We kindly inform you that, as long as the subject affiliation of our 300.000+ articles is in progress, you might get unsufficient or no results on your third level or second level search. In this case, please broaden your search criteria.
This article explores the opposition between concepts of ‘emigre literature’ and ‘migration literature’. The first has a deeply rooted tradition in nineteenth and twentieth-century Polish literature. The Poles’ migrations today are typical of global culture. And yet, some clusters of issues are shared across the board, such as the attention to cultural difference.
More...
The post-war "new woman" was supposed to reject fashion as a cultural practice of the decadent bourgeois world. The paper analyzes the attempt made by the Yugoslav communist regime to establish original socialist clothing outside the influence of western systems of fashion. I will explore the characteristics of "utopian clothing" and the bases of a new aesthetic. Simple, practical, unobtrusive and appropriate clothing displayed the role of women in socialist society to the world at large, at the same time reminding women of the duties and limitations which came with the role. Even though gaudiness was declared backward, the public taste could be appeased through the use of ethno motives. Ornamentation based on the reinterpretation of traditional cultural heritage was interpreted as a defense against western influences as well as a visual display of national harmony. However, the attempt to establish a radically different course in fashion was deeply conflicting. The imposed oblivion towards old dress codes implied a look back: the production of exemplary styles mimicked not only traditional material heritage, but also western fashion of the early 1940’s.
More...
Northwest Balkans, whose major part of the population forwed by South Slavs, were Slavicised by the slavic migrations that had begin in 6th century in a period of two hundred years. In the wake of conquest of region in 15th century, unlike the other slavic groups, Islamic Slavs have entered a new political and ethnic formation based on Turkish culture and Islamic faith. From Literature to folklore and from architecture to music, the source of new civilization was that Turkish culture and Islamic faith. Muslim Slavs; lived in that region in other words Bosniaks, development of verbal culture products in the context of creative and execution, came true in a peculiar way differently and independently from the other Slavic groups. Under the different purposes many European and American researches visited the region and reconded the products of oral culture and some of them examined and evaluated those materials in the light of scientific methods. Oral culture products belonging to the South Slavs were also recorded in the context of European cultural conventions. This study inform the sources of Bosniaks vernacular products based on Turkish and İslamic orient and also enlighten the recording style in a systematic way and with certain methods.
More...
This article outlines the state of research on dreams and dreaming. Windt proposes a new structure to describe conscious experiences while dreaming. Building on methodological and theoretical achievements in the natural sciences as well as philosophy, she indicates new directions for the development of a philosophical theory of dreaming and related concepts of dreaming, wakefulness and consciousness. Windt discusses the phenomenology of dreaming as well as the relations between the sleeping physical body and the sleeping ‘I’. This allows her to explore alternative states of consciousness and their relationship to dreams and dreaming.
More...
Neuger explores how local terms in Wisława Szymborska’s poetry are translated into English (by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh) and Swedish (Anders Bodegård). Problematic aspects include proper nouns (such as Zabierzów in the poem ‘A Tale Begun’ or the shoes from Chełmek in ‘Stage Fright’), the names of Polish dishes and culinary customs, as well as family relationships (the Swedish translator must decide if the grandma in Zabierzow is a maternal or a paternal grandmother).
More...
The Radcliffe Line at Wagah is now a world famous tourist spot where each evening thousands of tourists gather to witness the ritual of lowering the flags of India and Pakistan. Visiting the place is kind of pilgrimage for the Indians, (and must be for the Pakistanis as well), and the Wagah has gradually evolved into a shrine of patriotism. The ceremony of lowering the flag lasts about an hour when on both sides of the border there remain a kind of celebratory atmosphere—and the thing celebrated is nationalism. The patriotic frenzy, however, leads to a menacing display virtual violence as the cry varat mata ki jai ( victory to mother India) on the one side and Pakisthan jindabad(long live Pakistan) on the other bangs upon the ear and fills the air around. Each side tries to supersede the other; the cry gets louder and louder and the tension rises as if there will be an instant war. It leads the sensitive mind into troubled history of partition of India and to the indelible trauma of communal violence—the wound that the people of the subcontinent sustained during and in the aftermath of the partition in 1947. The paper will attempt to analyse the nationalistic ceremony at Wagah and will explore the problematic nature Indian nationalism and national identity. The objective is to examine the paradoxical nature of the Wagah rituals which though aimed at consolidating national identity ends up disrupting it. In the course of discussion, three cultural texts, namely, the ceremony at Wagah, the memoir of Sadat Hassan Manto‘s last days in Mumbai, and Shabnam Virmani‘s documentary film Had Anhad (Bounded Boundless) will act as intertexts of the article.
