Text Archives Research Articles

«Земля стоит на Божьём мору»: рассказы о сотворении мира из Приангарья в записи А. А. Макаренко

The paper presents new archival texts containing folk stories about the creation of the world. The stories were recorded by A. A. Makarenko on the Angara River in the Kezhemsky volost of the Yenisei district in 1904. These records were not included in the collection “Siberian Folk Calendar in Ethnographic Relation: Eastern Siberia. Yenisei province” published in 1913, remaining outside the attention of the scientific community. The folk stories describe how God created the land from the earth raised from the bottom of the sea by Satan (cf.: S. Thompson. Motif-index of folk-literature: A811. Earth brought up from the bottom of primeval water; A812.1. Devil as Earth Diver). These are the complete versions of cosmogonic narratives, almost as in their authentic fixation. The Angara versions of cosmogonic history were compared with the texts of similar narratives from the European territory of Russia, revealing the connection with the folklore traditions of the Russian North. This connection is due to the peculiarities of the settlement of the Angara region: the lower reaches of the Angara River and its tributaries. According to the research, the original settlers of the Angara region were natives of the Russian North, with the old-time core of the Russian population.

Some Archival Texts Chiefly from the Reign of Šulgi in the Iraq Museum

Some Archival Texts Chiefly from the Reign of Šulgi in the Iraq Museum

«На нашей нивке сегодня обжинки…» – жнивные песни белорусов Омской области

The paper analyzes archival and published materials of Belarusian harvest songs recorded on the territory of the Omsk region. Previously unpublished archival texts of harvest songs recorded on the territory of the Omsk region are introduced into scientific circulation. Quantitative and qualitative indicators of the material are provided, and the degree of exploration of the topic is accessed. The study involved ascertaining the ethnicity of the informants, which included not only Belarusian settlers but also individuals from the Chernihiv province and Russian territories bordering Belarus. Additionally, an attempt is made to clarify the geo-graphical distribution of reaping rites in the Omsk region. Particular attention is paid to the issues of classification and systematization of song material. The study adapts the functional-ethnographic classification of texts, initially proposed by Belarusian scientists, to analyze the Irtysh records. A comparative analysis of the resettlement and maternal traditions is conducted, focusing on the Belarusian versions found in most Omsk texts. Systematization is performed by identifying plots and plot situations and finding similar or similar text variants in Belarusian sources. The perspectivity of the topic under consideration is noted, suggesting the need for further comprehensive research: mapping of areal zones of tradition in the Omsk region, compiling a systematic index of traditional content formulas to demonstrate the poetic nature of stubble songs, performing a musical and stylistic analysis with the identification of typical tunes and comparing them with Belarusian variants.

ЭПИЧЕСКОЕ НАСЛЕДИЕ БАШКИР РОССИЙСКОЙ ФЕДЕРАЦИИ В ЗАПИСЯХ СЕРЕДИНЫ ХХ В.

The article is devoted to the topical issue of studying archival records of epic monuments recorded outside the Republic of Bashkortostan, in particular in Orenburg, Kurgan, Chelyabinsk, Samara, and Saratov regions, some of which have been published, and variants are taken into account in the comments to the volumes. In the first monograph devoted to the Bashkir heroic epic, its author A. N. Kireev noted that expeditions to the regions of the Russian Federation listed above gave a lot of new information about the Bashkir folk epic. This article is aimed at the study of epic material recorded precisely outside the Republic of Bashkortostan. The objectives of the article are to identify texts included in the volumes of the scholarly code “Bashkir folk art” and texts that have not yet been published; possible repeated recordings; determining the area of distribution of this or that epic tale, the age and gender of the informants. To solve the tasks, a statistical method was used to characterize the repertoire; the method of comparative analysis was used as the main one, an element of structural analysis and a comparative-descriptive method was also used in the study of repeated recordings in line with experimental approaches developed by V. M. Gatsak in the field of the theory of the preservation of the epic in time. The methodological basis of the article was the works of Russian, including Bashkir, researchers-predecessors in the field of epic studies: A. N. Kireev, S. A. Galina, M. M. Sagitova, V. M. Gatsak, I. V. Pukhov, etc. The study will allow us to present the content, volume of material, distribution areas of the Bashkir epic in the regions of the Russian Federation where Bashkirs live compactly. When studying archival materials, it turned out that epic works about animals and social and everyday ones were particularly widespread there. In the future, archival texts will be published and put into active scientific circulation. It is a subject for special research, including dissertations, on various genres of folklore of the Bashkirs of the Russian Federation, both from the folkloristic and linguistic point of views (dialects are interesting, both archaisms and Russian words are used, even characters of Russian folklore are found in the texts).

