This article examines how sacred landscapes are created, contested, and reimagined within the Deori community of Assam, Northeast India, focusing on the rituals and memory surrounding Goddess Kesaikhaiti. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, oral traditions, and spatial analysis, the study investigates how sites such as the bolisaal (sacrificial space) and the Tamreswari temple ruins serve as focal points for negotiating indigenous, Vedic, and modern influences. Situating the analysis within the frameworks of cultural geography, spatial memory, and political ecology, the article demonstrates how sacredness is actively formed through ritual practice, landscape symbolism, and collective memory. The research highlights how sacred spaces serve as arenas for the ongoing assertion of cultural identity and community resilience amid historical disruption and change. By foregrounding the intersections of spirituality, ecology, and group belonging, the article offers new insights into the territoriality of faith and the politics of sacred space within evolving cultural landscapes.

ABSTRACT The universalist conception of peace as the mere absence of conflict often obscures indigenous understandings rooted in active ethical and spiritual practices. This paper foregrounds Yorùbá epistemologies to advance a framework for conceptualising peace as àlàáfíà, an active moral equilibrium grounded in spiritual authority, justice, and communal responsibility. Drawing on a critical reflection methodology, we examine the cosmological foundations of Yorùbá peace thought, including the interplay between Ayé (the physical world) and Ọ̀run (the spiritual realm), the role of the Òrìṣà, and key philosophical concepts such as Ìwàpẹ̀lẹ́ (good character), Ìrẹ́pọ̀ (harmony), Orí (inner consciousness), and Tòrò (serenity). We analyse the symbolic and ritual significance of the dove (ẹyẹ àlà / Ẹyẹlé) within Ifá divination, oríkì traditions, ìjálá poetry, and ritual practice, alongside other peace symbols including Ọ̀kín (peacock) and Màrìwò (palm frond), which reveal layered indigenous meanings that resist reduction to singular emblems. We argue that Yorùbá cosmological perspectives, rooted in the veneration of the Òrìṣà and sustained through oral and performative traditions, offer necessary alternatives to liberal pacifist paradigms and provide ethical and communal frameworks for peace-building. This approach opens possibilities for transformative theorisation in peace studies and engagement with indigenous epistemologies in the global South.

Poetic language is fundamentally different from ordinary language in both structure and purpose. Its complexity makes it not only context-sensitive but also deeply symbolic, conveying meanings that go far beyond literal interpretation. This study investigates the challenges associated with interpreting and decoding the subtleties of Yorùbá poetic language, with particular emphasis on symbolism and how it constrains the effectiveness of Artificial Intelligence (machine language). It examines the use of verbal symbolism in four forms of Yorùbá oral literature Ìjálá, Ẹ̀sà-Ẹ̀gúngún, Ìyèrè-Ifá, and Ṣàngó-pípè each categorized as religious chants. Adopting a symbolic framework based on the perspective of Charles Sanders Peirce, the study employs widely used AI systems such as ChatGPT, Meta, Gemini, GigaChat, and Grok to interpret the symbolic expressions found in these oral traditions. Findings indicate that while Artificial Intelligence is a powerful tool that supports various human tasks, it remains limited in interpreting verbal symbolism, as such meanings extend beyond direct, word-for-word semantic analysis. The study also identifies three key semiotic relationships sign, signifier, and signified consistent with Ferdinand de Saussure’s theory. Ultimately, the findings show that verbal symbolism culminates in figurative language, reinforcing its inherently poetic nature.

This article examines folk beliefs and conceptions concerning death and the afterlife, burial practices as represented in Armenian oral tradition, including their typology, ritual system, and related, in parallel with extensive ethnographic material. The aim and objective of this study is to identify and analyze the burial ritual system, the ritual environment, and the multilayered cultural structure of religious and mythological beliefs and perceptions associated with death. Although perceptions and beliefs undergo spatiotemporal transformations over time, conditioned by the development of human consciousness and scientific progress, they continue to persist as traditional cultural values, maintaining an inseparable link between the past and the present and thereby preserving the relevance of the topic.

