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- Convenors:
-
Ülo Valk
(University of Tartu)
Lidia Guzy (National University of Ireland)
Ane Ohrvik (University of Oslo)
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- Chair:
-
Lidia Guzy
(National University of Ireland)
- Formats:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Narratives
- Sessions:
- Monday 21 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
The relationship between humans and the environment is regulated by many rules. If these rules are violated, some places (e.g. holy places, shrines) can acquire agency and react, hence, take part in social life. The panel discusses the related narrative traditions in different cultures and contexts.
Long Abstract:
Boundaries between territories and places are often marked by the invisible: narratives, discourses, memories, and symbolic meanings that certain locations acquire in the interaction between humans and their environment. This relationship is regulated by multiple unwritten rules and norms that are followed, acted out in everyday life but rarely verbalised. Behaviour rules in wilderness and cultural landscapes, indoors and outdoors, can differ greatly, to some extent depending on who controls or owns these places and what the social roles of the involved are. Holy places, shrines, graveyards, heritage sites, etc., stand out as particularly sensitive locations. Violation of behaviour rules here can lead to serious consequences, as confirmed by traditional belief narratives and personal experience stories; or the consequences can be experienced bodily as in the case of breaches of taboo. Places suddenly cease to be passive locations but acquire agency; they react bringing consequences for humans who transgress the norms of behavior. Hence, places can actively participate in social life and have both personhood and personality. The panel explores taboos in the context of a human and non-human agency, and narratives of transgression and agency of place from both historical and contemporary perspectives within the changing contexts of religions, secular worldviews, new spirituality, etc.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 21 June, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
Places and paths are habitually and consensually made by humans and non-human animals, and governed by invisible and unnamed norms, rules, habits and interactions. This paper juxtaposes consensual and non-consensual place-making through 19th century visitors’ narratives and archival sources.
Paper long abstract:
How did the visitors to Norway find their way to places and navigate the paths that ran through pastures, forests and mountains, along rivers and streams, over running brooks and frozen lakes? Places and paths were established long before the visitors’ arrival, and were governed by invisible and unnamed norms, rules habits and interactions. Visitors often transgressed norms, and even violated the habits and common interactions of the locals who indeed accommodated the same visitors. Places and paths are habitual parts of a landscape, and are acts of social and consensual making (Macfarlane 2012:17). Hooves and feet habitually created places and paths that visitors to Norwegian landscapes walked on. Movement in a particular place allows the body to integrate its emplaced “past into its present experience: its local history is literally a history of locales” (Casey 1987:194). Who made the paths you can walk in the dark? If we explore the history of the pack horses, cows, sheep, goats and the people who tended these, we can reach a deeper understanding of the places, the paths, the landscape. In addition to ethnological archive sources and various historical accounts, these consensual hoof- and footsteps of people and animals can be found in-between the lines and as afterthoughts in travel accounts written for other readers, belonging to other social classes, and in terms of the non-human animals – to other species, while also introducing other locomotive practices and technologies.
Paper short abstract:
What happens when digital scavenger apps like Geocaching are given agency in the re-discovering, re-narration and ritualization of formerly culturally important places like the Norwegian Saint Olav wells?
Paper long abstract:
Scavenger hunts by way of digital apps has had a steady increase in popularity on a global scale during the last couple of decades. With GPS-technology as an integrated locative aid in the activity, these apps and games are constructed around targets or posts on physical locations that people visit. Guided by the GPS people can participate in guided exhibitions in museums, detective games or other theme trails set out in the city environment or in the nature. This paper will explore what happens when digital scavenger apps like Geocaching are given agency in the re-discovering, re-narration and ritualization of formerly culturally important places like the Norwegian Saint Olav wells. Anthony Bak Buccitelli suggests that locative gaming apps should be seen as “spatial ‘regimes’, value-encoded systems of power that play out in the individualized user’s experience of space and place” (2017,9). Following this line of thought, in what way does the app contribute to the construction (or restoring) of the St Olav wells as places? Moreover, how does the app contribute in the negotiation of national-religious historical figure still subject to debate in Norway?
Paper short abstract:
Looking at legends about enchanted places in nature is an effective way to approach folklore. Legends give those places agency, especially when the unwritten rules and taboos are broken. They also connect the past and present, placelore, posthumanism, belief and environmental issues.
Paper long abstract:
In Iceland many folk legends focus on the relationship between man and nature. Some of them are narratives about enchanted places, which are surrounded by various unwritten rules and taboos. If they are broken the revenge of the place or the supernatural forces or beings who the place belongs to is to be expected. The places gain agency and the consequences can be severe; illness and death of important livestock, or even in some cases, people.
In this talk we will focus on enchanted spots in Strandir region, a rural area in the Westfjords of Iceland. Over 100 places there are connected with stories of this kind, some of them derived from personal experience while others are traditional belief narratives. These legends are still today found in oral tradition, passed on from one farmer to the next, giving these places symbolic meaning and renewing their sacredness. In the region belief in these legends and places still exists. Most locals try to obey the rules, or at least they do not risk damaging those places, prompting an interesting discussion about what constitutes belief.
It is also interesting to note the social context of legends focusing on enchanted places, and how they have in the last few years been used in relation to transgressive discourses about environmental issues and nature conservation.
Paper short abstract:
The ethnography of a marine storm will allow to accompany the overlapping of ecological and ritual transgression in an urban African context. It also will allow to suggest that traditional ritual specialist can embrace an emerging ecological engagement.
Paper long abstract:
Formerly, among the kimbundu-speaking fishermen of Luanda (Angola), the good relationship between humans and the sea was insured by periodic food offering by humans that the sea rewarded through the availability of fish. In the contemporary era, the combined effect of the abandon of ritual routines and pollution and urbanization of maritime areas broke this former relation. The transgression of ritual and ecological orthopraxis translated into the reaction of the sea under the form of marine storms. These catastrophic events became the paradigmatic relation between humans and the sea in the contemporary era. The ethnography of a marine storms will illustrate how much the religious representations are subject to the history and more specifically to the ecological degradation that characterizes the contemporary era. It will also allow to suggest that traditional ritual specialist can embrace an emerging ecological engagement.
Paper short abstract:
The paper discusses material and immaterial transactions in the ethnographic context of the Minyag community in western China. It elaborates on the consequences that legitimate and illegitimate actions undertaken in specific sites of the environment entail for the individual and the community.
Paper long abstract:
A community of ten-thousand, Minyag clusters in small villages around Gongga Mountain in western Sichuan (PRC). During my fieldwork in Mengzhong village I was recommended not to venture into the northern outskirts, where the village is delimited by a visible thick grove and a less noticeable Chinese-style Han tomb. The lurking presence of ghosts, especially after dusk, keeps the villagers away from both sites. However, fear of unpleasant encounters is overcome on the occasion of bringing offerings to ancestors' altars located on the hill, deep into the sacred core of the grove.
While villagers need to trespass on the grove and perform the sacrifice of a sheep or a chicken in order to ensure the prosperity of the household, the Han tomb remains a sinister space to be avoided. Nevertheless, the accidental excavation of supposedly old clay jars nearby the tomb nurtured the hopes of one villager to make profit out of it in the black market. After knowing that he had removed and hidden the jars in his attic, other villagers kept distance from his house, fearing for the "polluting" effect generated by the dislocation of these items.
The paper juxtaposes personal experiences and shared taboos related to material and immaterial transactions happening in the grove and nearby the tomb. It further elaborates on the consequences that legitimate and illegitimate actions undertaken in the environment entail for the individual and the community.