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This paper explores Folk and Black Metal, briefly tracing their evolution from an underground phenomenon to recognised music genres. It examines how both draw on a romanticised idea of nature as a core aesthetic and symbolic element in music, lyrics, and iconography – and their historical sources.

Paper long abstract

Black Metal is an (in)famous extreme music genre that developed underground, primarily in Scandinavia, between the late 1980s and early 1990s. It later evolved into a widespread and commercially successful phenomenon. Today, it remains a significant player in the music industry. Folk Metal, in its early forms, is closely related – musically, thematically, and aesthetically – to Black Metal and its kindred sub-genres, such as Pagan Metal and Viking Metal. Some of the earliest Folk Metal bands, including Storm and Finntroll, originated from the Black Metal scene; specularly, several Black Metal musicians, such as Ulver and Wardruna, have produced albums of non-metal folk music. The pioneering bands of the early to mid-1990s are widely regarded as highly influential and have attained cult status, with nature a central source of inspiration.

Over time, Folk and Black Metal have developed into an international subculture. Once primarily a masculine, North-European youth phenomenon, they now embrace a broader, more inclusive ethos, attracting all ages, genders, and nationalities, as they increasingly intersect with diverse musical, ethnic, and folk traditions worldwide, effectively evolving into a form of world music.

Both Folk and Black Metal frequently draw on nature, often in a romanticized, decadent, and gothic-infused manner. This paper seeks to historicise and analyse this imaginary, tracing its diachronic aesthetic and symbolic development through musical, textual, and visual sources. Nature appears in fact not only in compositional and stylistic choices but also in artists’ and bands’ names, album titles, lyrics, and visuals, including costumes and album artwork.

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This paper examines the Assamese Bihu songs as oral archives that preserve ecological knowledge and cultural memory. Examining both traditional and contemporary forms, it traces how these songs link seasonal change, environment, and community identity across shifting contexts.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the potential of Assamese Bihu songs, performed during Rongali Bihu. These seasonal celebrations are central to shaping environmental awareness and communal identity through their dual role as markers of seasonal transitions and repositories of cultural and ecological memory. Beyond festive entertainment, these songs preserve detailed knowledge of rivers, crops, birds, and flowering cycles, linking agrarian life to wider community experience. By examining both traditional and contemporary versions drawn from oral repertoires, archival sources, and mediated performances, the study traces how ecological memory adapts to shifting cultural and environmental contexts.

This analysis integrates folklore studies, cultural memory theory, ecocriticism, and performance theory. Folklore studies focus on performance and transmission, while memory theory highlights intergenerational continuity. Ecocriticism examines the representation of human and nonhuman relationships in songs. Performance theory addresses the embodied and dialogic enactment of ecological knowledge, and posthumanist perspectives emphasize the agency of nature within these performances. Their interaction demonstrates how Bihu positions ecological forces as active participants in cultural memory by depicting nature not merely as a symbol but also as an agency, with rivers influencing migration, winds signalling seasonal change, and flowers announcing fertility. The paper also considers how environmental disruption and commodification transform Bihu traditions, particularly through stage performance, media circulation, and festival economies. Regional and class variations are examined, contrasting rural agrarian repertoires with urban, commodified performances. Ultimately, the study demonstrates that Bihu persists as a vital site where ecological knowledge, ethical sensibilities, and multispecies relations are continually reimagined through song and performance.

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This paper explores how Slovenian folk singers negotiate authenticity both on stage within heritage institutions and through embodied ties to nature and place, revealing ecological imaginaries that connect humans, ancestors, and the more-than-human.

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This paper examines how contemporary Slovenian folk singers in Slovenia negotiate authenticity through their interpretations of traditional songs, with particular attention to the symbolic and affective roles of nature and spatiality. Drawing on interviews and performance analysis, I show how singers conceptualize folk song not only as heritage, shaped by institutional frameworks and historical aesthetics, but also as a living medium that connects them to places, ancestors, and nonhuman environments.

While institutional guidelines often promote static and historically codified modes of singing, individual singers emphasize embodied, emotional, and spiritual experiences, locating authenticity in the resonance between voice, landscape, and memory. For these singers, authenticity is inseparable from ecological imaginaries: it emerges when songs are sung in specific landscapes or sacred spaces, where sound, place, and natural acoustics intertwine, and where singing is understood as mediating between humans, ancestors, and the more-than-human environment.

By situating these practices within broader debates on heritagisation and affective authenticity, I argue that Slovenian folk song interpretations highlight the paradox of authenticity: while heritage institutions canonize and stabilize forms, performers re-inscribe songs with ecological and existential meanings.

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From the 1890s into the 1970s, loggers’ songs was a genre in Sweden where ecological awareness and cultural critique was voiced, also reaching into popular music and protest songs. An 1893 song of deforestation is taken as a starting point of a discussion of productive tropes and the logger persona.

