‘Dark cognition’: W.B. Yeats,J.G. Herder and the imperfection of tradition

In this article I connect Revivalist politics in nineteenth-century Ireland to Enlightenment epistemology by exploring how the ideal of the Irish – or Celtic – folk tradition is embroiled in the problematic of theoretical modernity. I dispute Seamus Deane's ideological characterisation of the Irish tradition, emerging from his encounters with the work of Edmund Burke and Matthew Arnold, and propose an alternative characterisation using Johann Gottfried Herder's theories of the Volk and the origin of language. I show how, at a crucial point in European history, the folk tradition modelled a view of cognition and modernity, which stood apart from analytic rationalism and based itself upon a positive evaluation of the obscurity of sensation. Finally, I read this literary-aesthetic model of what Herder called ‘dark’ cognition into Yeats's early folkloric works of the 1890s, especially The Celtic Twilight; and I make the argument that this often-neglected text does not represent a degeneration of folkloric integrity into Celtic mysticism but a comedic trait of folk modernity.     

Towards a Revaluation of the Legend of “Saint” William of Norwich and its Place in the Blood Libel Legend

The legend of William of Norwich is extremely well known and often quoted in discussions of defamatory folklore. However, since I started working on it three or four years ago I have found that there are surprisingly few folkloric analyses. Leaving aside those who have attempted to believe the story and to use it as anti-Jewish propaganda, most of the respectable work has been done by historians and has tended to concentrate either on debunking the legend or on attempting to reconstruct events in Norwich during Easter 1144. My aim in this paper is to redress this balance and tackle a couple of the more folkloric questions.     

Something ‘Wyrd’ This Way Comes: Folklore and British Television

Outlining key elements of folk horror, this article discusses the influence of British 1970s television upon post-2000 folk-horror revivalists, arguing that television is of vital importance to social and cultural folklore. With reference to Mikel Koven’s ‘mass-mediated ostension’, this study brings together folkloristics and screen studies, and proposes ‘wyrd’ as a term to apply to eerie, hauntological media with folkloric themes. Supernatural tropes are examined alongside a case-study analysis of the BBC series Ghost Stories for Christmas to illustrate how folkloric content is represented on screen, and how the eerie atmosphere of 1970s television was created.     

Free Trade without Words: Popular Public Rituals and Corn Law Repeal in the Early 1840s

This article examines the folkloric protest and popular political culture during the anti-Corn Law agitation. It offers a new analysis of the role of customary demonstration based on moral economy in supporting free importation of foreign corn. It examines previously unstudied bread processions during the 1841 general election and effigy burnings of Sir Robert Peel that occurred simultaneously against his minor revision of the Corn Laws in 1842. It argues that the practice of these traditional protests offered a basis on which plebeians understood the emerging idea of Free Trade. While the protesters and more moderate reformers represented by the Anti-Corn Law League shared a common cause of Corn Law repeal, there was a potential conflict over respectability. Moreover, Chartists could appropriate this popular custom for promoting the People's Charter rather than Free Trade. This article contributes to understanding the relationship between popular custom and radical politics in the wider context of the emergence of Free Trade Britain in the early Victorian period.     

The Irish rent … and mended: transitional textual communities in nineteenth-century America

In this paper, traditional folkloric forms that were ritualised and practised in pre-Famine Ireland are examined. So, too, are the strategies that storytellers employed in disseminating the imaginative aspects of the oral tradition to their audiences. Following the disruption of the storytelling tradition precipitated by the Great Famine and emigration, the fabric of Irish storytelling lay threadbare, both in Ireland and abroad. Of interest is the fact that in America the less “heroic” and more subtle strands of Irish folklore resurfaced in the theatrical venues that developed during the second half of the nineteenth century, namely, minstrelsy, Vaudeville, and Tin Pan Alley. By the turn of twentieth century, the Irish were responding to other “heroic” depictions of themselves, not only with protestation but also with “tongue-in-cheek” laughter. Their grounding in a variety of folkloric texts in Ireland enabled them to transition to multiple kinds of accommodation and expressive resistance.     

