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- Convenors:
-
David Rotman
(Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Margaret Lyngdoh (University of Tartu)
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Short Abstract
This panel explores how folk narratives across cultures challenge binary distinctions between nature and culture through representations of the Marvelous, hybrid beings, enchanted spaces, and transformative encounters with non-human entities.
Long Abstract
This panel invites critical discussions on how folk narratives from different cultural and historical contexts challenge long-standing structuralist dichotomies between nature and culture. Building on recent theoretical shifts that question the stability of these categories, we examine how narratives of the Marvelous—particularly those involving enchanted landscapes, hybrid beings, and metamorphic encounters—destabilize inherited epistemologies of the "natural" and the "cultural."
Focusing on Jewish and South Asian traditions, our contributors explore how folk narratives function as imaginative spaces where nature is not a passive backdrop but an active and entangled agent. These stories blur binary distinctions and shift focus on what emerges as fluid, analytical categories: human and other-than-human; the mundane, wondrous, and the liminal; the terrestrial, the sacred, and ambivalent; and so on. By doing so, these stories offer insights into the ways communities have understood, negotiated, and reshaped their environments and cosmologies.
Rather than treating nature as an inert category, this panel approaches it as a dynamic domain, shaped by narrative practice and folkloric imagination. Our aim is to reveal how folk narratives complicate prevailing binaries and contribute to broader understandings of ecology, belief, and cultural expression. We welcome contributions that highlight narrative expressions of “nature” as marvellous, disruptive, and generative; never as an absolute category, but as an emergent one.
Accepted papers
Session 1 Tuesday 16 June, 2026, -Paper short abstract
This lecture examines Jewish liturgical poetry (piyyut) as folk narrative that creates mystical geographies. Transmitted orally across generations, piyyut conveys images of the Holy Land that shift collective memory between scriptural sacred space, the liminal present, and visions of redemption.
Paper long abstract
This lecture investigates how Jewish liturgical poetry (piyyut), transmitted orally and sung communally for centuries, functions as folk narrative that reimagines nature and place. Although rooted in sacred ritual, piyyut spread across diverse Jewish communities as a living oral tradition, linking it to the broader field of folklore.
I will examine how piyyut creates a distinctive relationship with landscape through absence rather than presence. Unlike secular Hebrew poetry that abounds in scenic description, piyyut rarely depicts natural views. Instead, it fills its verses with sacred toponyms—Jerusalem, Zion, the Temple, Hermon—that anchor memory and devotion without offering pictorial detail.
The lecture will highlight three interrelated phenomena: how these toponyms construct “mystical geographies” where biblical places resonate across the past, present, and future, how the lack of description paradoxically invites listeners to imagine their own landscapes of longing, and how natural imagery such as stars, lilies, vines and gazelles serves as metaphorical language for spiritual transformation rather than to depict nature itself.
By analyzing these strategies, I will show how piyyut transforms ordinary place-names into sites of collective imagination and memory. More broadly, this approach illustrates the ways oral traditions generate enchanted geographies that blur the boundaries between the earthly and the celestial, the cultural and the natural.
Paper short abstract
"Nature as a living entity in the traditional Tibetan opera tales" explores the relevance of a living nature and its magical creatures in the traditional Tibetan opera tales and how it shapes Tibetan folk tale tradition and the rich cultural heritage the genre of Ache Lhamo carries in modern times.
Paper long abstract
Tibetan Opera, or Ache Lhamo (meaning „Sister Goddess”) as it is called in Tibetan language, is an ancient art form, a secular theatre of Tibet that employs songs, dances and drama to tell stories and is still performed today by troupes in India, Nepal and Tibet.