Boardgames have been a much-neglected aspect of India’s intangible heritage, despite their fundamental role in shaping societies and cultures and have largely remained invisible within traditional academic discourses and museum archives. In the absence of physical archives and given the ephemeral nature and the multiple mediality of boardgames as artefacts, a digital archive seems to be the way forward in documenting Indian boardgames and their role as cultural artefacts. This article introduces the ‘Digitizing Ancient Indian Boardgames (DAIB)’ project, which seeks to move beyond the limitations (and often absence) of curated physical collections to curate a wide array of ‘ludic artifacts’ ranging from ancient cave etchings to oral traditions that are still in vogue. Through the lens of postcolonial DH and the praxis of jugaad, this DH project examines the challenges of archiving “ephemeral” culture in a resource-constrained environment. It remains cognisant of the fragmentariness of data and the difficulty of creating a cohesive history of play while, nevertheless, offering a scalable model for preserving intangible heritage across the Global South.

Language and literature, which have long served as core elements of cultural identity, continue to play a crucial role in shaping and sustaining collective memory and social values. This paper examines the historical and contemporary dynamics of multilingual literary traditions in Lalbagh, Murshidabad, and analyses their contribution to cultural identity formation. It explores the interaction of Persian, Urdu, and Bengali across different historical periods and identifies the key factors influencing their continuity and transformation. There is limited research that comparatively analyses the coexistence of these linguistic traditions within a localized socio-cultural context. The study reveals that despite the dominance of Bengali in formal domains, Urdu and traces of Persian persist in cultural and religious practices, supported largely by oral traditions such as marsiya, nauha, and Baul songs. However, challenges such as modernization, language shift, and inadequate institutional support threaten the sustainability of these traditions. The study situates Lalbagh within a broader historical and cultural framework and highlights the importance of community participation, documentation, and institutional support in preserving linguistic diversity and sustaining cultural identity.

This article examines the transmission of life values through bekana, a traditional storytelling practice preserved by the Dayak Kebahan community in Sintang, West Kalimantan. The main issue underlying this study is the diminishing role of indigenous traditions in passing down moral and cultural values due to the pressures of modernization, which risks weakening the foundations of local identity and education. The purpose of the research is to investigate how bekana functions as a cultural medium of teaching, particularly in shaping ethical behavior, communal responsibility, and spiritual awareness among younger generations. Using a qualitative ethnographic method, data were gathered through direct observation, semi-structured interviews, and textual analysis to obtain a comprehensive picture of bekana’s educational dimensions. The results highlight nine categories of values that are consistently communicated: honesty, responsibility, solidarity, respect, wisdom, heroism, patience, spirituality, and environmental consciousness. These findings indicate that bekana is not solely a form of oral tradition but also an educational system that integrates cultural heritage with practical guidance for life. The synthesis of these insights demonstrates that bekana serves as an informal curriculum, reinforcing community worldviews while enabling adaptation to contemporary social change. The conclusion underscores that bekana is a crucial resource for sustaining cultural continuity and for enriching character education, thereby offering valuable perspectives for bridging indigenous traditions and modern educational frameworks.

Place Names in the Legend of Dodan: An Exploration of the Interconnectedness of Land and its Stories in the Rabha oral tradition

Kuntulan is a traditional performing art that has developed within pesantren communities in Purwakarta, characterized by a unique combination of martial arts, traditional music, and Arabic-language sholawat (Islamic chants). This study employs a descriptive qualitative method, focusing on analyzing the sholawat lyrics in Kuntulan using Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic theory and Stuart Hall’s representation theory to explore Islamic values. The study identifies various religious signs and the meanings of Islamic teachings in the context of local culture. The findings reveal that the lyrics convey Islamic values such as love for the Prophet, intercession, and monotheism, and also represent the religious identity of the pesantren community in a performative and emotional way. Furthermore, the analysis shows that these lyrics function as part of an oral tradition that effectively transmits values, shapes moral character, and strengthens collective spirituality in a continuous and aesthetic manner.

