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This article presents the account of the struggle of the Vila Autódromo community – located in the Barra da Tijuca neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – in their opposition to the City Hall’s policy to remove the slums in the context of the 2016 Olympic Games. The grass-roots organization of the community culminated in the construction of the Evictions Museum in 2016, established to fight for the right to housing and for the preservation and communication of the community’s memory.

The work of Juan José Arreola, taken as a whole, represents a fluid and continuous coming and going between life and literature, reality and fiction. It is a back and forth trip, a zig zag between official and popular culture, literary genres, orality and writing, because Arreola is above all a thinker and a man of culture through multiple facets that accompanied him throughout his career: essayist, narrator, chronicler, biographer, philologist, teacher, actor, theater expert, lecturer, conversationalist, communicator, art critic, and translator. Here we review some of the writer’s lesser-known creative moments, and offer examples of an endless journey in search of stylistic perfection and literary restraint.

This article examines the relationship between oral traditions of cursing and the oldest Greek curse tablets from Selinous and Himera in western Sicily. As much early Greek writing is thought to record or reflect the spoken word, it is perhaps unexpected that these early Sicilian texts carry few signs of orality or speech. There are no verbs of speaking, incanting, cursing, singing, binding; no deictic language; no metre. Rather, the oldest curse tablets in the Greek world show clear signs of written literacy. Sicilian curse tablets from 500–450 bce employ verbs of writing to curse their victims (ἐνγράφω, 'I inscribe'; καταγράφω, 'I write down'; ἀπογράφω, 'I enrol'), and exhibit textual distortion, scribal symbols, abbreviations, and columnar lists of names – features that ground these texts in the realm of writing. It is suggested that Greek curse practice developed alongside and in response to the spread of legal writing in the late sixth-century law courts of western Sicily. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a result of the codification of Hungarian civil procedure, the first modern code of civil procedure was enacted in 1911. It was characterised by the principles of orality, immediacy, and publicity. An important question of the legislation was to decide to which extent should the parties be allowed to propose new allegations and proofs in the second instance proceedings. Furthermore, the legislative reforms of the interwar period amended the regulation of the appeal as well. The study examines these questions with the help of the primary sources of the era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Question (1669-6581) is the property of Universidad Nacional de La Plata and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Jordanian Journal of Arabic Language & Literature is the property of Mutah University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Dirassat in Humanities & Social Sciences is the property of Research & Development of Human Recourses Center (REMAH) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The orality and writing dichotomy was among several dichotomies that drawn the attention of researchers in different disciplines, In order to determine their importance and find the specificity of each one, and the relationship they have. In particular, the presence of one of them recalls the presence of the other, and if the orality is the only medium in the process of communication between members of oral communities, the literature has changed the shape of human consciousness more than any other invention; it preserves and maintains the orality from extinction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Zeliangrong Nagas (Zeme, Liangmai, Rongmei and Inpui) inhabit the contiguous regions of the present-day Indian states of Manipur, Assam and Nagaland. The Rongmeis first embraced Christianity in the 1920s through converts and evangelists from their neighbouring communities, who were themselves influenced by the American Baptist missions. Through these encounters, indigenous singing practices of their neighbouring Thadou-Kukis were translated and incorporated into Rongmei Christianity as the lujam. The lujam songs have survived in popular practice and print culture, coexisting alongside translations of English hymns and, in more recent years, contemporary Christian worship music. In tracing the journeys of the lujam, this paper presents the gradual indigenisation of Christian teachings and practices among the Rongmeis. It argues that the lujam, as practised among the Rongmeis, embodies an effective mode and method of theologising among the Rongmeis. At the same time, the paper teases out inherent tensions that are managed in the lujam (if awkwardly), between traditional 'landed' lifeworld and the lujam's 'heavenly' lifeworld. Thus, the study highlights the theological agency of Rongmei Nagas in their encounters with Christianity as