Paper short abstract:

The paper explores the ways in which old popular beliefs in witches, werewolves and fairies are used for audiovisual entertainment at open festivals in today's Croatia. The main social function of supernatural beings to invoke fear has been reused to amuse and attract modern visitors.

Paper long abstract:

Today we are witnessing the abundance of open festivals and gatherings that celebrate mythical/supernatural heritage of certain places and regions in Croatia. The basis for such gatherings is some historical or ethnographical information that can connect certain places with mythical/supernatural past. Some newer festivals invent mythical heritage and offer themes related to fairies, werewolves, witches, shamans, and other creatures that allegedly lived in the region. Furthermore, visitors are offered to spend some time in the dungeons where alleged witches were kept and tortured; they can close themselves in the coffins to experience "material aspects" of afterlife; children are introduced to morbid figures of monsters in nearby forests, and every corner of the festival's surrounding is covered with scary images and sounds. I want to argue that the concept of fear plays a significant role in the entire process. According to Lauri Honko (1966), the main function of supernatural beings from popular beliefs was to invoke fear among the people and thus help them fit in desirable social norms. Today visitors also face the fear invoked by audiovisual concepts inspired by supernatural beings, but within the monitored and controllable festival environment. In this manner visitors are attracted by audiovisual representations of supernatural beings but at the same time, throughout entertaining themselves, they learn how to confront fears "caused" by supernatural beings.

Paper short abstract:

For centuries, the musical 'Naubat' has (re)presented times and spaces of divine kingship in North India. What drove the Merasi court musicians to halt its performance in the World Heritage Site of Jaisalmer? This paper considers how sensory ideologies and politics (trans)form heritage sites.

Paper long abstract:

Throughout history, the affective medium of music has been constitutive for local practices of remembering and place-making across the Rajput realms of North India. In the wake of globalization, however, the inherent visualism of the modern heritage industry has been gradually superseding sonic ways of representation in the epistemological economy of Rajasthan.

Drawing on collaborative, ethnographic research conducted in the city and former kingdom of Jaisalmer (2011-2018), this paper delves into the silence of the 'Naubat', a politicoreligious performance/clock that was central to endemic conceptions of heritage and yet was halted in 1997. Particularly, I focus on the "silencing" of its players, the hereditary royal musicians 'Alaamkhana Merasi', as a lens for examining how the perceptual is embroiled in politics of recognition.

First, I expose how the thundering Naubat, historically performed at umbrella-shaped pavilions guarding the palaces' entrance and aimed at making the Maharavals' power audible across the walled town, was a powerfully emplacing and a spatially encoded vehicle of memory for both local audiences and the Alaamkhana performers.

Then, I examine why the Naubat outlived the British Raj but became still at the turn of the millennium, unravelling the reasons why the Alaamkhana halted a tradition that was central to their senses of identity, and the reasons why the pavilions of sonic performance have been sealed with chains at the 'monumental' Mandir Palace.

I suggest that the silence surrounding the Naubat might be, precisely, what best speaks of the visual imageries and power politics (re)shaping "Jaisalmeri heritage" today.

Paper short abstract:

This paper reflects on the historical and ethnographic research & thought processes behind the live audiovisual performance "Ife & Bilal: Songs on a Journey", centred in the globalised world of the Indian Ocean, 1000 years ago, re-examining histories and heritages linked by transoceanic connections.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation reflects on an artistic production created between 2017 and 2018 as part of a Mellon-funded, inter-institutional research project titled: ‘Re-centring Afro-Asia: Musical and human migrations in the pre-colonial period 700-1500 AD’ (University of Cape Town, University of the Western Cape, University of the Witwatersrand, Ambedkar University Delhi).

“Ife and Bilal” is an interdisciplinary and intercultural collaboration between artists from South Africa, India, and Turkey. In a live improvised creation using sound and visuals, we explore the Indian Ocean as an archive and an agent, echoing the past with the present.

