Totem Animal Research Articles

Local knowledge, uses, and conservation status of the African golden cat Caracal aurata in central Cameroon

ABSTRACT The African golden cat Caracal aurata is one of Africa’s least known felids, and little is understood about local people’s knowledge and uses of this cat. Questionnaires were completed with 454 people from 15 villages near Mpem et Djim National Park and the Council Forest of Yoko to assess local knowledge, uses, and perceived conservation status of this felid. Only 35% of respondents recognized the species, and older people were more likely to do so. Locals stated that the golden cat population is currently low, that the species is considered a totemic animal, a sign of power and grandeur, and that their pelts are an ornamental asset. Hunting with guns and snares was stated to be the greatest threat to golden cats. Locals urged restricting hunting to protect the species, and both chicken and pig farming were suggested as alternatives to hunting. Our study is the first community-based evaluation of the golden cat in Cameroon.

Култ медведя у народов Примурья и Примория (по материалам российских исследователей)

Based on field materials and publications of Russian ethnographers, the article discusses the cult of the bear, which is widespread among the indigenous small-numbered ethnic groups of the southern part of the Far East. Among the native ethnic groups of the Amur Region and Primorye, this cult manifests itself in the so-called “bear” holiday, which was celebrated on two occasions: the first celebration was associated with the killing of an animal in a den, and the second - on the occasion of a bear grown in captivity. The peculiarity of this holiday lies in the fact that the bear at the region’s natives was a totem animal from the Neolithic era. Therefore, the “bearish” holiday among local peoples has pronounced totemic features that reflect various prohibitions. Starting with the killing of the beast and ending with the special process of eating it, all this was accompanied by magical actions aimed at diverting from the hunters the responsibility for killing the bear - a close “relative” in the female line. The peculiarity of the “bear” holiday lies in the fact that only men and the oldest women, incapable of having children, took part in it, and even then with a number of restrictions associated with eating meat. The totemic nature of this holiday is also reflected in the rite of keeping intact all the bones of the skeleton and skull of the bear, and their ritual burial is associated with the idea of reviving the dead animal. This holiday reflected the idea of the unity of two clans of one ethnic group and testified to a single process of cultural development among the peoples of the Amur and Primorye.

Wolf, little wolf, are you there?... No; I have been extirpated or History of the extirpation of the gray wolf (Canis lupus) in thesouthern part of the Mexican Plateau

After humans, the gray wolf is the mammal that had the largest known natural global distribution. Throughout it, while humanswere hunter-gatherers the gray wolf was a totemic animal, spiritual guide, and friend, but gradually, in Europe and Asia, thisperception changed to that of undesirable vermin that had to be eliminated, due to its predation on domestic animals. Europeansbrought that sentiment to the Americas and the gray wolf was persecuted until it was eradicated from most of its range, includingfrom all of Mexico. In this paper we review the history of its eradication in the southern part of the Mexican Plateau. In this region,the persecution that culminated in its extirpation developed from the 19th Century to the mid-20th Century. The history of the wolfin the region is not unique but it is shared with that of many species when two different cultures meet and capital has the last word

Character in Young Adult fiction: The example of Lyra in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials (1995-2000) and The Book of Dust (2017- )

