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This paper offers an insight into the forms how imaginaries and narratives about haunted places and wandering souls in Japan interact with Brazilian breadth and historical depth of the code and discourse about spirits and possession.

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Afro-Brazilian religions spread in Japan after the migration of Brazilians – mostly Japanese descendants with their families – and count more than 30 religious centres and a great number of small groups that gather in private houses.

Afro-Brazilian religions are centred in ritual embodiment of spirits and a wide use of plants for healing. Many people enter Afro-Brazilian religions after experiences with spirits, exceptional event, or physical or psychological disorders that are later reinterpreted in terms of mediumship. Forms of sensing, feeling and attuning with other more-than-human beings (including the environment, plants, animals, other humans, spirits and energies) are further expanded through the development of mediumship and specific modes of attention and response-ability.

In Japan, the breadth and historical depth of the code and discourse about spirits and possession in Brazil interacts with Japanese widespread imaginary and deep cultural relationship with spirits, wandering souls, and sacred and haunted places. New relationships and forms of sensing, feeling, becoming and healing with the environment, plants, spirits and energies develop.

Because “radioactive ghosts” can blur the distinctions between visibility and invisibility and reveal the entanglements of the ontological and epistemological insecurities of the atomic age with the intimate ruptures of psychic life (Schwab 2020), Hiroshima represents an interesting case of analysis. It can shed light on how Afro-Brazilian religions interpret and heal wandering and suffering spirits, and memories imprinted in bodies and the landscape, and how they deal with the complex history, memories, meanings and local practices related to the atomic bomb.

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This paper examines how Lithuanian belief narratives of natural sites portray places as dynamic and living. Using theoretical approaches such as phenomenology, ontological turn, and Japanese Shinto non-dualistic thought, it shows how these belief narratives blur boundaries between humans and nature.

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This paper explores how certain places gain significance through folklore and collective memory, and how the meaning of these places is never fixed, and rather lived. In Lithuanian ethnic tradition, sacred groves, hills, mythological stones, and bodies of water are not passive geographical locations, but rather dynamic sites where humans interact with nature and (most importantly) vice versa. These interactions are often represented through belief narratives.

The focus of my paper is twofold. First, I will discuss theoretical approaches that help us understand the relationship with place in these belief narratives, such as phenomenology and the ontological turn in anthropology. To further contextualize this discussion, I will introduce Japanese non-dualistic thought, particularly the conception of landscape and place in Japanese Shinto. Despite the cultural and geographical distance, there are notable parallels between Shinto and the remnants of Lithuanian ethnic religion, particularly with regard to their relationship to sacred space, place and nature. In Shinto practices, places are understood to be living entities, not merely neutral containers for religious practice. This aligns with the contemporary approach to landscape studies. According to this approach, landscapes are regarded as dynamic phenomena that actively influence human lives, and the meaning of places is never fixed. A similar sentiment can be expressed regarding Lithuanian ethnic religion and its relationship with the landscape. The second aim of my paper is to present different traditional belief narratives about Lithuanian natural sites and demonstrate how place lore often blurs the line between humans and nature.

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As a huge monolith placed between land and sea, Pizzomunno is undoubtedly a landscape attraction of Vieste, a renowned southern Italian tourist town. However, what makes it even more attractive are the legends about its origin, whose meanings and functions recently increased and diversified.

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Pizzomunno is a large and tall limestone rock placed on the shore at the entrance of Vieste, a tourist town in Gargano (Puglia, southern Italy). Given its peculiar look and location, it is not surprising that this monolith is regarded by the locals as an identifying feature of the town. On the other hand, Pizzomunno is one of its most visited and photographed attractions. Nonetheless, this natural site would not be the same without the enchanting meanings provided by folklore. In particular, a current local legend, which is in fact the result of a combination of motifs coming from earlier beliefs and narratives, identifies Pizzomunno as an eponymous fisherman who was petrified after losing his beloved Cristalda because of the mermaids jealousy. What makes even more fascinating this story is the fact that, one night every a hundred years, Pizzomunno recovers the human form and can stay with Cristalda, temporarily released by the mermaids. In this way the rock giant has been turned into a symbol of authentic and tragic love, as well as a metaphor of the unpredictable, metamorphic relationships between land and sea, humans and other-than-human beings. In the last years the local community, especially after the legend became the subject of a song by a renowned Italian artist, has increasingly invested on Pizzomunno as shaped by folklore, so as to diversify its tourism supply, promote new cultural initiatives and modify accordingly its own identity.

