Martor Journal. The Museum of The Romanian Peasant Anthropology Journal; no29, p. 207-217., 2024
Whether harmonious or tense over time, the ways in which encounters
with wild animals are narrate... more Whether harmonious or tense over time, the ways in which encounters with wild animals are narrated reflect perspectives on nature and human interaction with it. In this regard, the article reveals documents recorded by the author during fieldworks conducted among Carpathian shepherds.
Martor. The Museum of the Romanian Peasant Anthropology Journal. Bucharest. p. 125-137, 2023
An interesting phenomenon of incubation ritual was attested in open air in southwest Dobruja at t... more An interesting phenomenon of incubation ritual was attested in open air in southwest Dobruja at the very beginning of the 20th century, at a healing stone cross that, two decades later, was enclosed by an Orthodox Christian monastery. The article focuses on the narrative strategy that asserts Christian authority over the site. The strategy includes a corpus of legends that associate the origin of the cross with the local martyrdom past, its miraculous finding, and a modern hagiography whose main character is a thaumaturgic monk. The dream as a realm for divine communication, represents a theme that coagulates the entire narrative corpus and contributes greatly to the construction of a sanctuary. Over the last decades, energy and spiritual healing practitioners have enriched the group of visitors to the monastery.
Incantatio. An International Journal on Charms, Charming and Charmers, 2023
Within the contexts of charming, as it has been recorded among Romanians, the article aims to dis... more Within the contexts of charming, as it has been recorded among Romanians, the article aims to disclose the meaning of the theme of fairies’ taboo violation as a precondition to gain sacred knowledge. In this regard, various certain incantations addressed to the fairies are examined, along with legends and third person accounts that underline the role played by these supernatural entities as numinous agents for initiation to the `secret` register of knowledge through a special form of communication, which in modern neuroscience terminology might be referred to as an ‚altered state of consciousness’, but which, in the emic terms of magic medicine is described as a disease, namely being taken by the fairies . In concordance with the idea of mutual exchanges between humans and the numinous, the one who accept the fairies’ authority and pay the price of being tormented by them, gain the gift of therapeutic and divinatory abilities.
“Werewolf Legends”, Coordinators: Blécourt Willem de, Mencej Mirjam, Palgrave Macmillan, Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic Series, p. 158-181, 2023
The imaginary profile of the werewolf is articulated on a complex of beliefs and ideas paradigmat... more The imaginary profile of the werewolf is articulated on a complex of beliefs and ideas paradigmaticaly organized in patterns that get concretness and syntagmatic coherence during the effective performance situations of telling stories about humans who have been turned into wolves, hence got a supernatural, secondary nature added to their first natural status. My contribution to this volume explores figures of werewolves as configured in a corpus of narratives recorded in a montane area of Western Carpathians, Romania, narratives that interconnect two distinct situations: the story teller met a werewolf and, secondly, the story teller is the very werewolf. How is the generic picture of the human-wild animal hybrid re-constructed when the werewolf (the local Romanian terms are pricolici or strigoi lupi) is embodied by a certain person with a familiar face? The fantastic is replaced with ontic anxiety and the narratives encipher attitudes and images that axologically encode the predestination – freewill question, whose terms seem to depend on the teller’s involvement in the very narrated events. Hence, having a focus on what it should mean to be a werewolf, this study brings in the fore the case of certain men who are said to be pricolici. Based on an artistic documentary, a literary reportage, and transcriptions of ethnologic field recordings, each of them with specific poetics, generic conventions, rigors, demands, author, and destinations, my aim is to describe how werewolf’s (self) image and, in consequence, his behaviour, are constructed at the interaction between his own philosophical and religious quest, on the one hand, and the cultural code of the community, including the local profile of the werewolves and the social and religious attitudes towards them, on the other hand.
REPRÉSENTATIONS DE LA VIERGE MARIE ENTRE CULTE OFFICIEL ET VÉNÉRATION LOCALE TEXTES ET IMAGES Études réunies par Cristina Bogdan, Cristina-Ioana Dima et Emanuela Timotin. Heidelberg. ISBN 978-3-948670-09-2, p. 313-322, 2022
Martor. The Museum of the Romanian Peasant Anthropology Review , 2021
This article concerns only tangentially the broad field of food. The focus will be on the handwri... more This article concerns only tangentially the broad field of food. The focus will be on the handwritten recipe notebook as an arena for interferences between orality and literacy; these interferences articulates the texts with their paratextual uses, some of which explicitly included in the very body of the recipes (the directions), some other autonomously developed from them. Secondly, the very structure, configuration, use, and meanings of such a notebook go beyond its direct primary purpose, i.e., cooking directions, turning it into a multileveled cultural product. A handwritten recipe notebook is not a mere domestic collection of recipes, but a material support for an immaterial tradition that combines culinary knowledge with commensality practices. These are formalized texts (a title, a list of ingredients, and directions) activated through the oral performance of a formalized setting (the food preparation process), which combines sequences of gestures instead of (or together with) words, or/and through a writing activity (copying a model or transcribing the recipe after dictation). The final material artefact (namely the dish and the written recipe) incorporates the syncretic and immaterial memories of all previous performances. A recipe notebook is not a simple anthology of texts either, it is instead a subjective ‘critical edition’ which grows page by page, according to imperceptible selection criteria; with the passing of time, the pages become impregnated with smells, traces of pots of oil or sugar, children’s fingerprints, figurative drawings, etc. Keywords: cooking, performance, informal knowledge, handwritten notebook, memory.
"The Language of magic", edited by Eleonora Cianci and Nicholas Wolf, Editioni Universitarie di Lettere Economia Dirito, Milano. Volume publicato con il contributo dell' Universita degli Studi 'G. Annuntio' di Chieti Pescara, Dipartimento di Lingue, Letterature e Culture Moderne, 2022
Coming from the early modern Christian times, The Dream of the Mother of God was, and still is, a... more Coming from the early modern Christian times, The Dream of the Mother of God was, and still is, a text with an ambiguous status. As an apocryph, it was discouraged by the official church(es), together with its ritual manipulation for therapeutic, divinatory, apotropaic, and other human purposes that involve supernatural. On the other hand, it was very popular among believers (including clerics), partly for its inner dramatic images and sensitive potential and partly for the very rituals the church condemned it for. Categorized as charm from an etic point of view and as a prayer from the emic point of view, the Dream gets a third dimension once it entered in the contemporary magazines’ pages and internet circulation, being reshaped in concordance with new conventions and strategies and with postmodern expectations. Keywords: apocrypha; Mother of God; orality-literacy; power of words; Romanian legends; vernacular religiosity.
