Paper short abstract:

The paper explores epistemological uncertainties relative to geopolitical and cultural borders in Finnish folklore. Folk belief and vernacular knowledge on living with the border spirits are discussed here with the recurring folk narrative schemas in different border situations.

Paper long abstract:

This paper discusses folklore and epistemological uncertainties relative to geopolitical and cultural borders. The multiple ways of knowing borders have been acknowledged in the field of borders studies since its early days. Nowadays, the diversity of borders regularly serves as a point of departure in border research. Border un/certainties are approached here from the viewpoint of vernacular knowledge and folk belief. The research materials are limited to the 20th century folklore descriptions of the border folk beliefs in Finland and its borderlands. Methodically, the study links to a critical-creative folkloristic perspective so that its symmetrical lenses draw also from the narrative methodology and border theory. The paper illustrates that the borders between farmhouses, villages, regions, and states serve as source for a vivid place-lore, and that these borderlands are regularly inhabited by dwellers other-than-human beings. It is argued that the un/certainties of living with the border spirits in these contexts link to the un/certain knowledge of the site of the border. Moreover, the epistemological un/certainty of borders refers also to the question of how folk belief schemas, for instance the racket of the border spirits, are vividly narrated and varied in different kinds of border situations, not only in the farm, but also in the state border contexts. In addition, it is pondered how these findings and this kind of approach more generally contributes to the contemporary border studies discussions of border un/certainties, for instance, in terms of the research on/with/for empowering border knowledge and sociocultural inclusion.

Paper short abstract:

This paper addresses the instrumentalization of the Virgin Mary through visions, apparitions and heavenly messages in order to fight supposed existential threats - atheist ideologies, apostasy and doctrinal renewal - to the R.C. Church and to the modern world at large.

Paper long abstract:

In particular since the Second World War the interventions of the Catholic saint Mary on planet earth have surged considerably. Her apparitions, together with the messages she brings along, are claimed to be supernatural, as manifestations coming directly from heaven. For devotees and believers such events form often an ultimate source of wisdom, which cannot be easily passed over. Her messages have since strongly increased in meaning and quantity. Two developments have played an important role in this. The first one was the Cold War era, the result of the threat of communism, and in particular a threat for the Church because of the communist atheist ideology. The second development was the Aggionamento, the renewal movement in the Catholic Church itself, which was perceived by many Catholics as a threat to the Catholic faith from within the organization itself. In conjunction with each other, this paper will explain how the non-human body of the holy Virgin is instrumentalized, shaped, depicted and altered by both developments.

Paper short abstract:

Basing on my ethnographic research and using Blaser’s notion on a still ongoing colonial ontological war (Blaser 2014), this presentation asks how to take seriously a supernatural entity, a certain forest in Central Eastern European Hungary?

Paper long abstract:

Blaser (2014) argues that colonial violence manifests in an ontological war where non-western realities and natures struggle to be acknowledged against western makings of the world. Posthumanism is a part of the ongoing conflict. Blaser (2014) and Sundberg (2014) point out that the so far dominant, western type of posthumanisms tend to prioritise technological other-than-humans compared to (non-western) supernatural ones like spirits, to avoid ‘the taint of superstition, animism, […] and other pre-modern attitudes’ (Bennett 2010, p 53). This means that other, non-western kinds of worlds and natures face difficulties when making their way into posthumanist academic knowledge production. Combining decolonial authors from CEE (Tlostanova 2015, Koobak and Marling 2014) with decolonial posthumanist critique, my research deals with the possible existence of Other natures and their (supernatural) other-than-humans in the Hungarian countryside.

Hungary, and the CEE semi-peripheries are not far enough to be recognised and acknowledged as potentially different by and from the west, but many times get constructed as its handy inner Others or pathological region (Boatcă 2012), stuck in an underdeveloped past, in the constant need of catching up. This presentation asks what does this ambiguous, blurred Otherness mean for the supernatural entities of the Hungarian countryside? How do we recognise and acknowledge the possible existence of not-entirely western natures and worlds in the border zones of Europe? How should we approach, speak for, and let a forest speak for itself, which lays in mountains ‘colonised by the wrong (subaltern) empires’ (Morozov 2015), the Ottomans, the Habsburgs, the Soviet Union?

Paper short abstract:

Contemporary shamans (in harnerian, non-entheogenic specialization) often enlist the help of other-than-human actors to heal their clients. This paper aims to theorize shamanic healing from the perspective of the reconstruction and restructuring of the client’s Self that this encounter may provoke.

Paper long abstract:

Contemporary shamans often engage in private one-on-one healing. The most common healing techniques involve seeking out and summoning “allies” from the Other Worlds and returning lost parts of the patient’s soul back into the patient’s body. Both techniques subsequently affect the patient’s self-perception, albeit in different ways.

Based on long-term field research and in-depth interviews with participants in shamanic healing sessions, this paper focuses on how the client’s Self can be transformed and perceived via encounters with the two aforementioned types of non-human actors. The ritually found ally and the lost part of the soul play an important role in creating new opportunities for social interaction. Even after the healing ritual is over, the client has to keep communicating with these newly found helpers, using various techniques to remind themselves of their presence and attend to them.

