Hidden rituals and public performances

Hidden rituals and public performances PDF Author: Anna-Leena Siikala
Publisher: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura
ISBN: 9522228125
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Why are Khanty shamans still active? What are the folklore collectives of Komi? Why are the rituals of Udmurts performed at cultural festivals? In their insightful ethnographic study Anna-Leena Siikala and Oleg Ulyashev attempt to answer such questions by analysing the recreation of religious traditions, myths, and songs in public and private performances. Their work is based on long term fieldwork undertaken during the 1990s and 2000s in three different places, the Northern Ob region in North West Siberia and in the Komi and Udmurt Republics. It sheds light on how different traditions are favoured and transformed in multicultural Russia today. Siikala and Ulyashev examine rituals, songs, and festivals that emphasize specificity and create feelings of belonging between members of families, kin groups, villages, ethnic groups, and nations, and interpret them from a perspective of area, state, and cultural policies. A closer look at post-Soviet Khanty, Komi and Udmurts shows that opportunities to perform ethnic culture vary significantly among Russian minorities with different histories and administrative organisation. Within this variation the dialogue between local and administrative needs is decisive.

Hidden rituals and public performances

Hidden rituals and public performances PDF Author: Anna-Leena Siikala
Publisher: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura
ISBN: 9522228125
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Get Book Here

Book Description
Why are Khanty shamans still active? What are the folklore collectives of Komi? Why are the rituals of Udmurts performed at cultural festivals? In their insightful ethnographic study Anna-Leena Siikala and Oleg Ulyashev attempt to answer such questions by analysing the recreation of religious traditions, myths, and songs in public and private performances. Their work is based on long term fieldwork undertaken during the 1990s and 2000s in three different places, the Northern Ob region in North West Siberia and in the Komi and Udmurt Republics. It sheds light on how different traditions are favoured and transformed in multicultural Russia today. Siikala and Ulyashev examine rituals, songs, and festivals that emphasize specificity and create feelings of belonging between members of families, kin groups, villages, ethnic groups, and nations, and interpret them from a perspective of area, state, and cultural policies. A closer look at post-Soviet Khanty, Komi and Udmurts shows that opportunities to perform ethnic culture vary significantly among Russian minorities with different histories and administrative organisation. Within this variation the dialogue between local and administrative needs is decisive.

Hidden Rituals and Public Performances

Hidden Rituals and Public Performances PDF Author: Anna-Leena Siikala
Publisher: BoD - Books on Demand
ISBN: 9522223077
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
Why are Khanty shamans still active? What are the folklore collectives of Komi? Why are the rituals of Udmurts performed at cultural festivals? In their insightful ethnographic study Anna-Leena Siikala and Oleg Ulyashev attempt to answer such questions by analysing the recreation of religious traditions, myths, and songs in public and private performances. Their work is based on long term fieldwork undertaken during the 1990s and 2000s in three different places, the Northern Ob region in North West Siberia and in the Komi and Udmurt Republics. It sheds light on how different traditions are favoured and transformed in multicultural Russia today. Siikala and Ulyashev examine rituals, songs, and festivals that emphasize specificity and create feelings of belonging between members of families, kin groups, villages, ethnic groups, and nations, and interpret them from a perspective of area, state, and cultural policies. A closer look at post-Soviet Khanty, Komi and Udmurts shows that opportunities to perform ethnic culture vary significantly among Russian minorities with different histories and administrative organisation. Within this variation the dialogue between local and administrative needs is decisive.

Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy

Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy PDF Author: Simon Goldhill
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521642477
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
This 1999 book discusses the ways performance is central to the practice and ideology of Athenian democracy.

Signs That Sing

Signs That Sing PDF Author: Heather Maring
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813052920
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
“A critically sophisticated leap forward in the study of early medieval literature, Signs That Sing issues a bold challenge to long-held preconceptions about the relationships underlying Old English poetry between past and present, pagan and Christian, and oral and literary.”—Joseph Falaky Nagy, author of Conversing with Angels and Ancients: Literary Myths of Medieval Ireland “Maring sidesteps simplistic oral versus literary schools of thought as she considers Old English verse as the product of an emergent hybrid form, representing a fusion of native poetics and Christian beliefs and practices. A welcome contribution to oral poetics and the understanding of the earliest period of English literature.”—John D. Niles, author of The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England 1066–1901: Remembering, Forgetting, Deciphering, and Renewing the Past “Elegantly shows how the elements of oral poetry continued to inspire the authors of Old English verse long after their conversion to Christianity. Far from being antiquarian relics, the themes of oral verse joined with learned exegesis and ritual performances to form a rich source of metaphorical meaning in Old English poetry, which this book brilliantly opens up to modern readers.”—Emily V. Thornbury, author of Becoming a Poet in Anglo-Saxon England In Signs That Sing, Heather Maring argues that oral tradition, ritual, and literate Latinbased practices are dynamically interconnected in Old English poetry. Resisting the tendency to study these different forms of expression separately, Maring contends that poets combined them in hybrid techniques that were important to the development of early English literature. Maring examines a variety of texts, including Beowulf, The Battle of Maldon, Deor, The Dream of the Rood, Genesis A/B, The Advent Lyrics, and select riddles. She shows how themes and typescenes from oral tradition—devouring-the-dead, the lord-retainer, the poet-patron, and the sea voyage—become metaphors for sacred concepts in the hands of Christian authors. She also cites similarities between oral-traditional and ritual signs to describe how poets systematically employed ritual signs in written poems to dramatic effect. The result, Maring demonstrates, is richly elaborate verse filled with shared symbols and themes that would have been highly meaningful and widely understood by audiences at the time.

