transformations in rural society in 20th century Transylvania. It starts from events of sporadic stealing in the thirties, and continues with examples of mass stealing after collectivization, as recalled by Pál Balogh (1931-2014, Valea village, Vargata commune). The moment of collectivization marked the beginning of a moral crisis with long-term effects - or, shall we rather speak about an accentuation of moral and social transformation specific to socialism in a rural context? Did everyone learn to steal so fast - or did they apply previously existing social adaptation techniques to the new political, economic and social conditions? Social memory speaks about a beginning - but data from my research on social and moral behavior in the same context before collectivization suggests that stealing has to do rather with an adaptation of old means to new conditions.
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