Download or read book Pro ethnologia written by and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Ethnologia Balkanica written by and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Mythic Discourses written by Frog and published by Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura. This book was released on 2012-12-31 with total page 487 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mythic discourses in the present day show how vernacular heritage continues to function and be valuable through emergent interpretations and revaluations. At the same time, continuities in mythic images, motifs, myths and genres reveal the longue durée of mythologies and their transformations. The eighteen articles of Mythic Discourses address the many facets of myth in Uralic cultures, from the Finnish and Karelian world-creation to Nenets shamans, offering multidisciplinary perspectives from twenty eastern and western scholars. The mythologies of Uralic peoples differ so considerably that mythology is approached here in a broad sense, including myths proper, religious beliefs and associated rituals. Traditions are addressed individually, typologically, and in historical perspective. The range and breadth of the articles, presenting diverse living mythologies, their histories and relationships to traditions of other cultures such as Germanic and Slavic, all come together to offer a far richer and more developed perspective on Uralic traditions than any one article could do alone.
Download or read book The Beauty of the Primitive written by Andrei A. Znamenski and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-07-16 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the past forty years shamanism has drawn increasing attention among the general public and academics. There is an enormous literature on shamanism, but no one has tried to understand why and how Western intellectual and popular culture became so fascinated with the topic. Behind fictional and non-fictional works on shamanism, Andrei A. Znamenski uncovers an exciting story that mirrors changing Western attitudes toward the primitive. The Beauty of the Primitive explores how shamanism, an obscure word introduced by the eighteenth-century German explorers of Siberia, entered Western humanities and social sciences, and has now become a powerful idiom used by nature and pagan communities to situate their spiritual quests and anti-modernity sentiments. The major characters of The Beauty of the Primitive are past and present Western scholars, writers, explorers, and spiritual seekers with a variety of views on shamanism. Moving from Enlightenment and Romantic writers and Russian exile ethnographers to the anthropology of Franz Boas to Mircea Eliade and Carlos Castaneda, Znamenski details how the shamanism idiom was gradually transplanted from Siberia to the Native American scene and beyond. He also looks into the circumstances that prompted scholars and writers at first to marginalize shamanism as a mental disorder and then to recast it as high spiritual wisdom in the 1960s and the 1970s. Linking the growing interest in shamanism to the rise of anti-modernism in Western culture and intellectual life, Znamenski examines the role that anthropology, psychology, environmentalism, and Native Americana have played in the emergence of neo-shamanism. He discusses the sources that inspire Western neo-shamans and seeks to explain why lately many of these spiritual seekers have increasingly moved away from non-Western tradition to European folklore. A work of intellectual discovery, The Beauty of the Primitive shows how scholars, writers, and spiritual seekers shape their writings and experiences to suit contemporary cultural, ideological, and spiritual needs. With its interdisciplinary approach and engaging style, it promises to be the definitive account of this neglected strand of intellectual history.
Download or read book The Russian Kurosawa written by Olga V. Solovieva and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-04-03 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Russian Kurosawa offers a new historical perspective on the work of the renowned Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa. It uncovers Kurosawa's debt to the intellectual tradition of Japanese-Russian democratic dissent, reflected in the affinity for Kurosawa's worldview expressed by such Russian directors as Grigory Kozintsev and Andrei Tarkovsky. Through a detailed discussion of the Russian subtext of Kurosawa's cinema, most clearly manifested in the director's films based on Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gorky, and Arseniev, the book shows that Kurosawa used Russian intertexts to deal with the most politically sensitive topics of postwar Japan. Locating the director in the cultural tradition of Russian-inflected Japanese anarchism, the book challenges prevalent views of Akira Kurosawa as an apolitical art house director or a conformist studio filmmaker of muddled ideological alliances by offering a philosophically consistent picture of the director's participation in postwar debates on cultural and political reconstruction.
Download or read book Estonia s Transition to the EU written by Marju Lauristin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-11-25 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two decades on from the start of the ‘Singing Revolution’, and five years on from the Baltic States’ entry to the European Union, the time is ripe to take stock of Estonia’s remarkable transition from Soviet Republic to EU member state and address the challenges - some new, some ongoing - and uncertainties that have arisen following the country’s entry to the EU. This book locates the post-accession period within the broader sweep of post-communist transition and diagnoses the problems facing Estonia as the global economic downturn takes hold and a new mood of pessimism reigns in Central and Eastern Europe. Until recently, Estonia enjoyed an international reputation as an emerging high-growth ‘tiger economy’ and reform pioneer, not least in the sphere of IT. This economic success story, however, masked the continued problematic political and social legacies of the Soviet period, including the issue of ethnic integration, which again hit the headlines following riots in Tallinn in April 2007. This fully up-to-date appraisal - the first in English - covers all of the key issues, and will appeal to specialists in Baltic and Central and Eastern European politics and society, as well as to anyone with an interest in European integration more generally. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Baltic Studies.