More...
Artificial people are present in every culture and in every period. Even without further analysis it can be seen that not only in fairy tales, mythology and science fiction movies, we find in their presence. This theme is as old as literature. It is at the same time very complex and complicated. It contains the hidden essence of humanity – how artificial people are portrayed, is really a measure of empathy, compassion, respect for the other person or tolerance. Whether artificial people are monsters or victims, always ends the same way – burned alive by angry mob, left to oblivion at the bottom of the sea or shot in the street, artificial people are tragic figures. This work tries to answer the question, what is the essence of the phenomenon, what are the roots and what is related to the fact that artificial people are brought to life, regardless of the historical period or geographical area in which the author lives. It helps to understand the phenomenon, which is the need for people to create their artificial duplicates, and to answer the question, what are the associated fears and concerns and fascinations.
More...
Graffiti is both a hermetic artistic work and a kind of visual communication. It can be treated either as an independent subculture of writers or as a visual element of the hiphop subculture. The graffiti artists create a global subculture in which some local characteristics, such as sociolects and microhistories, may be found. Broadening the scope of this phenomenon is connected with its homogenization as well as the hybridization of culture and the imperialism of the American cultural models. This article is an attempt to explain what graffiti is in the global and local context. It comprises a description of the selected issues, such as globalization and commercialization of this phenomenon, its place in the cyberspace and the world of art. This article has been written based on the studies concerning this phenomenon, ethnological qualitative research conducted between 2009 and 2011 as well as the currently conducted (since 2011) anthropological research concerning the iconography of the contemporary youth subcultures.
More...
Street art is a relatively new art form, which its aesthetic categorization still raise some controversy. In this perspective, the author attempts to outline a framework which can be a basis according to which particular works can be interpreted as a “pure” street art. Her reasoning is based on Greenberg’s artistic formalism thesis. This article is an attempt to answer the question on what are the characteristic traits of such art form, and what formal conditions must a work meet to be considered as a “pure” work of street art.
More...
Texts in this issue show different emanations of the new/old environment, which is the internet for folkloristic content. This is the everyday life that we observe and in which we participate. After all, the Internet itself is becoming a creation of a "folk" imagination, saturated with multimedia narratives, which - like in traditional folklore - have a collective author. So far, there was no such anonymous medium that allowed the rapid spread of folk narratives about the world. By entering the discussion forums, blogs, fan sites and other forms of online activity, we realize that the internet reproduces the need for community, but in a technological form. And such need is always built on stories.
More...
Alongside the rapid development of new media, in particular the Internet, the processes of shaping new paradigm of a folk-type culture and emergence of the phenomena referred to as e-folklore have been increasing. The e-folklore, as a part of the network culture, is radically different from traditional folklore. The content, which was present outside of the network, is naturally transferred to the Internet, mainly by its users. New technologies successfully inspire the users' creativity, thanks to which old content is gradually modified and changed, gaining new forms (e.g. the so called chain letters, false virus warnings, urban legends, conspiracy theories, miraculous events, etc.). The new forms of humour expressions are of particular interest (a new type of the Internet joke, photoshopping, memes), which lead to the emergence of a global humour culture and the phenomenon of visual folklore. The users' activity in the net can be characterised as folkloristic and is an example of the upward convergence (according to Jenkins), which supports the need to participate in a defined, virtual community, in the realm of common emotions and imagination.
More...
Article is divided into two parts. First one examines the condition under folklore is created on Facebook portal. I’m examining communication and participation rituals and customs. Second focuses on more general mechanisms of functioning of this social medium. The main emphasis is put on the relation between technological infrastructure and users action. I’m introducing the concept of collective disintentionalization, which occurs because Facebook’s regulation that encourage rather short term participation contained within the portal.This mechanism forces users to create folklores as an strategy of resistance to hyperinstrumentalization. In the summary I’m showing how we could speak of evolution in Facebook from creating folklore to the role of existential prostheses. Also cultural importance of this social medium is strongly emphasized.
More...