‘The Pacific Way’ as Postcolonial Discourse

In 2005, an entry entitled ‘Pacific Way’ appeared in a collection of essays on postcolonial thought. While this seems unremarkable, it invites questions concerning both the Pacific Way idea and the nature of postcolonial critique. This article is especially concerned to examine the specific circumstances in which the term was initially articulated and the precise meaning with which it was imbued. Although the Pacific Way acquired some ‘postcolonial’ characteristics in subsequent years, it was evidently anything but in its original formulation. Rather, it was a conservative discourse embracing notions of class hierarchy common to elites among both colonisers and colonised. This brings into question the status of the Pacific Way as a postcolonial discourse, and whether postcolonialism's ‘anticoloniality’ is in fact hospitable to indigenous hegemony, thus undermining its general anti-hegemonic credentials.     

Mrs. Murray - Aynsley sent from Kashmir a description of “Masock”, a game played by Cinghalese fisher-boys near Colombo,in Ceylon

This paper examines the mutability of the ‘meaning’ of folklore, as articulated by Lauri Honko. The paper aims to illustrate the amorphous and ambiguous nature of customs and traditions by considering the multiple ‘meanings’ ascribed to a contemporary British folkloric custom: the Cumbrian coin-tree.     

中国报刊生产的空间特征与区域发展趋势预测

报刊的出版发行工作的效果与报刊生产地的空间区位密切相关。目前国内外地理学界对此问题的研究见诸文字的还不多见,这一研究领域急待发展。本文分析了我国报刊生产空间分布特征,划分了报刊生产的空间功能类型区;进行了报刊生产的区域发展趋势预测。     

Giving Masculinity a History: Some Contributions from the Historiography of Colonial India

Contemporary historiography, especially in North American, European and Australian history, now includes a fairly respectable body of literature on men and masculinity. While this literature has produced important contributions to the usefulness of gender as a category of historical analysis, there has also been some wariness within feminist scholarship on the grounds that the issue of the gendered organisation may be evaded. Reflecting on the question ‘what is involved in writing a history of masculinity?’, this article considers the potential contribution that the historiography of colonial India offers to the study of masculinity     

Deducing rationales and political tactics in the partitioning of Ireland, 1912–1925

Partition is an intrinsically abstract and simplistic blunt instrument applied on a complex mosaic of peculiarities that constitute reality. There are very few modern states that are ethnically or culturally homogenous. In this context, partition is a subjective territorial tactic that can treat or exacerbate symptoms of historical, political, and geographical difficulties. While exhibiting comparative scope, especially to the role of the British State and the dynamics of national majorities and minorities, the circumstances concerning the partitioning of Ireland deviate from patterns gleaned from other examples as the evolving bases of its partition between 1912 and 1925 mutated at various stages with regard to geography, political status, and function. However, Ireland served as an important historical precedent in illustrating the disparity between the original intent and eventual result of its partition. Indeed, one can extrapolate from the Irish example that partition is better understood as a catalytic tactical process that radically reconfigures the political and geographical dimensions of conflict rather than as a decisive political instrument solving it.     

Sound recordings and cultural heritage: the Fonck Museum,the Felbermayer collection,and its relevance to contemporary Easter Island culture

Sound recording plays a prominent role in cultural heritage work in the Pacific region, supported by sound archives and institutional collections that serve to preserve this intangible cultural heritage. While it has long been a standard practice for field recordings to be lodged in institutions of learning, recent developments in Pacific research have emphasised the ethical and social benefits that can result from the repatriation of sound recordings to their communities of origin, and from the development of field recording practices in which cultural stakeholders are more directly involved. Meanwhile, the digitisation of historical sound recordings and the use of digital domains for dissemination have become matters of theoretical and methodological inquiry in their own right. This article seeks to contribute to the discourse surrounding the repatriation of historical field recordings through the presentation of findings from a recent Chilean government-funded digitisation and repatriation project involving previously undocumented recordings of Easter Island (Rapanui) music from the Fonck Museum, Viña del Mar. It will explain the circumstances under which the project developed, the strategies pursued in bringing it to fruition, and the reception of the project by the Rapanui community.     

