Search Results (7)

This article explores the voices of sailors across time, focusing on how song and prayer animate the nautical cult of St. Nicholas of Myra from the Middle Ages to the present. Drawing on hagiography, poetry, and music, it examines how medieval sources portray sailors’ cries to St. Nicholas during storms at sea, often depicting univocal, affective pleas that provoke divine response. These representations—especially in Latin sequences such as Congaudentes exultemus—highlight the cultural weight of the literal and metaphorical voice within miracle narratives. The article then bridges medieval and modern devotional soundscapes through nineteenth- and twentieth-century ethnographic collections from Apulia, Italy, particularly through the work of folklorists Saverio La Sorsa and Alfredo Giovine. Their records of Barese sailors’ songs and prayers to St. Nicholas—still sung today—provide embodied counterpoints to the mediated voices of medieval texts. Through this transhistorical lens, I argue that voice operates as connective tissue in the devotional lives of seafarers: an expression of fear, faith, and communal identity. By amplifying sailors’ voices in text, song, and performance, both medieval and modern traditions construct a vivid aural archive that affirms the enduring relationship between St. Nicholas and those who navigate the dangers of the sea. Full article

Using available empirical data of Oromo Orature, particularly folksongs, obtained from the field through interview and observation in Oromia, central Ethiopia, in 2009 and 2010, and other sources in print, this study has two objectives to tackle. First, reflecting upon the questions of a native model of origin narratives in relation to ecology, this study examines some examples of Oromo ecopoetics to determine: (a) how ecology and creative process conspire in the production of folksongs and performance, and (b) how the veil of nature hidden in the opacity of songs is revealed through the rites of creative process and performance as the human and ecological realms intersect. When put in relation to ecology, I theorize, the ecocultural creative act and process go beyond the mundane life activities to determine the people’s use (of nature), perceptions, and implications. Second, damages to the ecology are, I posit, damages to ecoculture. Drawing on the notion of ecological archetypes, thus, the study makes an attempt to find a common ground between the idea of recurrent ecological motifs in Oromo orature and the people’s ecological identity. The findings show that the political and social attitudes the Oromo songs embody are critical of authorities and the injustices authorities inflict on peoples and the environment they live in. For the folksinger, singing folksongs is a form of life, and through performance, both the performance and the song sustain the test of time. In its language, critique, imagination, and cultural referents, Oromo Orature is a voice of the people who rely on traditional agricultural life close to nature along with facing challenges of the dominating religious, political and scientific cultures. Full article

Girls’ nuptial songs of the Oromoo of Horn of Africa are powerful folksong genres, but are rarely practiced today. Ethnographic data were collected and analyzed contextually, structurally, functionally, and semantically from multidisciplinary approaches: folklore, ethnomusicology, anthropology, sociology, literature, linguistic, gender, and others’ theories. They are classified into arrabsoo (insult), faaruu (praise), mararoo (elegiac/dirge), ansoosillee (bridal praise), fala (resolution), and raaga (prediction) with their distinct natures. Macca Oromoo girls compose these competitively to making weddings memorable, express themselves, inspire and encourage men for brave and appropriate actions. These genres form binary oppositions in their respective orders and enrich the culture. They also depict identities and roles of girls in creations and maintaining of culture. Full article

This paper presents the values, knowledge and beliefs of the environment that are inscribed in the Oromo folksongs with particular reference to Eastern and Western Hararghe zones of Oromia regional state. The paper discusses the various contributions of the Oromo folksongs in conserving the environment. The paper is based on the qualitative data produced through face-to-face interviews, non-participant observations and document analysis of both published and unpublished sources. The data used in this paper were collected from 24 individuals of the community leaders, elders and sheekaas by using purposive and snowball sampling techniques. The analysis of the paper is employed in functional, contextual and ecocritical theoretical models. In order to arrive at the various ideas of folksongs connected to the environmental conservation, some selected folksongs were carefully designated. The paper attempts to address the contexts in which the folksongs reflect the viewpoints of environment. It also tries to explore the role of Oromo folksongs and their implications in the efforts of wide-reaching environmental views. The position of this paper is that indigenous knowledge (Oromo folksongs) is an effective vehicle in supplementing the existing efforts of conserving the environment through imagery, metaphoric, and symbolic description. Based on the analysis, this paper addresses the association that the Oromo people have strong reflections of environmental conservation through its folksongs. On the basis of the contextual analysis, we classified the folksongs that have environmental implication into four sub-divisions: (1) for utilitarian reason, (2) for visualization, (3) for aesthetic values and (4) for morality purpose. Full article

Born out of the convergence of intellectual traditions and owning a borrowing capacity analogous to the one that engenders creole languages, the study of folklore, or folkloristics, claims the right to adapt and remodel political, psychological, and anthropological insights, not only for itself but for the humanities disciplines of philosophy, art, literature, and music (the “PALM” disciplines). Performance-based folkloristics looks like a new blend, or network, of elements from several of those. What looks like poaching, which is a common practice for folksong and folk narrative, can be examined in the PALM disciplines under names like intertextuality and plagiarism. Nation-oriented traditions of folklore study have convergence, borrowing, and remodeling in their history which are also discoverable in other disciplines. Linguistic and cultural creolization—what happens when people of different linguistic and cultural backgrounds are forced together to learn from one another—lies at the center of folklore; its study opens paths for research in all humanities fields. The study of folklore, while remaining marginal in universities, is undergoing a self-transformation which should lead to the acceptance of its methods and findings in the PALM disciplines. Full article

An evaluation of landscape tradition, in Near and Middle East area, could emphasize a profound past of agricultural experience, as well as of landscape and garden art. In reference to this common past, Byzantine and Arabic landscape and garden art paradigms appear to be geographically and culturally correlated, as proved by a Byzantine 12th century folksong, presenting the construction of a villa, with its surrounding gardens and landscape formations, in the territory of Euphrates River. This song refers to Vasilios Digenes Akritas or ‘Border Lord’, a legendary hero of mixed Byzantine-Greek and Arab blood; ‘Digenes’ meaning a person of dual genes, both of Byzantine and Arabic origin, and ‘Akritas’ an inhabitant of the borderline. At the end of the narration of the song, contemporary reader feels skeptical. Was modern landscape and garden art born in the European continent or was it transferred to Western world through an eastern originated lineage of Byzantine and Arabic provenance? Full article

American Folklore consists of traditional knowledge and cultural practices engaged by inhabitants of the United States below Canada and above Mexico. American folklorists were influenced by nineteenth-century European humanistic scholarship that identified in traditional stories, songs, and speech among lower class peasants an artistic quality and claim to cultural nationalism. The United States, however, appeared to lack a peasant class and shared racial and ethnic stock associated in European perceptions with the production of folklore. The United States was a relatively young nation, compared to the ancient legacies of European kingdoms, and geographically the country’s boundaries had moved since its inception to include an assortment of landscapes and peoples. Popularly, folklore in the United States is rhetorically used to refer to the veracity, and significance, of cultural knowledge in an uncertain, rapidly changing, individualistic society. It frequently refers to the expressions of this knowledge in story, song, speech, custom, and craft as meaningful for what it conveys and enacts about tradition in a future-oriented country. The essay provides the argument that folklore studies in the United States challenge Euro-centered humanistic legacies by emphasizing patterns associated with the American experience that are (1) democratic, (2) vernacular, and (3) incipient. Full article