The encounter with these actors is thus a chance for the integration of new significant others into the client’s self-understanding, where the Self is understood as fluid, relational, and permanently negotiated as an interface between the social Me and personal I. This newly established self-perception, on the one hand, starts the healing process; however, on the one hand, the very experience with these actors is often perceived as strong, but dubious by the clients themselves, and the once-established contact is not at all easy for clients to maintain. These other-than-human actors can thus break, challenge, and change the usual self-perception, yet their power and existence remain uncertain.

Paper short abstract:

Fieldwork concerning haunted people in Denmark reveals both empirical and analytical uncertainties connected to experiencing something you cannot explain. Discussing these uncertainties, the theoretical concepts das Unheimliche, the Thing, factish and other-than-human are taken into consideration.

Paper long abstract:

In Denmark, many people have experiences that they cannot explain. Notions such as haunting, ghost or specter are typically relegated to children’s books, horror movies and folklore boogies. This has left a void for unexplainable experiences; they have become hard to fit into the existing reasoning and vocabulary. In this context, a feeling of uncertainty is evoked when experiencing something beyond reason; Many find that the concept “ghost” is inappropriate, as are similar notions for that matter, and they find it hard to grasp, to categorize and to share their experience. What do you do, when experiencing something that you cannot understand or explain? Where do you turn when the sociocultural context does not offer possible categories or proper explanations? How can this kind of experiences be theorized? By which concepts can you analyze what seems to be slipping between categories and reason? Based on ethnographic fieldwork concerning haunted people in Denmark today, this paper discusses the trouble that many people have, when experiencing something that they cannot explain. Also, the paper discusses the trouble that the anthropologist has, when seeking to analyze the field material at hand. In this connection, the uncertainties of theoretical concepts such as Das Unheimliche (Sigmund Freud 1999(1919)), factish (Bruno Latour 2010), The Thing (Jacques Derrida, 2006) and other-than-human are taken into consideration. Frictions and troubles and maybe also new potentialities arise, when the supernatural confuses everyday life.

Paper short abstract:

The paper discusses personal experience narratives of supernatural encounters in 21st-century Estonia. Perplexion and uncertainty regarding these events evoke different storytelling strategies and frames of interpretation ranging from traditional folk religion to disbelief and humour.

Paper long abstract:

Folklorists have usually interpreted experience narratives about the supernatural within the context of folk narrative genres, such as memorates and legends. This kind of approach enables us to see links between personal storytelling, narrative patterns, and cultural tradition as a shared resource. From the moment an experience is transformed into a verbalized account, it appears in an intertextual and –generic context and can be studied as an expression of a storyworld. For individuals, however, their personal supernatural experiences appear as unique and often shocking events. The related storytelling tends to be charged with a sense of uncertainty, insecurity, and fear. The lack of rational frames of interpretation turns personal experience stories into an epistemological problem, often handled with perplexion, disbelief and humour. The paper analyses storytelling about personal encounters with the uncanny from 21st-century Estonia, discussing these cases within the context of folk religion as a resource for meaningful interpretations and changing beliefs that sometimes contradict the narrative tradition of the past.

Paper long abstract:

Being haunted by evil spirits or experiencing Virgin Mary apparitions are divergent phenomena in many ways. They follow different traditions that are often in explicit opposition, have opposing emotional valence (dysphoric vs. euphoric), one being avoided and the other valued, attract different degrees of public attention, etc. Despite this apparent contrast, the two phenomena are also similar in many ways. They are similar in how individual experience and collective tradition are intertwined and bidirectionally influenced and in how their social transmission depends on the form of a testimony. Using narrative material from my field research in northwestern Slovakia, I will show that the similarities in testimonies about encounters with supernatural agency and the transmission dynamics of these narratives can be illuminated by the contemporary knowledge regarding human perception, memory, and social communication. Psychological insights into when and how collectively shared beliefs and social conventions may influence individual perception or memories show that the underlying cognitive mechanisms are not only associated with uncertainty but are probably direct strategies to cope with uncertainty. I will argue that this creates a specific psychological niche that delineates the forms and enables the emergence of specific narrative traditions in which first-hand testimonies play a crucial role.

Paper short abstract:

Jewish healers in Yemen practiced several kinds of communication with spiritual entities in their healing methods. By analyzing oral sources, this lecture will ask how folk religion of a Jewish minority in a Muslim land reacts to immigration, in a new cultural context which questions its legitimacy.

Paper long abstract:

Traditional Jewish healers in 19th-20th century Yemen practiced several kinds of communication with other-than-human entities in their healing methods. Notably, these healers would address non human, spiritual beings for various purposes, such as creating amulets, divination, curing sickness, or evoking love or hate to the request of young Jews or Muslims. Past ethnographic writings of these practices often depicted them in contrast to modernity, through orientalist and colonialist prisms. This trend accelerated in the 1950's, after the majority of the Yemeni-Jewish population immigrated to Israel, encountering traditional Yemeni practices and concepts of 'the occult' with the western and modern image Zionism sought to cultivate.

By analyzing oral sources collected by ethnographers in the past century, with additional field work with Yemeni-Jewish immigrants in current-day Israel, this lecture will ask how folk religion of a Jewish minority in a Muslim land reacts to immigration, in a new cultural context which questions its legitimacy. By discussing practices such as talking to Jewish angels in Arabic, or marrying a demon, the lecture will examine how Yemeni Jewish folk religion displays blurred borders between religions and genders, and how it challenges strict categories such as 'Good Angels' or 'Evil Demons'