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Soil is one of the main sources of human life with its various uses. One of these uses is pottery making. Pottery, which refers to making vessels from the soil for various purposes, is almost as old as human history. As in various regions of the world, Anatolian people have been making pottery by combining the four basic elements of the Earth, namely the soil, air, water and fire with their creativity for nearly nine thousand years. As commercial activity wheel pottery has continued to live in various places in Turkey, while traditional or primitive pottery have been practiced in Anatolia since the Neolithic period. This type of pottery is one of the main elements of folk culture and is at the center of it. However, recent changes in the socio-economic and cultural structure have rapidly regressed traditional pottery made in Anatolia and today these activities are limited to 16 centers. Therefore, the sustainability of traditional pottery, which is one of the important carrier elements of intangible cultural heritage, has been brought to the agenda of the researchers as an important issue. By revealing the basic character of pottery made in the village Dölek, Gümüşhane, the paper aims to discuss how pottery can be safeguarded within the framework of the principles introduced by the UNESCO's Convention on the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. The data used in the study were collected first hand by the author through fieldwork. In this context, a field study was conducted in the above-mentioned village for one month in the summers of 2019-2020, and the history and culture of pottery was tried to be understood through in-depth interviews with potters and sellers. Pottery making stages were observed and recorded through participant observation. The results were interpreted in the context of the Convention on the Protection of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. The results of the study show that pottery production in the village was done with a few simple tools, without wheels, entirely by women, and in traditional ways. There has been a decline in pottery especially due to out-migrations and technological developments and modernization efforts planned with top-down approaches have not yielded any tangible results. The findings were interpreted in the context of the Convention. Mistakes such as excessive commercialization and decontextualization were found to be the main reasons of the failure of the attempts to develop pottery in the village. In addition, these activities focused on the resulting tangible products and ignored the intangible elements such as knowledge, skills, culture, memory and space. These attempts tried to banalize the pottery in Dölek village through mass production, assimilating it to other places and this, in turn, threatened environmental sustainability. In order to safeguard pottery in Dölek, as in other countries, this handicraft should be added to the Convention-related lists, and it should be safeguarded with the new paradigm brought by the Convention, with a participatory planning that takes into account the wishes and needs of the society and pottery masters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper evaluating the relation between memory and tradition on folklore museums axis, primarily the boundaries of memory and tradition have been determined and their mutual relation has been reviewed. Due to the fact that memory and tradition are misused as substitutes for each other and as this causes incomprehensibility, it has become necessary to determine the boundaries of these two concepts. In addition to this, the relation of cultural memory and tradition with the museum has rendered an in-depth understanding of these two concepts necessary. The fact that "tradition", which enabled the birth of museums as the most important sustainability institutions of modern and postmodern societies and also the birth of folklore museums, in the context of this study, is not present in the exhibitions and collections of these museums constitutes the focus point of this article. No matter how natural it is for folklore products to constitute the collections of folklore museums, these museums are unable to exhibit all products of folklore. In this paper products of folklore are classified as "living", "inter-timed" and "fixed". While "Living" products of folklore are synonymous with tradition, inter-timed folklore products are considered as the dream of the past in the present. In addition to these, fixed folklore products are considered to be matured or dead. When the said products of folklore are considered to be artifacts and/or collections of museums, it has been observed that products of living "folklore" are not a part of museum collections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the founders of Tatar literature Abdullah Tukay is a person who is identified with Tatar society. In order to learn and understand Tatar society's life story from a primary source, it's enough to read Tukay's works and learn his own life story. Tukay's works should be understood as not only the projection of his spiritual life, but also the reflection of Tatar society's cultural and political transition as well. In Tukay's creativity Tatar society's experience has an important place. This experience became united with Tukay's life and Tukay's works which can be identified as contemporary Tatar keystones appeared. In this paper Tukay's creativity's outlines will be followed and the effect of different social spheres he lived on his creativity will be defined. In addition to this, how Tukay showed that the material culture might disappear in time but the folk culture transmitted by the ancestors resists disappearance will be analyzed. The effects that helped him to fulfill this idea will also be pointed out. Shortly, the aim here is to attract the scholars' attention to the importance of A. Tukay as a literary figure by presenting his social circle and ideas about folk culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study consists of two parts. In the first part, my aim is to discuss what seem to be the most distinctive features of magical realist texts, then I will put forward the motives, reasons, uniqueness behind employing and modeling the distinctive features of folk narrations in magical realist texts. The presentation of the supernatural as common and the employing of folk narrations are the most widespread features of magical realist texts. These features, however, are not adequate to distinguish magical realist texts from those of some genres that resemble them, such as the fantastic. I will argue that the presentation of the real and the magical in balance seems to be the first distinctive feature of magical realist texts. In order to find the second one, I will deal with the following question: "For what reasons and purposes do the authors of this literary phenomenon always stylistically employ the features of folk narrations, and also establish intertextual relations between magical realist texts and folk narrations?" The main thesis of this paper is that what is most distinctive to magical realist texts is not the employing of folkloric materials, but the reasons, motives for, and means of their use in producing "the magical". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, there is a general evaluation covering the religious and magical practices of the folk medicine which is a part of folk culture. A part from the applications considering religion and magic is discussed with a comparative view by giving examples from various native societies. In this study, the applications of religion and medicine related field of folk medicine that is classified in various forms in written sources are explained by mentioning examples from Anatolia. It is important to emphasize that the earlier research studies have important contributions in the means of understanding the origins of folk medicine. From this point, various applications which have been the basic sources for folk medicine are compared with the examples of ethnographic researches that conducted with native societies; the practices that are evaluated in the means of religion and magic are discussed in the basis of "magico-religious approach". Article starts with the comparison of folk medicine and modern medicine concepts; in the rest of the article, a general analysis of the treatment practices in the field of religion and magic is conducted by depending on the claim that in the ongoing period from diagnosis to treatment they are perceived as the reason of the illnesses and as being the source of folk medicine. The health applications that continued from the native societies to today's approaches and which are named as "folk medicine" are related with supernatural fundamentally. Although there are differences among cultures, the field of traditional folk medicine is functional in the treatment of the illnesses at the basis of "magic" and "religion". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, it is aimed to get clues about the concept world and idea construction of Turks through the explanation of metaphors in the proverbs of Dîvânu Lugâti't-Turk (DLT) that is the oldest dictionary of Turkish language. Traditionally, metaphor is viewed as a figure of speech in which a word or a phrase that ordinarily means one thing is applied to another thing in order to suggest a likeness between the two, implying the comparison between the two different things. Metaphors are elements that get vigor and deed to expression and display variety to another culture from a culture. They appear through our physical, social and cultural experience. A lot of metaphors in DLT are ontological. These metaphors are loaded with lots of message. In these messages, usually, an order or an advice modality is not located in imperative sentences but is located in declarative sentences. This situation is be able to seen as an effective precaution toward refuse order or advice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]