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In the presented text, the author discusses a modest proposal of practicing the humanities that was developed by him. Anthropography, as the name suggests, is a combination of the two terms of anthropology and ethnography. It is also their specific synthesis and reduction. The very name suggests the meaning – it reveals author’s idea as well as his research and writing attitude. Anthropos – anthropology “unburdened” from logos (in the sense of law) as a nomothetic science that seeks universal and objective laws governing the reality under study. The author wanted to redirect this way of thinking and go beyond this way of understanding anthropology. Secondly, ethnography without the ethno prefix, which also suggests a specific tradition of thinking, which the author also wanted to give up while remaining with the term graphia, graphos referring to description and writing. Because anthropography is all about recording, describing human (cultural) reality and for documentation, registration of activities, manifestations, experiences, relationships that define contemporary people. Combining these two research attitudes, directions of thinking and observing the city in research, the author developed his own methodological proposal, the model of anthropography. A model based on several postulates. A model that is constantly evolving, open, emerging and summarizing what the author thinks is necessary, which should be taken into account when conducting research activities. Anthropography is an idiosyncratic description, documentation of methods, not only of practicing scientific creativity, but more importantly, a record of ways of cultivating existence, tracing its course revealed in human activities, cultivating culture (referring to the etymology of this concept), which enables a person to act in the world, functioning in relation to oneself, to another person and to the broadly understood community; collective.

This article offers a critical reflection on so-called ethically oriented zoos, which, at least since the 1970s, often under the banner of contemporary Noah’s arks, have sought to move into the position of new institutions of nature conservation. In the following sections, I argue that the limitations inherent in the metaphor of the ark – e.g. anthropocentrism – as well as the contradictions apparent for the modern zoo, stemming from, among other things, the biopolitical valuation of species or the logic of profitability, prove to be a significant obstacle to adopting a more resolute stance towards the sixth extinction and mass defaunation. I see an opportunity to transcend these limitations in the process of ‘becoming a sanctuary’, which, through a genuine interest in wounded nonhuman life and collaboration with the animal rights movement, may be seen as a harbinger of a broader sector-wide change. The article consists of three main parts. In the first, I outline the cultural history of the ark metaphor, which in the case of zoos is rooted in the work of Carl Hagenbeck. In the second, I highlight its shortcomings, pointing out that these not only undermine the new model of zoo justification but also often influence the ineffectiveness of their conservation efforts. Finally, in the third section, I look at the alternative narratives and modes of functioning of institutions with similar tasks to the zoo, with a particular focus on the interventionist activities of the Poznań Zoo.

Social memory refers to the collective knowledge and understanding produced by society through various cultural, material, and immaterial elements. Folk music is one of the most important expressions and carriers of Turkish culture and social memory. The life and works of Âşık Veysel, a key figure in the continuation of traditional Turkish culture, play a multifaceted role in the context of social memory and the transmission of cultural heritage. This study aims to examine the elements that play a role in preserving social memory in terms of its external dimensions, within the context of the interview Âşık Veysel gave to the Turkish Radio and Television Corporation (TRT) in 1969. Social memory is addressed based on the theoretical approach of Jan Assmann, one of the leading theorists of cultural studies, and the auditory and visual elements related to Âşık Veysel are analyzed through a semiotic lens in terms of four different dimensions of memory defined by Jan Assmann: mimetic memory, object memory, communicative memory, and cultural memory. The findings suggest that through his life and works, Âşık Veysel has contributed to the preservation of belief systems, value structures, modes of living, human relationships, and individual experiences within Turkish cultural memory, thus ensuring the continuity of social memory across generations.

Documentary film is an art that has preoccupied the human soul for more than a century now. One of the pioneers of this cinematic genre, Dziga Vertov, was the one who managed to give the viewer a different perspective on the world around him, through the ‘cine-eye’, thus creating a new small universe inside man. Ethnographic documentary film is said to have appeared once with the first documentaries, and now there are more and more filmmakers and anthropologists interested in it. In the landscape of the Romanian documentary, Dumitru Budrală is one of these names, but also Nicoară Mihali, on whom we stopped, who deals with themes of Maramureș anthropology, in a documentary rich in visual poetry, in visual symbols. In this study, we chose to analyze the symbolism of water in his film, for which we chose the qualitative methodology as an appropriate one, more precisely the content analysis of the symbolic meanings of water, after which we found a persistence and a trend of using certain meanings of the symbol of water in the chosen documentaries, from the first documentary of the filmmaker, until now.

This paper presents a preliminary study on migrant’s adaptation in the post-nomadic settlements inside Mongolia’s Ulaanbaatar and China’s Nantun (Evenk Autonomous Banner or Ewenke Zizhiqi) using specific examples of education and housing. The research fields were selected in order to find urbanised areas with herders migrating to the city, and where such movement is numerous enough to establish districts or at least impact the urban culture. Therefore the context differs from the situ­ations when fewer families enter a relatively large settlement and have to adjust to the found condi­tions. At first glance the recently urbanised areas might seem a provisional imitation of the city, as a result of the century-long development. The migrants define their culture-based settlement. The shared condition of the selected settlements is the status of a post-nomadic migration destination. Therefore there is an expectation of some shared similarities in city-life adaptation. Presenting such exemplary districts illustrates the interesting social dynamics in the post-nomadic cities. Among the similarities of the formation of the post-nomadic settings, we find some common mechanisms shaping social dynamics in migration, then community foundation. They arise even in the context of exceptionally diverse frameworks of state urban policies. We will also discuss gentrification pro­cesses in newly emerged districts and their impact on the cityscape.