Few studies have examined the question of characters and the specific ways in which they are treated in children's literature. Yet the construction of the character is all the more important in novels for children and teenagers as a large proportion of these books focus on Bildung and personal development through the exploration of the transition from childhood to maturity.I examine the treatment of character in these books through the case study of young Lyra, Philip Pullman’s new Eve in His Dark Materials fantasy trilogy (1995-2000). On the one hand, the treatment of the character of Lyra belongs to a rather conventional novelistic tradition in several respects. But on the other hand, it also benefits from more innovative elements related with the possibilities offered by fantasy, a genre which is still at the height of popularity with young adults. Daemons, for instance, are animal creatures in Lyra’s familiar yet different world who are closely connected to their human counterparts and disclose their owners’ innermost nature while playing the protective part of totemic animals. This metaphor is one of the devices in the trilogy, along with the alethiometer—a compass-like symbol-reader—, through which the character of Lyra is revealed to the reader.The fact that Pullman’s work belongs to the genre of young adult fiction is also essential. This literature targeting a liminal age group whose boundaries are increasingly blurred, fragments its young characters’ evolution ad infinitum by following them step by step towards adulthood as a way to better dissect the mutations and metamorphoses of adolescence. Even if His Dark Materials identified puberty as a turning-point in the young protagonists’ process of growing up and construction of identity, it is significant that Pullman, who had already added a small companion book—entitled Lyra’s Oxford—to the trilogy’s literary universe, is still trying to explore the multiple dimensions of Lyra’s constantly shifting character: while book 1 of The Book of Dust, Pullman’s new trilogy, La Belle Sauvage (2017), is a prequel to His Dark Materials, which focuses on Lyra as a baby—before the action in Northern Lights takes place—, book 2, The Secret Commonwealth (2019), takes a closer look at Lyra once she has become a young woman, after her meeting with Will in His Dark Materials.

"Fantastic Realia: Some Lexical Correspondences (Russian-Romanian)"

The traditional folkloric substratum of different cultures and the mythological one are still very noticeable nowadays, and the modern person cannot disregard them, as they are intensely reinterpreted, reimagined, and promoted in a vast array of fantasy books, fantasy films, etc. The protagonists of fantasy culture are the imaginary, supernatural, magical, demonic beings, the totemic animals, the fantastic objects, etc. In relevant literature they are defined as mythemes. Moreover, another present-day function was assigned to folkloric, mythological elements (the mythemes) through their animated metamorphosis into the realm of video games, already being annotated, listed online. The present paper aims to emphasise the role of realia-mythemes in traditional and current culture on one hand, and on the other hand to present a series of means of conveying, mainly in Romanian, the fantasy (i.e., folkloric, mythological) realia-words with Russian cultural characteristics (cf. Ба́ба-Яга́ [Ro Baba-Iaga], [En BabaYaga/Jaga]; Богаты́рь [Ro bogatîri], [En bogatyr]; Васили́са Премудрая [Ro Vasilisa Premudraia], [En Vasilisa Premudraya]; Жар-пти́цa [Ro jar-ptița], [En zhar-ptitsa]; Русáлка [Ro rusalca], [En rusalka], etc.). The transfer of realia elements constitutes a complex process that has been drawing the attention of researchers for a long time, especially since there is no “sole” translation solution, and the “ideal” rendering of these units is performed by considering certain intra- and extralinguistic, intra- and extra-translational aspects.

