There is a great deal of debate among researchers of the Japanese literature about whether it is possible to consider the narrative form called gunki-monogatari a branch of epic genre, but, according to the tradition, these narratives - including “The Chronicle of Yoshitsune” (15^th c.) - are regarded as literary works, despite their folkloric nature. This main characters biographies. First of all it shows that not only the presence of an “epic core” brings this work closer to the epic but also its certain motifs and topical units have clear epic provenance. Secondly, despite the researchers’ suggestions about the selection of legendary material undertaken by the authors of “The Chronicle” in order to create a more real image, in fact, there were no prerequisites for this technique in the Japanese culture of that period. It seems that in “The Chronicle of Yoshitsune” oral legends were structured in accordance with an epic plot structure. Thus, we can see that in spite of the lack of traditional epic forms, that function can be assumed by gunki-monogatari , engendering a narrative structurally and thematically similar to the epic.

The article examines elements of Slavic mythological texts that have an interpretative function. The main focus is on the person who provides the interpretation, and on the nature and methods of its presentation in the text, and on the correlation with functions of the narrator. In the oral folk culture despite the frequency and significance of textual elements in which traditional cultural information from the sphere of popular hermeneutics is explicated, they did not become a subject of the separate folkloristic or linguistic study. The question of the subject of interpretation in the texts of the East Slavic mythological prose was not raised by any of the researchers. An application of a narratological approach to the material made it possible to establish that in oral mythological tales the figure features for the interpreter-narrator are determined by the peculiarities of the communicative situation of the text existence. In particular, the functioning of the mythological text in the pertinent colloquial-speech discourse has determined the dominant role of the narrator as a subject of interpretations. The article reveals a correlation between interpretation forms (explicit and implicit) and the narrators’ position, namely the degree of his proximity to the text event. In addition, the article describes ways of implicit interpretation of mythological situation in the text related to the genre pragmatics.

The paper analyzes a lamenter attitude towards her lament. In her other papers the author analyzed laments as a ritual folkloric text with a melody, which imitates weeping. The texts consist of folkloric formulas aiming to a communication with the dead. The lamentations are performed in funeral and commemoration feasts by special women called lamenters. The article researches lamenters’ emic (existing within the culture) attitude of lamenters towards the question of improvisation. By the material from interviews and comments appearing in the process of recordings of lamentations, it is proved that the idea of lamenting as an expression of grief is part of the lamenters’ emic concept of funeral lament. The texts of the bailichkas and oral narratives define two types of lamenters: a professional one, working for a fee, and a grieving relative, spontaneously beginning to lament at the funerals of relatives, and it is the second one, who becomes a protagonist. Tales of learning the lament also work on this idea. Despite the practice of training before the first lament, lamenters were to maintain an illusion of spontaneity and personal emotional involvement. Thus, the ethical notion of a lamenter as a ritual specialist, which was formed as the result of a long and careful analysis of texts and practices, contradicts not only the ‘romantic’ view of the world of the first collectors of folklore, but also the emotional representation that exists within the culture.

The article is concerned with the speech behavior of a modern city inhabitants in the communicative space of the burial-memorial ritual. In the article there is an analysis of the interviews with obituarists considered in terms of their inclusion in the social interaction regarding the death of a famous person. The article answers questions about the communicative situation in which people use the obituary genre: who and under what circumstances writes the obituary, what image of the intended addressee appears in this case, what attitudes and imperatives stand behind a particular utterance, what communicative intention drives the author, how an obituary changes social reality. The paper also raises the question of the professional and personal approach to writing an obituary, the context affecting the statement, the impossibility of expressing the author’s real aims and experiences. In addition, the writing of the obituary is considered as a part of a special type of grief, carried out through the creation of biographical texts about the deceased and inscribing the facts of the deceased’s life into the individual life fate of the obituary author.

This article is dedicated to the problem of developing indexes for the texts of children’s ‘scary’ narrative folklore, which is especially relevant in connection with the fact that in recent year these texts, which are regularly published on the internet, have been attracting the growing interest of non-researchers. The availability of a universal and thoroughly checked index for at least one of the genres of children’s ‘scary’ narrative folklore would help to analyze traditional oral materials and, in the long run, to work on texts posted on the internet. Taking into account the literature on the subject, we designed our own model of the universal index, the description and scheme of which are presented in this article.

In the article, an attempt is made to raise the question of limits for the applicability of statistics to determine the type of the system of versification in traditions for which by now it has not been done. Using the example of Tongan laments, it was shown that even if the researcher deals with a well homogeneous genre, the differences between individual texts are extremely significant. Some Tongan texts are almost strictly syllabic, while others are greatly shaken loose, and that fact does not allow final conclusions on the main principle of the Tongan versification to be drawn. The author also demonstrated that criteria based on counting the number of lines that fit strictly into a certain meter, can due to a more elaborate terminology available for the syllabic-tonic versification, make it possible to include non-strictly tonic or non-strictly syllabic traditions into the syllabic-tonic category.