Download or read book Baltic Biographies at Historical Crossroads written by Aili Aarelaid-Tart and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-06-12 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lying on the coastline of the Baltic Sea, the small but strategically well located Baltic territories have historically found themselves in the middle of many power struggles between larger states, empires and other power-holders. This book brings together life stories from five generations of Balts, living through the diverse and recurring transformations of the 20th century; occupations, war, independence, totalitarianism, and democratic rule and market economy.
Download or read book Memory and Pluralism in the Baltic States written by Eva-Clarita Pettai and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-11 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Memories, both in individual and collective form, still have a significant impact on how people relate to political processes in Europe today. While much has been written about top-down attempts by states and political actors to mould people’s memories of the past through public commemoration, textbooks or monuments, this volume takes a view from below by focusing on different types of societal actors and the ways in which they interact with the political world in order to influence collective memory. Presented within a comprehensive conceptual framework, the empirical cases focus on three countries of the former Soviet Union: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. They show that different or even antagonistic perceptions of the recent past not only appear between different ethnic groups, but also between socio-economic groups, different age groups or generations as well as between women and men. Moreover, they give an impressive account on the multiple ways in which these perceptions empower individuals and groups to seek greater influence in the construction of collective memory. The volume, therefore, not only provides a valuable and fresh perspective on the relationship between social memory and democratic politics, but also contributes to post-Communist regional studies in the enlarged European Union. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Baltic Studies.
Download or read book Contemporary Pagan and Native Faith Movements in Europe written by Kathryn Rountree and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2015-06-01 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pagan and Native Faith movements have sprung up across Europe in recent decades, yet little has been published about them compared with their British and American counterparts. Though all such movements valorize human relationships with nature and embrace polytheistic cosmologies, practitioners’ beliefs, practices, goals, and agendas are diverse. Often side by side are groups trying to reconstruct ancient religions motivated by ethnonationalism—especially in post-Soviet societies—and others attracted by imported traditions, such as Wicca, Druidry, Goddess Spirituality, and Core Shamanism. Drawing on ethnographic cases, contributors explore the interplay of neo-nationalistic and neo-colonialist impulses in contemporary Paganism, showing how these impulses play out, intersect, collide, and transform.
Download or read book Creating Diversities written by Anna-Leena Siikala and published by Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura. This book was released on 2007-07-07 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The effects of globalization and the momentous changes to the political map of Europe have led to a world in which multiculturalism and ethnic differences have become issues of increasing importance. In Nordic countries, relationships between new immigrants, local ethnic groups and majorities are created in ongoing and sometimes heated discussions. In transforming multicultural societies, folklore has taken on new manifestations and meanings. How can folklore studies illuminate the present cultural, political and historical changes? "Creating Diversities. Folklore, Religion and the Politics of Heritage", edited by Anna-Leena Siikala, Barbro Klein and Stein R. Mathisen, seeks answers to this question. It emphasizes two important factors in the cultural and political exchanges among historical minorities, recent immigrants, and the majority groups dictating the conditions of these exchanges. The first factor is religion, which is a powerful tool in the construction of ethnic selves and in the establishment of boundaries between groups. The second factor is the role of national and regional folklore archives and ethnographic and cultural historical museums which create ideas and images of minorities. These representations, created in different political climates, affect the general understanding of the people depicted. Fifteen well-known folklorists and ethnographers from Norway, Sweden, Finland, Estonia and the United States offer insights and background material on these problems. In addition to immigrants and ethnic minorities in the Nordic countries, especially the Sámi, examples are sought from among the Finno-Ugrian minorities in Russia and the Nordic population in North America.
Download or read book A Pragmatic Alliance written by Vladas Sirutavičius and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-10 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses the political cooperation between Jews and Lithuanians in the Tsarist Empire from the last decades of the 19th century until the early 1920s. These years saw the transformation of both Jewish and Lithuanian political life. Within the Jewish community, the previously dominant integrationists were now challenged both by those who believed that the Jews were not a religious but an ethnic or proto-nationalist group and those who believed that only with the abolition of capitalism and the establishment of a socialist state would Jewish integration be possible. Among the Lithuanians, the emergence of a modern national identity became increasingly prevalent.