Underfoot by Niillas Holmberg

Reviewed by: Underfoot by Niillas Holmberg Graziano Krätli NIILLAS HOLMBERG Underfoot Illus. Inga-Wiktoria Påve. Trans. Johanna Domokos & Jennifer Kwon Dobbs. Buffalo, New York. White Pine Press. 2022. 100 pages. UNDERFOOT may be the "first Sámi poetry translated into English in the U.S.," as the publisher states, but I daresay that its uniqueness and appeal lie more in the book as a creative artifact—and in poetry as verbo-visual communication—than in its linguistic peculiarity. This is a book that questions the limits and limitations (physical as well as intellectual) of the book form, simultaneously exploiting and expanding them (see WLT, Sept. 2022, 16). The reader experiences the text as part of a scenography dominated by an eloquent and haunting graphic theme: a spectral, metamorphic trace that runs throughout the slim and stylish volume, cover to cover, linking the unnumbered pages structurally as well as thematically. Set against a background that changes gradually from pitch-black to dark gray to light gray and then again from light gray to dark gray to pitch-black, this graphic thread assumes various shapes and symbolic identities (esoteric glyphs, electrocardiograms, leaves and other imprint fossils, totemic animals, and shamanic masks), transforming the pages into veritable panels of a looping, folding screen. Some of these panels feature the text of the poem, in the form of couplets, tercets, quatrains, or a combination of two or more of them placed on the lower half of the left or the right page, and occasionally on both. At (more or less) regular intervals, a variable number of pages with no text string the five sections of the poem together. This structure, together with the ratio of written to unwritten pages, the positioning of the text, and the overall color scheme, creates an orchestral texture upon which Holmberg's poetry, like the soloist in a piano concerto, plays a unifying as well as a signifying role. "Time to return to the feet. / Underfoot there's a drum / skin carved with human letters." However, between the feet and what lies underfoot (the complex, earthbound symbolism and mythologies of a traditional culture) are the shoes of forced assimilation, technology, industry and the market, collectively enabling/enforcing progress while eroding "[t]he body's memory / . . . of a linguistic nervous system." Language makes it possible to recognize and interpret the "human letters" carved on the drum skin underfoot, which tell the difference between simple tracks (such as the imprints of forward motion, progress) and the vestigial, transcending power of traces. It is the connective tissue that binds mind and body, body and earth, past and present in the triadic movement of sensing, tracing, seeing ("Sense the touching, trace where the body meets earth, see / the foot"). [End Page 78] Poetry, of course, is the ultimate manifestation of such a language—and of verbal communication in general—and in Holmberg's distinctive and captivating voice (and that of his capable translators) it acquires an almost oracular eloquence, richly allegoric ("children / with ears like leaves, children / with grammar hidden in their bodies") and metaphorical ("Looking through the shoemaker's window / is to mourn stones that can't fly"), but at the same time plain and straightforward, as in the crucial questions that ultimately concern us all: "Is it too late to raise a child / or merely too late to ask?" It is indeed time to return to the feet—if we can still find them. Graziano Krätli New Haven, Connecticut Copyright © 2023 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Культ орла в мифологии хангаласцев

Культ орла в мифологии хангаласцев

Образ медведя в чувашской культуре

The work is devoted to the study of the image of the bear in the Chuvash linguistic culture and aims to study its properties in the perception of the Chuvash people in a broad ethnographic aspect, including linguistic (etymological, onomastic), as well as folklore approaches. The material of the study was the texts of oral folk art and ethnographic developments containing information about bears. The author also refers to thematic developments in the field of Finno-Ugric studies, since the Finno-Ugric peoples are representatives of the forest culture, which invariably implies a significant participation of bears in their lives. The study is based on traditional methods: scientific understanding of oral folk art and analysis of ethnographic literature. The bear is a popular character in Chuvash folklore. At the same time, it does not have an unambiguous assessment in the Chuvash culture: the bear is an ingenuous creature, as a result of which it loses to a cunning person. At the same time, the Chuvash recognize the bear as a symbol of strength. Analogues in the perception of the bear are more likely to be traced in Russian linguistic culture than in the cultures of the Volga-Kama peoples, many of whom, primarily the Finno-Ugric peoples, recognize the bear as a totem animal. A number of Chuvash texts about bears are nomadic plots.

Sheep (ram) symbolism in folklore, rituals and customs of the Bashkirs

The paper analyzes the remnants of the sheep (ram) cult among the Bashkirs, which was one of the revered animals in their religious and mystical views. The consecration of the sheep (ram) by the ancient Bashkirs is based on the remnants of the totemic way of primitive people thinking about the identity, unity and blood relationship of man and the sheep (ram). Their vestiges are manifested in fairytale folklore, folk games, tribal ethnonymy and anthroponyms of the Bashkirs. The existence in the oral stories of the Bashkirs of a character a king with rams horns shows that the ancient Bashkirs revered as their first ancestor a mythical creature in the guise of a half-man-half-ram. In the role of the totemic ancestor the sheep (ram) in Bashkir folk art and beliefs acts as a patron, guide, savior, benefactor and healer of people, a guardian of life, a soothsayer and predeterminer of their destinies, an escort of the souls of the dead to paradise, symbolizes fertility, prosperity, prosperity and happiness. In some elements of the traditional Bashkir wedding and the sacrifice of a ram, a superstitious attitude towards the skull and links of the cervical vertebra of a sheep (ram), traces of the ancient holidays of the sheep (ram) with rituals of totemic taboo, collective communion with meat and blood, magical resurrection and reproduction of a totem animal are visible. In Bashkir legends, riddles and vocabulary, the evolutionary paths of ideas about the totemic ancestor of the sheep (ram) are traced, as well as the formation on their basis of views about sheep (rams) supernatural divine beings, personifications of stars, attributes and companions of the gods.