Paralipsis Archives: Ways of Localisation and Interpretation of Gaps in a Folklore Archive

This article explores the problem of the paralipsis of a folklore archive with reference to materials stored at Ural Federal University. The author hypothesises that folklore archives can be studied not only through access to the collections kept in them but also through paralipsis/lacunae that appear in them. In the Russian and European traditions, the very principle of collecting material determines the appearance of gaps in folklore archives. The researcher interviews the informant in accordance with their mental map, which inevitably leads to the loss of part of the material, especially in situations where the “context of the situation” is not fixed. The author analyses archival texts collected in the village of Gary, Sverdlovsk Region, in 1977. Gaps and omissions were identified during the digitalisation of the Ural Federal University folklore archive collection. The article describes the method of keywords, which made it possible to partially localise gaps. Also, the description of the texts of the archive through keywords helped identify lacunae of a genre, thematic, and contextual character never studied previously. The last part of the article mainly focuses on describing and interpreting gaps that appeared due to the lack of context. The article puts forward several hypotheses that make it possible to interpret some of the gaps identified. The author also attempts to restore the research context in which the material was collected, for which she employs methodological recommendations formulated by V. P. Kruglyashova, the academic leader of the folklore expedition. Part of the interpretation of the gaps relies on the comparison of her recommendations with their implementation in practice with reference to the Gary collection. From the methodological point of view, the article can be of use to everyone working on the problems of the digitalisation of cultural heritage.

The German geschweige denn construction

Abstract The corresponding German construction to English let alone is geschweige denn with a meaning of ‘and even more/less so’. For present-day German, the construction is described as a coordinating conjunction, the use of which is tied to certain usage conditions, such as negative contexts. The construction is idiomatic and can be described as a form-function pairing in a Construction Grammar framework. This paper describes the origin and development of the idiomatic construction from a diachronic perspective. The data analyzed comes from the core corpus of the German Text Archive (Deutsches Textarchiv; DTA), occasionally complemented by the extension corpora of the DTA. It is shown that the construction evolves from verb phrases such as ich geschweige (‘I remain silent’), which are often used with a genitive complement or a dass-clause complement (‘that-clause’). One crucial aspect of the development of the coordinating conjunction is the loss of the filling of the nominative complement, usually ich (‘I’), with geschweige and the loss of ge- prefixes in inflected verb forms, which gradually leads to a change of the verb form to ich schweige, while the conjunction fossilizes the form prefixed with ge-. Furthermore, over time, the coordinating conjunction denn wins against the competition by dann and other words to form geschweige denn. The paper also traces the development of the idiomatic verb phrase ganz zu schweigen von, which happens in parallel to that of geschweige denn.

Йойги в контексте свадебной обрядности северных карелов: семантика и особенности функционирования

The article deals with the joiks as a genre of North Karelian folklore, which in traditional culture marks the transitional, crisis situations in the life- and calendar cycles and is an element of the wedding ritual’s musical code. In terms of the poetic text content, the joiks bear a typological similarity to the reprobating (korilnye) songs from the folk music of Slavic peoples. The lack of research on the semantics and functions of the joiks in the context of wedding rituals, as well as on the correspondence between the joik poetic texts and ritual tunes makes this study relevant. The task for this article is to identify the ritual and non-ritual functions of the joik musical and poetic texts based on ethnographic data and the study of the etymology and the semantic field of the term’s meanings. Another aspect examined in the article is that of the features of functioning of the joiks when they are performed with wedding song tunes. The material for the study was provided by a set of published and archival texts and audio records made by folklorists and musicologists predominantly in the mid-20th century.

