Warfare, Oral Tradition, and Tourism

Turkish folk narratives formed around the Gallipoli Campaign, which reflect the mental, psychological, and cultural attitude of Turks towards this war and hold an important place in Turkish folklore, also have the potential to make significant contributions to battlefield tourism of the region. The effective, creative, and innovative uses of the folk narratives conveying the mystical, supernatural, and miraculous events believed to have taken place in this war can be used in the enrichment and diversification of space, products, services, and experiences offered in battlefield tourism. The ultimate aim of the study is to discuss how authentic, creative, and innovative tourist attractions can be created by the valorization, remediation, and reenactment of intangible war heritage based on the example of the relationship between folk narratives about the Gallipoli Campaign and battlefield tourism in the Gallipoli Peninsula.

Sama Culture and Folk Narratives Structures

The understanding of a folk narrative lies in the underlying principles that govern its composition. This study focuses on structures and culture found in the folk narratives of Sama, an indigenous group in Island Garden City of Samal, Philippines. The paper uses the theory on narratology by French-Lithuanian literary theorist, Algirdas Julien Greimas, and cultural theory by Bronislaw Malinowski to analyze the selected Sama folk narratives. The study reveals that the ten (10) Sama folk narratives collected do not completely follow the theory on narratology of Greimas. This is because the theories used are foreign and the folk literature collected are of local origin. Regardless of this, the study shows that Sama folk narratives reflected the ways of their people. Consequently, Sama folk narratives exemplify their cultural practices. They present social, economic, political, and religious practices. The leaders from the Sama folk were requested to validate the cultural texts gathered for this study. This research highlights the structure of Sama literature and illustrates Sama’s cultural heritage by gathering and analyzing their folk narratives so that the rest of the population (the new generation) could have the chance to experience their culture and appreciate it. Also, the researcher further emphasizes the relevance of gathering and using local literature to prevent it from vanishing into oblivion.

“Distinct Characters of Their Own”: Mermaids in late 19th-mid 20th Century Australian children’s fiction

While mermaids have been found all around the world, their literary and cultural representations are traditionally associated with Europe. Recently attention has been paid to the particular resonance of mer-folk narratives in specifically Australian contexts. Hayward, Floyd, Snell, Organ and Callaway have drawn attention to examples of mer-worlds that directly intersect with and comment on Australian environments. Beginning in the late 19th Century, predominantly women writers relocate mermen and mermaids to explore relationships between land and sea, city and bush that have local resonance for young readers. These stories are often accompanied by rich illustrations designed to appeal to young imaginations. This note comments on three writers whose work relates mer-cultures to Australia: J.M Whitfield, Pixie O’Harris and Harriet Stephens, along with their illustrators, G.W Lambert, Ida Rentoul Outhwaite and O’Harris herself.

MYTHOLOGICAL ELEMENTS IN ER-TOSTUK TALE

Mythology is called the myths, which are about the seemingly real events to explain the beliefs, practices, institutions, or natural phenomena of a particular civilization or religious tradition, but are often associated with rituals and ceremonies, mostly unknown origin. Rumors tell the events that are outside of human life but which are the basis of it, what the gods or extraordinary beings do. This situation is generally included in folk narratives. The Turkish tribes who live in different parts of the world have their own folk narratives. Some of these folk narratives, such as Koroglu and Alpamys, have exceeded the difficulties of geography and history and have belonged to the whole of the nation. Er-Tostuk narrative is one of them.

Ravana as Dissident Artist

This three-part chapter combines the performance scripts of two contemporary productions—Vinay Kumar’s The Tenth Head and Maya Krishna Rao’s Ravanama—along with a general introduction and critical annotation of the scripts themselves. Both productions represent avant-garde experiments in retelling the story of Ramayana from the perspective of Ravana: While The Tenth Head focuses on the role of the nonconformist individual in the collective through a dramatization of Ravana’s tenth head, which does not quite fit into the uniformity of Ravana’s traditional iconography, Ravanama explores multiple retellings of an actor’s attempt to find different ways of representing Ravana through his relationship with Sita as daughter, drawing on folk narratives and Jain renderings of the Ramayana story. Fragmented through a collage of images rather than a linear dramaturgy, the texts of the two plays are annotated in detail, with attention to their disjunctive structures, gestures, movements, music, and multimedia inputs in the larger context of creative dissidence.

