Search Results (6)

Starting from the concept of death in contemporary Serbian culture (in the context of thanatological and anthropological studies), the author focuses on the analysis of communication with the deceased in dreams, which is still perceived as an important form of contact with the otherworldly. The analysis of material collected during field research at various locations in Serbia and in Serbian communities in Romania (from 2017 to 2024), supplemented by dream narratives from the internet, has shown that based on the main messages conveyed by the deceased to the living, dreams can be divided into: (1) dreams about “the unappeased deceased” (who lack something in the otherworld, usually due to an omission by the living related to funerary rituals); (2) dreams in which the deceased show the otherworld and provide verbal assessments of it; (3) dreams in which the deceased inform of their departure or final passing into the world of the dead; (4) dreams in which the deceased demonstrate their presence in the world of the living, i.e., providing information pertaining to the sphere of the dreamer’s social reality; (5) dreams in which the deceased convey their messages, advice or warnings to the living; and (6) dreams interpreted as the deceased person’s call to the dreamer to join them in the otherworld. Basic element analysis of the spatial world image, projected via the dream, highlights the importance of the locus perceived as a border space. Dreams about the deceased seem to be ambivalent in this respect, given that, on the one hand, they are perceived as an important means of communication between this world and the otherworld, and on the other hand, through the ideas on which they are founded and that they further transmit, they are also part of the narrative strategies of the boundary between this concept of two worlds. Full article

Many taboos and a high resistance to change are the hallmark of posthumous rituals and customs among all Slavic peoples, which has helped maintain their archaic nature. According to Slavic beliefs, in the otherworld, the souls of the deceased who were kind-hearted during their lifetime join the group of their ancestors who guard the living, providing them with prosperity and fertility. In return, living descendants had an obligation to periodically organize commemorations for the deceased, invoke memories of them, and make (food) offerings meant for the salvation of their souls. On the other hand, Slavs believed that the deceased who died prematurely or violently, or those who were dishonourable throughout their lives, became “the revenant deceased” or “the impure deceased” and could bring harm, sickness, and death to the living. For these reasons, people tended to prepare all of the dead—particularly the ones whose souls could potentially become members of the “impure” group—adequately for the funeral and to see their souls off from this world following traditional rites. This research is based on the presupposition that, among folk beliefs, customs, and rituals regarding the deceased (and their souls), there is a substratum whose archaic nature reaches back to the period when Slavic peoples lived together. These are folk beliefs and customs which appear in all three groups of Slavic peoples but are not related to any of the predominant religions, primarily Christianity, nor did they emerge under the influences of those religions. The sources used in the research include a published ethnographic corpus of data and scientific papers on posthumous rites among the Slavs. Also taken into account were archaeological, historical, and linguistic sources. Full article

The current article is an exploration into the colonial inheritance of digital games. It argues that the pervasiveness and persistence of discursive practices, like imagining the play world as the otherworld and valuing the play world for its pedagogical potential, are tied to the colonial logic of exclusion, extraction and exploitation. Perpetuation of these colonial conceptualizations in the discourse surrounding digital games makes attempts at decolonization ineffective. The essay seeks to explicate the colonial in these discursive formulations. Full article

This chapter seeks to answer the question as to why, even though subsistence conditions militated against continuing to eke out an existence on unproductive holdings, many inhabitants in Ireland’s western counties did just that. Particularly in the west of Ireland, Irish women and men found ways to remain on their lands and in their dwellings despite the enduring proclivity for permanent migration from Ireland during the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. The answer lies in the Irish penchant to engage in a variety of vernacular religious practices reiterated via expressive cultural forms like proverbs and reinforced via plays and films. In addition, an otherworld feminine perspective permeated their consciousness. For the Irish, their implicit religion—a complex network of symbols and practices—remained intact, so much so that seasonal migration endured, and the Irish preserved their homelands. Full article

This article shows how temporal disorder diffuses into the wildernesses within early modern English drama. Those areas beyond the walls of cities and castles in—among other plays—The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, and Macbeth thus flit free from the temporal rules that construct a play’s quotidian world, and the conspicuous partitions that enclose an otherworld in medieval iconography no longer seem clear within them. I argue that these spaces enact an unfamiliar and chaotic ‘otherworld’ within quotidian space, and characters’ ventures into these outer regions at certain points resemble movements into an ‘afterlife’. Journeys into a wilderness, then, parallel a shift from one temporal sphere to another, and characters encounter a post-death state of being within the play’s present. Full article

Nietzsche develops three important genealogies of central aspects of Christianity: one concerning a certain syncretism between Judaism and the cult of Dionysus; a second concerning a “slave revolt in morality”; and a third concerning doctrines about an otherworld (God, an afterlife, etc.). In each case, his genealogy appears implausible or even perverse at first sight, but on closer examination turns out to be very historically plausible, indeed correct. Full article