Review of Breathing Aesthetics by Jean-Thomas Tremblay (Duke University Press)

Jean-Thomas Tremblay's Breathing Aesthetics draws our attention to how respiration as a cultural analytic maps the uneven distribution of risk in our contemporary moment. Intervening at the intersection of queer theory and the environmental humanities, Tremblay deciphers an archive of cultural texts that range from CAConrad's ritualized poetry to Ana Mendieta's elemental performance art and Toni Cade Bambara's novel The Salt Eaters. In so doing, they reveal an understanding of how breath registers precarity across race, gender, and disability, while also serving as a mechanism for healing and care. This discerning analysis, combined with a focus on the exchange between body and milieu, makes a case for respiration as a distinctly ecological and embodied relation. Ultimately, Breathing Aesthetics provides crucial insight into how aesthetic expressions of respiratory variations evidence a tension between morbidity and vitality within bodies whose ability to breathe is most endangered.

Evliya’s Song: Listening to the Early Modern Ottoman Court

Abstract This article discusses the relationship between music, sound, writing, and power in the early modern Ottoman Empire. It focuses on a description of a musical gathering at the court of Murad IV (r. 1623–40) in the Seyahatnâme (Book of travels), written by the courtier and musician Evliya Çelebi (1611–ca. 1685). The article draws on literature from historical anthropology, sound studies, and Ottoman cultural history to produce a multilayered reading that underscores the importance of music and other sonic practices in Ottoman courtly culture. Shifting between micro and macro perspectives, the article discusses the role of ceremonial music, Qur’anic recitation, the call to prayer, and patronage networks in the projection of imperial power. It then discusses the social implications of debates about the religious permissibility of music and the distinction between elites and commoners. Elite music-making is situated within a larger context of kin relations, patronage networks, and intimate male companionship. Themes of sensual pleasure, intoxication, and eroticism are discussed as poetic and philosophical tropes that are embodied in the intersubjective space of musical performance. Finally, the article highlights the role of textual practices in the construction of Ottoman music as a discursive formation. A situating of Evliya’s writing practices within the larger textual archive of Ottoman music raises methodological and epistemological questions about the relationship between aural experience and inscription, and about notions of historiographic and ethnographic truth. These questions are connected to current disciplinary debates about writing, sound, and power, particularly in the context of empire.

A tale of the city of Kolkata through the eyes of the “common women"

This paper focuses on working-class women from the informal settlements of Kolkata, India and their precarious relationships with the city. Their existence at the margins of society (socially, spatially, historically, and sometimes even geographically) tends to make them invisible actors in the production of contemporary urban spaces of Kolkata. This paper examines the role of class, caste, and gender in informing the spatial practices of these minoritized women that occur in the city’s liminal landscapes. These practices are quite distinct from those of women from middle- and upper-classes in Kolkata. Terms like “public women” or “bad women” or chhotolok (a common Bengali term used for people from lower classes or castes) have been used to represent and mark these working-class, lower caste women as deviant bodies in terms of their class, caste, and even sexualities. These labels are important to understand how these women have been represented historically in the urban history of Kolkata. By analyzing secondary literature, archival texts, songs, films, poems, and photographs, the paper investigates the following interrelated questions. First, how has the spatial organization of urban Kolkata historically determined the ways in which these women have navigated, engaged with, and attempted to overcome a wide array of structural and systemic constraints? And second, how have these women produced and applied various forms of situated spatial knowledge in the city’s liminal landscapes? In terms of the paper’s structure, I start by analyzing the existing literature on gender and urban space in India. Thereafter, I lay a theoretical groundwork to elucidate the importance of adopting an intersectional lens to understand overlapping regimes of power that affect the life-worlds of minoritized bodies; in this case, the working-class lower caste women of Kolkata. Finally, I use a chronological approach to examine the changes in Kolkata’s urban fabric and its material culture that have significantly added to the precarities faced by these minoritized and marginalized women. In other words, I trace an alternate urban history of Kolkata through the eyes of these “common women.”

