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A retelling of the traditional tale in which five silly fishermen, unable to count properly, are convinced that one of their group has drowned.

The Sundarbans is the largest mangrove forest in the world, spanning across the borders of Bangladesh and India. It is also a UNESCO World Heritage site recognized for its ecological uniqueness and importance to all humanity. The Sundarbans is home to diverse species and some of the poorest twelve million people in the world. Hindu and Muslim fisherfolk and honey collectors who call this place home share a respect for the forest and venerate Bonbibi (Forest Lady), who they believe reigns over the forest and its inhabitants. For them, she offers protection. This article argues that in their ritual and ethical practices, these Muslims and Hindus treat the Sundarbans as sacred land. It is sacred because it provides all they need to live a sustainable life. This study combines textual analysis of the epic poem about Bonbibi entitled the Jahuranama with ethnographic studies and field visits.

Background Most fisher-gatherer communities we know of utilized a limited number of natural resources for their livelihood. The Turkic-speaking Loptuq (exonym Loplik, Loplyk ) in the Lower Tarim River basin, Taklamakan desert, Eastern Turkestan (Xinjiang), were no exception. Their habitat, the Lop Nor marsh and lake area, was surrounded by desert and very poor in plant species; the Loptuq had to make the most of a handful of available biological resources for housing, furniture, clothing and fabric, fishnets and traps, tools and other equipment. The taxa used by the Loptuq were documented by foreign explorers at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, prior to the forced resettlement of the group in the 1950s and subsequent destruction of their language, lifestyle and culture. Methods and sources Ethnobiology explores the relationship between humans and their environment, including the use of biological resources for different purposes. In several aspects, historical ethnobiology is more challenging; it studies this relationship in the past and therefore cannot verify results with informants. As the present study discusses an extinct culture on the basis of literary and material sources, we apply a method called source pluralism . This approach allows the inclusion and combination of a wide range of data and materials, even scraps of information from various sources, with the aim to understand phenomena which are sparsely mentioned in historical records. Travel reports by Swedish, British, German, American and Russian explorers together with linguistic data provide the most important sources for understanding Loptuq interaction with the environment and its biota. Especially the large number of toponyms and phytonyms recorded by the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin and materials from his expeditions, including voucher specimens kept in Stockholm in the herbarium of the Swedish Natural History Museum, and objects of material culture in the collections of the Ethnographical Museum, are crucial for our analysis about local knowledge among the Loptuq. Illustrations and photographs provide us with additional information. Results The question of how the Loptuq managed to survive at the fringe of a desert, a marsh and a lake which changed its location, intrigued all foreign visitors to the Lop Nor. The Loptuq’s main livelihood was fishing, hunting and gathering, and their material culture provided by plants and other organic materials included their usage, consumption and trade. Only a handful of species formed the basis of the Loptuq material culture, but they had learned to use these specific plants for a variety of purposes. The most important of these were Lop hemp, Poacynum pictum (Schrenk) Baill., the riparian tree Euphrates poplar, Populus euphratica Olivier, and the aquatic common reed, Phragmites australis (Cav.) Trin. ex Steud. Several species of tamarisk were used for fuel and building fences. A few plants were also harvested for making foodstuffs such as snacks and potherbs. In addition, the Loptuq also used fur, bird skins, down, feathers, mammal bones and fish bones for their material needs. The habitat provided cultural ecological services such as motifs for their folklore, linguistic expressions and songs, and the Loptuq engaged in small-scale bartering of plant products and furs with itinerant traders, which ensured them with a supply of metal for making tools. Conclusion This article discusses the now extinct Loptuq material culture as it existed more than a hundred years ago, and how the scarce biological resources of their desert and marsh habitat were utilized. Loptuq adaptation strategies to the environment and local knowledge, transmitted over generations, which contributed to their survival and subsistence, were closely connected with the use of biological resources. For this study, a comprehensive approach has been adopted for the complex relationships between human, biota and landscape. The Loptuq are today largely ignored or deleted from history for political reasons and are seldom, if at all, mentioned in modern sources about the Lop Nor area. Their experience and knowledge, however, could be useful today, in a period of rapid climate change, for others living in or at the fringe of expanding deserts.

The influential English writer M. R. James (1862-1936) developed a repertoire of techniques for creating folkloresque ghost stories that seem authentically supernatural. These include the citation of (often invented) scholarly sources, details of (often invented) material culture and landscape, and reference to (often invented) oral tradition. James’s stories are literary (folkloresque) counterparts to supernatural legends, creating their sense of credibility with techniques that are similar to those used to create a sense of truthfulness in legends.

Discussion of the folk horror subgenre emphasizes its use of folkloric materials. By portraying tensions between surviving village lore and the invention of faux-ancient practices, The Witches (1966), an early Folk Horror film, also demonstrates the subgenre’s close links with folkloristics. This article examines the folkloresque links between folk horror and folklore’s disciplinary history and development, developing definitions of the subgenre and extending our understanding of popular culture’s representational dependence on folkloristics.

