Klaipėdos universitetas

In the article is surveyed the calendar-ritual tradition and its change from the magical beginning to poetic, aesthetic one. It is presented dominant level – suggestive, seen in the formula desirable – real. The focus is on a calendar memory, its main factors by which it is relayed. The emphasis is on repetition, variation of traditional actions and verbal expression.

The collective memory of people in the post-Soviet space preserves some stereotypes, and they have a certain influence on the cognitive process. For example, the focus on interfaith conflict, as well as silencing issues of constructive interaction, was a deliberate manipulation. The author set the goal of analysing intercultural contact between different ethnic groups in the religious practice of votive offerings in Ukrainian lands. The attribution of votive offerings preserved in museums in Ukraine shows that the tradition was widespread, but waned during the Soviet era.

The current article sketches some peculiarities of the Christian worldview manifested as Roman Catholic, Protestant and Eastern Orthodox traditions shaped by unique social activities of nations and their luminous representatives. These three traditions are described as Roman Catholic (society which pleases God), Protestant (Professional calling from God) and Russian Orthodox (merge of religious and national identity). Traditions are characterized by illustrations from the key documents representing local peculiarities of the Christian mindset. Being mutually interactive, these vectors open up unlimited ways to carry out practical Christian ministry both within the Church and outside its walls at the same time acting as preconditions for Christian social teaching and development of caritative social work.

The concept of ethnogenesis offers a theoretical approach to hybridity and syncretism that finesses the tensions between “New Amazonian Ethnography” and “New Amazonian History” by simultaneously encompassing the study of indigenous ontologies and alternative constructions of history (i.e., “mytho-historical narratives”) as well as the reconstruction of history from all available sources. Ethnogenesis can be defined as a process of authentically re-making new social identities through creatively rediscovering and refashioning components of ‘tradition,’ such as oral narratives, written texts, and material artefacts. Understood in these terms, ethnogenesis allows us to explore the cultural creativity of indigenous and non-indigenous peoples alike in the making of new interpretive and political spaces that allow people to construct enduring social identities while moving forward in the globalizing nation-states of Latin America.

The debate about the public role of ethnology and folklore has been ongoing for some time, and has its parallel in the current debate about an ‘applied anthropology’. In Great Britain folklore and ethnology are, at least in institutional terms, virtually absent from higher education institutions. An author set pointers for the future – concentrating on the need for the study of culture to focus on lived experience as well as, and perhaps before, text; the need to revisit the political roots of the discipline in a critical but constructive spirit; and, the need to reconceptualise the region as the theatre of ethnological fieldwork – with a view to developing an ethically aware, evidence-based, policy-oriented and culture-critical European ethnology. Within this broad framework, we need to explore further the issues surrounding cultural mediation as a process for applying, but also generating, cultural knowledge and understanding, and the role(s) that ethnologists do, could, should, and perhaps should not play in that process.