No 6 (2023)

An introduction to the thematic issue on “Voyages of Living Things: Distributed Memory, Evocative Objects, and Affective Micro-Niches” with special focus on material scaffoldings in the ecology of memory and affect, exemplified by experiences of migrants, border residents, and tourists. The invited editor of the issue presents articles by Sholeh Sharokhi, Sibel Aksu Güngör, Darya Radchenko, Pavel Kupriyanov, Veronika Nurkova and Olga Sulim, analyzing the theoretical approaches and data presented within the framework of the ecology of human abilities, including the material aspects of human memory and affectivity.

Sovetsk, a city in the Kaliningrad region of Russia, is the typical case of a complex interaction of locals with a “foreign” past. The dwellers of the city are living within the environment of material heritage that remained after the total change of population in World War II (including everyday objects, architecture and landscape) and are building their identity through them. Drawing on the approaches of border studies and memory studies, we show how regions of memory of pre-war Tilsit and post-war Sovetsk interact and conflict in vernacular narratives of city dwellers, and how the latter move between those regions in the course of manipulating evocative objects in daily and business practices. The article is a part of the RANEPA state assignment research program.

The acquisition of mental tools is a uniquely human mode of resisting situational pressure and achieving psychological self-determination. The fact that material photographs effectively trigger autobiographical memories has led to the hypothesis that they have functional counterparts in the form of memories of the most personally significant photographs. One hundred and eighty-five participants volunteered to recall, describe, and rate on several scales the memories of photographs that best express their personality. The “self-defining mental photographs” obtained from the participants were found to be subjectively attractive, highly functional, and expressive of various personality traits. The exploratory factor analysis suggested a three-factor solution interpreted as qualitatively specific types of mental photographs. Mental photographs scoring high on Factor 1 (Focus on the event) may serve as retrieval tool for extracting personal sense from a concrete episode of the past. High scores on Factor 2 (Detailed image of the narrator) probably refer to the internal dialogue between past and present self. High scores on Factor 3 (Holistic Self) were attributed to the integrated experience of personality-destiny unity coinciding with the awareness of one's history of existence.

The article considers the use of the term vernacular in various fields of humanities and the effectiveness of its utilization as an additional way of describing various types of amateur museums in modern society. An analysis of published works has shown that, regardless of the disciplinary perspective, three key features of this concept stand out. The first feature implies that vernacular is associated with locality, i.e. territorial locality correlates with individual activity. The second feature is characterized through opposition to official social institutions; therefore, vernacular presupposes properties such as informality, independence, and lack of regulation. Finally, the third feature is the great importance of the creative component, due to which the global and institutional are adapted to the individual perception of the world. Museums are considered within the anthropocentric approach as grassroots initiatives aimed at representing individual interests, as well as one of the ways of self-actualization. Despite the fact that the vernacular museum is essentially an individual practice, it refers to those museum spaces in which both the personal stories of living certain events and the narrative patterns of collective memory are presented.

The article addresses perceptions of linguistic practices underlying the construction of Karelian identity in the republic of Karelia. Based on the notion of language ideology, I analyse fieldwork data collected in the region to reveal enduring attitudes towards the functioning of Karelian. Being aware of both significant dialect variations and the generation gap in the command of the language, Karelians nevertheless tend to consider themselves part of the same ethnic group. I argue that there exist two language ideologies directly related to reproducing and reshaping the Karelian identity. The first one equates the vitality of the language with the vigour of the national community. Within the second one, which could be referred to as ideology of language performativity, various practices of using Karelian are themselves acts of constructing and rethinking ethnic identity.

In 2022, the 100th anniversary of Julius Nyerere (1922-1999), the leader of Tanganyika, the founder and first president of Tanzania, an outstanding African politician and statesman, was celebrated. His political legacy in Tanzania, as well as the socio-political dynamics in Tanganyika and Zanzibar are the milestones in the recent history of the East African region, in the history of ideology, national question, national movements on the continent. His name is associated with both African nationalism and pan-Africanism. The achievements of Nyerere as a nationalist - “gathering”, creating, structuring, stabilizing and preserving a multi-tribal Tanzania as an integral state unit - are at the same time the success of Nyerere as a pan-Africanist, since the Tanganyika-Zanzibar union is a relatively successful experience in the political unification of two previously separate sovereign territories.

This article begins with the paraphrase of the Sumerian poems “Lugalbanda in the Mountain Cave” and “Lugalbanda and the Anzu Bird”. The retelling is made by Rim M. Nurullin who consulted the recent studies related to these texts. A parallel between “Lugalbanda in the Mountain Cave” and the Rigveda is specifically discussed. Further, a classification of episodes found in the narratives recorded in Eurasia and America ca. A.D. 1850-1950 that contain the same motifs as the episode of Lugalbanda’s meeting with the Anzu bird is provided. The area distribution of two main variants is revealed. According to the first one, a man kills a serpent that was going to devour the nestlings of a mighty bird, and the grateful bird helps him. This variant is attested from Algeria to India and from Manchuria to the Carpathian-Balkan region. The American parallels also exist. According to the second variant, the man cares for nestlings (feeds them, covers from a storm, etc.) while the serpent is not mentioned. In the Sumerian poem, the hero decorates the nestlings. Concerning late traditions, such an episode being rare in the south (from the Maghreb to India) is predominant among the Eastern Slavs, Baltic Finns, and probably Balts. Rare Siberian cases are scattered from the Northern Khanty to Asiatic Eskimo. Considering the American parallels, the first variant looks like the earlier one. The basic motif of a hero who helps the nestlings is an example of a narrative element that had spread at least in the Terminal Paleolithic and has survived until recent times when it was incorporated into the fairytales.