Martor最新文献

{"title":"Making and Unmaking Witchcraft Attacks in Twenty-First Century Lorraine (France)","authors":"DÉBORAH KESSLER-BILTHAUER","doi":"10.57225/martor.2023.28.04","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.57225/martor.2023.28.04","url":null,"abstract":"If witchcraft in Lorraine (France) has been widely studied and commented on by medieval and modern historians thanks to the analysis of the context of the Inquisition, books on demonology, witchcraft trials and ordeals such as torture or the stake, this is because it has long been considered and described as a peasant superstition, even a naive belief, which disappeared decades ago. However, since the second half of the 20th century, ethnologists and social and cultural anthropologists have sought to show that witchcraft remains a living social and cultural phenomenon in many regions of France and Europe. In the same way, this article aims to affirm, with regard to the results of a long-term field survey of unwitchers-healers and their clientele, that 21st century witchcraft still constitutes an explanation of misfortune, the disease, which aims to be coherent and effective in the face of events or symptoms deemed unexplained or strange. The article also proposes implicitly to question the status, place and role of contemporary healers in a region of eastern France. It is therefore a question of enriching the reflection on the plurality of the offer of care which is deployed in French society and comes to question the monopoly of scientific medicine.","PeriodicalId":52657,"journal":{"name":"Martor","volume":"13 5","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136228279","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Reflections on Christian Magic","authors":"ASTRID CAMBOSE","doi":"10.57225/martor.2023.28.09","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.57225/martor.2023.28.09","url":null,"abstract":"This article tackles the much-disputed borderline between religion and magic, focusing on a sensitive subject that is still under debate: the Christian magic. The Christian doctrine states its irreconcilable opposition to magic, but in a practical perspective the line of separation between the two is quite blurred. The paper argues that many Christian priests and most of the Christian believers can be seen as practitioners of magic, like shamans, clairvoyants, or witches in more marginal cults. These practitioners form a very large community with shared practices of confronting evil. They interrelate on the grounds of timeless common magic representations. The paper suggests that in all religions, and despite the possible prescriptions of the religious authorities, the commoners produce and make use of their own version of that specific religion. Scholars call this version a popular, lay, or vernacular religion. The present article explores the cultural and social meaning of these terms. In the case of vernacular Christianity, should the interpretation focus on Christianity, or on the too vaguely defined term vernacular? And, in the latter case, is it sure that some vernacular features could still be called Christian? The present article proposes an analysis of field data separated from the usual religious frame of interpretation in order to reach a possibly different understanding of how popular religion actually works on a daily basis. Can popular practice transform any given religion into some sort of magic bearing the appearance and using the canonical religious symbols? The paper discusses contemporary examples based on the fieldwork I have conducted in villages with predominantly Orthodox Christian population and in villages with Roman Catholic population in the region of Moldavia, Romania, between 2015 and 2021. The data reflects the following practices: a) Fasting as a magic tool; b) Consecration of different substances and objects in order to sustain magic practices; and c) Special forms of religious service, such as “black liturgy” or “barefoot liturgy,” “cutting morsels,” priests’ curses, and priests’ help with believers’ oath-making. All these rituals have a religious appearance and at the same time they illustrate magic at work.","PeriodicalId":52657,"journal":{"name":"Martor","volume":"14 4","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136228606","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Did White Swallowwort (Vincetoxicum hirundinaria) Exist or Did It not During the Organic Regulations Regime? Notes on some Previously Unknown Documents from Wallachia","authors":"NICOLAE MIHAI","doi":"10.57225/martor.2023.28.13","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.57225/martor.2023.28.13","url":null,"abstract":"The present text is a small commentary on a classic case of cultural conflict that occurred in Wallachia in 1835 under the Organic Regulations regime. Starting from the discovery of some unknown documents in the archives of Romanați county, relating to the public proclamation of the non-existence of the plant iarba fiarelor (white swallowwort), which was made use of by treasure hunters at the time, we have tried to establish what was at stake in this conflict. Popular culture suddenly became a threat to the authorities of a modern state that was operating a real process of socio-cultural dressage in that period, a move that inevitably brought it into a precisely datable conflict with those who still remained faithful to a folklore culture. One of those happy cases in which history comes to the aid of ethnology.","PeriodicalId":52657,"journal":{"name":"Martor","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136228298","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Notes on the Iconography of Witchcraft in Romanian Art","authors":"BOGDAN NEAGOTA","doi":"10.57225/martor.2023.28.16","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.57225/martor.2023.28.16","url":null,"abstract":"In this article we seek to describe the methodology that gives shape to the various components of the documentation of the book and identifies the different fields to which the issues discussed belong: art history (iconography, religious art), late antique and medieval literature (apocryphal texts), ethno-anthropology (with ramifications in visual anthropology, ethnology, folklore studies) and the history of mentalities (where research into witchcraft takes place chiefly within historical anthropology). The aspects discussed in this reading note: the social and cultural contextualisation of iconography, through an exploration of its social, cultural and mentality-related forms of expression, which connect it at a profound level to traditional peasant/pastoral societies; eschatological iconography concerned with witchcraft in Romania, seen as an eschatological replacement, with preventative and punitive functions, for the punitive institutions of Central and Eastern Europe that were responsible for eradicating the phenomenon of witchcraft; a comparative treatment of eschatological themes in Romanian iconography, in the regional context of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, through a comparison between them and those of the region south of the Danube (Bulgaria) and of the northern Slav area (Ruthenia); the absence from iconography of the distinction between the morphological classes of magic, based on their trans-human magical agents, that we find in oral narrative traditions; a systematic handling of local eschatological iconography and oral narrative repertoires; the issue