Literacy Skills as Local Intangible Capital

Literacy Skills as Local Intangible Capital PDF Author: Sofia Kotilainen
Publisher: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura
ISBN: 952222796X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
This book studies the ”grey area” of the success story of rural lending libraries in the Nordic countries through the activities of people’s libraries in one area of Central Finland. The study explores the influence of social, cultural, geographical and economic phenomena, such as the spread of revivalist movements, on the reading habits of the local population and reveals interesting reasons why the establishment of elementary schools and popular libraries and the growth of functional literacy did not automatically increase the informational capital of the common people of remote regions or lead to their social advancement. This study represents a methodological experiment in describing the life history of a people’s library. The combination of collective biographical and transnational comparative methods with rarely utilized original sources in this study is innovative and has not been used before in Finnish historical research on functional literacy and popular libraries. The advantage of the comparison is that it reveals the attitudes to libraries that were characteristic of each of the cultures involved. For the people of the Finnish countryside in the late nineteenth century, libraries represented a way of acquiring new information that was still strange and unwelcome. The distribution of immaterial capital was extremely uneven with regard to age, gender and social rank. In the earlier Finnish research has not very often been analysed, how the communal status of the peasant reader and his or her personal networks in the local community affected the quality of his or her reading habits. This book shows, that the location of the library in its local community and on the other hand the status and position of its customers in their networks, had a great significance on the use of the library and thus to the improvement of reading skills.

The Finnish Case System

The Finnish Case System PDF Author: Minna Jaakola
Publisher: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura
ISBN: 9518586489
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
This volume presents an up-to-date cognitive-linguistic account of the Finnish cases that would serve the interests of an international audience. As the Finnish linguistic tradition has always considered grammatical cases to be meaningful elements, this volume also addresses the extensive work by earlier scholars from different theoretical backgrounds. The volume consists of an introduction and eleven articles. The introduction presents the system of Finnish cases and provides a brief overview of the main tenets of cognitive linguistics, offering guidance for those readers who are not familiar with cognitive linguistics. Some articles focus on one case and present a unified account of its functions, others analyse a larger group of cases that form a system (the local cases), whereas yet others address the use of cases in certain constructions (such as expressions of change). This collection of articles also discusses more general topics, such as the notion of case, questions of polysemy, the traditional division of cases into grammatical and semantic, the relationship between inflection and derivation, and the role of inflection in the categories of adpositions and adverbs.

Oral Tradition and Book Culture

Oral Tradition and Book Culture PDF Author: Pertti Anttonen
Publisher: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura
ISBN: 9518580332
Category : Crafts & Hobbies
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
Traditionally, oral traditions were considered to diffuse only orally, outside the influence of literature and other printed media. Eventually, more attention was given to interaction between literacy and orality, but it is only recently that oral tradition has come to be seen as a modern construct both conceptually and in terms of accessibility. Oral traditions cannot be studied independently from the culture of writing and reading. Lately, a new interdisciplinary interest has risen to study interconnections between oral tradition and book culture. In addition to the use and dissemination of printed books, newspapers etc., book culture denotes manuscript media and the circulation of written documents of oral tradition in and through the archive, into published collections. Book culture also intertwines the process of framing and defining oral genres with literary interests and ideologies. In addition to writing and reading, the study of oral traditions must also take into consideration the culture of publishing. The present volume highlights varied and selected aspects of the expanding field of research into oral tradition and book culture. The questions discussed include the following: How have printing and book publishing set terms for oral tradition scholarship? How have the practices of reading affected the circulation of oral traditions? Which books and publishing projects have played a key role in this and how? How have the written representations of oral traditions, as well as the roles of editors and publishers, introduced authorship to materials customarily regarded as anonymous and collective? The editors represent some of the key institutions in the study of oral traditions in Finland: the University of Helsinki, the Finnish Literature Society, and the University of Eastern Finland. The authors are folklorists, anthropologists, historians and literary historians, and scholars in information studies from Finland, Sweden, Norway, Ireland, and the United States.