The article is devoted to the specifics of local communities’ self-organization in the “private housing sector” of a Russian provincial city. It is shown that a significant part of the urban space of the Russian territory is made up of low-rise single-family houses, known as the “private housing sector”. The organization of living space and the way of life in such localities can be defined as “non-urban”. It is shown that reciprocity was the basis for the formation of such communities in Soviet times. Having spread as a mechanism for adaptation and survival in the urban environment, reciprocity has become the most important mechanism for securing the marginality (“temporary”) of communities in the “private housing sector”. Changes in the “private housing sector” in the post-Soviet period led to a decrease in the role of reciprocity in the organization of such communities, which in turn led to their fragmentation and the emergence of various variants of local communities. The article is based on the observation, including participant, of the evolution of local spaces and communities of the “private sector” of Irkutsk, Omsk and Khabarovsk during 2007–2019 and a series of interviews from 2016–2020.

The Nordic Institute of Folklore, internationally well known by its abbreviation NIF, left a lasting imprint on the history of Nordic and international folkloristics despite its relatively short operation period of less than four decades. The present article, first in a series of forthcoming articles on NIF, examines Lauri Honko’s directorship in the 1970s and 1980s and focuses on the changing of the institute’s field of operation from folkloristics to ‘tradition science’. The term ‘tradition science’ (traditionsvetenskap in Swedish, perinnetiede in Finnish) was never clearly defined in NIF, but was used – and it has continued to be used in folkloristics and ethnology in Finland – in three meanings: an approximate synonym for folkloristics, a joint term for folkloristics and ethnology, and (in plural) an umbrella term for an unspecified number of fields in the study of history, vernacular religion, and culture. The possible earlier history of the term is beyond the scope of this research, but there are indications that the term came into use in both Finnish-language and Swedish-language folklore research in the early 1970s, while the similar term ‘tradition research’ (traditionsforskning in Swedish, perinteentutkimus in Finnish) has a longer history. The term ‘tradition science’ was adopted into NIF’s statutes around the same time as the Nordic Council of Ministers – through which the inter-governmental funding of NIF was administered – initiated the expansion of NIF’s profile to cover folk culture “in its entirety”, suggesting specifically the extension of NIF’s field of operation to include ethnology. Whether NIF implemented this expansion or not, and to what extent, is a matter of debate, and the topic of this article.

The definition, application and scope of folklore are held differently in various countries and cultures. The theories / approaches / methods put forward are criticised for this reason. Among the theories applied widely in folklore researches in Türkiye is Bascom’s functional theory. Yet, this theory has several important defects stemming from the scope and application of folklore in Türkiye. Bascom’s functional theory is based upon four basic principles. These are “a) Having good time, entertainment and enjoyment, b) Supporting values, social norms and traditions, c) Transmission of education and culture to new generations and d) Overcoming personal and social pressure”. İlhan Başgöz added a new function to these, which is “Protesting”. These functions are inadequate in products of Turkish Folk Literature and Folklore as they do not include all the economic, sociologic, psychologic and ethnologic influences. In addition to these functions, in the article, we have discussed scientifically the practices of some folkloric products and come up with additional new functions, which are “having an income, economic support”, “facilitaing and increasing solidarity and charity”, “facilitating physical and psychological relief”, “contributing to the formation of personal and national consciousness”, “helping in pysical activity and training”, “getting rid of the feeling of loneliness and helplessness (solace)”, “offering a source of inspiration for science, art, cinema and literature”, and “ıncreasing the power and influence of verbal expression”.

The subject of the article is the transformation of social time in the pandemic reality. The situation caused by COVID-19 provided a unique opportunity to observe sudden changes in the social rhythm. In the considerations conducted from the perspective of time studies, the author tries to specify what these changes are, and also considers how social time is shaped in the economy of late capitalism. The observations show that changes in the organization and experience of social time during a pandemic are shaped mainly on the basis of three categories: power, technology and work. The experience of the crisis of the usual feeling of time and of the uncertainty about the future, resulted in the rise of questions pertaining to the new concepts of time, the effects of this transformation and the upcoming social changes.

The goal of the article is to answer the following question: what does the pandemic of COVID -19 reveal in the context of the discussion dedicated to the ways of the functioning of the academy today? Therefore the subject of the analysis is not the disease itself nor its cultural meanings, but the phenomena that, although present before the pandemic outbreak, became far more clear, perceptible and acutely experienced. In the article, our interest is focused on the increase of the pace of virtual social interactions, the speed of information transfer, the enhancement of academic regimes of productivity, the surplus of knowledge generated within the fields of humanities and social sciences and the role of information and communications technologies played in these processes. The main argument is that, the pandemic of COVID-19 shows how, in the context of the academy, the entire logics of late capitalist social relations and neoliberal governing of social subjects is focused.