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The article focuses on the structure and functions of the myth of the Hussite origin of (a part of ) Slovak protestants. The narrative, based on claims of some earlier historians, started gaining momentum in the 18th century and fully developed in the 19th century literary production (especially in the works of Pavol Jozef Šafárik, afterwards Samuel Tomášik and other representatives of Romanticism and, later, in the writing of Ladislav Pauliny and Július Botto). During the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries, its elements were dismantled on historical, linguistic, architectural and liturgical grounds. Those who contributed to the deconstruction of the myth included František Palacký, Jan Koula, Emil Edgar-Kratochvíl, Pavol Križko or Jozef Škultéty. The work of Branislav Varsik marked a significant break in the dismantling of the fictitious origins of Slovak protestant community. Once the mythological character of the narrative was revealed, it became accessible to analysis from the point of view of mythology, poetics and rituals. Its structure contains such features as separation phase, mythical trials, death, revival and gaining the prize – mythical wedding and settling in the “promised” land. The narrative helps form and maintain a new collective identity: it is invested with explanatory and consecrating functions and serves as a legitimising argument for the identity, religious rituals and cultural customs of the protestant community.

En este artículo se propone un significado para las ofrendas de estatuillas en miniatura de seres humanos y camélidos en ritos incaicos, entre ellos la qhapaq hucha o capacocha, ceremonia principal de veneración a las huacas que incluía sacrificio humano. La investigación moderna ha buscado una explicación satisfactoria respecto de este rito, así como de la función de dichas estatuillas, apoyándose básicamente en información documental. Actualmente, se dispone de información de primera mano proveniente de hallazgos arqueológicos de diferentes cumbres de los Andes. En este trabajo se entrecruzan los datos históricos con los arqueológicos relativos a vestimenta e insignias de la nobleza inca, para proponer que dichas estatuillas simbolizaron a la pareja fundadora del linaje, Mama Ocllo y Manco Capac, en el acto mismo del surgimiento desde la pacarina del cerro Tambotoco, y que representaron por extensión, a los descendientes de tales progenitores. De esta manera, con las estatuillas se habría preservado la memoria de este pasaje crucial del mito de origen de la etnia inca, recordando a la pareja primigenia como creadora del orden social existente, y legitimando a la vez, el origen divino del poder de la élite gobernante.

The 10th anniversary edition A Guardian Best Book about Deforestation A New Scientist Best Book of the Year A Taipei Times Best Book of the Year \"A perfectly grounded account of what it is like to live an indigenous life in communion with one's personal spirits. We are losing worlds upon worlds.\" —Louise Erdrich, New York Times Book Review \"The Yanomami of the Amazon, like all the indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australia, have experienced the end of what was once their world. Yet they have survived and somehow succeeded in making sense of a wounded existence. They have a lot to teach us.\" —Amitav Ghosh, The Guardian \"A literary treasure…a must for anyone who wants to understand more of the diverse beauty and wonder of existence.\" —New Scientist A now classic account of the life and thought of Davi Kopenawa, shaman and spokesman for the Yanomami, The Falling Sky paints an unforgettable picture of an indigenous culture living in harmony with the Amazon forest and its creatures, and its devastating encounter with the global mining industry. In richly evocative language, Kopenawa recounts his initiation as a shaman and first experience of outsiders: missionaries, cattle ranchers, government officials, and gold prospectors seeking to extract the riches of the Amazon. A coming-of-age story entwined with a rare first-person articulation of shamanic philosophy, this impassioned plea to respect indigenous peoples' rights is a powerful rebuke to the accelerating depredation of the Amazon and other natural treasures threatened by climate change and development.

This paper examines genderand species-inclusive notions of community as reflected in the origin myths, animistic beliefs and practices of a few Tibeto-Burman minorities in the uplands of China's southwestern province of Yunnan. Among these minorities, culture-specific views of descent and cosmocentric attitudes toward sentient nature showcase women's social standing and role in enhancing relational empathy with non-human actors or species, as well as with a pantheon of deities who are believed to (co)inhabit or own the physical landscape. Integrating sources of knowledge from environmental history, comparative mythology and anthropology, the paper presents a selection of case studies on the Mosuo, Naxi, Yi and other minority cultures, demonstrating how relations with multiple non-human selves can be genealogical and how rituals aimed at influencing them can have positive effects on community well-being.