Storytelling – literary, oral, and spontaneous – exerts profound psychological, social, and existential power. Beyond its aesthetic function, storytelling can be deliberately mobilized for survival, resistance, transformation, healing, and the cultivation of sensitivity to cross-cultural understanding. It links individuals by combining dulce et utile: aesthetic pleasure with pragmatic implication, enabling persuasive forms of narrative therapy through allusion and parable, and fostering individual and collective consensus oriented toward human well being. Story practices evoke memory, archetypal symbols, mythic imagery, survival instincts, personal trauma, and forms of resistance rooted in identity, politics, and history, while illuminating the unconscious. In moments of existential peril, storytelling becomes an essential human act that sustains mental resilience, social solidarity, and cultural memory. Drawing on myth, oral tradition, literature, autofiction, confession, and therapeutic narration, this paper demonstrates how stories persuade, preserve communal identity, and promote personal development. Reading, writing, narrating, and performing diverse forms of narrative therapy – such as myths, folk tales, fairy tales, koans, Zen parables, personal confessions, dream scripts, diaries, memoirs, and other fictions – activates the will toward individuation, evolution, and empathy. Through a comparative analysis of paradigmatic literary cases (One Thousand and One Nights; the myth of Philomela; Boccaccio’s Decameron; Naguib Mahfouz’s Arabian Nights and Days; Burhan Sönmez’s Istanbul, Istanbul; Irvin D. Yalom’s therapeutic fiction; Nossrat Peseschkian’s Oriental Stories; and John Williams’s Butcher’s Crossing), this paper argues that storytelling is an embodied practice capable of effecting both inner psycho–mental transformation and external social change, fostering resilience at personal and cultural levels. In its aesthetic and therapeutic dimensions, storytelling evokes the fundamental human right to happiness and affirms the necessity of narration – both for oneself and for others.

The article focuses on modern Egypt to explore how the regional tradition of oral storytelling interacted with the nascent formats of Arab serial drama (musalsalāt) on radio and television. While academic works have tended to emphasise the rupture brought about by the advent of mass serial culture, the article stresses deep structural affinities between the narrative modes used by Arab professional reciters and locally produced serialised plays. Thus, it compares existing theorisations of ‘premodern’ episodic storytelling and ‘modern’ narrative seriality, showing that the two share crucial features, including instalment-based progression, openness, and expandability. To achieve this, the study first turns to the accounts of travellers, writers, and scholars of the 19th–20th centuries to demonstrate that Egyptian reciters casually employed techniques associated with modern narrative seriality in their professional practice. The article then examines the understudied Egyptian periodicals of the 1950s–1960s to explore the convergence between the oral storytelling tradition and local early radio and television drama. The Egyptian case, therefore, provides a lens for reassessing how mass media scholars approach the genealogy of serial narrative forms, making it less centred on Western Europe and North America and open to trajectories in other regions and cultures.

This article examines how the Eʋe folktale “Self-Serving” was adapted into a musical fable as a means of preserving oral traditions in contemporary society. Among the Eʋe people, folktales are not only stories but also performances that combine music, movement, and participation to teach values and strengthen community life. Today, however, these traditions are facing decline because of modernisation and changing cultural contexts. The study responds to this challenge by showing how creative adaptation can keep such traditions alive and meaningful. The work is guided by the 2003 UNESCO Convention on the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, which calls for traditions to remain dynamic and continually renewed. The article demonstrates how compositional strategies such as rhythmic patterns that reflect character traits, musical contrasts that highlight moral lessons, and the use of gesture and audience participation transform the folktale into a staged performance that is both faithful to its roots and engaging for modern audiences. Beyond performance, the work underscores the educational value of folktales reimagined through music and drama. It concludes that the musical fable offers a practical model for bridging tradition and modernity, advancing UNESCO’s vision of safeguarding intangible heritage while ensuring that Eʋe oral traditions remain vibrant, relevant, and resilient for future generations.