evidenced in the lujam practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ever since the theory of orality and literacy was introduced, it has provided scholars with a deeper understanding of the intertwined nature of culture and communication, as well as an appreciated tool for analysis. This is true also for the field of World Christianity. As the era of digital media emerged, the theory was developed as a tool to interpret digital culture as a 'secondary orality'. This article critiques and cultivates this theory, by showing how the analytical tool of orality, literacy and secondary orality might be sharpened. This is done in dialogue with the practice of female preachers. Preaching thus serves as an example for a wider discussion on the development of the theory. The sharpening of the tool is done through letting the complexity of practices inform the theory. Through historical case studies of three strategically chosen female preachers, four questions are identified that would be important to consider when the theory and its developments are used in analysis: genre of communication, the categories of body and space, and how authority is construed. Finally, the cultivated theory is applied in the analysis of a female preacher in a digital culture and space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sometimes insights into the future, including possible dystopic futures, may be gleaned from examining dystopic pasts. Early European settlement in Aotearoa New Zealand, including the arrival of new diseases for which the people had no defences, created many dystopic outcomes for Māori. However, Māori realized how European technologies, including literacy, could be usefully adopted and adapted. By the early 1800s, probably more Māori were print literate in the Māori language than Pākehā (European New Zealanders) were literate in English. Different literacies, including sign and recitation, were employed within the intensely oral lives of Māori. While the exceptional memorization skills of pre-European Māori would gradually decline as conventional forms of literacy became embedded, a new synthesis of literacy and orality developed. Literacy did not prevent colonization's dystopic outcomes, but it became a technology that Māori selectively modified and was influential in their retaining agency in creating their future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The expression ‘North-East India’ invokes an ethnographic monolith in popular imagination without looking into its multilingual set-up, heterogeneous cultural locations and diverse literary traditions, most of which are unscripted, orally composed and community-specific. Orality, which appears to be a crucial tool to understand the nuances of the literary landscape of this region, assumes a dual role. On the one hand, it is stratified, textualised, homogenised and commodified by the global market. On the other hand, it becomes a tool to challenge anonymity and reclaim the roots of the people, who had been suffering from a rupture in identity since the advent of the colonial education system and the ever-growing dependence on written communication in the modern socio-economic structure. This paper, through a close reading of three women poets of North-East India - namely, Temsula Ao, Mamang Dai and Esther Syiem, explores the reclamation of identity through the use of traditional tales, formulaic composition and indigenised vocabulary in their poetry. It also argues how orality is constructed within the ambit of the written text using coloniser’s language thereby creating a space for cultural hybridity thus subverting the hierarchy between orality and writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the politics of translation has concerned itself with cultural globalisation, in heterogenous national formations it transcends the myopic conception of language alteration to collective imagination. What is at stake in such structures is that the idea of 'history' is severely contested across one national community with its inherent contradictions. The conflict between an umbrella term against individualities of particular communities poses the centrifugal forces of cultural identities. Herein, the co-ordinates of different identities for one community vis-a-vis its acceptance/rejection by other communities interrogates what constitutes a larger sense of an umbrella community and how this identity is constructed and stabilized. From a technical sense of literary conception, this is a cause of celebration but a challenge for processes of historicization. In this paper, I look into the fiction of Sidhartha Sharma to understand the curious ordeals of translation as he explores the relationships of identity and language to mainland Indian independence struggle. In his novel, The Grasshopper's Run, Sharma risks a double course of translating North Eastern Tribal imagination that thrives through orality (and thus evades documentation like most native cultures) with the processes of transcription. In this endeavour, what is of importance is how meaning gets eroded and newly formed as it is transmitted across cultural barriers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much