Paper long abstract

In the winter of 1893, Oskar Thelén wrote a 28-stanza narrative song on how companies of the forest industry had cheated peasants into selling off their forest lands for a petty sum, and how the deforestation had ruined the ecological system so farming was no longer possible. The growth of a pauperised working class was one result noted, but the song ends with a utopian image of a restored forest in an equal society. During the first half of the 20th century, logger songs was a productive genre reaching into popular music where ecological perspectives could take romantic as well as culture-critical expressions, in utopian as well as dystopian terms. Nostalgia in the face of modernisation was in the 1960’s joined with public awareness of industrial pollution and a contemporary language of protest, bringing out tropes of anti-capitalism as well as “nature’s revenge”. This presentation will go into these and other productive tropes, but also study the logger persona in popular culture as an eco-conscious subject with a “close to nature”-knowledge.

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The paper explores the connections and shifting meanings between lament tradition and forests within the Karelian and Finnish contexts from the early 20th century to the 2020s. I ask what the forests of lamentation at different times reveal about the cultural values of forests and their changes.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the shifting meanings and multiple connections between laments and forests in the context of Karelia and Finland from the early 20th century to the present day. In lament poetry, forests and trees appear as metaphors, as concrete material for a coffin or heating the bridal sauna, or, in the age of Eco-crisis, as the source of grief. On the other hand, several contemporary lamenters experience a forest as a suitable physical environment for lamentation, and even traditional Karelian burial grounds are often located in forests. In this case, the forest and its trees can be personified and placed among the listeners of the laments.

During the analysed period, both the practice of lamentation and the use and relationship with forests have undergone significant changes, and both areas are experiencing a new kind of transition towards sustainability, ecological and cultural. Regarding the lament tradition, this is particularly relevant for Karelian-speaking Karelians, who are a poorly recognised minority in Finland. The Karelian lament tradition has been revived in Finland with varied interpretations. Some focus on its aesthetic qualities, others on emotional release, and some on Karelianness. These processes of reinterpretation and reframing have also influenced the tradition's meanings, causing some nuances to fade and introducing new elements.

Drawing on ecocriticism, posthumanism, and multidisciplinary new-spiritual research, I examine how these sociocultural shifts are reflected in the lament tradition, as well as what the forests in the lament tradition reveal about the cultural values of forests and their transformations.

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By comparing and contrasting different folk songs the paper explores how metaphors contain ecological knowledge and through new ways of transmission how their meanings shift or are reinterpreted in contemporary times.

Paper long abstract

Haryanvi society is an agrarian society that expresses its relationship with the land, weather and agriculture through its large collection of folk songs. Given its geographical location, Haryana experiences all four seasons marked by festivals and rituals celebrating them all. Its vibrant musical tradition includes seasonal, rites of passage, wedding songs, all deeply rooted in the natural world and encapsulating the ecological knowledge of the region. Nature metaphors used in these songs are not merely ornamental, but they embody lived experiences of the community and its relationship with the non-human factors.

In this digitally mediated world, when younger generation drifts away from its agrarian roots, folk songs serve as mnemonic anchors of past struggles and resilience. And when nature is compromised for development, these folk songs mediate between traditional agrarian world views and modern developmental aspirations by keeping the younger generation grounded through folk songs. This paper explores and investigates how deeply nature metaphors are engrained in the collective memory of Haryanvi communities and how they are used in folk songs to convey and communicate the lived experiences of the people. By comparing and contrasting different folk songs the paper explores how metaphors contain ecological knowledge and through new ways of transmission how their meanings shift or are reinterpreted in contemporary times.

This study situates the Haryanvi folk songs in the broad discussion of human-nonhuman interdependence. It argues that nature metaphors functions as repositories of ecological knowledge and as sites where memory and relationship with the natural world are negotiated.

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We examine the nature of transition areas between animal tales and songs, paying attention to poetic devices and lexical particularities as well as the conceptualization of animals. We explore the position of the animal lore within the folkloristic systematics, also its functionality and reception.

Paper long abstract

Animal tales (ATU 1–299) are stories whose characters are animals that behave and act like humans. Anthropomorphism of animals is one of the main features of this fairy tale type. The setting of these stories reflects human society and interpersonal relationships.

Estonian runosong tradition includes various lyrical songs describing poetically or symbolically animals or their traits, (semi)narrative songs in which animals appear as agents or anthropomorphized dialogue partners, as well as songs imitating natural sounds, especially bird calls (known as naturlaut).

In Estonian folklore, animal tales and songs form the area where two completely opposite genres of oral self-expression—prose and poetry—meet and intertwine. There are many instances where the same narrative plot appears both as a song and as a tale. Formulaic fairy tales (ATU 850–999) tended to develop into songs because their structure is based on the repetition of the same elements facilitating the transformation. Several animal tales include songs, for example, dialogues are performed in verse, using the poetic devices of runosong such as alliteration and parallelism. Animal songs performed separately from tales are a symptom of the decline of the storytelling tradition

In this presentation, we examine the nature of these transition areas between songs and tales, paying attention to poetic devices and lexical particularities. We are especially interested in the depiction and conceptualization of animals across different genres. We are also interested in the position of animal lore within folkloristic systematics and the ideological hierarchy, as well as its functionality and reception.