“There was much new to grok”: an analysis of word coinage in science fiction literature

Abstract As can be witnessed in projects such as The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction (Prucher, Jeff. 2007. Brave new words: The Oxford dictionary of science fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press), science fiction has been fertile ground for the creation of new words and concepts. Whereas the aforementioned dictionary was constructed by eliciting examples and citations from volunteers, this paper presents an initial foray into data-driven methods for uncovering lexis unique to science fiction. Words unique to science fiction texts are extracted by comparing a science fiction corpus against the British National Corpus (BNC Consortium. 2007. The British National Corpus, XML edition. Oxford Text Archive. http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12024/2554 (accessed 29 June 2022)) to produce a list of 306 neologisms from 74 texts. In addition, this study seeks to examine the ways in which authors impart the meaning of such words to the reader, drawing on frameworks of semantic word relations and work in cognitive linguistics. This reveals the use of definitions and glosses by the authors, both in narration and direct speech, co-occurrence with synonyms, and the drip-feeding of attributes pertaining to the concept being referenced. In addition, characters can be shown to struggle with the concepts to which neologisms refer, allowing authors to explore themes of alienation and other-worldliness.

BUNG KARNO'S SPEECH, UNESCO AND INDONESIAN DIPLOMACY

The contextuality of world civilization today presents a portrait of relations between countries that are less harmonious. The Covid-19 pandemic, which should have been a momentum for the unity of countries in the world, has actually sparked sharp conflict between the United States and China. On the other hand, the Russian and Ukrainian war opened our understanding that there was a wrong global construction that fueled Russia's "coercive and unilateral" behavior towards its own neighboring countries. Globalization has made problems in a country or region develop into global issues. It is at this point that Indonesia can make its contribution. With the designation of Bung Karno's speech entitled "To Build the World A New" as Memory of the World, it became easier for the international public to access the text archive of the speech as a reference for developing studies related to UNESCO's field of work. Archives are only archives if they are only stored in bookshelves and documents. The aim of this research is to answer the research question: How to "animate" Indonesian historical archives so that they benefit the world? and How to capitalize on these historical documents for the interests of Indonesian diplomacy? This study uses a qualitative method. The analysis was carried out by interpreting the data based on the literature study. Data were collected from previous reference journals, books, and news from internet sources. This study concludes, Pancasila can become an international reference. This is because the text of the speech is open for use by researchers, academics and international practitioners in studying Pancasila as a philosophical and political discipline, whose values are very relevant for mediating socio-cultural conflicts.

Sound, Noisy Feelings, and the Audible Sublime in Nineteenth-Century Latin America

Abstract: This article delves into the aural dimensions of Latin American literary tradition, exploring those instances when the sublime provides the vocabulary and syntax to textually inscribe sonic phenomena. As highlighted by Ana María Ochoa Gautier, the audible techniques cultivated by lettered elites found a way into their writing, thus forming a rich textual archive where they registered sounds, voices, and noises that often defied classification and overwhelmed the senses. In reading texts for sounds that emphasize adversity, discordance, and sono-racial designations, this article traces the sort of negative emotions characterizing Edmund Burke's and later theorists' definitions of the sublime as a combination of pleasure and pain, a negative moment of disturbance and confusion. Focusing on the sonic features of political writings by Simón Bolívar and foundational fictions such as Esteban Echeverría's La cautiva (1837) and Jorge Isaacs 's María (1867) , this article illustrates how sound shapes the discursive articulation of defining binaries such as civilization-barbarism, reason-emotion, nature-culture, and mind-matter.