Incantatio. An International Journal on Charms, Charmers and Charming, 2014
His scientific interests are related to the Latvian charming tradition, calendar customs, traditi... more His scientific interests are related to the Latvian charming tradition, calendar customs, traditional music, and the Latvian diaspora in Siberia.
Racursiuni etnologice. In Honorem Silviu Angelescu, editor Adrian Stoicescu, Editura Universităţii Bucureşti, Bucureşti, p. 59-66, 2022
Copilul e plictisit. Mama-i cântă, dar nu-l poate scoate din plictiseală. Atunci îşi ia refugiul ... more Copilul e plictisit. Mama-i cântă, dar nu-l poate scoate din plictiseală. Atunci îşi ia refugiul în altă distracţie. Prinde cu degetul cel mare şi cel arătător de la mâna dreaptă pielcăluţa dosului mânei băiatului şi trăgând-o în sus, cu mână cu tot, cântă:-Piţigaie, gaie/Ce duci în tigaie?/-Un picior de oaie!/Cine ţi l-a dat?/-Popa din Bărgău/Ţină-l Dumnezeu. La vorbele Ţină-l Dumnezeu, îi lasă mânuţa în jos şi-l gâdilă frumos la foale, până ce îi stârneşte râsul şi copilul sare din plictiseală şi râzând zice: fă, mamă! (Simion Florea Marian, Nașterea la români).
Acta Ethnographica Hungarica, 64(2), p. 311-320, 2019
The images, characters, and events featured in a charm enter into mutual, organic relations with ... more The images, characters, and events featured in a charm enter into mutual, organic relations with other images, characters, and events that are not explicitly included in the given text but contribute implicitly to the overall significance of the charm. The aim of the current article is to reveal the unspoken components of St. Elijah narrative file embedded in the deep horizon of beliefs and knowledge implied by a given charm. Following the charm step by step, I point out items that imply the unvoiced-but still present-level of images and beliefs taken from the non-charming narrative corpus. As a strong biblical character, St. Elijah (who is present in both the Old and New Testaments and also suggested in the Apocalypse) is the protagonist of a rich canonical and apocryphal legendary corpus developed in Hebrew, Christian, and Muslim traditions through written, oral, and figurative means. At least in the case of Romanian folklore, this corpus is still active. Recently I wrote a typological monograph of St. Elijah's profile in Romanian folklore, which I hope to be useful for further comparative studies dedicated to this figure with a trans-cultural and trans-religious presence. It is not my intention to further develop the topic here, but a brief description might be useful for a better understanding of the charm my article deals with. The research will be published as a book (typology, comments, corpus of texts) in early 2020. Here is the typological scheme: I-St. Elijah is a religious vindicator and revenger 1 The article was written in the frame of the ERC project nr. 32421, Vernacular religion on the boundary of Eastern and Western Christianity: Continuity, changes and interactions, and in the frame of the project Narratives about fantastic legendary entities (Naraţiuni despre reprezentări legendare fantastice) of the Institute of Ethnography and Folklore "Constantin Brailoiu" in Bucharest.
1918-2018. Limba și cultura română, structuri fundamentale ale identității naționale: evaluări, perspective, Ofelia Ichim (coord.), TractusArte, București, pp. 461-470, 2018
Personaj cu prezență biblică vetero și neotestamentară (explicită în Schimbarea la Față și sugera... more Personaj cu prezență biblică vetero și neotestamentară (explicită în Schimbarea la Față și sugerată în Apocalipsa), căruia îi este dedicată o sărbătoare respectată în calendarele iudaic și creștin, Sfântul Ilie este protagonistul principal al unui bogat dosar narativ, canonic şi apocrif, scris şi oral, care, el puţin în cazul folclorului românesc are calitatea de a fi deschis și viu; aceasta nu doar în sensul că istoriile îi sunt (re)povestite, ci și că sunt adaugate altele noi, cele mai multe structurate în jurul temei pedepsirii celor care nu îi respectă sărbătoarea, a tunetelor și trăznetelor din timpul furtunii, sau a ploilor care vor veni ca urmare a rugăciunilor adresate acestui sfânt intransigent, justițiar, îmbunat în cele din urmă de o văduvă din Sarepta. Prin actualizarea un amplu repertoriu legendar de expresie verbală şi figurativă, se configurează profilul religios al Sfântului Ilie, care, până acum s-a bucurat din partea etnologilor îndeosebi de interpretări de factură mitologizantă, prin care i s-a atribuit (oarecum expeditiv) calitatea păgână de "zeu" (sau fost zeu) al fulgerului şi al trăznetului, al cerului, al soarelui (Helios) etc. Lectura legendelor populare româneşti hagiografice, cosmogonice sau meteorologice în relaţie cu textul biblic referitor la profetul Ilie, duce, însă, la constatări interesante, care justifică aprofundarea şi reconsiderarea acestor afirmaţii, cel puțin în ceea ce privește cultura română folclorică. Recent, am redactat o monografie tipologică a Sfântului Ilie în folclorul românesc 1 , care surprinde complexitatea și caracterul oarecum condtradictoriu al acestui personaj. Lucrarea va fi publicată în viitorul apropiat și sperăm că va fi un instrument de lucru folositor studiilor comparative dedicate acestui sfânt cu prezență transculturală și transreligioasă. Pentru a-i configura profilul, am analizat 435 de texte pe care le-am supus, într-o primă etapă, unui proces deconstructiv, extrăgând, pentru fiecare variantă în parte, elemente ale unui tipar descriptiv pe care se articulează profilul tuturor personajelor legendare ale folclorului nostru. Conceput de echipa
'PRESENT AND PAST IN THE STUDY OF RELIGION AND MAGIC', Edited by AGNES HESZ and EVA POCS, BALASSI KIADO, 2019
In the twenties of the XXth century, a Romanian Orthodox priest learned that shepherds isolated ... more In the twenties of the XXth century, a Romanian Orthodox priest learned that shepherds isolated on the mountain harrow a cross in a fir’s bark and confess in front of it. Probably because it was performed by a certain (and limited) category of (isolated) people and also because it is so unconventional (even non-canonic, since the Orthodox dogmatic prescriptions require the priest involvement in each sacramental ritual), there are only sporadic attestations of such confession. But, at the beginning of the XXIst century (2014, 2017), I had the chance to record more memories than I expected, related to this ritual, and also to notice people’s attitudes toward it. The goals of this article are: to enrich the corpus of data about this strange ritual; to identify the coordinates of religiosity, which this ritual is articulated on, and which also validate it; to hermeneutically explore the conception about human’s pure-impure status expressed through the alive (green) vs dead (dried) hypostases of the vegetal world, e.g. of arbors, and to suggest its possible relevance for our times Keywords: shepherds, local religiosity, Carpathian mountains, apocrypha, Christian confession, Romania, oral narratives
Incantatio. An International Journal on Charms, Charmers and Charming, Issue 7, Editor: Haralampos Passalis, pp. 161-176, 2018