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I explore how Slovenian “ethno” singers engage with notions of nature and the “natural.” Drawing both on onthological turn and poststructuralist view of music and voice as self-technology, I show how their practices alter Western dualisms, but also intersect with modern commodification processes.

Paper long abstract

Western epistemology has long been shaped by conceptual oppositions, one of them being culture/nature. The “ontological turn” questioned the legitimacy of applying these dualities to the ontologies of the “Others.”

This question - the epistemological schism between researcher and interlocutors - became central to my research with the singers of “ethno” music in Slovenia. How do we theorize emic narratives of engagement with traditional music as emancipatory while also analyzing its embeddedness within contemporary cultural processes and means of production?

I unravel this dilemma by exploring notions of nature and “natural” among singers from two epistemological standpoints. First, I draw on the idea of interlocutors as “co-theorists” (Holbraad and Pedersen 2017), and of folk song as agentive subject. I show how the affective engagement with traditional music allows singers to inhabit modes of subjectification alternative to Western dualisms and cultivate different relation to the nature.

Second, I consider poststructuralist notions of music and (“natural”) voice as “technologies of the self” (De Nora 2004) and show how the “natural voice” concept is embedded in contemporary processes of commodification of musical traditions, voice-work and self-work.

Bringing these seemingly incongruent approaches together highlights how engagements with traditional music complicate romanticized notions of “traditional ecological knowledge” and frame nature as emergent through performative practices. At the same time, singers - neither confined to nostalgic folk-life imageries, nor reducible to products of modern ideologies - strategically mobilize ideas of nature and the “natural” and take active role in the construction of their own life-worlds.

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This paper examines the Lotha folksongs as a rich ethnographic resource, analyzing their intricate portrayal of nature to uncover underlying cultural values and the community’s symbiotic relationship with the environment.

Paper long abstract

Lotha Folk Songs as a Repository of Cultural Values and Environmental Symbiosis

E Ongarhoni Ovung

Research Scholar

Department of Cultural and Creative Studies

North-Eastern Hill University

Shillong-793022, Meghalaya

Email: ovungongarhoni@gmail.com

Abstract

This paper examines the Lotha folksongs as a rich ethnographic resource, analyzing their intricate portrayal of nature to uncover underlying cultural values and the community’s symbiotic relationship with the environment. It may be noted that in Northeast India the Lothas as a distinct Naga tribal community located largely in Wokha district of Nagaland have a rich indigenous oral tradition replete with varied age-old oral poetry or folk songs that is passed on from generation to generation. Lotha folksongs are an intricate cultural record, using the vibrant representation of plants and animals to narrate nature’s beauty. These elements function as powerful metaphors that reflect Lotha cultural values and the community's symbiotic relationship with its environment. Beyond their aesthetic value, these lyrical narratives function as a living cultural chronicle and a powerful communal bond, providing a collective means of expression across the emotional spectrum—from celebratory jubilation to shared sorrow and resilience. But in course of time, it has been gradually impacted by several internal and external factors like spread of Christianity and the unavoidable effects of modernization. As result, some of the indigenous knowledge are either forgotten or woven in rejuvenated manner along with Christian beliefs and practices, thereby creating a syncretic cultural tradition.

Keywords: Lotha folksongs, cultural metaphors, environmental symbiosis, oral tradition, resilience, cultural values, syncretic, ethnobotany.

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Two songs from the Arbëresh-Italian villages of Puglia and Molise contain rich images of the natural world that evoke both longing for their ancestral homeland and a strong sense of belonging that centers their identity as custodians of Albanian language and cultural traditions deeply in place.

Paper long abstract

The people of 500-year-old Arbëresh communities in Puglia in southern Italy, whose ancestors fled the Ottoman invasion of Albania, have long navigated their dual identity as Italians and custodians of their Albanian language and heritage. Two songs in particular are rich with images of the natural world that evoke both longing for their ancestral homeland and a strong sense of belonging that centers their cultural traditions deeply in place. Their relationship with traditional songs allows connections with the past to be continually negotiated in the present.

In “Rine Rine,” a young girl is lured away from home by the charms of a distant, cloud-enshrouded mountain, and seeks to conceal her adventure from her mother. The mountain may represent Albania or the Apennines just visible on the horizon that, along with tantalizing images of olives and apples from orchards that span the hills and valleys between Arbëresh towns in the region, symbolize the generational fissures that have led young people to migrate away from southern Italy, and the painful experience of language shift that threatens the survival of Arbëreshë dialects.

In contrast, “Qifti” recounts the tale of a girl who ventures into the wild on a sunny spring day, and speaks with a hawk (qift), whose language she understands. The hawk leads her to a garden, where a special flower attracts her. Instead of being lured away, she returns home to her mother, content to “bloom where she is planted,” and finding joy in the language she shares with the hawk.