In the contemporary situation, folklore text becomes a “small change” of many groups. In this process, their genre characteristics undergo permanent changes. on one hand, texts adapt to the changing needs of society. on the other hand, innovative elements may be substituted by traditional ones, following certain models. The paper is focused on the changes which the texts of such folklore genre as heavenly letters underwent in the context of vernacular religiosity of the Soviet period.

This article is dedicated to a microethnographic analysis of the practice of celebrating the New Year in the Crimea. In some families until 2014 there was a tradition to celebrate the New Year twice - on Moscow time and on Kiev time, - which has not been previously described in the literature. In addition to describing the practice of a “double” celebration, the article attempts to consider the different meanings given to both New Years by inmates of the same family. For this, the author refers to the constructivist theories of nations (B. Anderson, E. Hobsbawm), as well as to the methodology of the ontological turn (A. Mol, J. Law).

The article describes the main features that characterize the ideal society of the past as viewed by a most famous contemporary Russian neopagan publicist, Lev Rudolfovich Prozorov. The study of this author’s narratives allows us to form an image of the old Slavic society, which occupies the place of a kind of “golden age” in his worldview. A special place in Prozorov’s works is occupied by images of the past constructed on the basis of folklore sources: epics, fairy tales, spiritual verses, proverbs, and sayings occupies a special place in Prozorov’s works. Using exactly that technique he describes his social utopia, while adding a greater weight to his historical views, compared with some other neo-pagan authors. Nevertheless, the author of the article comes to the conclusion L.R. Prozorov argumentation often comes into conflict with the folkloric material used by the author, and the final picture of the past in his works is mostly inspired by the contemporary traditionalist discourse and partly overlaps the concept of “Ur-Fascism” by U. Eco.

In the article, an attempt is made at a typological analysis of Carpathian beliefs regarding planetniks at the end of the 19^th - beginning of the 20^th century. Based on the field materials collected by members of the Shevchenko Scientific Society, the author considers bailichkas about encounters with planetniks as realization of a plot about struggle of two parties against each other, where a planetnik might act either as the protector from hailstorms or, on the contrary, as a creature (in contrast to the impersonal, non-demonized element) bringing the storm forward, or as both - depending upon the class of characters it belongs to typologically. Remarking upon the peculiarities of Carpathian data in comparison to the neighboring Polish and Southern Slavic traditions, the author performs a typological classification of planetnik characters as found in the field data from the beginning of the 20^th century (ordinary members of the community using common apotropaic magic; professional witch doctors; demonological characters sui iuris ) and concludes that the typological variants of the planetnik might not come from a single original invariant but be, on the contrary, the outcome of the convergence of the invariants originally differing both typologically and dialectally. It is the dialectological analysis of Carpathian data that is proposed by the author as the cornerstone of their further study.

The article is dedicated to the study of the cult of saints in Islam, by the example of a mazar in accordance with the theory of Bourdieu, which allows to bridge the gap between the objective and subjective approaches in the study of the cult of saints. The article describes the key social positions of agents of the field of the cult and determines the level of their involvement in the production and reproduction of the cult practices. The process of transformation of the field of religion into the field of power apparatus is shown using the real people stories. Geographical names and names of agents are omitted, especially since the plot of the struggle for a monopoly on the legitimate exercise of religious authority is very typical for different historical eras. The author calls our agents according to the position taken in the structure of the cult of a renowned Saint: Imam, Folbin, Shih, Grandson of Shih, Mulla, Devon. The place of action is a kishlak (a village) Kishlak.

The article takes an attempt to review the Korean shamanic ritual Jeju Chilmeoridang Yeongdeung gut in the framework of the traditional Korean philosophy. original sources are used to analyze the historical and philosophical aspects of the Korean shamanism as a part of the ancient religion of the Koreans, which includes common shamanistic views along with Confucian, Buddhist, and Taoist concepts. As far as we can judge based on the contemporary worldview, shamanism in the modern Republic of Korea has turned into one of the national brands, and the government of the Republic of Korea has made its promotion to internal and external markets a national goal. Different programs were have initiated in order to preserve and popularise the cultural heritage, of which the shamanism is an important part. First of all, this article reviews the Korean shamanic ritual in honor of the spirits of wind, rain, and sea - Chilmeoridang Yeongdeung gut. In 2009, the ritual was included in the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage List. Today, the ritual is performed by invited shamans from the mainland in a different dialect and does not possess a sacred significance for the locals. As a result, the shamanism becomes an enterprise aimed at tourists. An attempt is made at discovering what caused the ritual’s desecration. The conclusion is drawn that the practice of cultural heritage preservation devolves into its profanation: the form starts to take over the content, and the ritual becomes a performance.