Hidden rituals are a category of religious practices, whose disclosure is not easy to be made by ... more Hidden rituals are a category of religious practices, whose disclosure is not easy to be made by an outsider ethnologist. In this frame, a relatively less studied ensemble of gestures, which nowadays are almost perished, but whose traces are preserved in the Christian churches' frescos from Orthodox space is represented by the act of voluntarily scratching the eyes of the saints painted on the wall. The paper systematizes the few references concerning this ritual entirety and also inquires about the relations established between the official dogma and the religious practices as actuated in the very case of the icon and the saint's figure, in the 19 th century Romanian milieu. The walls, the objects and the paintings of a church are related to each other and to a set of gestures, rituals, beliefs, stories, as well, all of them being expressions of the religious view of those who create, receive and use the sanctuaries founders , builders, monks, clergymen, lay believers, pilgrims, tourists, charmers, etc. Its space (inside or outside the area delimited by walls, but in connection with the very body of the church), consecrated to liturgical rituals and prayers, also support a complex of individual gestures that, canonically speaking, sometime are placed on the border between permission and inter-diction or even could slide towards the second side. Covering a large thematic field, from moving churches, to writing names on the walls or to the gesture of touching the wall with the forehead, the topics are challenging. This article is focused on a relatively less studied ensemble of gestures, which nowadays are almost perished, but whose traces are preserved in some Christian churches' frescos: the voluntarily scratching of the saints eyes or body, and the use of the collected mortar in charming rituals. We'll approach concrete cases from the Romanian Orthodox milieus, as attested in the 19 th century. The first goal here is to systematize the few references to this ritual, which I shall analyse from the perspective of the dynamic relations established between the official dogma and the religious practices as actuated in the very case of the icon and the figure of the saint.
Vision and Traditions. Knowledge Production and Tradition Archives, edited by Lauri Harvilahti, Audi Kjus, Cliona O'Carroll, Susanne Osterlung-Potzsch, Fredrik Skott, Rita Treja, in the FF Communications , Academia Scientiarum Fennica, Helsinki,, 2018
The goal of this essay is to highlight the very voice of the collector as part of the supernatura... more The goal of this essay is to highlight the very voice of the collector as part of the supernatural encounter story’s message. As a conclusion: Besides the theoretical and methodological basics shared by almost all oral culture archives, each of them has a specific meta-folkloric discourse, in connexion with the larger local context and expressed by the manners of editing and preserving the documents. From the entire repertoire of epistemological issues mirrored by the archiving processes, our essay approached the process of creating and transmitting knowledge from informant(s) to collector(s) and from collector(s) to other person(s). Considering the collector as a link for the second life of the folklore items he/she records – she/he receives and transmits a story, a song, etc. outside its natural, original context- the article is focused on the perceptiveness level, which is incident to any folkloristic and anthropologic communication act. Within this large frame, we analysed some meta-data cards of the Archive of the Institute of Ethnography and Folklore (AIEF), being interested in how the collector’s presence is inscribed at these cards subtle layers. The main corpus we focused on was represented by the supernatural encounter narratives that, due to the questionable (etic-emic) definition of “supernatural”, which ultimately is a matter of perceptiveness, may offer access to the intercultural exploration: we identified such confrontations indirectly reflected by the recordings and their attached meta-data cards we analysed. A certain document is a result of successive interventions of the actors employed in a narrative’s second life, in which, alongside the recording-archiving-exploitation processes, we include documents’ exploration as an intermediate phase, placed between the archiving and exploitation ones. Each of these actors express, in their own voices, their perception over a certain story’s meaning and functions: 1) the voice of the source the recorded story-teller learned the story from enters the informant’s mental text and is indirectly actuated during the recording event; 2) the voice of the informant(s) is recorded on the tape; 3) the voice of the collector might be recorded on the tape (addressing questions, exclaiming etc.) at its turn, or it might be indirectly inscribed in the meta-data cards. At the subliminal level of receptiveness, the collector transmits not only a piece of folklore, but also his/her attitude toward it, toward the informant and toward the culture to which the informant belongs to; 4) the scholar(s) who listen(s) to the tape or read(s) the transcriptions and the meta-data cards has/have her/his/their own preconception about the nature and function of the given narrative and this, preconception that shape the receptiveness act. Last, but not least, any exploration-interpretation of a folklore document includes imagination as an important component. At the end of this (presumptively never ending) chain of subjective interpretations and emotional participations it results a multi-voiced construction of the fluid and unfixed meaning of the story. In these regards, we speak about documents with multiple authors, whose voices defines, each time, the specificity of the subjective-objective nature of knowledge stored in the folklore archive.
This paper inquires about the social reasons and epistemological consequences of sacred knowledge... more This paper inquires about the social reasons and epistemological consequences of sacred knowledge (a charm) transmission outside its “original setting”, toward an archive of folklore or to a new age journal, as well. Some local specificities of the relation between knowledge and power are explored through multiple contextualisation of an interview we conducted with a former shepherd and healer, in the Carpathian Mountains, Romania. Keywords: charm, Carpathian culture, serpent, shepherd, new age culture
Martor Journal. The Museum of The Romanian Peasant Anthropology Journal; no29, p. 207-217., 2024
Whether harmonious or tense over time, the ways in which encounters
with wild animals are narrate... more Whether harmonious or tense over time, the ways in which encounters with wild animals are narrated reflect perspectives on nature and human interaction with it. In this regard, the article reveals documents recorded by the author during fieldworks conducted among Carpathian shepherds.