research has been done on orality in dubbing, but orality in subtitling remains largely unexplored. This study seeks to address this by examining and comparing translators' use of Mandarin Sentence Final Particles (SFPs) 啊/呀 (a/ya), 吧 (ba), and 呢 (ne) in both translation modes against the benchmark of how they are used in non-translated Chinese dialogues. The use of SFPs is evaluated by the frequency of their occurrence and collocation patterns. A comparable corpus was compiled for the analysis. Statistical results show that, although subtitling is often assumed to be a mode that prioritises conciseness and brevity over orality, subtitling translators show a stronger tendency to uphold orality by using more selected SFPs than dubbing translators. Examination of the collocation patterns of SFPs in the corpus reveals more similarities than differences between the two AVT modes in using SFPs. Where differences are spotted, the limited cases studied are insufficient for drawing a conclusion about which translation mode is closer to non-translated dialogues. Three factors are identified as being contributive to the findings: institutional working procedures, interference from the source language, and translators' recourse to simplification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Popular culture has been moving towards a role closely linked to the tradition of the written language through the rise of social media. This article turns to interdisciplinary analyses with a particular focus on language and literary areas, with which the aim is to address Twitter as a discursive and plural space. Therefore, the current text is focused on Twitter as an ongoing conversation with an oral-written hybrid component. This circumstance influences the type of literary and creative productions, as well as the impact of the 21st century pop-culture that inhabits its servers. Through an approach to memes, as the epitome of our current text-visual cultural, and their footprint on Twitter, this article approaches pop-culture and proposes a vindication from the Humanities of the online public communication space. In doing so, the article proposes the need to address this space not only from the synchronous approach that brings digitality and digital studies, but from the perspective of a greater scholarly tradition. RESUMEN: La cultura popular ha ido avanzando hacia un papel vinculado fuertemente con la tradición escrita a través del auge de las redes sociales. Para este artículo, recurrimos a análisis interdisciplinares, con especial atención a los ámbitos lingüísticos y literarios, con los que abordar Twitter como espacio discursivo y plural. Por tanto, centramos el artículo en Twitter desde el punto de vista de una conversación en marcha y su componente híbrido oral-escrito. Esta circunstancia influye en el tipo de producciones literarias y creativas, así como en el impacto de la cultura popular del siglo XXI que habita sus servidores. Mediante una aproximación a los memes, como epítome de nuestra cultura texto visual, y su huella en Twitter, abordamos la cultura popular y proponemos una reivindicación desde las Humanidades del espacio de comunicación público en la red. Con ello, proponemos la necesidad de abordar este espacio no solo desde el abordaje sincrónico que conlleva la digitalidad y los estudios digitales, sino desde la perspectiva de una tradición académica mayor.

The term “Afro-Colombian literature” refers to a concept under construction for which each author contributes their particular vision. In this paper, we promote a dialogue with three authors who share the place of enunciation of the black woman: María Teresa Ramírez (1944) in La noche de mi piel, María Elcina Valencia (1963) in Pentagrama de pasión, and Nena Cantillo (1981) in Aquella noche con Winnie the Pooh. We choose three axes: body, orality and identity. Regarding the body, in the three books the woman is associated with nature, although it varies greatly in the relationship with the male body. Orality is very present in the three works, although in different ways: connection with ancestral songs, with the sounds of nature and with the colloquial speech of the city, respectively. In terms of identity, we find great differences between Ramírez's pan-Africanist vision, Valencia's ecosophy and Cantillo's radical openness. In the conclusions, we discuss the variety of approaches, the possible causes and the richness that they contribute to the concept of “Afro-Colombianity”.

This essay proposes a critical examination of representative Romanian novels of the twentieth century and their intersection with the theoretical crosscurrents of the century's fiction. The unusual range of writers and texts selected, from Gellu Naum, Mihail Sadoveanu and Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu to Camil Petrescu and Ştefan Agopian, attest to the importance of and necessity for a critical vision of the Romanian novel and a commitment to uncovering its dynamic interactions that include elements of magic, the presence of detailed descriptions of the phenomenal world, and an unusual interaction between the reader and the text that disrupts our received ideas about time, space, and identity.