In the Spermonde as in the other main island groups around Sulawesi, seagrass and coral ecosystems are intimately linked ecologically and overlap extensively on the shallow water shelves surrounding most islands. One keystone species living in these shallow waters is the dugong (Dugong dugon). Officially fully protected under Indonesian Law (PP7/1999), published data on dugongs in the islands around Sulawesi are extremely limited. In this research, we collected, compiled and evaluated data and information (mostly unpublished) on the distribution, exploitation and community perceptions of dugongs around Sulawesi, including the Togean, Banggai, Spermonde, Taka Bone Rate/Selayar and Tanakeke Islands. Opportunities for dugong conservation, and potential benefits for coral reef ecosystems in a small island socio-ecological context, were considered. Once common within living memory, socio-economic data indicate that Sulawesi dugongs are now rare and under severe threat. Many fishing communities consider dugong meat superior to beef, and see it as a welcome change from fish, while certain body parts fetch a high price, as do dugong tears. In the Spermonde Islands, dugongs may already have been extirpated; the most recent reported sighting was in 1993 when the capture of an adult dugong by fishermen of Barranglompo Island resulted in an impromptu festival. All these Sulawesi small islands communities have dugong princess (putri duyung) legends with potential as an entry-point to hearts and minds. Preventing further extirpations and striving to bring back the “lost princess” could be an iconic component of moving towards sustainability in small-island socio-ecological systems.

Drawing on our experience in establishing marine protected areas (MPAs) in the Roviana and Vonavona Lagoons, New Georgia, Solomon Islands, this paper shows how a geographical information system (GIS) database can be used to incorporate socio-spatial information, such as indigenous knowledge and artisanal fishing data, along with biophysical and other information to assist in MPA design. We argue that converting peoples' knowledge and socioecological behavior into geo-spatial data allows researchers to formulate hypotheses regarding human responses to inter- and intra-habitat variability, along with other marine ecological processes, and help in the designing and implementation of resource management strategies in a cost-effective and participatory way, bridging the gap between indigenous and Western cognitions of seascapes. More generally, we show the significance of combining spatial tools, anthropological fieldwork, and social and natural science methods for studying artisanal fisheries with the goal of aiding the design of marine protected areas.

Using H. P. Lovecraft's short story \"The Tomb\" as its \"case zero,\" I posit the existence of an \"affect-narratology\" that I name \"the Spooky.\" I explore Tzvetan Todorov's Fantastic and Mark Fisher's Weird and Eerie in the context of ruins broadly, and in the work of Lovecraft specifically, so as to map out positively the space for what Todorov and Fisher accidentally carve out without filling in. I suggest that the Spooky's emphasis on the prospects not-yet-quite-visible in the gloom ensures the Spooky remains an optimistic zone of preparation and possibility characterized by expectation and anticipation. My hope is that naming and describing this narratological structure will help set ourselves free from the requirement of living in a disenchanted world.

Analysis of Brazilian fishers' classifications of 24 marine (Atlantic coast) and 24 freshwater (Amazon) fish species reveals that fishers from the Atlantic coast identify fish mainly through generic names (primary lexemes), while riverine Amazonian fishers typically identify them through binomials. The similarity of Amazonian fish species seems to contribute to the detailed folk taxonomy used by riverine fishers. High‐ranking groups called “relatives” or “cousins” are sorted by fishers in terms of similarities of habitat, diet, and morphology and, secondarily, behavior. The general correspondence between the folk and scientific taxonomies reinforces the reality of both the supracategories used by these fishers and the biological groups as discontinuities in nature. Given the urgency of biological inventories and the lack of knowledge of high‐biodiversity environments such as the Atlantic Forest and the Amazon, these results suggest that fisher knowledge and experience could contribute to scientific research.

The Lord Mayors' shows represent the mayor's leadership as critical to the capital's-and by extension the nation's-social, economic, and political health. But London's livery companies-those ancient institutions that commissioned the shows and, indeed, conferred the prestige of urban citizenship in the first place-also viewed themselves as critical to those ends. Scholars have characterized the Lord Mayors' shows as promoting \"unity\" among various civic interests.7 However, these perspectives tend to leave underexplored the reality of competition among London's industries and, by extension, the ways in which guilds' specific interests registered in the pageants they commissioned.8 This paper complicates the unity aesthetic by analyzing representations of English fishing in pageants commissioned by the Fishmongers' Company. I will home in on the three early modern shows surviving in print9-Thomas Nelson's The Device of the Pageant: Set forth by the Worshipfull Companie of the Fishmongers (1590), Anthony Munday's Chrysanaleia: The Golden Fishing: Or, Honour of Fishmongers (1616), and Elkanah Settle's The Triumphs of London (1700)-to analyze how one company used the civic pageant to argue for its industry's continued relevance in an economy increasingly dependent on the long-distance trade of luxury goods, goods different in value and kind from those yielded by the humble fishermen who supplied the Company. I argue that these productions affirm fishing, and sea labor in general, in a way that anticipates the maritime foundation of the British Empire and argues for the Fishmongers' importance within that economic scheme. I will suggest further that the London guilds, although sometimes viewed as fossilized in nostalgia,10 in fact were highly responsive to change and, more specifically, attuned to the representational possibilities of the pageant for imagining a specific industry's role in a prosperous national future.