Martor. The Museum of the Romanian Peasant Anthropology Journal. Bucharest. p. 125-137, 2023
An interesting phenomenon of incubation ritual was attested in open air in southwest Dobruja at t... more An interesting phenomenon of incubation ritual was attested in open air in southwest Dobruja at the very beginning of the 20th century, at a healing stone cross that, two decades later, was enclosed by an Orthodox Christian monastery. The article focuses on the narrative strategy that asserts Christian authority over the site. The strategy includes a corpus of legends that associate the origin of the cross with the local martyrdom past, its miraculous finding, and a modern hagiography whose main character is a thaumaturgic monk. The dream as a realm for divine communication, represents a theme that coagulates the entire narrative corpus and contributes greatly to the construction of a sanctuary. Over the last decades, energy and spiritual healing practitioners have enriched the group of visitors to the monastery.
Incantatio. An International Journal on Charms, Charming and Charmers, 2023
Within the contexts of charming, as it has been recorded among Romanians, the article aims to dis... more Within the contexts of charming, as it has been recorded among Romanians, the article aims to disclose the meaning of the theme of fairies’ taboo violation as a precondition to gain sacred knowledge. In this regard, various certain incantations addressed to the fairies are examined, along with legends and third person accounts that underline the role played by these supernatural entities as numinous agents for initiation to the `secret` register of knowledge through a special form of communication, which in modern neuroscience terminology might be referred to as an ‚altered state of consciousness’, but which, in the emic terms of magic medicine is described as a disease, namely being taken by the fairies . In concordance with the idea of mutual exchanges between humans and the numinous, the one who accept the fairies’ authority and pay the price of being tormented by them, gain the gift of therapeutic and divinatory abilities.
“Werewolf Legends”, Coordinators: Blécourt Willem de, Mencej Mirjam, Palgrave Macmillan, Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic Series, p. 158-181, 2023
The imaginary profile of the werewolf is articulated on a complex of beliefs and ideas paradigmat... more The imaginary profile of the werewolf is articulated on a complex of beliefs and ideas paradigmaticaly organized in patterns that get concretness and syntagmatic coherence during the effective performance situations of telling stories about humans who have been turned into wolves, hence got a supernatural, secondary nature added to their first natural status. My contribution to this volume explores figures of werewolves as configured in a corpus of narratives recorded in a montane area of Western Carpathians, Romania, narratives that interconnect two distinct situations: the story teller met a werewolf and, secondly, the story teller is the very werewolf. How is the generic picture of the human-wild animal hybrid re-constructed when the werewolf (the local Romanian terms are pricolici or strigoi lupi) is embodied by a certain person with a familiar face? The fantastic is replaced with ontic anxiety and the narratives encipher attitudes and images that axologically encode the predestination – freewill question, whose terms seem to depend on the teller’s involvement in the very narrated events. Hence, having a focus on what it should mean to be a werewolf, this study brings in the fore the case of certain men who are said to be pricolici. Based on an artistic documentary, a literary reportage, and transcriptions of ethnologic field recordings, each of them with specific poetics, generic conventions, rigors, demands, author, and destinations, my aim is to describe how werewolf’s (self) image and, in consequence, his behaviour, are constructed at the interaction between his own philosophical and religious quest, on the one hand, and the cultural code of the community, including the local profile of the werewolves and the social and religious attitudes towards them, on the other hand.
REPRÉSENTATIONS DE LA VIERGE MARIE ENTRE CULTE OFFICIEL ET VÉNÉRATION LOCALE TEXTES ET IMAGES Études réunies par Cristina Bogdan, Cristina-Ioana Dima et Emanuela Timotin. Heidelberg. ISBN 978-3-948670-09-2, p. 313-322, 2022
Martor. The Museum of the Romanian Peasant Anthropology Review , 2021
This article concerns only tangentially the broad field of food. The focus will be on the handwri... more This article concerns only tangentially the broad field of food. The focus will be on the handwritten recipe notebook as an arena for interferences between orality and literacy; these interferences articulates the texts with their paratextual uses, some of which explicitly included in the very body of the recipes (the directions), some other autonomously developed from them. Secondly, the very structure, configuration, use, and meanings of such a notebook go beyond its direct primary purpose, i.e., cooking directions, turning it into a multileveled cultural product. A handwritten recipe notebook is not a mere domestic collection of recipes, but a material support for an immaterial tradition that combines culinary knowledge with commensality practices. These are formalized texts (a title, a list of ingredients, and directions) activated through the oral performance of a formalized setting (the food preparation process), which combines sequences of gestures instead of (or together with) words, or/and through a writing activity (copying a model or transcribing the recipe after dictation). The final material artefact (namely the dish and the written recipe) incorporates the syncretic and immaterial memories of all previous performances. A recipe notebook is not a simple anthology of texts either, it is instead a subjective ‘critical edition’ which grows page by page, according to imperceptible selection criteria; with the passing of time, the pages become impregnated with smells, traces of pots of oil or sugar, children’s fingerprints, figurative drawings, etc. Keywords: cooking, performance, informal knowledge, handwritten notebook, memory.
"The Language of magic", edited by Eleonora Cianci and Nicholas Wolf, Editioni Universitarie di Lettere Economia Dirito, Milano. Volume publicato con il contributo dell' Universita degli Studi 'G. Annuntio' di Chieti Pescara, Dipartimento di Lingue, Letterature e Culture Moderne, 2022
Coming from the early modern Christian times, The Dream of the Mother of God was, and still is, a... more Coming from the early modern Christian times, The Dream of the Mother of God was, and still is, a text with an ambiguous status. As an apocryph, it was discouraged by the official church(es), together with its ritual manipulation for therapeutic, divinatory, apotropaic, and other human purposes that involve supernatural. On the other hand, it was very popular among believers (including clerics), partly for its inner dramatic images and sensitive potential and partly for the very rituals the church condemned it for. Categorized as charm from an etic point of view and as a prayer from the emic point of view, the Dream gets a third dimension once it entered in the contemporary magazines’ pages and internet circulation, being reshaped in concordance with new conventions and strategies and with postmodern expectations. Keywords: apocrypha; Mother of God; orality-literacy; power of words; Romanian legends; vernacular religiosity.
Incantatio. An International Journal on Charms, Charmers and Charming, 2014
His scientific interests are related to the Latvian charming tradition, calendar customs, traditi... more His scientific interests are related to the Latvian charming tradition, calendar customs, traditional music, and the Latvian diaspora in Siberia.