The performers are also researchers in the fields of history, ethnomusicology, and ontology, and each brings a focus on a different region of the precolonial Indian Ocean system. Our research revealed songs from centuries ago with themes of boats, voyages and separation. From this repertoire, Malayalam songs of Cochin Jews in India, Swahili songs of Zanzibar, and Ottoman songs from Turkey were combined with projected visuals drawing from Arab enquiries into astronomy, alchemy, and navigation, to weave a narrative that travels across the Indian Ocean a millennium ago.

All of these seafaring cultures around the Indian Ocean were deeply connected despite the vast distances between them, and yet some of these histories and heritages are still viewed in isolation, rather than as a collective heritage of the Indian Ocean littoral. An audiovisual production such as this is one way to begin a much needed de-colonial reorientation of the current view of these multiple histories and heritages.

Paper short abstract:

The study tries to highlight the relation between heritage and audiovisual methodology regarding the vernacular architecture of nowadays Romanian villages as it can be traced in different regions. Questioning people regarding the cultural value of this architecture can reveal original recordings.

Paper long abstract:

Researching everyday life in Romanian rural areas can reveal valuable results regarding the changes produced regarding the material culture and the mentalities of people. This becomes obvious when we look these days to some of old houses from the village that still keep intact some vernacular elements of the courtyard. Few of these constructions seem to belong to Village Museum, they are still alive in a contemporary courtyard, they are well conserved and functional, and some of them, even they are still functional, they are in a bad shape. The images of the courtyard "speak" about people's life, about the changes that happen - improved dwellings or changes that didn't happen or delay to happen - vernacular constructions of the past. There are very important the narratives of the people, how do they relate with this vernacular architecture? they received it from the ancestors as it is and it still respond to contemporary demands. These vernacular elements are so fragile that make you ask questions regarding the socio-cultural aspects of the landscape they provide and the necessity to safeguard them, to record them visually, to record the narratives of people. It's a kind of "private" heritage that needs to be kept alive, conserved in situ, only its image can be collected but in connection with everyday changes of rural areas. The study presents audiovisual material (interviews, images) about particularities from different ethno-folkloric regions of Romania: the well known Maramureș, Oltenia and Moldova.

Paper short abstract:

Focusing on a range of photographic materials, this paper explores the possibilities to use photographs in participatory research on transformations of Daugava river delta communities focusing on their relationships with the Freeport of Riga.

Paper long abstract:

Focusing on a range of photographic materials, this paper explores the possibilities to use photographs in participatory research on transformations of Daugava river delta communities focusing on their relationships with the Freeport of Riga. The decline of Baltic fisheries and industrialisation of the port over the past decades have substantially transformed what once were fishing suburbs, rural enclaves within a city, islands providing their inhabitants with access to natural resources and water in particular.

By creating corpora of photographs and making it accessible to communities, we are problematising cultural heritage process in two ways. Firstly, we engage communities themselves in collecting and curating their visual heritage. Secondly, the collected photographs are a separate set of data to be analysed.

The studied 4 communities are both similar and also different. These are/were both traditional fishing settlements and the industrial suburbs of the city. They are both ethnically homogeneous (dominated by inhabitants of Latvian or Russian language communities) and/or heterogeneous. We can also trace exile or virtual communities connected to these areas, like employees and inhabitants of former Soviet military bases, most of whom lives outside Latvia. Based on previous social research of Latvian society and communities, we assume that the cultural heritage of our target communities can vary considerably. So we ask: is there a need to produce a common visual narrative of cultural heritage and is it possible at all?

Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the audiovisual methods and production used in the studies of Lithuanian cross-crafting heritage. It focuses on how studies of cross-crafting heritage constituted mostly on the audiovisual data affect the maintenance of this intangible heritage today.

Paper long abstract:

The paper focuses on the audiovisual methods and production used in the studies of Lithuanian cross-crafting heritage. Cross-crafting and its symbolism is included in the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. As a synthesis of craftsmanship, artistry, faith and rituals this heritage is the research object of several disciplines such as ethnology, folklore, art history.