ЛИНГВОКУЛЬТУРНЫЙ ПОТЕНЦИАЛ ЭВФЕМИЗМОВ-ОБЕРЕГОВ

The article deals with a special type of euphemisms-amulets, that is, linguocultural units endowed with the function of protection. There are two types of euphemisms-amulets from the point of view of relevance: obsolete and current units. Obsolete euphemisms- amulets have targets that are not recognized as dangerous by the modern linguistic and cultural community. Current euphemisms-amulets, although not always consciously, are used by representatives of the modern Russian linguistic and cultural community to protect against something bad. The paper establishes that the use of the euphemism-amulet is based on the transla- tion of the target's representation into another cultural code. The work reveals that the euphemisms-amulets are directed not to mitigate an unwanted nomination but how to replace it. An undesirable nomination is endowed with negative magical properties, which is why the linguocultural community imposes a ban on its use. A protective cultural function is superim- posed on the euphemism. The main pragmatic explanation for the use of the euphemism- amulet is the speaker's desire not to predict an encounter with an unwanted object, which is based on belief in the magical power of the word. The factors that determine the linguocultural specificity of euphemisms-amulets are revealed. The first factor is target selection. For the Russian linguocultural community, such targets include a totemic animal, evil forces representing another world, death. The second factor is the selection of nominations for the euphemistic function, which is determined by culturally marked background knowledge, ideas, and typical practices. The communicative- pragmatic platform for the use of euphemisms-amulets is the belief in the magical power of the word, in the fact that the use of the forbidden word can lead to negative consequences (in particular, to cause the appearance of something dangerous, undesirable). The work proves that the identified cultural factors are universal, based on universal archetypes: one's own / another's, permission / prohibition, life / death. At the same time, the fact of the appearance of the euphemism-amulet, the choice of its internal form is determined by national and cultural factors.

Écriture des origines, origines de l'écriture by Kathleen Gyssels and Christa Stevens