Racursiuni etnologice. In Honorem Silviu Angelescu, editor Adrian Stoicescu, Editura Universităţii Bucureşti, Bucureşti, p. 59-66, 2022
Copilul e plictisit. Mama-i cântă, dar nu-l poate scoate din plictiseală. Atunci îşi ia refugiul ... more Copilul e plictisit. Mama-i cântă, dar nu-l poate scoate din plictiseală. Atunci îşi ia refugiul în altă distracţie. Prinde cu degetul cel mare şi cel arătător de la mâna dreaptă pielcăluţa dosului mânei băiatului şi trăgând-o în sus, cu mână cu tot, cântă:-Piţigaie, gaie/Ce duci în tigaie?/-Un picior de oaie!/Cine ţi l-a dat?/-Popa din Bărgău/Ţină-l Dumnezeu. La vorbele Ţină-l Dumnezeu, îi lasă mânuţa în jos şi-l gâdilă frumos la foale, până ce îi stârneşte râsul şi copilul sare din plictiseală şi râzând zice: fă, mamă! (Simion Florea Marian, Nașterea la români).
Acta Ethnographica Hungarica, 64(2), p. 311-320, 2019
The images, characters, and events featured in a charm enter into mutual, organic relations with ... more The images, characters, and events featured in a charm enter into mutual, organic relations with other images, characters, and events that are not explicitly included in the given text but contribute implicitly to the overall significance of the charm. The aim of the current article is to reveal the unspoken components of St. Elijah narrative file embedded in the deep horizon of beliefs and knowledge implied by a given charm. Following the charm step by step, I point out items that imply the unvoiced-but still present-level of images and beliefs taken from the non-charming narrative corpus. As a strong biblical character, St. Elijah (who is present in both the Old and New Testaments and also suggested in the Apocalypse) is the protagonist of a rich canonical and apocryphal legendary corpus developed in Hebrew, Christian, and Muslim traditions through written, oral, and figurative means. At least in the case of Romanian folklore, this corpus is still active. Recently I wrote a typological monograph of St. Elijah's profile in Romanian folklore, which I hope to be useful for further comparative studies dedicated to this figure with a trans-cultural and trans-religious presence. It is not my intention to further develop the topic here, but a brief description might be useful for a better understanding of the charm my article deals with. The research will be published as a book (typology, comments, corpus of texts) in early 2020. Here is the typological scheme: I-St. Elijah is a religious vindicator and revenger 1 The article was written in the frame of the ERC project nr. 32421, Vernacular religion on the boundary of Eastern and Western Christianity: Continuity, changes and interactions, and in the frame of the project Narratives about fantastic legendary entities (Naraţiuni despre reprezentări legendare fantastice) of the Institute of Ethnography and Folklore "Constantin Brailoiu" in Bucharest.
1918-2018. Limba și cultura română, structuri fundamentale ale identității naționale: evaluări, perspective, Ofelia Ichim (coord.), TractusArte, București, pp. 461-470, 2018
Personaj cu prezență biblică vetero și neotestamentară (explicită în Schimbarea la Față și sugera... more Personaj cu prezență biblică vetero și neotestamentară (explicită în Schimbarea la Față și sugerată în Apocalipsa), căruia îi este dedicată o sărbătoare respectată în calendarele iudaic și creștin, Sfântul Ilie este protagonistul principal al unui bogat dosar narativ, canonic şi apocrif, scris şi oral, care, el puţin în cazul folclorului românesc are calitatea de a fi deschis și viu; aceasta nu doar în sensul că istoriile îi sunt (re)povestite, ci și că sunt adaugate altele noi, cele mai multe structurate în jurul temei pedepsirii celor care nu îi respectă sărbătoarea, a tunetelor și trăznetelor din timpul furtunii, sau a ploilor care vor veni ca urmare a rugăciunilor adresate acestui sfânt intransigent, justițiar, îmbunat în cele din urmă de o văduvă din Sarepta. Prin actualizarea un amplu repertoriu legendar de expresie verbală şi figurativă, se configurează profilul religios al Sfântului Ilie, care, până acum s-a bucurat din partea etnologilor îndeosebi de interpretări de factură mitologizantă, prin care i s-a atribuit (oarecum expeditiv) calitatea păgână de "zeu" (sau fost zeu) al fulgerului şi al trăznetului, al cerului, al soarelui (Helios) etc. Lectura legendelor populare româneşti hagiografice, cosmogonice sau meteorologice în relaţie cu textul biblic referitor la profetul Ilie, duce, însă, la constatări interesante, care justifică aprofundarea şi reconsiderarea acestor afirmaţii, cel puțin în ceea ce privește cultura română folclorică. Recent, am redactat o monografie tipologică a Sfântului Ilie în folclorul românesc 1 , care surprinde complexitatea și caracterul oarecum condtradictoriu al acestui personaj. Lucrarea va fi publicată în viitorul apropiat și sperăm că va fi un instrument de lucru folositor studiilor comparative dedicate acestui sfânt cu prezență transculturală și transreligioasă. Pentru a-i configura profilul, am analizat 435 de texte pe care le-am supus, într-o primă etapă, unui proces deconstructiv, extrăgând, pentru fiecare variantă în parte, elemente ale unui tipar descriptiv pe care se articulează profilul tuturor personajelor legendare ale folclorului nostru. Conceput de echipa
'PRESENT AND PAST IN THE STUDY OF RELIGION AND MAGIC', Edited by AGNES HESZ and EVA POCS, BALASSI KIADO, 2019
In the twenties of the XXth century, a Romanian Orthodox priest learned that shepherds isolated ... more In the twenties of the XXth century, a Romanian Orthodox priest learned that shepherds isolated on the mountain harrow a cross in a fir’s bark and confess in front of it. Probably because it was performed by a certain (and limited) category of (isolated) people and also because it is so unconventional (even non-canonic, since the Orthodox dogmatic prescriptions require the priest involvement in each sacramental ritual), there are only sporadic attestations of such confession. But, at the beginning of the XXIst century (2014, 2017), I had the chance to record more memories than I expected, related to this ritual, and also to notice people’s attitudes toward it. The goals of this article are: to enrich the corpus of data about this strange ritual; to identify the coordinates of religiosity, which this ritual is articulated on, and which also validate it; to hermeneutically explore the conception about human’s pure-impure status expressed through the alive (green) vs dead (dried) hypostases of the vegetal world, e.g. of arbors, and to suggest its possible relevance for our times Keywords: shepherds, local religiosity, Carpathian mountains, apocrypha, Christian confession, Romania, oral narratives
Incantatio. An International Journal on Charms, Charmers and Charming, Issue 7, Editor: Haralampos Passalis, pp. 161-176, 2018