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Since the relationship between tourism, the landscape and folklore is rather complicated and includes certain (frequently conflicting) tensions, this paper explores a sustainable strategy for folklore tourism practices that is considerate of landscape, people living in a place, and heritage value.

Paper long abstract

Folklore tourism grew significantly in popularity over the last years, enticing people to explore landscapes infused with supernatural folklore. At the same time, however, the amount of scholarship in the field of folklore tourism is limited, and a need for more insight into the conflicting and complicated relationship between tourism, the landscape and folklore remains.

This paper, drawing inspiration from Ironside and Massie (2020), therefore explored a sustainable strategy for folklore tourism practices. Considering that modern travellers require narratives like supernatural folktales to enliven landscapes for them, allowing them to experience these landscapes in new ways, liminal spaces (i.e., a space between reality and the ‘extraordinary’) are created during which people may be receptive to new and fresh perspectives on, e.g., environmental matters. Consequently, folktales – which convey an animistic worldview – can thus offer transformative experiences that have the capacity to impact and mould tourist behaviour. Considering, furthermore, that humanity is at a turning point where we need to critically reflect on the relationship we have with the natural world, this paper considers an approach to folklore tourism that proposes an animist ‘folklore-centric gaze’.

Taking the Isle of Skye as a case study, this paper shows that supernatural folktales enable their audiences to ‘see more’, thereby stimulating a greater sensitivity and responsiveness to one’s surroundings, which is sometimes also accompanied by increased environmentally respectful behaviour. Hence, the influential capacity of folktales mainly consists of nudging people towards adopting a folklore-centric gaze, which enables more understanding/connectivity of/with the natural/more-than-human world.

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This paper explores how dreams, visions, and altered states were linked to caves, tombs, rivers, and fountains in Northwestern Europe. Drawing on Classical, medieval, and folkloric sources, it shows how rituals like incubation and offerings marked these sites as enduring portals to the Otherworld.

Paper long abstract

In the practice of incubation, an individual seeks aid or advice from Otherworldly entities by sleeping in a place dedicated to them. In Roman times, people practised formal incubation at the temples of healing deities (Asclepios, Amphiaros), and expected such encounters at the natural homes of water nymphs and goddesses. In Northwestern Europe, as elsewhere, these Classical practices formalised and merged with local belief-structures, later Christianised and adapted in various ways. This paper explores the evidence for ties between dream-experience (including altered states of mind, prophetic visions and nightmares) and specific kinds of natural places. Evidently NW Europeans and Scandinavians did expect encounters with the supernatural world at certain sites – such as caves, tombs, riverbanks and fountains – and could on occasion use ritual means for attracting (or repelling) this kind of experience. These means might include incubation, offerings, attendance (or avoidance) at particular liminal times or seasons. Looking at visual and narrative materials from late Classical, medieval Norse, Anglo-Saxon and Celtic sources, together with folkloric and ethnographic evidence, the paper considers what patterns can be seen here, how they reflect/express social distinctions (such as gender and class), and what they might tell us about how and why certain kinds of “sacred ground” were ascribed, created and maintained over very long periods, as portals to the Otherworld.

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Explore the narratives of connections to landscapes of fairy sites with tales from a Fairy Shaman on the Isle of Skye who communes with fairies to embrace his spirituality and an author/artist in Dartmoor, England who connects through her garden to create her sculptures and novels.

Paper long abstract

Fairy lore has provided many people with the ability to connect to historical Fairy sites in England and the Isle of Skye with a way of enhancing their every day existence. My research for this paper will be focusing on interviews with a Fairy Shaman who utilises his connection to the earth to help convene with the fairies and dragons, communing with their energy in an attempt to help heal the planets ever-growing climate crisis while also leading ‘silent pilgrimages’ for groups who wish to learn how to be more attuned to nature. I also explore natures affects on the creative process using stories from an interview with an artist and author in Dartmoor who share their garden with fairies who have provided her with endless artistic expression. Through these interviews I have the opportunity to share their stories and perspectives on the ways of living a more natural, outside of the box lifestyle and discover new evidence on what helps people feel safe in embracing the natural landscape.

My research seeks to find the connections people have between sites where fairies are known to be present and how the belief in such beings helps these people feel more connected to their lives, their spirituality, their creative/artistic accomplishments and the planet. My paper seeks to answer the question, ‘How does connecting to fairies through well-known geographical locations in Scotland and England enhance peoples lives and does the natural landscape help with their spirituality and creativity?”