of cultural transmission and the structure and composition of mechanisms of transmission, whose orality consists not only of words but also of images; discussion of the linguistic and iconographic typologies advanced by the book’s authors.","PeriodicalId":52657,"journal":{"name":"Martor","volume":"14 2","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136228276","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"On “The Familial Occult.” An Interview1 with Alexandra Coțofană","authors":"ALEXANDRA COȚOFANĂ, ANAMARIA IUGA","doi":"10.57225/martor.2023.28.14","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.57225/martor.2023.28.14","url":null,"abstract":"The interview offers a short insight into the soon to be published book at Berghahn, coordinated by Alexandra Coțofană, “The Familial Occult; Encounters at the Margins of Critical Autoethnography”.","PeriodicalId":52657,"journal":{"name":"Martor","volume":"10 5","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136228294","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Witches in Fairy Tales and their Use in Therapy. Interview with Gréta Vaskor","authors":"Gréta VASKOR, Tünde Komáromi","doi":"10.57225/martor.2023.28.12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.57225/martor.2023.28.12","url":null,"abstract":"Fairy tales (and other narratives) are used as therapeutic tools in therapy. Stories about witches and magic, including spells, mobilize the emotions and the mind of the patient and help them providing patterns and suggesting solutions. This interview is a dialog between an anthropologist specialized in the anthropology of witchcraft and magic and a psychotherapist trained in family and individual therapy using fairy tale therapy in combination with other methods.","PeriodicalId":52657,"journal":{"name":"Martor","volume":"13 6","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136228278","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Changing Destinies by Fighting Against Bad Luck","authors":"CAMELIA BURGHELE","doi":"10.57225/martor.2023.28.05","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.57225/martor.2023.28.05","url":null,"abstract":"\"In the traditional Romanian village, misfortune (bad luck) was countered by the use of magic means. Those who took the lead in performing the magico-ritual act were women who possessed special powers that enabled them to identify, isolate and destroy evil and thus restore peace of mind and health to their clients by manipulating chance and changing their destinies. They were country women without special qualifications who healed a wide spectrum of ailments – themselves caused by ritual means – or made love charms. By contrast, the contemporary urban environment in Romania can show us modern witches who are widely advertised in the media, practise aggressive marketing, and are in most cases digitally literate (they make use of the Internet and digital applications to facilitate relations with clients); by employing sophisticated rituals and often also by drawing on black magic, they provide solutions to sickness, curses and being crossed in love, as also happens in traditional villages, but they are equally able to deal with unemployment, impotence, lack of money, hair loss, business failure and above the straying of unfaithful husbands, thus demonstrating that they are in tune with the times in which they live. Everything is possible, because people living in modern communities, despite the categorical appeal to reason, despite digitalisation, globalisation, bureaucratisation and the coming of the computer age, still feel the need to “explain the inexplicable,” in exactly the same way as peasants living in traditional villages do, and in addition feel the need for personal experiences, including of magic ritual and witchcraft. The coronavirus pandemic had the effect of strengthening this impression of a “magic mindset” and even of uninterrupted coexistence between the magic of the traditional village and modern urban life, influencing the relation between magic/religion and science – something seen at its clearest in the attitudes of large numbers of people towards the origin and treatment of the virus and above all the vaccines. \"","PeriodicalId":52657,"journal":{"name":"Martor","volume":"12 6","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136228284","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Bōlērākō-cu! / “Speak, I’m Talking to You!” Reconstructing the Self in Tamang Shamanism","authors":"VASILE ALBINEȚ","doi":"10.57225/martor.2023.28.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.57225/martor.2023.28.11","url":null,"abstract":"The social functions of ritual are well studied in anthropology, but their psychological and neural basis for reconfiguring the individual self remains less explored. This study focuses on the initiation ritual in Tamang shamanism in Nepal, demonstrating how cultural tools help transform the cognitive and embodied self-narratives of individuals experiencing various biopsychological disorders who engage in this ritual. Fragmentation, instability, and inconsistency create a separation between us and the world around us, as well as a disconnection from our own bodies. All of these are consequences of mental and physical suffering, and the central place where they manifests is the self. Through the process of internalizing the preconfigured structure or framework embedded within the initiation ritual in Tamang shamanism, individuals reshape their own sense of self to align with the role and expectations of a shaman within their society.","PeriodicalId":52657,"journal":{"name":"Martor","volume":"14 3","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136228607","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“Was I or Wasn’t I Bewitched?” Conversations about Magic in Rural Transylvania","authors":"ELENA BĂRBULESCU","doi":"10.57225/martor.2023.28.06","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.57225/martor.2023.28.06","url":null,"abstract":"For people who are familiar with my work, the topic of this paper is pretty much a surprise. I was surprised myself both by the question in the title, which I have received in my field research in medical anthropology, and an abundance of stories of bewitched people I found when I explored the relation between illness and healing. The question was addressed to me, and I sensed that it was more than a rhetorical question. The argument of the paper starts from the question in the title and what it could possibly mean for my research participants in rural parts of Cluj County. I discuss the case of a bewitched man who believes he had been subject to witchcraft and therefore tells his story in the first person. The article problematizes the local cultural context of the interviewees, especially in relation to their memories and the reasons why they continue to tell stories of witchcraft.","PeriodicalId":52657,"journal":{"name":"Martor","volume":"13 4","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136228280","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Magical Power of Căluș Against Ieleʼs Possession in Dolj County","authors":"MIHAELA MARIN CĂLINESCU","doi":"10.57225/martor.2023.28.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.57225/martor.2023.28.10","url":null,"abstract":",","PeriodicalId":52657,"journal":{"name":"Martor","volume":"13 2","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136228282","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}