Adrian Pushkin: Perm experience of the bureaucratic messiahship

This paper presents to the reader’s attention a unique case of a local “messianic” prophecy which combines features of folk religious movements and principles of functioning of the bureaucratic machine. The manuscripts of civil servant and merchant Adrian Pushkin, who lived in the 19th century in the city of Perm (Kama region, West-ern Ural), are considered as a variation of development of popular religion which includes a messianic-apocalyptic narrative. This places the provincial clerk closely to founders of the alternative to the official Orthodox discourse movements in the Russian Empire, as well as new religious movements of the later period. The aim of this paper is to determine the place and the role of Pushkin’s revelation in the religious space of that historical period. The main sources of the research are local archival documents which include business correspondence, personal letters, photographs, also documents related to Pushkin’s psychiatric examination and his subsequent expulsion to the Solovetsky Monastery, letters and family photos of the “prophet”, and service notes. The research method is based on the phenomenological approach with elements of hermeneutical analysis. The new revelation was founded on biblical text well known to the Perm messiah, and its content was provided by the social and historical context. The targeted audience for the new prophet was the middle strata of the society, comfortable for him. The preferred way of communication involved the tools of the bureaucratic system of pre-revolutionary Russia. The development of the new interpretation of Christian teaching was based on individual choice of the revelator and mediated by already initiated processes of secularization of public life. Traditional narratives and imagery of the sacred books of the Orthodox tradition were placed by the messiah-bureaucrat in the context of local space of the region and the country, and were interpreted through realities of personal life. Open criticism of the official Church was combined with a complex of mythological ideas. The main accents of the prophetic text were apocalyptic and chiliastic, related to the personal and professional crisis experienced by the author. The latter was triggered by the abolition of serfdom and destruction of the habitual environment and self-realization system. The style and con-tent of Pushkin’s text represent a mixture of theological concepts and elements of folk narratives based on the biblical tradition. As a result of the textual development, the signature myth was formed, rooted formally in Chris-tian dogmas and associated with folk religious culture.

Identity of the Vietnamese narrative culture: archetypal journeys from folk narratives to fantasy short stories

The journey to another world is an archetype that exists in the forms of marvelous motifs and is also a typical narrative formula with the purpose of creating diverse versions of Vietnamese folk narratives. The archetypal journey was later reborn and expanded in medieval literature as Vietnamese culture, which has become more complex over time. With the aim of discovering the cultural identity of Vietnamese narratives using sociohistorical approaches and discussing the archetype grounded in specific contexts, this research focuses on journey motifs to the upper and lower world in folk narratives in early collections written in Han characters and in related historical and cultural bibliographies. At the same time, by analyzing the fantasy short stories in Excursive Notes on Weird Stories (Truyen ky man luc) by Nguyen Du, this study aims to discover the process of acculturation and creation of materials and motifs from folk narratives, and it discusses how these motifs have been adapted. This research reveals specific messages about the history, culture, era, voice and true identity of the medieval Vietnamese Confucian. Importantly, this study emphasizes the unification of spiritual power between folklore and Taoism and the powerful and influential competition between Taoism and Confucianism in medieval Vietnamese literature. The analysis shows that by recreating the motifs of the folk narratives, writers have built other world journeys to describe the hidden political discourses and religious conflicts in the thoughts of the human mind in the most ideal form.

The Sanctuary in Mishkova Niva Area near Malko Tarnovo - Servant of Many Lords

The sanctuary in the area Mishkova Niva near the town of Malko Tarnovo is an ancient object of our cultural heritage. For many years the site is inaccessible because it falls behind the border enclosure, in the nobody area between Bulgaria and Turkey. However, the site is present with bizarre legends in the local complex of folk narratives. It has been studied by several archaeological expeditions, adorned by Laitsi with exotic and modernist stories of fantasy-type, and today it is fully accessible for visits by ordinary and pilgrimage tourists. Many legends turn it into one of the big prides, but also the great care of the Malkotrnovska municipality. Keywords: Thracian Sanctuary, Folklore Legends, Divine Presence, Secrets and Mysteries, Tangible and Digital Heritage