The power of local wisdom in <i>Hadih Maja</i> : Mitigating social conflict in Aceh through oral tradition

Abstract - The Bhakti Movement, active across the Indian subcontinent between the seventh and seventeenth centuries, constituted a sustained challenge to religious hierarchy, social exclusion, and epistemic control. Bhakti poets such as Kabir, Tulsidas, Namdev, and Meera Bai articulated a spiritual philosophy that displaced ritual authority and caste privilege with ethical devotion, emotional immediacy, and human equality. Expressed through regional languages and transmitted via oral and folkloric traditions, Bhakti literature created a shared cultural domain accessible to communities excluded from elite institutions. In contemporary postcolonial scholarship, Bhakti has gained renewed attention as a form of cultural decolonization, preserving indigenous ways of knowing that contest colonial historiography and inherited social hierarchies. This paper argues that Bhakti constitutes a distinct indigenous enlightenment, one that foregrounds vernacular expression, subaltern memory, and spiritual democracy. By examining Bhakti through the lenses of postcolonial theory, cultural studies, and subaltern historiography, the study demonstrates how Bhakti continues to offer alternative frameworks for identity, resistance, and social justice in modern India. Key Words: Bhakti Movement, Cultural Decolonization, Vernacular Literature, Indigenous Epistemology, Subaltern Voices, Spiritual Democracy

Metamorphosis is a multilayered cultural and scientific phenomenon that is expressed in Armenian myths, legends, and wonder tales as a didactic, ritual, and symbolic tool. This study attempts to present the manifestations of metamorphosis in the context of Armenian oral tradition, comparing them with Indo-European mythological perspectives. The analysis examines the temporal, cultural, and spiritual dimensions of metamorphosis, emphasizing its role in transitional rites and in the restoration of social norms.

This paper examines colonial accounts of Khasi megalithic monuments, arguing that European travellers, scholars, and administrators often misunderstood and misrepresented these structures through a Eurocentric lens. It begins with an overview of Khasi history, oral traditions, and social organisation, before exploring the community’s encounters with colonial powers, particularly the East India Company. The paper highlights key moments such as road-building agreements that tied the Khasi people to British imperial ambitions. Drawing on Edward Said’s concept of the "colonial gaze," it analyses how figures like Henry Walters, Henry Yule, and Joseph Dalton Hooker portrayed the Khasi landscape and monuments in ways that exoticised and distorted their cultural meanings. It also critiques the renaming and romanticisation of Khasi toponyms by administrators like J.P. Mills, reflecting an imperial tendency to appropriate and reshape indigenous identities. In challenging these narratives, the paper stresses the need to foreground indigenous voices in the representation of their heritage. It argues that Khasi writers and cultural custodians play a crucial role in correcting colonial biases, reclaiming identity, and promoting cultural resilience. Ultimately, the paper calls for a critical reassessment of colonial texts and a renewed focus on indigenous agency in preserving and interpreting heritage.

ABSTRACT This article examines how gendered power and women’s subjectivities are discursively constructed within African traditional governance, focusing on the pognaa – a female chieftaincy position in the Waala society of northwestern Ghana. Drawing on decolonial African feminist perspectives and the Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse, it examines how cultural norms, institutional dynamics, and colonial legacies shape women’s authority in traditional governance. Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Dorimon, complemented by in-depth interviews with pognamine, chiefs, community members, and institutional representatives, four key insights emerged. First, while some actors frame the pognaa as a modern bureaucratic creation, others reclaim it as a reinvigoration of precolonial female authority. Second, the pognaa’s identity and position are often contested and presented in contradictory ways depending on the interlocutors’ positionalities. Third, these contestations situate the pognaa in a realm of cultural ambivalence – symbolically recognised as a position of authority, yet incessantly subordinated. Finally, notwithstanding these contestations, pognamine strategically renegotiate their positions through discursive practices, oral traditions, and bureaucratic regimes to redefine their status within the chieftaincy system. We conclude that, rather than merely a subject of power, the pognaa emerges as an agent for pushing the epistemic boundaries of gendered power, necessitating institutionalisation of the position to promote inclusive governance.