Reviewed by: Écriture des origines, origines de l'écriture by Kathleen Gyssels and Christa Stevens Eilene Hoft-March Gyssels, Kathleen and Christa Stevens, dirs. Écriture des origines, origines de l'écriture. Brill-Rodopi, 2019. Pp. 158. ISBN 978-90-04-41732-8. € 77 (hardcover). Where does Hélène Cixous's writing originate? In what rich soil does she ground her prolific, idiosyncratic work? This is the guiding inquiry of a volume of eight essays on her work, produced in honor of the writer's eightieth birthday and prefaced by a previously unpublished essay by Cixous herself. The editors have organized the volume with a bow to biblio-biographical chronology, although the unity of this collection comes from Cixous's anguished but enriching returns to her beginnings: the "native" land, the father's words, the mother's culture, the poet-philosopher's conversations. Gyssel's and Stevens's introduction provides a lovely, concise orientation: the cixousian return to origins can only occur in writing. Although this collection represents works primarily spanning the 90s to 2017, references to origins have appeared in her earliest texts in the 70s and 80s. Cixous's own text, "Le legs empoisonné," complicates the notion of origins as a straightforward transfer of [End Page 190] legacies through humans over time. Knowing that loss and betrayal are inevitable inheritances imposed on us by our (beloved) predecessors, Cixous's self-scrutinizing writing reads, muses, equivocates, grieves, regrets, self-blames, and loves. From there, Christa Stevens's essay explores the ambivalent trope of the garden as primal scene connoting paradise and hell, innocence and violence, desire and imprisonment—a double bind nevertheless productive of Cixous's poetic and politicized writing. The trope also permits a return to the original couple in the garden of the writer and her father, resurrected as beloved brother, dog, lover, or poet. Kathleen Gyssels makes an incisive comparison between Cixous's and Albert Memmi's narrations of key childhood events that confirmed the alterity of both authors in relationship to their "native" French colonial Maghreb. Both authors feature a totemic animal (a dog, for Cixous; a scorpion for Memmi) through which each reclaims their excluded status and confirms their suspicions of a "unified" identity. Maxime Decout's chapter homes in on Cixous's culturally and religiously unmoored "judéité," evident in her shifting and paranomastic language. Her Jewish heritage is undecipherable but also an inevitable guilt to be borne. Certain of these originary ambiguities become incarnate: the writer's expiatory Down's syndrome son or her literal descent from deported relatives. Catherine Phillips attributes Cixous's recent intensification of contested, deferred, unsuccessful yet repeated returns to origins as informing her poetics. Cixous figures her returns "autrement," through literature and dreams, to those places (Algeria, Osnabruck, Jerusalem) that in turn implicate other places, other promises, other books—a movement consistent with Cixous's original formulation of écriture feminine. Hervé Sanson gives a meticulous reading of Si près (about Cixous's return to Algeria) that posits the impossibility of transmuting the experience of return into a literary project. The mere attempt, however, richly disseminates "le legs de l'humus algérien," revealing the writer's "éthique pour la vie" (110). Focusing on Chapitre Los and Homère est morte, texts to either side of the mother Eve's death, Metka Zupančič analyzes the frenetic engendering of writing in response to loss, ever compounded by previous disappearances. Zupančič, like Cixous, chooses to focus on what literature can repair of mortality and disappearance: for instance, a death-defying laugh from Isaac, biblical wrestler of angels. Annelies Schulte Nordholt interprets the dialogue of Cécile Wajsbrot and Cixous about exile, loss, and mourning, teasing out their respective attachments to the German language that, while neither their native tongue nor that of their writing, is for both highly affective, rich in memory (or post-memory). The correspondents also entwine commentary about their fraught but warm relationships to a German city, Osnabrück for Cixous and Berlin for Wajsbrot. Oriane Pettini follows Cixous's reading of Claire Lispector, the latter having modeled a "mnesic" process that traces back to the source of meanings. Both authors reject "oculocentrism," which...

PERSONAL NAMES IN SLAVONIC ANTHROPONYMIC SYSTEMS, DERIVED FROM A LATIN NAME THAT DENOTES AN ANIMAL.

abstractIntroduction. There are two major periods of foreign names invasion. The first influence may be dated back to the 9th-10th c. AD when Christianity became the official religion for the Slavonic people and mostly Greek, Latin, and Hebrew names were introduced. Later on, at the end of the 20th century AD, West-European names became – and still are, popular and fashionable.The purpose of the article is to present a full list of Slavonic personal names derived from a Latin anthroponym that denotes an animal as well as their initial meaning.Background and motivations. Some totemic animals, like a wolf, bear, lion, and an eagle are part of the mythology and folklore of lots of European countries. The main reason for choosing to research personal names derived from an appellative for an animal is to follow the traces left from old beliefs and traditions and to study the influence of Christianity on them. Methodology. The main methods used are lexicographical excerption and etymological analysis. The researched anthroponyms are divided into three major groups according to: 1) the meaning of the appellative (i. e. a thematic classification); 2) the type of the basic word (i. e. if the researched anthroponym is derived directly from an appellative or via another anthroponym (be it a Roman mythological name, a Roman phenomena, a Roman gentile name, a Roman cognomen, or a Neolatin name)); 3) their canonization.All personal names included in this research are part of the modern anthroponymicons, even though they represent a small group with relatively infrequent usage.The expected results are to prevent those old Slavonic names from disappearing by making the name etymology more obvious for the common people and revealing the hidden symbolic meaning of the totem animal.All the researched anthroponyms have been saved in the Slavonic names pools due to two very strong traditions – according to the first one, the child, especially a boy, was given a totemic name, and the second one was for the child to be named after one of the paternal or maternal grandparents.

