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The article describes the relation between humour and religion, using Polish Passion plays as an illustration. The authoress focuses on jokes present in narrations about Easter plays. Although humour is not part of Easter play scenarios, it is a permanent feature of narrations about Passion plays. However, jokes are not about things divine, the holy story depicted in the play, but about the imperfections...
The aim of the article is to discuss possible problems faced by researchers studying the traditional use of plants in Poland. One of the main issues is the discrepancy between the folk taxonomy and Polish scientific names. It is often the case that a Polish scientific name assigned arbitrarily to a certain genus was actually extensively used by common people to name different genera. Sometimes the...
The article shows the recent changes in the institution of African chieftaincy. In the pre-colonial era and also during the colonial period, the traditional ruler was perceived as divine as he was supposed to be an earthly representative of gods and dead ancestors. This special bond with the ancestors gave him the right to run the ritual practices on which the wealth of his people depended. But recently...
The articles describes verbal recollections of Sibiraks, people deported between 1940-1941 to different regions of the Soviet Union (mainly Siberia and Kazakhstan). All these recollections were gathered between 2002-2005 in the course of interviews with representatives of the deportees, who live in Lódz and nearby. The article discusses the differences between verbal and written accounts of Sibiraks'...
This paper presents the ethnographic field data analysis concerning faith healing among Polish immigrants and their descendants. The research was carried out among the inhabitants of two settlements, located in the proximity of the triple frontier of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay in the province of Misiones, Argentina. The ailments described here are the so called 'folk illnesses': 'evil eye', empacho,...
Descriptions of different forms of traditional witchcraft in Poland can be found in the earliest ethnographic works. However, they are fragmentary and often presented as part of a broader discussion of beliefs, magic and fortune telling. The article is based on unpublished materials of the Polish Ethnographic Atlas, collected in the 1980s of the 20th C. One of the main assumptions of the Atlas was...
Rituals connected with death belong to the most complex African ritual practices. They include rituals practised in the period from agony to the end of mourning. Their aim is to properly bury the body of the deceased, help the deceased person's spirit enter the land of the ancestors and accompany the relatives during mourning. The practices change with technical progress, education and impact of monotheistic...
The article deals with magical activities observed in preparations for a folk wedding in Poland. The peak of magical acts was connected with the belief that a young couple was in a critical moment - the interim, which was dangerous for them because of its liminality. On the other hand, if proper patterns of behaviour were followed, it guaranteed happiness of the bride and the groom. According to the...
'Local political drama', as the title suggests, focuses on the social interactions of the local politics. The text is based on the author's fieldwork carried out in the northeast of Poland from 2005 till the end of 2006. That was the time of quick political and social changes due to the challenges related with European integration. In this article the author presents problems connected with his research...
The author tries, to some extent, to fill up the gap in the research on the impact of socio-economic transformations in Ukraine on rural communities. The article discusses selected aspects of everyday life of the inhabitants of a small village in the Eastern Bieszczady Mountains. The discussion is based on fieldwork conducted by the author in 2007. The everyday life in a former kolkhoz village is...
The article aims to present the role of the 'imagined past' in the development of the identity among the Guran community in Eastern Siberia. The group under analysis created a unique culture with strong Evenk and Buryat elements. The Gurans played a specific social role (Cossacks); they held the status of local Russians despite mixed origin. Their complex identity structure, with ethnic, racial, social...
The authoress discusses the problem of multiculturality of the rural communities in Podlasie in northeastern Poland. The region is inhabited by a population of different ethnic origin (Poles, Belorussians), language (Polish, Belorussian and local dialect), religion (Catholics, Orthodox) and social (peasants, descendants of small gentry). In the analysis she uses Anselm Strauss' concept of 'social...
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