Cádiz is a city in the southernmost region of Andalucía (Spain) famous for its annual carnival in February—a time when Cádiz’ historical center undergoes a radical transformation. Each year various groups of friends, neighbors, and colleagues create costumes, lyrics, and music independently from officially programmed acts. These “illegal” street performers—or carnavalescas callejera —create original comical acts based on recurrent themes and rhythms that come to life as they directly interact with thousands of people throughout all hours of the day and night. We use ethnographic data to examine the aesthetic, socio-political, economic, and symbolic dimensions of these massive street performances. Carnavalescas callejeras orally transmit social satires and ingenious political transgression based on sociocultural references that are very much anchored in local memory and identity. In this respect, we also reflect upon the significance of this massive performance as citizens autonomously transform urban spaces through their words and actions. As we argue, performers and carnival-goers partake in a singular ritual that contests social order, ridicules what is “politically correct,” and resists homogenizing cultural trends by affirming their identity.

The objective of this study is to analyse the audiobook from a pragmatic-communicative point of view and investigate the definitions that different authors have provided about the concept of orality, starting with Zumthor (1985) and Ong (1987) research on the literary theory related to the oral transmission of texts. Likewise, the studies of Bobes (1997) on the dramatic text for the audiobook as a "new dramatic text" leads to the analysis of the application of literary theory in the digital world, seen as a new literary product, evolution from orality to from the written text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the results of an exploratory study developed with the goal of contributing to the knowledge about the declared practices on the teaching of orality in the 1st cycle of basic education, in Portugal. More specifically, and taking into account the importance of the first years of schooling for the teaching and learning processes of this ability, in addition to the small number of investigations at this level of education, we follow the work of S. Colognesi and C. Deschepper (2019), applying their first questionnaire designed with the same goal, but in the context of basic education in French-speaking Belgium, with teachers working in the aforementioned schooling cycle, in schools (public and/or private), in Portugal. And the results already obtained allow us not only to identify certain advances in practices, and in the respective implicit conceptions - such as the reference to certain genres that refer to practices aimed, explicitly, at certain teachable dimensions of a given teaching object -, as well as recognizing that there are still considerable efforts to be undertaken - namely, in order to bridge the discrepancy between the moments in which the teachers assume to use the oral and those in which they claim to have an effective and explicit teaching of it -, in favor of the construction of a didactics of orality, more present, in the classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to present a didactic device for the teaching of a staged fable genre. For this, we resume, at first, the didactic models of the genres fable and the staged fable used in the mini course for portuguese language teaching and, subsequently, we approach the didactic device contrasting two modalities: 1) didactic sequence for the teaching of the fable; 2) itinerary for teaching the staged fable. Didactically, from the original proposal of a didactic sequence (DOLZ; NOVERRAZ ; SCHNEUWLY, 2004), we present an itinerary, a new didactic device, through the insertion of metacognitive activities (COLOGNESI & DOLZ, 2017) and retextualization (MARCUSCHI, 2001), which allows a greater articulation between writing, orality and reading. Furthermore, we incorporated dimensions that include elements of oral and scenic language, such as paralinguistics, kinesics and proxemics, which require the mobilization of multimodal and multisemiotic language skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through bibliographic research, the authors revisited 13 papers in which they report investigations that addressed the teaching of orality in curricular documents, textbooks as teaching practices. Adopting a sociointeractionist perspective, 4 main categories were constructed: relations between speech a writing, linguistic variation, reflections on social practices and orality, oral text production and understanding. Data shows that what prevales are guidelines and activities that envolve conversation/discussion and written texts oralization, with little attention to understanding what links speach and writting, refletions about oral practices and their production / listening attentively to formal genres. Nonetheless, the teachers who participated in a formative experience on working with oral genres were more keen to expand more productive activities, including attentive listening, planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prominent role books and the act of writing played in the life of the Manichaean Church distinguishes Manichaeism even among other "religions of the book." This article tackles the question whether the primacy of writing was established by Mani himself or resulted from a development that occurred within the first generations of Mani's followers. The analysis of the extant fragments of Mani's own works and early Manichaean texts such as the work of Baraies preserved in the Cologne Mani Codex and the Kephalaia indicate