Metamorphosis of a diplomatic interpreting event in ancient China

This article discusses how the earliest known interpreting event in Sinitic China was chronicled and recapped in political and literary writings across different dynasties, in an intertextual process comparable with metamorphosis. This event has continued to shapeshift in writings because of its symbolic importance in promoting Sinocentric sentiments and Confucian ideals. This interpreting record was, unusually, from a comparative perspective, elevated to embody ideological functions largely detached from inter-lingual communication. For millennia, this interpreting “legend” has been intertextually alluded to in numerous writings to connote auspiciousness, to extol Sinitic governance and civilisation, and to champion specific cultural values or political philosophies. This article aims at identifying and examining the symbolic and ideological significances of the conceptual link between the alpha interpreting record and complimentary Sinitic governance and virtues, so consciously drawn in theses of some archival texts. It is significant in two regards. First, it initiates an analysis of a classical reference to interpreting, which has escaped research attention in humanities. Second, it explores an unorthodox angle by analysing the discourse of interpreting in ancient China. The results of this analysis could serve as reference points for cross-cultural comparison of conceptualisations of “interpreting.”

Евразийство в зеркале исследовательских подходов, или поиски конкретного понимания идейного комплекса движения

The article is devoted to the issues of Eurasian studies, methods and research approaches to this important section of the history of Russian philosophical thought. The article highlights such methods as critical, conceptual, archival, author's approaches (dialectical method, structuralist approach, interdisciplinary and comparative research, etc.). It is argued that, unlike the Western research tradition, in Russia, at the very beginning of the study of Eurasian texts and archival documents, a solid foundation was laid by such authors as S.M. Polovinkin (1935–2018), A.V. Sobolev (1936–2019), V.Y. Pashchenko (1940–2007), who put the study of Eurasianism on solid ground of facts and concrete consideration, free of ideological cliches, and, at the same time, proposed original author's concepts. In the future, the study of Eurasianism developed in several directions, in particular, the publication of archival texts, or the republication of original works with comments. This direction made it possible to clarify many hidden aspects, but directed the attention of researchers to archival studies, which hampered the conceptual analysis. The article discusses the main problems of Eurasian studies – the lack of a complete chronology or monograph about the history of the Eurasian movement, opposite concepts, the lack of a unified opinion not only about the essence of the Eurasian doctrine, but even about its origins and subsequent development, a huge layer of unpublished material, both archival and previously published. The objective difficulties of Eurasian studies depend on the fact that the doctrine, ideology, various concepts (geopolitical, cultural, geographical, etc.) were created by Eurasian authors, each of whom was a recognized expert, sometimes of the world level of his time. Modern researchers may not take this point into account, believing that they can easily talk about Eurasianism, which supposedly has no philosophical or other scientific basis, such as, for example, structuralism or the theory of cycles in economics, developed by P.N. Savitsky and A.A. Alekseev. The author of the article offers her own concept of the chronology of the Eurasian movement and speaks about the most effective method of studying Eurasianism – a concrete understanding, the origins of which are in the conciliar consciousness described by S.N. Trubetskoy, the father of the founder of Eurasian movement Nikolai Trubetskoy.

Defying the Humanitarian Gaze: Visual Representation of Genocide Survivors in the Eastern Mediterranean

Abstract: This article is a critical encounter with the genre of humanitarian photography through the case study of images of women survivors of the Armenian Genocide. Viewing photographs taken as part of the American humanitarian campaign in the Eastern Mediterranean, the article exposes the universalizing modality of humanitarian photography while exposing mass atrocities as perpetuating the silencing of victims by reducing them to symbols of suffering. Through an indexical, forensic, and critical fabulatory engagement with the humanitarian photograph, the article aims to unsettle the universalized humanitarian body and explore the possibilities that lie at the boundaries of traditional historical methodologies. Firstly, it exposes the constraints of reading the image solely within the framework of the humanitarian index, highlighting the resulting silences. Secondly, the forensic reading, while placing the photograph in the context of the larger textual archive, provides glimpses into the local circumstances surrounding its creation but still violently mutes the photographed. Lastly, inspired by the method of critical fabulation, the article embraces a speculative reading to reimagine the lives and experiences of the women in the photograph based on imaginary possibilities. Deploying a method that attends equally to archival content and that which is impossible to discern allows us to shift the focus to those who are visible photographically but are nonetheless invisible in the archive and muted by being forced to perform as part of the humanitarian index.

"Head of the Class": equity discourses related to department head appointments at one Canadian medical school.

