Archaeologia Baltica

The combination of imagological and semiotic approaches allows us to consider ethnic stereotypes in fiction as elements of national imagomythology. Their totality (and related cultural elements) can be interpreted as a special semiotic system. Like an element of traditional mythology, an ethnic stereotype can take various forms of expression, but what remains unchanged is its place in the general picture of the world, which is transmitted by literary tradition as a set of plots and stories. The totality of such narratives constitutes the national imagomythology – a nation’s description of itself in comparison with other nations. Both mythological images and ethnotypes can be desemanticised, reduced and used in artistic practice as elements of stylisation and imitation. Ethnic stereotypes, as well as elements of traditional mythology, like literary tropes, do not require critical thinking from a rational point of view (they are initially understood as fiction).

In The Chronicle of Henry of Livonia there is a description of “divine trial” in Turaida (Latvia), where the “horse of destiny” was used to decide the fate of Christian preacher in the Turaida brother Theodoric. The overall depiction of the trial bears strong likeness to Germanic traditions account of which comes from as early as the writings of Tacitus, in 98. However, the historical context shows similar patterns of mythological thought both with the Livs, the Balts and Germanic tribes. Also similar is the role of the horse in the mythology of these peoples.

They were here as recently as 150 years ago. They spoke about the main players in their celestial domain and pointed them out in the night sky. Today they are gone and the reconstruction of their cosmology has required the breadth of the nineteenth century natural philosopher, drawing on zoology, botany, and linguistics, ethnography, geography and anthropology, as well as patient, long-term naked eye observation. It has been an exciting and stimulating task to gradually unfold these stories of the Australian Aboriginal clan who were regarded by neighbouring clans as the best astronomers in the region.

This work aims to present a panorama of the space-time of certain Brazilian native peoples, and especially the Tupi-Guarani and the Apinayé, as reported by some of the early ethnologists who traveled to Brazil, including Paul Ehrenheich, Theodor Koch-Grünberg and Curt “Nimuendajú” Unkel, as well the Canadian naturalist C. F. Hartt. This ethnohistoric data is compared to recent fieldwork.

This article presents some known Belarussian “astronyms” and related beliefs based on folkloric-ethnographic sources from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries together with material collected by the author and other researchers in the last decade.