that Mani's superiority as a writing prophet and the ritual meaning of writing most likely were not part of Mani's original teaching. Rather, they resulted from the efforts of Manichaean theologians who sought to demonstrate the exceptional status of Mani's revelation and prophetic mission based on his writings. The Prologue to the Kephalaia of the Teacher played a significant role in this development and contributed extensively to the ritualization of writing in Manichaeism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the catechism in the Book of Common Prayer, shedding light on the emergence of instructional writing from oral instruction. The 1549 text evinces qualities of preliterate oral communication identified by Ong. By contrast, the 1604 addendum reveals a trend toward modern plain style, which is even more pronounced in the 1647 Westminster Shorter Catechism. The evidence indicates the oral features were useful to the text's technical aims. What Ramist plain style gains in precision and objectivity comes at the cost of other useful features, such as reiteration, contextualization, and agonism, which (in Tannen's phrase) involve a greater relative focus on interpersonal involvement between speaker and auditor/ reader. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The International Yezidi Theological Academy established in Tbilisi is a breakthrough initiative in the history of Yezidism. The objective of my study is to describe the environment in which it was founded, its goals, leading figures and courses taught. The main part of the article is preceded by a brief description of Yezidism and its religious principles, which, due to the ban on writing, have been spread for centuries orally and have not been codified in writing. The following section outlines the changes that have taken place among Yezidis living in Transcaucasia, especially since the 20th century, when the ban on writing was widely violated, as well as the initiatives taken to preserve their cultural and religious identity. The latest of these initiatives is the Yezidi Theological Academy that provides Yezidis with traditional religious knowledge in an academic style. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is an analysis of the enumerative series from an interactive perspective. This perspetive is associated with emphatic strength, with robustness that this series contributes to the argument of which most cases were created. In order to classify such emphatic strength, we have created the Interactive Incidence Index, which results from the belonging of the elements of the series to one of the established sets. These are, from highest to lowest incidence, as follows: a) enumerative series with the presence of semantic groups that are repeated, generally, at the beginning of all its elements or in most of them; b) enumerative series with presence of semantic groups of the same category and whose meanings are very close, if not synonymous; c) enumerative series with presence in the different elements of semantic groups whose meanings differ, but whose class of words is the same, as well as their gender, number, verbal inflection; d) series formed by (verbal, nominal, adjectival, etc.) semantic groups that add intention and content, but are as heterogeneous in meaning as in form, and e) series formed by lists of words that only provide information, but not argumentative reinforcement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the centuries, Grotesque referred to the literary aesthetics as well as to the arts. One of the literary examples is Bernardo Guimarães' A dança dos ossos, a tale in which we aim to discuss as horror literature. Taking as the main objective the identification of Grotesque and the meaning behind it, we listed the concept of Horror, based on H. P. Lovecraft, memory and orality, based on Halbwacks, Bergson and Zumthor, respectively, aiming at the analysis of fragments of the tale. We hope, thus, on adding to the literary studies that deal with such themes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research paper develops an analysis of orality as a narrative resource in Ricardo Zelarayán's poetics. After a brief introduction to the objectives of this work and to the bibliography that, up to now, has dealt with this author, still meager outside Argentina, two sections are displayed corresponding to two scenes from the first chapter of Lata peinada, an unfinished novel that Laura Estrin edited in 2008 with the author's help. The reasons why these scenes, as enigmatic as revealing, have been chosen are the reproduction they make of the traditional tension between popular culture and literate culture and the fact that they allow the elucidation of a Zelarayanian author's figure. The results that this textual exegesis will illuminate are, on the one hand, that the voice occupies a preeminent place in the poetics of Zelarayán compared to the letter, as will be seen from the first scene, and the orphanhood that defines the writer's trade, whose poetics isolates him from the literate tradition. Collaterally, attention will be paid to the method of construction of the characters in the novel, the importance of the etymology of their names, traditional music as a narrative resource, or the presence of the «young orphan» motif, typical of the Latin American narrative of between centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This text is the transcription of the speech given by the author as recipient of the Walter J. Ong Award for Outstanding Career Achievement in the field of Media Ecology, at the 22nd Annual Convention of the Media Ecology Association. PUC-Rio, July 8-11, 2021. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present contribution is a first step of an ongoing investigation on the conceptualisation of "stupidity, foolishness, madness" in Iranian, as a selected case-study for an assessment of the controversial role played by phonosemantic/ideophonic paradigms in lexical production and areal diffusion of cognate words. The discussion will challenge the commonly- accepted interpretation of the Young Avestan term mūra - as prototypically referring to mental/cognitive impairment, based on a review of the attempts at etymological reconstruction and a closer scrutiny of disregarded evidence from Middle and New Iranian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Sunni revivalist Muḥammad Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb (d. 1792) has been subjected to rigorous scrutiny by a number of scholars. Much remains unknown about Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb's life and work, however, not least the rationale behind his idiosyncratic style of authorship. Examining the scholar's theological writings from the vantage point of Arabia's oral vernacular and popular religious traditions casts new light on the particularities of Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb's appeal. That appeal, this paper argues, is rooted in phenomena that were seemingly peripheral or even anathema to his puritanical religious mission, namely, poetry and magic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between orality and writing is key to understanding Latin American literature and the European colonization of the Americas. Concepts such as oral literature, ethnotext, and ethnoliterature have been proposed for the artistic expression of indigenous orality, among others. This article discusses oral literature referencing the postcolonial debate and, particularly, subalternity. It also offers insights into how naming indigenous oral expression is counterposed to writing. Further, we discuss the methodologies used for this study, which are under construction, and a number of conditions and minimum criteria for an interdisciplinary approach to this discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the author summarizes some conclusions drawn following her field research on narration and identity. Language itself is approached language itself as a guardian of ideas, structuring society, using humor as an integrative barrier. It is introduced the term identification narrative as crucial for understanding the self in the context of the community. The author briefly describes the cases of a popular local story that changed local oral practices and of a less popular local story that preserved local oral practices. She analyzes the natural transformations of local stories compared to their translations into the "language" of virtual communication. The author explores the impact of new forms of communication on local cultures and how the narrative of the desired identity comes to replace the traditional social narrative of the self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cultural life of Olympos, a village on the island of Karpathos in Greece, is organized around sung poetic improvisation. From the time when a majority of the villagers were illiterate to the present, this ritual performance has shifted without changing its nature from "primary orality" to "mixed orality," which coexists today with "mediated orality," and is characterized by three main types of transmission. First, this performance is still being transmitted via oral memory since men are able to remember improvised couplets, in particular so as to avoid singing and hearing the same couplet twice. However, it is mainly the women attending the performances who memorize verses, which they can later play back, thus acting like an oral archive. Next, a written memory has developed in addition to this oral memory because some of the women have recorded the memorized verses in notebooks. Further, the emergence of local newspapers has led women to publish couplets in the community life sections. Under their influence, men also began to publish verses in these newspapers, but especially via the new media. Finally, recording technologies have made it possible to broadcast performances without losing their oral dimension. As a result, many recordings made by the villagers are exchanged via social media or broadcast on local digital radios to make them available to Greek emigrants, and in the process become archived. Despite the discrete presence of writing, Olympos oral poetry therefore remains rooted in Olympos's social life as the community continues to perceive it as a functional form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting with the second half of the twentieth century, a number of graves from Bellu Catholic Cemetery in Bucharest became the stage of a ritual. The allegedly miraculous graves achieved fame due to different and, in some cases, random characteristics. Many people (most of them Greek-Orthodox, not Catholics) come to perform this ritual to have their wishes fulfilled. As an important part of the ritual built around these graves, its performers are leaving written notes on them, containing their wishes. The notes are often handwritten on different pieces of paper (notebook pages or even receipts), although they may also be typed on a computer and printed. In rare cases, the performers leave notes written on the back of printed photos. My research consisted in observing the ritual, talking with a small number of people who performed it, and, most importantly, analyzing the notes left by the graves. All the performers I interviewed were women, and most of them (with one exception) strongly disapproved of the practice of leaving notes. Nevertheless, judging by the great number of pieces of paper