Transactions of the Finnish Anthropological Society No. 38 The research area of this study was once the focal point of colonial penetration in East Africa. The author traces the evolution of ethnicity from the 15th century until the post-colonial period. She argues that ethnic group identification is used as a self-referent. People's perception of the present is a reflection of the colonial practice of dividing people into tribes. Yet, villagers in the Bagamoyo District stress commonality -- another dimension of ethnic consciousness.

The effects of globalization and the momentous changes to the political map of Europe have led to a world in which multiculturalism and ethnic differences have become issues of increasing importance. In Nordic countries, relationships between new immigrants, local ethnic groups and majorities are created in ongoing and sometimes heated discussions. In transforming multicultural societies, folklore has taken on new manifestations and meanings. How can folklore studies illuminate the present cultural, political and historical changes? "Creating Diversities. Folklore, Religion and the Politics of Heritage", edited by Anna-Leena Siikala, Barbro Klein and Stein R. Mathisen, seeks answers to this question. It emphasizes two important factors in the cultural and political exchanges among historical minorities, recent immigrants, and the majority groups dictating the conditions of these exchanges. The first factor is religion, which is a powerful tool in the construction of ethnic selves and in the establishment of boundaries between groups. The second factor is the role of national and regional folklore archives and ethnographic and cultural historical museums which create ideas and images of minorities. These representations, created in different political climates, affect the general understanding of the people depicted. Fifteen well-known folklorists and ethnographers from Norway, Sweden, Finland, Estonia and the United States offer insights and background material on these problems. In addition to immigrants and ethnic minorities in the Nordic countries, especially the Sámi, examples are sought from among the Finno-Ugrian minorities in Russia and the Nordic population in North America.

Society is never just a localized aggregate of people but exists by virtue of its members’ narrative and conceptual awareness of other times and places. In Jukka Siikala’s work this idea evolves into a broad ethnographic and theoretical interest in worlds beyond the horizon, in the double sense of “past” and “abroad.” This book is a tribute to Jukka’s contributions to anthropology by his colleagues and students and marks his 60th birthday in January 2007. By exploring the near, distant, inward and outward horizons towards which societies project their reality, the authors aim at developing a new, productive language for addressing culture as a way of experiencing and engaging the world.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This volume explores illusionism as a much larger phenomenon than optical illusion, magic shows, or special effects, as a vital part of how we perceive, process, and shape the world in which we live. Considering different cultural practices characterized by illusionism, this book suggests a new approach to illusion via media theory. Each of the chapters analyses a specific kind of illusionistic practice and the concept of illusionism it entails in a given context, including philosophy, perception and cognitive theory, performance magic, occultism, optics, physiology, early cinema, cartomancy, spiritualism, architecture, shamanic rituals, and theoretical physics, to show the diversity of shapes that illusionism and illusions can take. The book provides detailed analyses of illusions within performance and ritual magic, philosophy, art history and psychology as well as a first approach to the study of illusions outside of these established fields. It aims to find ways of identifying and analysing a wider range of illusions in the humanities. This multidisciplinary and comprehensive volume will appeal to scholars and students with an interest in media and culture, theatre and performance, philosophy, sociology, politics and religion. This publication was supported by the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie of the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar with funds from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. IKKM Books Volume 47 An overview of the whole series can be found at www.ikkm-weimar.de/schriften Chapter 5 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 4.0 license https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003188278-8/vanishing-lady-railway-illusions-movement-1-katharina-rein?context=ubx&refId=fe124e6e-8290-43e9-9d48-753bad162c50 Chapter 9 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003188278-13/talking-rocks-illusory-sounds-projections-otherworld-julia-shpinitskaya-riitta-rainio?context=ubx&refId=3aa829a8-8c0b-4103-870a-6fe5a4393e71

Through a series of case studies, this third volume in the Earth series deals with the technological constraints and innovations that enabled societies to survive and thrive across a range of environmental conditions. The contributions are structured into three sections to draw out particular commonalities and contrasts in the choices made by pre-industrial communities in the construction of varied landscapes and cultural heritage: Landnam, from the Old Norse for ‘taking of land’, deals with colonization, including the drivers and processes through which colonizers developed an understanding of the productive potential and limitations of their new lands. Fields and field systems: Field-walls are a distinctive and apparently timeless characteristic of many pre-industrial farming landscapes but they present many the challenges to their study, such as the effects of plowing, abandonment and land-use change and of urban development in fertile lowland zones which may eradicate, reduce or conceal past systems of land-use and division. The importance of indirect and proxy evidence is illustrated and the value of interdisciplinary and modeling approaches emphasized. Agro-pastoralism: focuses on the complex ‘time-space adaptations’ devised for managing cultivation and livestock production, particularly the need to prevent stock incursions into arable fields during the growing season whilst making effective use of seasonal grazing resources. The contributions focus on mountainous areas, where temporary migrations, in the form of transhumance, provided access to a diversity of resources based around seasonal constraints on their availability and productivity.

First Published in 2000. This text provides a survey of the peoples who speak Finno-Ugric languages and have titular republics or autonomous regions within the post-Soviet Russian federation. Their languages have set them apart from their Turkic and Russian neighbours and helped to preserve their distinct identity, including their animist religious practices. Previous works on this subject were written before the demise of the USSR so that information on the subject was screened by Soviet censors. In particular, this book explores the principal threats now facing these peoples - as much environmental as political. Although communism has gone, the exploitation of natural resources threatens the region's ecology, while the new rulers in the Kremlin seem set to continue their predecessors' oppressive policies towards the Finno-Ugrians. The book is written with commitment to the threatened human and political rights of these endangered peoples.