Migrants and Literature in Finland and Sweden

Migrants and Literature in Finland and Sweden PDF Author: Satu Gröndahl
Publisher: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura
ISBN: 9518580359
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
Migrants and Literature in Finland and Sweden presents new comparative perspectives on transnational literary studies. This collection provides a contribution to the production of new narratives of the nation. The focus of the contributions is contemporary fiction relating to experiences of migration. The volume discusses multicultural writing, emerging modes of writing and generic innovations. When people are in motion, it changes nations, cultures and peoples. The volume explores the ways in which transcultural connections have affected the national self-understanding in the Swedish and Finnish context. It also presents comparative aspects on the reception of literary works and explores the intersectional perspectives of identities including class, gender, ethnicity, ‘race’ and disability. Further, it also demonstrates the complexity of grouping literatures according to nation and ethnicity. The case-studies are divided into three chapters: II ‘Generational Shifts’, III ‘Reception and Multicultural Perspectives’ and IV ‘Writing Migrant Identities’. The migration of Finnish labourers to Sweden is reflected in Satu Gröndahl’s and Kukku Melkas’s contributions to this volume, the latter also discusses material related to the placing of Finnish war children (‘krigsbarn’) in Sweden during World War II. Migration between Russia and Finland is discussed by Marja Sorvari, while Johanna Domokos attempts at mapping the Finnish literary field and offering a model for literary analysis. Transformations of the Finnish literary field are also the focus of Hanna-Leena Nissilä’s article discussing the reception of novels by a selection of women authors with an im/migrant background. The African diaspora and the arrival of refugees to Europe from African countries due to wars and political conflicts in the 1970s is the backdrop of Anne Heith’s analysis of migration and literature, while Pirjo Ahokas deals with literature related to the experiences of a Korean adoptee in Sweden. Migration from Africa to Sweden also forms the setting of Eila Rantonen’s article about a novel by a successful, Swedish author with roots in Tunisia. Exile, gender and disability are central, intertwined themes of Marta Ronne’s article, which discusses the work of a Swedish-Latvian author who arrived in Sweden in connection to World War II. This collection is of particular interest to students and scholars in literary and Nordic studies as well as transnational and migration studies.

Spreading the Written Word

Spreading the Written Word PDF Author: Kaisa Häkkinen
Publisher: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura
ISBN: 9522227552
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
The Protestant Reformation began in Germany in 1517, and the adoption of Lutheranism was the decisive impetus for literary development in Finland. As the Reformation required the use of the vernacular in services and ecclesiastical ceremonies, new manuals and biblical translations were needed urgently. The first Finnish books were produced by Mikael Agricola. He was born an ordinary son of a farmer, but his dedication to his studies opened up the road to leading roles in the Finnish Church. He was able to bring a total of nine works in Finnish to print, which became the foundation of literary Finnish. The first chapter outlines the historical background necessary to understand the life’s work of Mikael Agricola. The second chapter describes Agricola’s life. Chapter three presents the Finnish works published by Agricola. The fourth chapter is a depiction of Agricola’s Finnish. Agricola carried out his life’s work as part of a network of influential connections, which is described in chapter five. The sixth chapter examines the importance of Agricola’s work, research on Agricola and Agricola’s role in contemporary Finnish culture. The book mainly focuses on language and cultural history, but in terms of Church history, it also provides a review on the progression and arrival of the Reformation to Finland. Finnish is a Uralic language but the source languages of Agricola’s translations – Latin, German, Swedish and Greek – were all Indo-European languages. Thus, the oldest Finnish texts were strongly influenced by foreign elements and structures. Some of those features were later eliminated whereas others became essential constituents of standard Finnish. To illustrate this development, the Finnish in Agricola’s works has systematically been compared with the standard contemporary language.

Novels, Histories, Novel Nations

Novels, Histories, Novel Nations PDF Author: Linda Kaljundi
Publisher: BoD - Books on Demand
ISBN: 9522226297
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
Since its emergence along with Western nationalism, historical fiction has been one of the key forms for constructing national histories - and it has not lost its importance even today. This volume highlights the cultural work historical fiction performed in Finland and Estonia ca. 1800-2000 in the ongoing articulation of national identities. This book comprises of a theoretical preface, a comparative survey of Finnish and Estonian historical fiction in their socio-political contexts, case studies by literary scholars and historians and a summary chapter by Ann Rigney that places Finnish and Estonian historical fiction in a broader European perspective. This volume is highly relevant to academics and students interested in cultural memory and nationalism studies at large. As one of the very few edited collections of comparative studies on Finnish and Estonian literature, it is also a must-read to those who study Finnish and Estonian subjects in particular. As the volume is situated in the cross-disciplinary field of cultural memory studies, it demonstrates that historical fiction is a stimulating research subject for various disciplines, including history, ethnology, cultural studies, art history and film studies. In all of these fields, this book is also suitable for students at different levels of study and as a reference guide.