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Contrasting a successful and a failed attempt of gaining ecclesiastic recognition to Marian apparitions at healing springs in 18th-century South Hungary, the paper presents the narrative place-lore that have been accumulated around some of the holy wells since the second half of the 1700s.

Paper long abstract

Marian apparitions have long been associated with natural landmarks, such as hilltops, grottoes or even springs. As the supernatural encounters vest the natural settings with new meanings, these natural locations start to act as spiritual magnets. As such they soon become important nodal points in the local story webs. The accumulation of new beliefs, local and historical legends, personal experience stories and true stories indicate the creative meaning-making process, which gradually transforms the apparition sites from everyday space to remarkable and significant place.

Contrasting a successful and a failed attempt of gaining ecclesiastic recognition to Marian apparitions at healing springs in 18th-century South Hungary, the paper presents the rich and diverse narrative place-lore that have been accumulated around some of the holy wells since the second half of the 1700s. The careful exploration of the place-related narrative traditions reflects the close bonds between humans and their environment. It also reveals the stratification of places in a historical sense and the processes how these natural sites become abandoned and then again reloaded with “sacred” significance by narrative folklore.

The paper draws both on long term ethnographic fieldwork and extended historical and archival research.

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This paper highlights how natural places or landscape elements play a pivotal role in Estonian plague legends, although seemingly devoid of any supernatural qualities or active agency, and how related micro-maps reflect survival strategies still relevant for today’s environmental health crises.

Paper long abstract

Estonian plague legends revolve around the interaction between humans and the plague spirit. Typically, the appropriate conduct of an individual or a community is portrayed as instrumental in ending the epidemic. Although nature appears to serve here merely as a passive backdrop, devoid of animated or supernatural qualities or active agency, natural places or landscape elements still play a pivotal role, being intricately linked to the mental micro-mapping strategies employed by humans, who draw upon their knowledge of the local landscape to gain an advantage over the plague spirit. For instance, in certain legends, a single small stone that breaks the wheel of the plague spirit’s carriage halts its destructive journey, thereby altering the course of destiny for the whole of humankind. A modest stream may become a matter of life and death, as a widely recurring legend motif suggests that the plague spirit cannot cross running water. Bog islands and forests also emerge as sanctuaries of refuge. These spatial trajectories – anchored in specific environmental features – are often conveyed through mythological language, yet they also reflect actual historical escape routes, closely tied to Estonia’s distinctive ecotypes.

Based on the findings of the project CHRYSES “Mapping Environmental Health Crises – Public Understanding Through Myths and Science,” I will draw parallels with contemporary environmental health crises, emphasizing how the local nature can be regarded as an ally and maps based on local cognitive and cultural practices of utilizing specific natural features for survival may prove vital for developing future solutions.

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This paper will discuss mythological references to the sky in the Prose Edda, attributed to Snorri Sturluson (1178/9-1241), written as a textbook for aspiring court poets who wanted to compose and understand the complicated and elitist court poetry which based its imagary on mythological references.

Paper long abstract

In the first part of the Edda a mythical trinity explains to King Gylfi of Sweden how the world came about and tells him ‘great tidings of the sky’. They explain the rainbow as the mythological bridge Bifröst between heaven and earth (Alvíssmál also lists different terms for the same phenomena among men and various mythological beings), and gradually transform the entire sky with the Milky way into the mythological abode of the gods with halls and places ( ‘owned’ by the sun and stars respectively). The text does not specify which heavenly locations are pointed at, but we know that the gods’ names were used about the planets: Mars was called Týr, Mercury Óðinn, Jupiter Thor, and Venus Freyja; and the Hyades was called the Wolf's mouth, located just below the planets’ path in the sky. The mythological vocabulary about the sun- and moon dogs and the sun- and moon halos has survived in modern folklore. The sun dogs are said to be the two wolves that run before and after the sun – similarly the mythological siblings that carry the moon between them on a pole, ‘as can be seen from earth’ in the Edda, could be the moon dogs. In this light the Edda is a unique source, written by an insider for other members of an elitist male culture, about Man’s age old practice of mapping the world with stories, on earth as in heaven – as opposed to a creative text based on poetic ‘sources’.

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This presentation discusses how contemporary community bonds to storied places (wahi pana) like Kīlauea volcano and Waipi'o Valley on Hawai'i Island constitute enactment and articulation of survivance, while also producing meaningful frameworks for practicing cultural identity in a colonial setting.