Re-Defining the Villain in A Song of Ice and Fire from the Aspect of Totemism

The confrontation between good and evil is one of the essential aspects of the fantasy genre. In George R.R. Martin’s epic fantasy novel series A Song of Ice and Fire (ASOIAF, 1996–2011), he approaches this conception from a critical point of view. Whilst Martin creates deep and challenging characters in his novels, he introduces the White Walkers to the audience as almost one-dimensional, classic antagonists. It can therefore be questioned whether this contradicts his approach towards the medieval ethos. In order to answer this question, I will approach the narration from the aspect of totemism, and will use totemic signs and values for my analysis. Firstly, I will establish a relationship between totemism and the Old Gods. Conceptions such as ‘sacred totem animal’, ‘totem as an emblem’, ‘restriction of incestuous intercourse’, and ‘spirits’ will be useful for comprehending the Old Gods. Furthermore, I will try to analyze the narration with the elements of totemism. Lastly, in the light of this examination, I will try to explain what theWhite Walkers represent within the narration.

DIKHOTOMY IN THE NOVEL OF SATIMZHAN SANBAEV "WHITE ARUANA"

The article analyzes a novel of Satimzhan Sanbaev “White Aruana” with regards to the semantic layers encoded in symbols and metaphors inherent in the mentality of the Kazakh people. The novel had been researched by many literary critics as one of the bright stories of socialist realism, but has never been considered in psychoanalytical aspect and in the frame of colonial discourse. The theme of this article is a psychology and tragedy of the disabled war veteran and colonial discourse transmitted through an image of Aruana camel as a parallel to the main character, its genesis and interpretation. Texts created in Soviet times by representatives of Turkic culture on the border of a nomadic and sedentary lifestyle still need proper interpretation in terms of colonial discourse and a strategy for encoding meanings in the era of ideological censorship. The story of Satimzhan Sanbaev is considered in the article from the point of view of literary psychoanalysis and intertextuality, the semantic layers of the work are analyzed in the aspect of linguistic bilingualism. The article traces how the writer realizes his plan using the symbols and metaphors of nomadic culture, revealing the image and significance of the totem animal. The aim of the study, therefore, is to identify the semantics and functions of poetics that implements the theme in the text of the writer.

Literary Animals as Spiritual Catalysts: Totemic Animals in Poems by José Emilio Pacheco, Miren Agur Meabe, and Guadalupe Grande

Literary Animals as Spiritual Catalysts: Totemic Animals in Poems by José Emilio Pacheco, Miren Agur Meabe, and Guadalupe Grande

Totems, Cannibals, and Other Blood Relations: Animals and the Rise of Social Evolutionary Theory