In Tibetan opera tales, the natural environment often functions as a living entitiy and the protagonists are often aided by beings with magical powers, by wise dakinis, or animals with magical abilities, talking parrots, flying horses or helping monkeys. They serve as mediators between realms, help the main characters in their efforts to fullfill their spiritual quest or save them from a slew of enemies and dangers. In the story of prince Dime Kunden, for instance, the barren Hashang Demon Mountain is a hostile environment, abound with beasts, demons and chimeras, it is where the protagonist has to spend twelve years in exile and tackle several obstacles as a punishment for his deeds.
In my lecture, I aim to explore the relevance of an active, living nature and its magical creatures in the traditional Tibetan opera tales and examine how these shape the opera stories, the Tibetan folk tale traditions, what kind of function they have in the narratives and how they contribute to the rich cultural heritage the genre of Ache Lhamo carries in modern times.
Paper short abstract
This paper explores the symbolic roles of the mule in pre-modern Jewish folk narratives, showing how this hybrid creature challenges fixed boundaries between nature and culture, purity and impurity, and the human and non-human.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines the rich array of symbolic meanings attributed to the mule in Jewish folk narratives from Late Antiquity through the Middle Ages. The mule—a hybrid creature born of a male donkey and a female horse—served as a common working animal throughout history, but in Jewish narrative traditions, it came to embody a much broader range of cultural meanings.
From Rabbinic literature to medieval commentaries and folktales, mules were portrayed as liminal and paradoxical beings. They were interpreted as unnatural yet divinely permitted, sterile yet powerful, grotesque yet noble. In particular, the mule became a symbol through which classical Jewish texts negotiated fundamental oppositions: between nature and culture, purity and impurity (tahor/tameh), creation and artifice, the monstrous and the domestic.
Through close readings of folk narrative integrated in selected sources, the paper explores how the figure of the mule was used to reflect, reinforce, and sometimes challenge normative categories in Jewish cosmology and law.
Ultimately, the mule emerges as a powerful folkloric device that complicates rigid binaries and invites a more fluid understanding of what is “natural,” especially in a culture deeply invested in categorization and boundary-making.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how sari-draping of trees and plants animates other-than-human agency, creates enchanted spaces, and affords marginalized women vernacular authority. Drawing on Santali and Hindu seasonal festivals, it explores ritual ecologies that challenge nature/culture binaries.
Paper long abstract
This paper explores how vernacular acts of sari-draping on natural forms—such as trees and plants—invoke other-than-human agency, activate ritual authority, and create enchanted spaces that challenge nature/culture binaries in South Asian ritual ecologies.
Based on fieldwork among marginalized Santali and Dalit Hindu communities on the outskirts of Deoghar, Jharkhand—a significant site for both traditions—the study focuses on two annual rituals that celebrate the sacred marriage of natural elements: Santali Sarhul (Baha Parab) and Hindu Tulsi Vivah. In Sarhul, which marks the union of the sun and the earth, sari-draped trees become bearers of a living tradition within sacred groves, mediating collective identity and seasonal renewal. In Tulsi Vivah, the ritual marriage of a plant and a stone, dressed in bridal attire, enacts domestic virtue and divine reciprocity within the household. I argue that these practices render nature not as an absolute category but as an emergent, relational domain—potent, transformative, and Marvellous.
Drawing on theories of material and vernacular religion and the ontological turn, this study shows how sari, tree, and plant become co-actors in metamorphic encounters that complicate inherited epistemologies of the “natural” and the “cultural.” These acts of dressing are not symbolic but generative, producing sacred presence and opening spaces of agency for women excluded by caste, gender, and institutional sanction. By tracing these ritual ecologies, the paper contributes to broader debates on sacred ecology, material religion, and the Marvelous in folk narrative traditions.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines the Karbi concept of parallel reality and the associated narratives that highlight a non-binary association and interplay between dream worlds, agency of nature, and human intentionalities, through the analysis of ethnographic fieldwork materials from Karbi Anglong.