Hidden rituals are a category of religious practices, whose disclosure is not easy to be made by ... more Hidden rituals are a category of religious practices, whose disclosure is not easy to be made by an outsider ethnologist. In this frame, a relatively less studied ensemble of gestures, which nowadays are almost perished, but whose traces are preserved in the Christian churches' frescos from Orthodox space is represented by the act of voluntarily scratching the eyes of the saints painted on the wall. The paper systematizes the few references concerning this ritual entirety and also inquires about the relations established between the official dogma and the religious practices as actuated in the very case of the icon and the saint's figure, in the 19 th century Romanian milieu. The walls, the objects and the paintings of a church are related to each other and to a set of gestures, rituals, beliefs, stories, as well, all of them being expressions of the religious view of those who create, receive and use the sanctuaries founders , builders, monks, clergymen, lay believers, pilgrims, tourists, charmers, etc. Its space (inside or outside the area delimited by walls, but in connection with the very body of the church), consecrated to liturgical rituals and prayers, also support a complex of individual gestures that, canonically speaking, sometime are placed on the border between permission and inter-diction or even could slide towards the second side. Covering a large thematic field, from moving churches, to writing names on the walls or to the gesture of touching the wall with the forehead, the topics are challenging. This article is focused on a relatively less studied ensemble of gestures, which nowadays are almost perished, but whose traces are preserved in some Christian churches' frescos: the voluntarily scratching of the saints eyes or body, and the use of the collected mortar in charming rituals. We'll approach concrete cases from the Romanian Orthodox milieus, as attested in the 19 th century. The first goal here is to systematize the few references to this ritual, which I shall analyse from the perspective of the dynamic relations established between the official dogma and the religious practices as actuated in the very case of the icon and the figure of the saint.
Vision and Traditions. Knowledge Production and Tradition Archives, edited by Lauri Harvilahti, Audi Kjus, Cliona O'Carroll, Susanne Osterlung-Potzsch, Fredrik Skott, Rita Treja, in the FF Communications , Academia Scientiarum Fennica, Helsinki,, 2018
The goal of this essay is to highlight the very voice of the collector as part of the supernatura... more The goal of this essay is to highlight the very voice of the collector as part of the supernatural encounter story’s message. As a conclusion: Besides the theoretical and methodological basics shared by almost all oral culture archives, each of them has a specific meta-folkloric discourse, in connexion with the larger local context and expressed by the manners of editing and preserving the documents. From the entire repertoire of epistemological issues mirrored by the archiving processes, our essay approached the process of creating and transmitting knowledge from informant(s) to collector(s) and from collector(s) to other person(s). Considering the collector as a link for the second life of the folklore items he/she records – she/he receives and transmits a story, a song, etc. outside its natural, original context- the article is focused on the perceptiveness level, which is incident to any folkloristic and anthropologic communication act. Within this large frame, we analysed some meta-data cards of the Archive of the Institute of Ethnography and Folklore (AIEF), being interested in how the collector’s presence is inscribed at these cards subtle layers. The main corpus we focused on was represented by the supernatural encounter narratives that, due to the questionable (etic-emic) definition of “supernatural”, which ultimately is a matter of perceptiveness, may offer access to the intercultural exploration: we identified such confrontations indirectly reflected by the recordings and their attached meta-data cards we analysed. A certain document is a result of successive interventions of the actors employed in a narrative’s second life, in which, alongside the recording-archiving-exploitation processes, we include documents’ exploration as an intermediate phase, placed between the archiving and exploitation ones. Each of these actors express, in their own voices, their perception over a certain story’s meaning and functions: 1) the voice of the source the recorded story-teller learned the story from enters the informant’s mental text and is indirectly actuated during the recording event; 2) the voice of the informant(s) is recorded on the tape; 3) the voice of the collector might be recorded on the tape (addressing questions, exclaiming etc.) at its turn, or it might be indirectly inscribed in the meta-data cards. At the subliminal level of receptiveness, the collector transmits not only a piece of folklore, but also his/her attitude toward it, toward the informant and toward the culture to which the informant belongs to; 4) the scholar(s) who listen(s) to the tape or read(s) the transcriptions and the meta-data cards has/have her/his/their own preconception about the nature and function of the given narrative and this, preconception that shape the receptiveness act. Last, but not least, any exploration-interpretation of a folklore document includes imagination as an important component. At the end of this (presumptively never ending) chain of subjective interpretations and emotional participations it results a multi-voiced construction of the fluid and unfixed meaning of the story. In these regards, we speak about documents with multiple authors, whose voices defines, each time, the specificity of the subjective-objective nature of knowledge stored in the folklore archive.
This paper inquires about the social reasons and epistemological consequences of sacred knowledge... more This paper inquires about the social reasons and epistemological consequences of sacred knowledge (a charm) transmission outside its “original setting”, toward an archive of folklore or to a new age journal, as well. Some local specificities of the relation between knowledge and power are explored through multiple contextualisation of an interview we conducted with a former shepherd and healer, in the Carpathian Mountains, Romania. Keywords: charm, Carpathian culture, serpent, shepherd, new age culture
Răsplata paradisului. Filoane livreşti şi orale ale credinţelor despre Blajini, în spaţiul române... more Răsplata paradisului. Filoane livreşti şi orale ale credinţelor despre Blajini, în spaţiul românesc (The reward of paradise. Written and oral sources of the traditions about Blajini in the Romanian space) Editura Academiei Române, Bucureşti, 2006, ISBN (10) 973
Visions and Traditions contains texts that in various ways discuss the political, methodological ... more Visions and Traditions contains texts that in various ways discuss the political, methodological and ethical aspects of how tradition archives have been - and are - involved in the production of knowledge.
The folklore studies of the 19th century, in the various forms they were performed, were concerned with not only imagining, but also sensing and experiencing the people. The early 20th century invention of the tradition archive, followed by the formations of folklore studies and ethnology as university disciplines, carried out fortifications, expansions and contestations as to who the people really were and how the people were to be seen and felt and experienced, and who had the authority to show us the people.