Totems, Cannibals, and Other Blood Relations:Animals and the Rise of Social Evolutionary Theory Amy Woodson-Boulton (bio) At the beginning of his 1963 work Totemism, the structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss made a remarkable claim about totemism, a nineteenth-century theory that the origin of both religion and incest barriers lay in systems of animal worship: he argued that this anthropological model had been "like hysteria," an invention that suited the purposes of the scholars who created it. Indeed, he wrote, both hysteria and totemism had served their inventors "to mark off certain human phenomena—as though they constituted a natural entity—which the scholars preferred to regard as alien to their own moral universe" (1). He continued: [T]he idea of totemism made possible a differentiation of societies, … if not by relegating certain of them into nature (a procedure well illustrated by the very term Naturvölker), at least by classing them according to their attitude toward nature, as expressed by the place assigned to man in the animal kingdom and by their understanding or alleged ignorance of the mechanism of procreation. … This naturalist view offered a touchstone which allowed the savage, within culture itself, to be isolated from civilized man. (2) One of the striking things about this passage is that it is in fact a historical argument about the Victorian era, which, while not the real subject of Lévi-Strauss's project, offers an important historical insight. Indeed, judging peoples according to their attitude toward nature in order to separate the "savage" from "civilized man" has been well studied as a key cultural aspect of the New Imperialism (e.g., Adas). What is less well known is the role that animals and human-animal relationships played in that project. While the modern-primitive divide became an overarching frame of reference in this period, and all cultural fields had the potential to fall within it, the specific question of how different classes and societies understood their relationship to animals—which became particularly acute in questions [End Page 211] about killing and eating—became a source of exceptional energy, debate, and rhetoric. In the shadow of Darwinian natural selection and other new theories that connected animals to humans in radical ways, and in the midst of increasing opportunities to eat meat at home in Britain and for big-game hunting and ethnographic research abroad, late nineteenth-century scholars, reformers, and hunters thought and wrote a great deal about what it meant to eat (other) animals. In doing so, they helped to articulate an increasingly pervasive theory of social evolution, by distinguishing "primitive" and "modern" ideas about and practices around killing and eating animals and by rethinking human-animal relationships. How did different ways of killing and eating animals distinguish the human from the bestial, the civilized from the savage, the modern from the primitive, the bourgeois from the proletarian? Anthropologists heatedly debated the meaning of eating and worshipping totemic animals among hunter-gatherer peoples in the Americas, Oceania, and Africa then under (or coming under) European control, understanding these peoples (or at least their cultures) as mostly doomed to extinction and in terms of set stages of social evolution. But even in seemingly unrelated cultural arenas, such as in the vegetarian movement or among big-game hunters, we see people applying similar logics about animals, identification, and consumption. Anthropologists, vegetarians, and hunters debated and defined "civilized" and "primitive" relationships with animals around questions of ingestion, relation, and prohibitions about what constituted allowable "meat" and what was prohibited (or sacramental) "flesh." As Lévi-Strauss noted, animals and our relationships with them were therefore crucial to late nineteenth-century definitions of primitive and modern. Using animals to establish what was "primitive" or "modern" went well beyond anthropologists or scholars, though; in fact, it was an essential feature of European imperialism. Moreover, such new attitudes were often provoked and made possible by new relationships with animals and animal products in Britain and its colonies. Vegetarians adapted the pervasive language of biological and social evolution, looking both "backward" at human anatomy and "forward" to transcending "primitive" and traditional diets, positioning their cause against "flesh-eating" as both natural...

Lyre shaped motif and its origins

Lyre shaped ornament is a common motif of ornamental and folklore applied art. But, unfortunately, the origins of the lyre shaped motif are still not well investigated. In the paper we review the literature devoted to the study of the emergence and spread of a lyre shaped motif and analyze museum exhibits from catalogs and published sources. The aim of the study is to define the сenters of the lyre motif origin and the paths of its distribution. Material and methods. Article analyzes lyre shaped motifs in museum artifacts, folk arts and crafts using materials presented in published literature and catalogs of museum exhibits. A spiral motif originated in Egypt. The origins of the lyre motif in ancient Egypt are probably connected with the iconography of the Egyptian god of Hathor, who was depicted as a woman with a headdress decorated with lyre shaped horns and a solar disk between them. It should be noted that the tradition of depicting a human face with cow horns has connections with the Neolithic period of the Nile Valley, where cattle breeding arose in the 6-5th millennium BC. The first cases of using a lyre shaped motif occured in scarab-like seals of Egypt and Minoan culture. Artifacts with a lyre shaped motif were observed related, dating from the Minoan and Mycenaean periods, during to the period of classical Hellenistic Greece. A lyre shaped motif was spread along trade routes from Crete to the Danube, the Elbe, the shores of the Baltic Sea and, together with the Celts, penetrated into Britain, from the Greek colonies of the Black Sea to the Scythians. In the Asian part of the Eurasian steppes, this motif symbolized the image of the eagle totem animal depicted like a griffin, especially in the early Scythian and Hunnic period. The origins of the lyre shaped motif in the Asian steppe, apparently, were the ancient motifs “taotie” in China and “masks” in the Russian Far East. The popularity of the lyre shaped motif in the folk arts and crafts of the Turkic peoples was probably due to the spread of this motif within the Scythian community, when there was a cult of the eagle-like griffin and totem.