ABSTRACT Folktales and oral narratives, are stories that nurtureand reinforce collective imagination, while preserving cultural roots, resulting in shared cultural spaces and practices. Kerala’s folklore and oral tradition decode the rich cultural fabric of the state, interlaced with memories and practices deeply embedded in local communities. Pranthan Kuriachan, an enigmatic figure in Kerala’s Christian folklore, is central to a historical legacy that is ritualised within vernacular devotional practice, producing a local moral belief system. He serves as a cultural and historical repository, encapsulating the mystical attributes and reflecting the syncretism between Christian motifs and indigenous beliefs within the cultural milieu of Mattancherry, a neighbourhood in the city of Cochin. Focussed on the nexus between culture and history, the study explores how this memory of resistance becomes ritualised within vernacular devotional practice, where oral narratives, everyday vows, and local ritual acts gradually domesticate ecclesiastical history into a lived moral system centred on Pranthan Kuriachan. Drawing on cultural and communicative memory, the paper demonstrates how historical rupture persists not merely as commemoration but as memory enacted through practice, producing a localised belief system rooted in shared experience.

In the works of composers of the Russian Far East, oral musical traditions are widely reflected, among which the role of East Slavic origins is significant. The purpose of the study is to identify the specifics of the embodiment of the Russian national principle in the musical imagery and style of the opera “I Believe” by A. V. Novikov (1987). The article reveals the ideological, figurative, musical and stylistic features of the work, which go back to the Russian mentality and folklore and genre origins. Scientific novelty is determined by the introduction into scientific circulation of a sample of domestic opera, which represents the regional (Far Eastern) trend of Russian neo-folklorism. As a result of the study, three musical and thematic plans, different in content and functions, were identified in the figurative dramaturgy of the work. It is shown that the psychological plan of action includes fundamentally dynamic portrait characteristics of the characters with their detailed display, typical of chamber opera. The other two planes – Russian folk-genre expressiveness and the “voice from the author” – represent collective (traditional) and maximally generalized images, distinguished by their background-commentary role. It is emphasized that the national principle, which colors all these plans to varying degrees, made it possible to individualize each of them, as well as to enrich the style of domestic chamber opera with features of neo-folklorism.

Purpose This study aimed to reconstruct the silencing of narratives about Lampung's female heroes in historiography shaped by the coloniality of knowledge and patriarchy. Method This study used a qualitative approach with a literature study and critical historiography to analyze colonial archives, official Lampung history, writings about female figures, and literature on oral traditions containing collective memories about them. It employed decolonial feminist critique to examine the relationship between gender, memory politics, and local knowledge. Result/findings This study showed that Lampung's historiography produces narratives of masculine heroic figures. This was showed by a historiography that centered on male figures as heroes, while the contributions of women such as Poeti Alam Naisjah Moeloek, Putri Mentawai, Ratu Mas Lamban Gedung, and Hj. Inci Hindun Rauf were reduced, silenced, or marginalized to the domestic and cultural realms. Oral tradition needed to be seen as an alternative epistemic medium and archive preserving the collective memory of the role of female heroes outside of written colonial archives and state narratives. Conclusion This study concluded that silencing was read as a form of layered epistemic injustice between the coloniality of knowledge and the coloniality of gender. It also offered a framework to reconstruct Lampung's history in a more inclusive, gender-just manner, grounded in community knowledge.