Download or read book Baltic Musics Baltic Musicologies written by Kevin C Karnes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is the first to bring together music scholars working on Baltic topics from throughout Europe, North America, and the Middle East for the purpose of exploring the impact of Nazi and Soviet occupation (1940-91) and the restoration of republican independence upon the production of musicological knowledge in and about the Baltic States of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Its collected essays sketch, for the first time, post-Soviet histories of the sociological dimensions of music study in the region, and examine methodological and ethical problems raised by music scholarship. They shed new light on such topics as the advent of Lithuanian musical modernism, the ecumenicity of Christian musics in Estonia, and the effects of Soviet nationalities policy upon the Latvian musicological discourse. Together, they confront those aspects of Baltic music study that still bear the marks of the Nazi and Soviet experience, and they suggest ways in which the turbulent cultural and political histories of the region might be negotiated by scholars presently active in the field. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Baltic Studies.
Download or read book The Finno Ugric Republics and the Russian State written by Rein Taagepera and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-11-26 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 2000. This text provides a survey of the peoples who speak Finno-Ugric languages and have titular republics or autonomous regions within the post-Soviet Russian federation. Their languages have set them apart from their Turkic and Russian neighbours and helped to preserve their distinct identity, including their animist religious practices. Previous works on this subject were written before the demise of the USSR so that information on the subject was screened by Soviet censors. In particular, this book explores the principal threats now facing these peoples - as much environmental as political. Although communism has gone, the exploitation of natural resources threatens the region's ecology, while the new rulers in the Kremlin seem set to continue their predecessors' oppressive policies towards the Finno-Ugrians. The book is written with commitment to the threatened human and political rights of these endangered peoples.
Download or read book The Nonreligious written by Phil Zuckerman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-02-01 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The number of nonreligious people has increased dramatically over the past several decades, yet scholarship on the nonreligious is severely lacking. In response to this critical gap in knowledge, The Nonreligious provides a comprehensive summation and analysis of existing social scientific research on secular people and societies. The authors present a thorough overview of existing knowledge while also drawing upon ongoing research and suggesting ways to improve our understanding of this growing population. Offering a research- and data-based examination of the nonreligious, this book will be an invaluable source of information and a foundation for further scholarship. Written in clear, accessible language that will appeal to students and the increasingly interested general reader, The Nonreligious provides an unbiased and thorough account of relevant existing scholarship within the social sciences that bears on lived experiences of the nonreligious.
Download or read book Cosmologies of Suffering written by Agita Lūse and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-01-14 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The edited volume elaborates on a range of themes that emerged during a workshop of the 8th biennial of the European Association of Social Anthropologists in Vienna in 2004. Among these themes are: the paradoxical permanence of ‘transition’ in post-communist countries, the accompanying persistence of social suffering and the structural conditions that give rise to it. A final theme focuses on the resources that people mobilize to cope with suffering and trauma. Ways of coping manifest a stance towards agency shared by sufferers from diverse post-communist regions, such as ethnically divided Croatia, politically and economically unstable Zimbabwe, relatively more peaceful countries such as Hungary, Poland and Slovenia, and, finally, two religiously unique areas in Siberia, Russia. Ethnographic accounts from these diverse settings testify that agency has often involved relinquishing reliance on one’s self and turning towards a power higher than the self, whether this is conceptualized through the lens of transcendence, religion, or cosmology.
Download or read book The Enigma of Isaac Babel written by Gregory Freidin and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2009-10-21 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A literary cult figure on a par with Franz Kafka, Isaac Babel has remained an enigma ever since he disappeared, along with his archive, inside Stalin's secret police headquarters in May of 1939. Made famous by Red Cavalry, a book about the Russian civil war (he was the world's first "embedded" war reporter), another book about the Jewish gangsters of his native Odessa, and yet another about his own Russian Jewish childhood, Babel has been celebrated by generations of readers, all craving fuller knowledge of his works and days. Bringing together scholars of different countries and areas of specialization, the present volume is the first examination of Babel's life and art since the fall of communism and the opening of Soviet archives. Part biography, part history, part critical examination of the writer's legacy in Russian, European, and Jewish cultural contexts, The Enigma of Isaac Babel will be of interest to the general reader and specialist alike.
Download or read book Baltic Socialism Remembered written by Ene Kõresaar and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it mean to tell a life story? How is one’s memory of communism shaped by family, profession, generation and religion? Do post-communist Baltic states embrace similar memories? The Baltic states represent not only a geographical but also a mnemonic region. The mental maps of people who live on this territory are shaped by memories of Soviet socialism. Baltic Socialism Remembered captures the workings of the memory of diverse groups of people who inhabit the region: teachers, officials, young people, women, believers. It comes as no surprise that their memories do not overlap, but often contradict to other groups and to official narratives. Baltic Socialism Remembered is a rare attempt to engage with the mnemonic worlds of social groups and individuals rather than with memory politics and monumental history. The contributors try to chart unpredictable ways in which public and national memory affect individual memory, and vice versa. Understanding complexity and diversity of memory workings in such compact region as the Baltic states will enable a more nuanced policy-making. This book was originally published as a special issue of Journal of Baltic Studies.