A Medieval Repoussage Item from Pankrushikhinskiy District (Altai Krai)

The paper describes a bronze plaque, made in Perm animal style by method of one-side casting. It depicts a rampant winged bear with its paws on the shoulders of a standing man. Being an accidental finding, the plaque comes from the northern regions of the Altai Territory (the village of Vysokaya Griva, Pankrushikhinskiy District). The paper features its composition and plot, which has a complex semantic content. Following other researchers, the authors consider such products a metal reflection of the three-part world structure, characteristic for the peoples at a certain level of social development, and a myth about the origin of the people. A comparative analysis with both neighboring and quite remote areas made it possible to assume that there were different totem animals, ancestors of the major ethnic groups of different Finno-Ugrian peoples. Thus, a bird of prey was the most typical totem animal for the western territories representing a Finnish-speaking population that lived in the European part of Russia. The bird was both the ancestor and the guardian spirit of the ethnic group. A bear was the totem for the eastern territories of the Finno-Ugrian peoples living in Siberia, in the Asian Russia, that represented the Ugrian-Samoyedic population. It is evidenced by the absence of bears on the plaques with encoded myths about the origin of the kindred in Western European regions, and on the contrary, a practically complete absence of birds on similar plaques in the Asian regions. The finding is published for the first time.

TOTEMISM CULT IN THE ERA OF TECHNICAL INNOVATIONS

The article represents the study of the roots of religious totemism in modern advertisement. It has been noticed that the motives of marketers and advertising specialists who use totemic myths coincide with the motives of shamans who appeal to totems. Among them we can highlight the desire to get a kind of help from a totem animal, the desire to acquire the characteristics of an animal to adapt to the environment, and the need to expand the emotional background and unity with nature. Special attention is paid to advertising of innovative products - smartphones and cars. The motives for addressing totems in these two cases are the same. However, here we often see a modified totem: robots and computer models supersede animals. This is a new trend in the era of technical innovations, and there is reason to believe that it will continue to evolve.

People and Animals in Lithuanian Folktales: the Didactical and Psychological Aspects

The purpose of the article is revealing the great variety of relationships between humans and animals in the traditional Lithuanian folktales in order to understand the meaning of the animal motives in this folklore genre. Analysis of the ethical, pedagogical and psychological aspects of the tales rests on the printed and archived materials from the 19th – 20th century. The author discusses the instances of clashing and matching perspectives between the folklore-centered, psychological, and culture-oriented views on the traditional narratives and on the worldview that these narratives reflect. Representations of both the wild animals, birds and reptiles, and the domesticated ones in the Lithuanian fairy tales and animal tales are symbolical rather than realistic, thus encouraging to view these narratives as essentially meant for upbringing or psychotherapy rather than natural education. According to the emotional, ethical and pedagogical value of relationships between the protagonist and the animals, the folktale motives fall into several groups:a. relations based on fear (folktales prohibiting to hurt the totemic animals);b. overcoming of fear and hostility (folktales describing marriage with animals);c. empathy (folktales describing people saving and caring for the animals, and therefore experiencing great success);d. acquiring protection (folktales describing animals sacrificing themselves for the benefit of the protagonist);e. animals endowed with authority in the eyes of the humans (folktales revealing special powers and capacities of the animals, which alone enable the humans to achieve their aims; these tales reveal dependence of people on nature);f. narratives enhancing emotional consciousness (tales of animals and formula tales dedicated to the youngest children and teaching them strategies of safe behavior as well as encouraging their emotional self-awareness);g. hostility (stories derived from the medieval animal epos);h. pragmatism and economical attitude (folktales describing animals as sources of profit rather than self-contained characters).In conclusion, the author assumes that literary tradition must have had minimum impact on the ancient Lithuanian folktales and their worldview in particular, since they do not antagonize the natural and the human world. Contrary to the view expressed by the French cultural historian Robert Darnton maintaining that French tales essentially have been harsh and cynical, the majority of the Lithuanian tales merit recognition for their positive view of the world, for bringing up educational examples, for pedagogical intentions and the general concept that rightful behavior deserves an appropriate reward. Having discussed the psychoanalytic interpretations of folktales, the author assumes that animals in the oldest versions of the Lithuanian folktales play the role of the superego rather than id. This allows to maintain that respectful attitude towards animals was inherent in the culture of the ancient peoples, particularly the peasants, being “discovered” in the literary tradition as late as the end of the 19th century.