The paper answers the question, how folkloristic narrations participate in the social construction of reality. The notion of folklore relates here - in accordance with propositions of P.G. Bogatyrev and R. Jakobson – to poetic texts aimed at la langue. Such texts are conventional in the sense that their semantic structures are broadly reproduced inside one communicative society. Habitualisation based on more or less accurate repeatability of stereotypical representations,motives, action scenarios, rationalisations and motivations, is the source of relatively stabile world image. Folkloristic texts participate this way in constitution of experiences, beliefs and cognitive (noetic and behavioral) habitsof its agents. In the folkloristic creativity the collective images of the past which legitimize changing social institutions are very often unnoticed adjusted to such changes. Hence, narratives reproduced within a society which are considered by its members as memorates are very often fabulated. The author focuses especially on connotation which seems to be crucial for “tacit“ legitimizations of various phenomena. He follows diverse reciprocal legitimizations between representations in folkloristic narratives and representations spread by media.
More...
This article examines the language that we used to use in Internet communication. Traditional bilateral division into written and spoken language is inadequate nowadays. Internet speech, that I named ”third language” has its own specific character, based on both: written and spoken varieties of language. These influence on it’s ortography, expressions, syntax and even phonetics. For example it is necessary, like in written language, to use some tools: computer or smartphone, but the ‘digital’ language is also spontaneous and free of deep reflection, just like the spoken one. In my article I examine similarities and differences to both of these. But Internet communiation is not only a contamination of two traditional varieties. I also explored typical features of third language, like specific shortcuts or emoticons as a substitute of facial expression. Due to it’s expansion, connected with technological development, we need to get used to treat it as a language variety of standard value,”third language”.
More...
The article deals with the problems of the efolklore in the context of the e-humanitarianism. E-humanitarianism is interactive phenomenon, it enriches forms and mechanisms of contemporary folklore. Its success is often determined by the speed of the spread of information and content of spontaneous circulation on the world of tragedy and crisis. Article argues that e-humanity is a sign of unwavering vitality of folklore in contemporary culture.
More...
The article aims to characterise the phenomenon which is a manifestation of the Internet-based religious folklore – Internet accounts of revelations which have a clear spiritual base. Due to the connections of such e-visions with religion, in order to illustrate them it is key to describe the types of religious content occurring in cyberspace. Within it, four dimensions of spirituality may be distinguished, and the folklore depending on the occurrence of various e-revelations is to be assigned to two of them: the one concerning the account character of the Internet which, as a communication tool, allows the visionaries to reach a wide audience, and the one connected with the emergence of new religious phenomena on the Internet which are only quite lightly related to the big official religions such as Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and other. Folklore is ‘people’s power’, therefore, in the case of its variety that consists in informing about one’s mystical experiences via the Internet, the superior role of any church authority figures is out of the question. The e-revelations are experienced by ‘amateurs’ and not by the representatives of the clergy or theologians, which locates the phenomenon in the sphere of the currently dominant selective (private) religiousness and the one which blurs all church hierarchies. The text presents numerous examples of e-places connected with visions, both the religious and the quasi-religious ones – they are shown, among other things, from the angle of the currently changing Marian revelations. For the author, an important exemplification of the discussed e-folklore are also all services on the apocalyptic prophecies – although they sometimes go beyond the strictly religious discourse (and they enter the pop-cultural one, for example), still the mystical experiences pertaining to the end of the world are always located within the sphere of spirituality. The end of the article offers several paths to be followed in further research on this part of e-folklore which are the religious visions.
More...
The article discusses the assembly of death lore including funeral rites, `rituals of sorrow`, their textual representations and other media artifacts (for example, digital gravestones, memorials, books of condolence, emotical grave candles and other) appearing as a new folklore currently created in cyberenvironments. The practices, artifacts and texts are appearing in a following site-genres: different kinds of virtual human, pet and emotion cemeteries, cybergenealogical sites in their communal and individual embodiment, social portals and environments created by „angel`s moms”, or bereaved mothers. Their `rituals of sorrow` can be account as a proposal of innovative cultural practice of grief.
More...
“To be, or not to be, this is the question”, this famous sentence from Shakespeare’s Hamlet is very actual nowadays in the context of Internet, but maybe much important question is: how we are exist in Internet? First of all I would like to surpass the ideas about duality of physical and digital reality in the context of human identity. By the psychoanalytical tools I would like to show my fieldwork experience on the ground of human sexuality in Second Life. It will allow me to see human practice in Internet from different angle. From my perspective man be came cyborg, which exist as a computer virus. I will show his agency using wide perspective of theoretical tools from Computer Science to Marxist theory. It will help me to explain our hyperactivity in Internet, and why it became so important in our lives.
More...