Origins of Missionary Periodicals: Form and Function of Three Moravian Publications

The nineteenth century was a boom time for the genre of missionary periodicals. Missionary periodicals were established by religious organizations, societies, and churches for their members, for the general public, for theologians, for women, for children, and for converted non‐Europeans, and their growth reflected the expansion of missionary societies into the non‐European colonial world. Despite the abundance and wide range of these publications, research on the origins, form, and function of missionary periodicals remains limited. This article examines the rationale behind the establishment of three Moravian Church missionary periodicals: the British Periodical Accounts (1790–1970); the German Missions‐Blatt (1837–1941); and the North American The Little Missionary (1870–1920). The article elucidates both broader similarities and differences in missionary periodicals, as well as distinguishing how intentions behind the establishment of missionary periodicals differed from the practice of how religious organizations, societies, and churches utilized these periodicals in presenting themselves to the outside world.     

“场域-行动分析”视角：贵州西村农民的旅游抗争

随着地方社会不断卷入到旅游开发浪潮中，围绕旅游而发生的抗争日渐增多，这里称之为“旅游抗争”。旅游抗争主要发生于20世纪90年代以后，对中国地方社会的稳定和政治生态产生了重大影响。本文提出“场域-行动分析”这一新分析视角，破解“结构-制度分析”和“过程-事件分析”两种分析模式内蕴的“行动-结构”、“个人-社会”和“主观-客观”二元困境，将“结构-制度分析”化约为“场域”，具体分为社会场域和文化场域，将“过程-事件分析”化约为“行动”，具体分为行动的策略和一般演化路径。在该理论视角的关注下，本文对贵州西村旅游抗争的缘起、策略、演化路径及后果进行了完整叙事，为抗争研究提供了新视角，同时重构了二重性分析范式。     

The Local Drivers of Land Degradation in South‐East Asia

Economic globalisation has led to a huge increase in demand for food, goods and services by expanding urban middle class populations. These demands cause environmental changes that in turn feed back upon the urban environment and human population. While the global changes are well researched, the cumulative significance of local environmental changes is less well known. Yet, the local changes may have greater impact on the decisions which individuals make that affect soil erosion and land degradation. People respond to family circumstances and to local economic opportunities in ways that most suit the needs of their families and households. Several demonstration projects that were not adopted offer lessons in understanding how people make their land‐use decisions. An understanding of people's past experiences, present needs and views of the future helps those seeking to improve environmental management to promote policies and actions that are likely to succeed by being acceptable to those involved.     

Romanian Folklore and Literary Representations of Vampires

This article presents nineteenth-century Romanian folklore about vampire-like creatures which is analysed in reference to two literary representations of the vampire Dracula. I argue that the folklore tradition establishes a body-oriented perspective, conducive to a feminist analysis of the role of vampire creatures in socializing the otherness of nature echoed in the sexualized powerful female body. The perspective emerging from the folkloric material is subversive in relation to the social and sexual controls enabled across the axes of gender and class by the use of vampire figures in industrial urban cultures of the late nineteenth century.     

Krivopete: Wild Women with Backward-facing Feet in Slovenian Folk Narrative Tradition

This article gives an account of the Slovenian folk tradition of krivopete, who are supernatural female creatures with backward-facing feet. An overview of archival material, publications, and contemporary fieldwork outlines the characteristics, constants, and variables of krivopete, as well as modern folkloric transformations of the belief in these beings.     

Illuminating the Path to Grand Pari(s): Architecture and Urban Transformation in an Era of Neoliberalization

This article examines the architectural exhibition associated with the large‐scale Grand Paris urban development project initiated in 2007 by French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Through a close examination of the exhibition, I argue that imaginative representation is crucial to urban transformation, here acting to justify and naturalize neoliberal reforms. While the ten international teams of architects tasked with imagining twenty‐first century Paris presented sometimes radical scenarios, the architectural proposals are also used by the state to secure a sense of regional coherence, to reaffirm the imperative of economic growth, and to deny broad sociospatial conflict. The futural aspect of speculative regional development is redoubled in the prospective architectural visions, thus solidifying the dominance of a marketized mode of urbanization. While this cooption of architectural designs emerges from the unique circumstances of contemporary Paris, it also speaks to the broader promise and limits of imaginative urbanism and large‐scale architectural intervention.     

A Witch-Doctor's Kit,from Magila,East Central Africa.

The long shared history and traditions of Spain and Mexico have given rise to similar stereotypes and folkloric figures. These relationships are often explained through myths that take the form of historical accounts. Here we will discuss some of these discourses to try to understand the relationship between two iconic figures that define similar customs and share a single name in Europe and America: El charro.