Researchers from different fields are using different audiovisual methods and production in the studies of this heritage depending on research problems and aspects. Ethnologists and folklorists focus their attention on the research of rituals, customs, and faith of the living tradition of cross-crafting while art historians explore an artistic expression of this heritage both in the past and present days. Audiovisual production serves as records of reality, as documentary evidence of the people, places, things, actions and events they depict. Their analysis is the extraction of such information. Audiovisual technology (photo, film, video) enables researchers to note down visual information in its native environment, store it for longer periods of time and reproduce it again at any time. Researchers also decipher the hidden messages of the visual material using other methods of interpretation.

It will be discussed which audiovisual methods are relevant for the ethnologists, folklorists or art historians? What direct and indirect information provided by audiovisual production is important to scholars from different fields? Moreover, how studies of cross-crafting heritage constituted mostly on the audiovisual data affect the maintenance of this intangible heritage today?

Paper short abstract:

The Ransom project is a transmedia, multidisciplinary research about kidnapping and mediation. Every kidnapping is a story, with ever recurring characters. My aim is to track the changes in this process through centuries, using the tools of oral history, semiotics, folklore studies and film making.

Paper long abstract:

I am working on a multidisciplinary and transmedia project focused on kidnapping and mediation through the centuries. Starting from the current debate on Public History, I will produce both a written, canonical dissertation and also an audiovisual project, likely a documentary or a series of short films.

Kidnapping is a human practice that somehow predates human history, since it is present in several mythological narratives from all over the world. With his recurring characters, the process of kidnapping have a built-in narrativity that can be examined with the tools of comparative literature, folklore studies and semiotics.

My aim is to highlight the continuities and changes in this practice, dating back from the XVI century to the present day, in order to investigate two set of things: to track the changes in the process of kidnapping, mediation and release of hostages in the Mediterranean; but also trying to work on the audiovisual telling of the longue durèe, while most of public history products are more focused on contemporary history.

Working in a multidisciplinary environment, I will use tools coming from different disciplines: semiotics, anthropology, folklore studies, media studies. Mediation works in an ever-changing legal framework so I have to research also in that direction.

High importance willl be given to filmed interviews with surviving victims of kidnap, with relatives who had to seek for mediation and with real life mediators. We will create a dialogue between living people and historical figures who experienced the same process in different times.

Paper short abstract:

Paper discuss images of four N Adriatic fish that have important role in heritage-making processes: Piranꞌs mullet, a migratory fish linked with local tradition; "sedentarized" seabass from fish ponds, the sardines, important for fishing industry and tuna linked with the "lost" Slovene territory.

Paper long abstract:

Paper discuss stories and images of four N Adriatic fish that have important role in heritage-making processes. They appear in museums, on postage stamps, within tourist brochures, movies and other promotional material. The first one is a Piranꞌs mullet, a migratory fish that is strongly linked with local fishing tradition. The second one is its rival, a "sedentarized" pray fish, Piranꞌs seabass, living in fish farms. Mullet's image was selected for the Slovene animal postage stamp in 2013, and the fish often finds its way also into Slovene newspapers and TV, most frequently in connection with the disputed maritime border which they obliviously cross. Piranꞌs seabass swimming in fish farms in the Bay of Piran is a novelty. It is a fish "without heritage", a fish for which the doors of Piranꞌs municipality and museum are closed, a fish that doesn't cross the contested border and sit comfortably within sustainable development discourse. There are two other fish, important for this region and linked with other specific heritage discourses, historical periods or fishing technologies - the sardines and tunas. The sardines are small pelagic fish important for ex-Yugoslav fishing industry but also a common meal served at fish picnic taking place on Slovene fishing boats. The fourth fish is tuna - it is contextualised with the narration on the traditional Slovene tuna fishing along the coast between the Trieste and Sistiana (on the nowadays Italian coast), with the "lost" Slovenian territory and it lives in museum and past stories linked to the "real Slovene fishing".