Paper long abstract

Hawai'i’s colonial context of Americanization, settler-dominance, and oppression of Native Hawaiian culture and language have influenced the narrative traditions within which Hawai'i’s storied places are made meaningful for contemporary islanders. Contemporary narrative folk traditions about storied places span from everyday culture to tourist-lore and other types of commercial texts (disseminated online, in brochures, or orally conveyed by professional tour guides) to stories told in educational settings or regurgitated and reconfigured in the contemporary literature of Hawai'i. In the highly diverse landscapes of Hawai'i Island (aka the Big Island of Hawai'i) storied places (wahi pana) like Kīlauea volcano and Waipi'o Valley are closely related to Native Hawaiian storytelling (mo'olelo), the practice of caring for the land (malama 'āina), and the ongoing bond building (pilina) between people and land as expressed in chants (mele) and proverbs ('ōlelo no'eau), such as “the land is the chief, man is its servant” (“he ali'i ka 'āina, he kauwā ke kanaka”). The social stratification between land and people and the cultural values expressed in Hawaiian oral traditions frame contemporary perceptions of Hawaiian identity as tied closely to the land, in particular the storied places of Waipi'o Valley and Kīlauea volcano, where the enactment and articulation of belief narratives reinforce humans’ responsibility (kuleana) to honor their relations (pilina) to the land. This process may be seen as survivance, both resisting the hegemony of American colonialism while sustaining the survival of cultural identity. Concepts and expressions from Hawaiian epistemology will be used to analyze this topic.

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This paper explores the heterotopic meanings ascribed to forests when the urban electronic music subculture organises a rave party in the forest. Heterotopia here refers to the Foucauldian idea of an “other” cultural space.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores the heterotopic (héteros, “other”; topos, “place”) meanings ascribed to forests when the urban electronic music subculture organises a rave party in the forest. In this case, rave refers to unlicensed electronic music events held outdoors and organised secretly in the forests of Finland. Heterotopia (Foucault 1986) refers to the idea of an “other” cultural space that functions as a counter-space distinct from its surroundings. It is thus understood as a place that allows deviation from the normal and from norms, providing a space for the expression of subjectivity.

Drawing on interviews with rave participants, I focus on narratives about nature and the heterotopic meanings of the forest. The analysis suggests that the forest offers a space to hide and to escape not only everyday life but also the norms that prevail in formal venues for raves, such as clubs or concert halls. As a space, the forest provides an opportunity to disappear from society and to party “together but alone.” The forest also offers protection from outsiders, including authorities as well as people unfamiliar with the unwritten rules and protocols of the subculture. Ultimately, even though the phenomenon is contemporary and urban, the narratives of heterotopic meanings attached to the forest resemble the traditional narratives associated with forests in Finnish folklore.

Reference

Foucault, Michel. 1986. “Of other spaces: Utopias and heterotopias.” Diacritics 16: 22–27. https://doi.org/10.2307/464648.

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In Midnight's Children (1981) and Victory City (2023) Salman Rushdie's forest tales draw on belief narratives and other conceptualisations from Indian folklore. The human-nature encounter results here in the protagonists achieving personal progress, the forest functioning as a catalyst.

Paper long abstract

In Indian culture, forests have been venerated for centuries, and indeed millennia. The significant role of forests as specific places is evident in belief narratives related to the creation myths, such as the Mahabharata or the Ramayana. This broadly inspires Indian Anglophone writers. Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children and Victory City are novels that can be interpreted as metaphorically depicting, in one way or another, the birth or creation of India and her ongoing development. In each of these novels a portion of the narrative is set in a forest environment, i.e. "In the Sundarbans" and "Exile", respectively. The forest is conceptualised here as an enclosure, a place, or even a distinct reality that exists in parallel to that found outside.

The present paper will examine the characteristics employed by the author in order to define these forest environments as enchanted sites as well as parallel realities, and how this impacts the protagonists who find themselves there. The forest, into which the characters retreat from their former, oppressive reality, is initially presented as an unpredictable, hostile and even dangerous environment. Nevertheless, through a meaningful interaction between the forest's inhabitants, both animal and superhuman, and the newly arrived characters, as well as through the forest's transformative powers, the latter are ultimately enabled to achieve significant personal growth while their needs and/or desires are being fulfilled.

To this purpose, the author makes use of India's belief narratives, particularly myths, cosmological imagery and the popular traditions, the subject of analysis of this paper.