I found by the "miraculous" graves every time I went to Bellu Catholic Cemetery, this practice seems to be general and deemed to be effective. The paper I propose is, therefore, focusing on the analysis of those notes. The way they are handwritten or typewritten, as well as how their content offers valuable insight into the performers' social identity, religious affiliation, and level of education, as they contain specific formulae, spelling errors, and professional or personal wishes. The "secondary orality" (Zumthor 1972) involved in these texts is an important element of the "vernacular religion" horizon (Primiano 1995) to which the performers of the ritual obviously belong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article sets out to study the records and testimonies created during the First World War in order to understand this important historical moment in the existence of Romanian rural communities. Many of the testimonies of Romanian soldiers capture the shift from oral culture and oral language to writing and written culture. Writing, which the soldiers had yet to fully internalize, was one of the few possibilities available to them on the war front to maintain alive the connection with their families and to leave a trace about the exceptional times they were living. These written accounts, which do not always observe the rules of correct writing, make apparent and available to us today a deep layer of oral culture that had until then been orally transmitted from generation to generation. Romanian soldiers from Transylvania were best known for writing home messages in verse, which they composed on the spot, using memorized set structures and phrases from the shared folklore repertoire circulating at the time in the village world. Privates coming from the Kingdom of Romania also made verses in their letters or journal entries, but it was less common. They would sometimes insert in their notes orally transmitted moral stories or parables, as well as other forms and pieces of the peasant oral culture to which they belonged. Some of these testimonies can present real challenges in terms of understanding the writing but also the semantics of some of the words. While familiarized with letters, writing, and reading, their authors had only a rudimentary knowledge of spelling and punctuation rules. To be able to discern the meanings of these writings today, one needs to first understand the complex circumstances that produced them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Before the 1930s, the peoples who inhabited the Amur region located in Eastern Russia transmitted traditional information only orally within their groups. That accumulated knowledge was a fundamental cornerstone for their mental world and mainly reflected the social processes that had been unfolding in the large river valley. The Three Suns Nanai cosmogony legend, which tells the story of the three suns that melted and scorched the Earth, is a good example for understanding the local history. The basic myth is split into several actions, forming independent subplots with separate characters and their behaviors. The branched storyline of the legend confirms the specific migratory processes that used to take place within the Amur territory. The new communities embedded their family stories into the Three Suns common myth. In that way, the migrators harmonized their lives with their world model, i.e., with the mythical universe seen as the otherworld where shamans sent only righteous human souls. Since the 1930s, with the spread of written language, the Amur natives have developed a new culture code which was created not by the older generation who still followed the oral tradition, but by the literate persons among them. Their entire folklore heritage was given a different conceptual design and began to be understood within world history. The local archaeological artefacts dating back to the third millennium BC were interpreted through the mythic narrative. Thanks to this discovery, a Russian-language simplified version of the legend was created which was accessible to a wide audience. Nowadays we witness the emergence of a new mythical history originating from this written version. Linking the legend to the archaeological sites makes the Lower Amur peoples' history significantly older. According to modern understanding, the local history begins not with mythical events, but with a reconstructed picture of ancient social life embedded in the Earth's topography and chronology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue of Martor problematizes the complex relationship between the written and the oral in the production of meaning that defines "traditions," community and group relations, in different contexts of change (post-communism, migration, the use of hypermedia, storytelling, and so on). It approaches the new ways orality is found in contemporary societies, but also opens avenues for methodological discussions in ethnological research regarding the phenomenon of orality in contemporary societies, dominated by history and written texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The French poet Valérie Rouzeau's work can be considered an example of writing beyond the text thanks to its "extensive" speech and its versatile rhythm, whether sung, played or danced. Both collective and interactive, Rouzeau's poetry sinks into experience and goes off the beaten paths. This article aims not to separate what engages the body and the language for some remarks and analyses as close as possible to the linguistic, artistic and social practices by which Rouzeau's living poems are promoted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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