Paper long abstract
In Karbi Anglong, Northeast India, folk narratives render nature and culture fluid and interwoven, disrupting structuralist binaries. My fieldwork reveals Karbi Anglong as a nexus of multiple cosmologies, where vernacular narratives of the human and other-than-human continuum animate the landscape. By foregrounding the ‘marvellous’ in everyday life—dreams, parallel realities, and intentionalities—the study, with a folkloristic and engaged approach, examines the conceptualisation of the Karbi notion of parallel reality and how its narrativization co-constitutes the Karbi ecology.
The Karbi parallel reality, superimposed on the perceptible environment, calls you in your dreams, tests the purity of your intentions, and makes you earn your way back into your own reality. Furthermore, as an interlocutor explains, “you only get to visit if the place and its people decide you are worthy of it,” underscoring the Karbi conceptualisation and interactions between human and other-than-human agency. Thus, visiting the space entails a deep engagement with the agency and intention not only of the people but of the space itself. Stories of the space enact an alternate epistemology: the empirical and the sacred become porous, aligning the mundane and wondrous in a single narrative order. Through emergent and storied Indigenous landscapes of superimposed geographies, dreamscapes, and spatial agency, this paper presents a perspective that reveals landscapes as entangled assemblages of affect, memory, and meaning, offering a critical counter-narrative to monolithic modernity that transforms the hills into multivalent landscapes, eroding the conventional nature/culture dichotomies.
Paper short abstract
This presentation focuses on the various manifestations of the marvelous in contemporary Israeli popular culture, exploring its connection to nature and examining the roles such narratives play in present Israeli culture, particularly the ways they engage with the local landscape and Jewish folklore
Paper long abstract
This presentation will focus on the various manifestations of the marvelous in contemporary Israeli literature and popular culture, exploring its connection to nature and local landscapes. Demons and spirits dwelling in deserts and abandoned places, City Spirits inhabiting urban landscapes, and other supernatural entities embodied in nature are all part of the expressions of how the marvelous is deeply rooted and entangled with geographical spaces, the local landscape, the physical environment, and the surrounding climate.
From folk narratives to fantastic literature, looking through the perspective of the marvelous reflects, to a large extent, the collective subconscious of the narrating group at a given time. Therefore, it serves as a means of examining identities, concerns, conflicts, and tensions, in this case, within Israeli society and beyond.
Additionally, often drawing from the rich tradition of Jewish and Hebrew origins and their fantastic aspects, these works create a bridge between Jewish traditions and folklore and modern Israeli culture, re-imagining traditions, beliefs, and myths in dialogue with contemporary reality.
In this presentation, I will focus on the current works of some of the emerging voices in Israeli speculative fiction in recent years. Through a close reading and analysis of selected texts, in the light of theoretical approaches, I will examine the roles that narratives of the marvelous play in present Israeli culture, particularly the ways they engage with the local landscape, wherein culture and nature are intertwined.
Paper short abstract
My presentation will bring perspectives from fieldwork and I will show how magical traditions mediate parallel realties. I try to look at general ritual practice and try to elucidate the base rationale behind magic among Khasi and Karbi as faciliatory and how reality can be blurred.
Paper long abstract
Core discussions on the concept of what constitutes reality comprises the focus of this presentation. Reality as every-day, shared, and experienced with other group members constitutes popular and general understandings of the world and vernacular life. But reality is not absolute and fixed. Located at the intersections of Khasi and Karbi Indigenous belief worlds, the practice of Myntor/ka Mintor is so secret and taboo, that any discussions of it are prohibited in social or sacred spaces. Myntor is one of the categories of magic that are common to practices between Khasi and Karbi communities. My presentation will bring together fieldwork over the last 14 years and I will show how knowledge connects over ethnicity and constructed boundaries. I try to look at general practices of magical traditions and try to elucidate the base rationale behind magical rituals among Khasi and Karbi as faciliatory of how reality can be blurred. Using my ethnography, I will describe what myntor tradition is among Khasi and Karbi. Embedded into ethnographic descriptions, I try to look at how people position their relationality toward parallel realities that are catalysed through the medium of magic.