The disciplinary rumbles and departures from the late 1960s gave profound insights in how folkloristics and ethnology had contributed to the creation and strengthening of political identities, and left many folklorists and ethnologists skeptical about ever getting involved in identity politics again. The agenda of Herder, to assist the people in seeing and feeling and experiencing itself, for many became a shameful agenda. They sought refuge in purer forms of science, be it cultural history, linguistics or phenomenology. They would say: "To make the people visible is not our job. Let us leave them to it. But we will observe from safe distance."
ln the wake of the digital revolution and the new and powerful information technologies, people (not the people this time, but just people) are exercising great new abilities to make themselves seen and felt and experienced. Do people need tradition archives or folklorists in these endeavors? The editors of this volume suspect the tradition archives have qualities that are strongly in demand right now and that folklorists are needed both as facilitators and for critical reflection.
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Papers by Laura Jiga Iliescu
with wild animals are narrated reflect perspectives on nature and human
interaction with it. In this regard, the article reveals documents recorded by
the author during fieldworks conducted among Carpathian shepherds.
My contribution to this volume explores figures of werewolves as configured in a corpus of narratives recorded in a montane area of Western Carpathians, Romania, narratives that interconnect two distinct situations: the story teller met a werewolf and, secondly, the story teller is the very werewolf.
How is the generic picture of the human-wild animal hybrid re-constructed when the werewolf (the local Romanian terms are pricolici or strigoi lupi) is embodied by a certain person with a familiar face? The fantastic is replaced with ontic anxiety and the narratives encipher attitudes and images that axologically encode the predestination – freewill question, whose terms seem to depend on the teller’s involvement in the very narrated events.
Hence, having a focus on what it should mean to be a werewolf, this study brings in the fore the case of certain men who are said to be pricolici. Based on an artistic documentary, a literary reportage, and transcriptions of ethnologic field recordings, each of them with specific poetics, generic conventions, rigors, demands, author, and destinations, my aim is to describe how werewolf’s (self) image and, in consequence, his behaviour, are constructed at the interaction between his own philosophical and religious quest, on the one hand, and the cultural code of the community, including the local profile of the werewolves and the social and religious attitudes towards them, on the other hand.
A handwritten recipe notebook is not a mere domestic collection of recipes, but a material support for an immaterial tradition that combines culinary knowledge with commensality practices. These are formalized texts (a title, a list of ingredients, and directions) activated through the oral performance of a formalized setting (the food preparation process), which combines sequences of gestures instead of (or together with) words, or/and through a writing activity (copying a model or transcribing the recipe after dictation). The final material artefact (namely the dish and the written recipe) incorporates the syncretic and immaterial memories of all previous performances. A recipe notebook is not a simple anthology of texts either, it is instead a subjective ‘critical edition’ which grows page by page, according to imperceptible selection criteria; with the passing of time, the pages become impregnated with smells, traces of pots of oil or sugar, children’s fingerprints, figurative drawings, etc.
Keywords: cooking, performance, informal knowledge, handwritten notebook, memory.
as a prayer from the emic point of view, the Dream gets a third dimension once it entered in the contemporary magazines’ pages and internet circulation, being reshaped in concordance with new conventions and strategies and with postmodern expectations.
Keywords: apocrypha; Mother of God; orality-literacy; power of words; Romanian legends; vernacular religiosity.
The goals of this article are: to enrich the corpus of data about this strange ritual; to identify the coordinates of religiosity, which this ritual is articulated on, and which also validate it; to hermeneutically explore the conception about human’s pure-impure status expressed through the alive (green) vs dead (dried) hypostases of the vegetal world, e.g. of arbors, and to suggest its possible relevance for our times
Keywords: shepherds, local religiosity, Carpathian mountains, apocrypha, Christian confession, Romania, oral narratives
https://doi.org/10.7592/Incantatio2018_7_Iliescu Incantatio 7 161
As a conclusion: Besides the theoretical and methodological basics shared by almost all oral culture archives, each of them has a specific meta-folkloric discourse, in connexion with the larger local context and expressed by the manners of editing and preserving the documents. From the entire repertoire of epistemological issues mirrored by the archiving processes, our essay approached the process of creating and transmitting knowledge from informant(s) to collector(s) and from collector(s) to other person(s). Considering the collector as a link for the second life of the folklore items he/she records – she/he receives and transmits a story, a song, etc. outside its natural, original context- the article is focused on the perceptiveness level, which is incident to any folkloristic and anthropologic communication act. Within this large frame, we analysed some meta-data cards of the Archive of the Institute of Ethnography and Folklore (AIEF), being interested in how the collector’s presence is inscribed at these cards subtle layers. The main corpus we focused on was represented by the supernatural encounter narratives that, due to the questionable (etic-emic) definition of “supernatural”, which ultimately is a matter of perceptiveness, may offer access to the intercultural exploration: we identified such confrontations indirectly reflected by the recordings and their attached meta-data cards we analysed. A certain document is a result of successive interventions of the actors employed in a narrative’s second life, in which, alongside the recording-archiving-exploitation processes, we include documents’ exploration as an intermediate phase, placed between the archiving and exploitation ones. Each of these actors express, in their own voices, their perception over a certain story’s meaning and functions: 1) the voice of the source the recorded story-teller learned the story from enters the informant’s mental text and is indirectly actuated during the recording event; 2) the voice of the informant(s) is recorded on the tape; 3) the voice of the collector might be recorded on the tape (addressing questions, exclaiming etc.) at its turn, or it might be indirectly inscribed in the meta-data cards. At the subliminal level of receptiveness, the collector transmits not only a piece of folklore, but also his/her attitude toward it, toward the informant and toward the culture to which the informant belongs to; 4) the scholar(s) who listen(s) to the tape or read(s) the transcriptions and the meta-data cards has/have her/his/their own preconception about the nature and function of the given narrative and this, preconception that shape the receptiveness act. Last, but not least, any exploration-interpretation of a folklore document includes imagination as an important component. At the end of this (presumptively never ending) chain of subjective interpretations and emotional participations it results a multi-voiced construction of the fluid and unfixed meaning of the story. In these regards, we speak about documents with multiple authors, whose voices defines, each time, the specificity of the subjective-objective nature of knowledge stored in the folklore archive.
Keywords: charm, Carpathian culture, serpent, shepherd, new age culture
with wild animals are narrated reflect perspectives on nature and human
interaction with it. In this regard, the article reveals documents recorded by
the author during fieldworks conducted among Carpathian shepherds.