Equitable appointments of departmental leaders in medical schools have lagged behind other Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) advancements. The purpose of this research was to 1) analyze how policy documents communicate changing ideas of EDI, employment equity, and departmental leadership; and 2) investigate department heads' (DH) perspectives on EDI policies and practices. We conducted a critical discourse analysis to examine underlying assumptions shaping EDI and departmental leadership in one Canadian medical school. We created and analyzed a textual archive of EDI documents (n = 17, 107 pages) and in-depth interviews with past (n = 6) and current (n = 12) DH (830 minutes; 177 pages). Documents framed EDI as: a legal requirement; an aspiration; and historical reparation. In interviews, participants framed EDI as: affirmative action; relationships; numerical representation; and relinquishing privilege. We noted inconsistent definitions of equity-deserving groups. Change is slowly happening, with emerging awareness of white privilege, allyship, co-conspiracy, and the minority tax. However, there is more urgent work to be done. This work requires an intersectional lens. Centering the voices, and taking cues from equity-deserving leaders and scholars will help ensure that EDI pathways, such as those used to cultivate department leaders, are more inclusive, effective, and aligned with intentions.

The morphologization of German noun-participle combinations. A diachronic case study

The present paper focuses on the recent history of German noun-participle combinations in which the noun saturates an argument of the base verb. These structures are hybrids between phrases and words, yielding variation in spelling and in the form of the nominal constituent. For instance, the combinations Mitleid erregend vs. mitleidØerregend vs. mitleidserregend ‘pitiful’, lit. “pity-arousing” (where Ø represents a zero morpheme) exemplify such variation, which is a (preliminary) result of (ongoing) language change. Therefore, this paper studies how the noun-participle pattern has diachronically evolved between syntax and word formation since the 18th century. Spelling and nominal forms are used as central indicators. For the latter, two approaches based on verb-valency are introduced. Data from the German Text Archive and DWDS core corpus show that over the past 300 years, noun-participle combinations have undergone a process of morphologization: they are increasingly written as a graphemic unit and take nominal forms that are typical of nominal root compounds. Moreover, this study shows that morphologization is partly supported by high token frequencies of individual types. It is argued that the phenomenon is best characterized by assuming a gradient distinction between syntax and word formation.

Oral History and the Textual Archive: Contemporary Pakistani Shi‘i ‘Ulama’s Recollections and Reflections on Politics and Sectarian Harmony

AbstractRecent scholarship on Pakistani Shi‘ism draws on a historical archive that it primarily textual: books, journal articles, pamphlets, etc. authored by Shi‘i ‘ulama and notables. However, as the field of oral history rightly asserts, the textual archive can never capture those historical facts that are only accessible through oral sources. This article at times challenges and at other points supplements and reinforces the textual archive through the creation of a new archive: an oral history archive based on multiple interviews with two leading Shi‘i ‘ulama in contemporary Pakistan. At the heart of these interviews lies the question of how these ‘ulama conceptualize and remember their country’s political past and assess their present, considering their minority status and sectarianism. Through undertaking the above-mentioned examination, this article inaugurates the use of oral history as central to scholarship on Shi‘i ‘ulama and underscores the importance of the study of this overlooked primary source.

Margery Kempe as Mankind: Scripted Devotion and East Anglian Performance Culture

This essay reads The Book of Margery Kempe alongside the morality plays of the Macro manuscript — The Castle of Perseverance, Wisdom, and Mankind — to argue that the Book shares important features with them. Kempe's documentary mission relies on morality play formulas and themes, which imply her participation in the flourishing dramatic culture found in early fifteenth-century East Anglia prior to the scripting of the region's famous plays. The evidence presented in the sole surviving manuscript of the Book offers insight into how Kempe's eventual readers, the Carthusians of Mount Grace Priory, both understood and valued the performative and interactive nature of her text for their own acts of readerly performance. Although other work has drawn attention to Kempe's dramatic impulses, viewing the Book itself as a remnant of performance demonstrates the importance of interrogating where and how the traces of premodern performance can be located beyond the textual archive.