The Old Norse origin myth known as Frá Fornjóti ok hans ættmönnum, which claims that Norway was founded by a pair of brothers named Nórr and Górr, is preserved in two distinct variants in the late fourteenth-century Icelandic manuscript known as Flateyjarbók. One variant, Fundinn Noregr, forms the preface to Orkneyinga saga and had therefore come into existence by c. 1230, whereas the other, Hversu Noregr byggðist, is not attested before c. 1290. Most scholars have argued that Hversu Noregr byggðist is a derivative of Fundinn Noregr, which was created to preface Orkneyinga saga by the Icelandic scholar Snorri Sturluson. This article draws attention to hitherto-undocumented parallels between both variants of Frá Fornjóti and a twelfth-century Latin text known as the Chronicon Lethrense or Lejre Chronicle. To explain these parallels, a new hypothesis for the pre-history of Frá Fornjóti is formulated: that both variants are independent witnesses to an earlier version of the myth which drew upon the Chronicon Lethrense or a shared model. This hypothesis is tested against arguments supporting the consensus that regards Fundinn Noregr as the original, taking the myth’s ideological underpinnings and analogues in Old Norse literature into account. It is suggested that the hypothesis best explains patterns of shared wording revealed by close comparative readings of passages in both variants, Orkneyinga saga, and other contemporary Old Norse texts. The article concludes with speculation about the context in which a previous version of the myth might have been composed.

The origin of the Gypsies’ slavery, as we understand it today, could not be known to the traditional Romanian society at the beginning of the nineteenth century. For their self-understanding and that of the world around them, those people related less to a distant past or to their real historical ancestors and more to the present, cultivating significant differences from their contemporaries. These differences were projected into a quasi-mythological past and justified by invoking authoritative characters such as God, Jesus, the Virgin Mary, various saints. As to the Gypsies’ representations, they were built around oppositions such as: slave vs. free man, honourable vs. infamous occupations, white vs. black, nomadic vs. sedentary, Orthodox vs. pagan. Differences from “the other” were exaggerated and manipulated. As the Gypsies were, par excellence, slaves, the texts generally used to explain their servitude or enslavement could be invoked to explain the origin of the Gypsies. After several local adaptations, the hagiography of Gregory of Agrigento came to serve as an explanation for the slavery of the Gypsies, whose allegedly sinful ancestors received their due punishment in the form of eternal slavery. The first part of this article attempts to sketch the mental horizon of the traditional society of the early nineteenth century, while the second part presents different variants of the hagiography which are analysed in order to observe since when and to what extent its varying elements could contribute to societal understandings and legitimizations of Gypsy slavery.

This article analyses the construction of religious origin myths for Islam within ‘universal religion’ and esoteric frameworks in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century South Asia and beyond, and sheds light on the role of ‘Western’ and Anglo-Indian converts in this process. At its core is a case study of the elusive Hamid Snow, founder of the so-called ‘Church of Islam’ in 1891 in Sikanderabad, Deccan. On the following pages, I reconstruct Snow's biography from little-known Urdu and English sources, analyse his writings, and place him within a context of religious modernist, esoteric, and convert networks encompassing South Asia, Europe, the United States, the Philippines, and other parts of the world. By focusing on the nature of the scholarship of religion at the time, and the reconstruction of religious pasts under the influence of esotericism and religious modernism, the article traces the influence of Orientalist and Eurocentric views on perceptions of the Islamic tradition and contributes to larger debates about the role of laypeople, especially those with an interracial background, in interpreting religious history and acting as cultural mediators between different communities during a time of ‘hybrid transnational occultism’.1

Dwight F. Davis is widely credited with having invented, or at least conceived, the original idea for the international tennis competition that bears his name, the Davis Cup. This paper aims to debunk this myth through comprehensive critical analysis of the period preceding Davis’s apparent epiphany in 1899. Previous national-team-based competitions are investigated, alongside key figures in American and British/Irish tennis, to demonstrate that numerous others had proposed the idea for an international team-based competition long before Davis and that Davis may have appropriated his idea from others with whom he came into contact. Davis’s wealthy background, political ambitions, and model-American image arguably helped smooth the process of his idea being officially accepted by the United States National Lawn Tennis Association, which likely saw in Davis a perfect “front-man” for American tennis at a time when the nation used sporting prowess to promote its identity, particularly in relation to the British, in international sporting competition.

Leaders of the medical profession are increasingly concerned about the extent to which members have become discontented with their lot. Predictably, the profession tends to look outwards for explanations, to the changing social, economic and organizational contexts of health care. Sociologists, however, have long recognized that a ‘social problem’ is not an objective state of affairs but a complaint that the world falls short of the complainant’s ideals. If we want to understand doctors’ dissatisfaction, then, another approach might be to ask what would make them content. What are the ideals of medical practice? What are new doctors – and the wider public – led to expect that professional life will be like? How do these expectations relate to the contingencies and experiences of everyday medical work?

This phenomenologically oriented ethnography focuses on experiential aspects of Yanomami shamanism, including shamanistic activities in the context of cultural change. The author interweaves ethnographic material with theoretical components of a holographic principle, or the idea that the \"part is equal to the whole,\" which is embedded in the nature of the Yanomami macrocosm, human dwelling, multiple-soul components, and shamans' relationships with embodied spirit-helpers. This book fills an important gap in the regional study of Yanomami people, and, on a broader scale, enriches understanding of this ancient phenomenon by focusing on the consciousness involved in shamanism through firsthand experiential involvement.