My contribution to this volume explores figures of werewolves as configured in a corpus of narratives recorded in a montane area of Western Carpathians, Romania, narratives that interconnect two distinct situations: the story teller met a werewolf and, secondly, the story teller is the very werewolf.
How is the generic picture of the human-wild animal hybrid re-constructed when the werewolf (the local Romanian terms are pricolici or strigoi lupi) is embodied by a certain person with a familiar face? The fantastic is replaced with ontic anxiety and the narratives encipher attitudes and images that axologically encode the predestination – freewill question, whose terms seem to depend on the teller’s involvement in the very narrated events.
Hence, having a focus on what it should mean to be a werewolf, this study brings in the fore the case of certain men who are said to be pricolici. Based on an artistic documentary, a literary reportage, and transcriptions of ethnologic field recordings, each of them with specific poetics, generic conventions, rigors, demands, author, and destinations, my aim is to describe how werewolf’s (self) image and, in consequence, his behaviour, are constructed at the interaction between his own philosophical and religious quest, on the one hand, and the cultural code of the community, including the local profile of the werewolves and the social and religious attitudes towards them, on the other hand.
A handwritten recipe notebook is not a mere domestic collection of recipes, but a material support for an immaterial tradition that combines culinary knowledge with commensality practices. These are formalized texts (a title, a list of ingredients, and directions) activated through the oral performance of a formalized setting (the food preparation process), which combines sequences of gestures instead of (or together with) words, or/and through a writing activity (copying a model or transcribing the recipe after dictation). The final material artefact (namely the dish and the written recipe) incorporates the syncretic and immaterial memories of all previous performances. A recipe notebook is not a simple anthology of texts either, it is instead a subjective ‘critical edition’ which grows page by page, according to imperceptible selection criteria; with the passing of time, the pages become impregnated with smells, traces of pots of oil or sugar, children’s fingerprints, figurative drawings, etc.
Keywords: cooking, performance, informal knowledge, handwritten notebook, memory.
as a prayer from the emic point of view, the Dream gets a third dimension once it entered in the contemporary magazines’ pages and internet circulation, being reshaped in concordance with new conventions and strategies and with postmodern expectations.
Keywords: apocrypha; Mother of God; orality-literacy; power of words; Romanian legends; vernacular religiosity.
The goals of this article are: to enrich the corpus of data about this strange ritual; to identify the coordinates of religiosity, which this ritual is articulated on, and which also validate it; to hermeneutically explore the conception about human’s pure-impure status expressed through the alive (green) vs dead (dried) hypostases of the vegetal world, e.g. of arbors, and to suggest its possible relevance for our times
Keywords: shepherds, local religiosity, Carpathian mountains, apocrypha, Christian confession, Romania, oral narratives
https://doi.org/10.7592/Incantatio2018_7_Iliescu Incantatio 7 161
As a conclusion: Besides the theoretical and methodological basics shared by almost all oral culture archives, each of them has a specific meta-folkloric discourse, in connexion with the larger local context and expressed by the manners of editing and preserving the documents. From the entire repertoire of epistemological issues mirrored by the archiving processes, our essay approached the process of creating and transmitting knowledge from informant(s) to collector(s) and from collector(s) to other person(s). Considering the collector as a link for the second life of the folklore items he/she records – she/he receives and transmits a story, a song, etc. outside its natural, original context- the article is focused on the perceptiveness level, which is incident to any folkloristic and anthropologic communication act. Within this large frame, we analysed some meta-data cards of the Archive of the Institute of Ethnography and Folklore (AIEF), being interested in how the collector’s presence is inscribed at these cards subtle layers. The main corpus we focused on was represented by the supernatural encounter narratives that, due to the questionable (etic-emic) definition of “supernatural”, which ultimately is a matter of perceptiveness, may offer access to the intercultural exploration: we identified such confrontations indirectly reflected by the recordings and their attached meta-data cards we analysed. A certain document is a result of successive interventions of the actors employed in a narrative’s second life, in which, alongside the recording-archiving-exploitation processes, we include documents’ exploration as an intermediate phase, placed between the archiving and exploitation ones. Each of these actors express, in their own voices, their perception over a certain story’s meaning and functions: 1) the voice of the source the recorded story-teller learned the story from enters the informant’s mental text and is indirectly actuated during the recording event; 2) the voice of the informant(s) is recorded on the tape; 3) the voice of the collector might be recorded on the tape (addressing questions, exclaiming etc.) at its turn, or it might be indirectly inscribed in the meta-data cards. At the subliminal level of receptiveness, the collector transmits not only a piece of folklore, but also his/her attitude toward it, toward the informant and toward the culture to which the informant belongs to; 4) the scholar(s) who listen(s) to the tape or read(s) the transcriptions and the meta-data cards has/have her/his/their own preconception about the nature and function of the given narrative and this, preconception that shape the receptiveness act. Last, but not least, any exploration-interpretation of a folklore document includes imagination as an important component. At the end of this (presumptively never ending) chain of subjective interpretations and emotional participations it results a multi-voiced construction of the fluid and unfixed meaning of the story. In these regards, we speak about documents with multiple authors, whose voices defines, each time, the specificity of the subjective-objective nature of knowledge stored in the folklore archive.
Keywords: charm, Carpathian culture, serpent, shepherd, new age culture
The folklore studies of the 19th century, in the various forms they were performed, were concerned with not only imagining, but also sensing and experiencing the people. The early 20th century invention of the tradition archive, followed by the formations of folklore studies and ethnology as university disciplines, carried out fortifications, expansions and contestations as to who the people really were and how the people were to be seen and felt and experienced, and who had the authority to show us the people.
The disciplinary rumbles and departures from the late 1960s gave profound insights in how folkloristics and ethnology had contributed to the creation and strengthening of political identities, and left many folklorists and ethnologists skeptical about ever getting involved in identity politics again. The agenda of Herder, to assist the people in seeing and feeling and experiencing itself, for many became a shameful agenda. They sought refuge in purer forms of science, be it cultural history, linguistics or phenomenology. They would say: "To make the people visible is not our job. Let us leave them to it. But we will observe from safe distance."
ln the wake of the digital revolution and the new and powerful information technologies, people (not the people this time, but just people) are exercising great new abilities to make themselves seen and felt and experienced. Do people need tradition archives or folklorists in these endeavors? The editors of this volume suspect the tradition archives have qualities that are strongly in demand right now and that folklorists are needed both as facilitators and for critical reflection.