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            <title><![CDATA[Working Relations]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/jef-2026-0002</link>
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            <pubDate>Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[This paper offers a concept of working relations as a complement and extension to existing theories of maintenance, care and repair. Building on the cases of an umbrella, a tractor and a pond, it advances seven propositions that might guide and inform further work and thinking in this space. It concludes with the challenging figures of Chernobyl, nickel extraction, and AI, and argues for the centrality of working relations to more generative and pluralistic relations with the things and worlds around us.]]></description>
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            <title><![CDATA[Notes and Reviews: “I Still Believe that One Picture Can Tell More Than Many Written Pages”: Interview with Mihály Hoppál]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/jef-2026-0010</link>
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            <pubDate>Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Editorial to the Special Issue: Repair : Towards A Vernacular Sustainability]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/jef-2026-0001</link>
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            <pubDate>Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Book Review: Theory, Tradition and Teaching: The Significance of Concept Work]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/jef-2026-0011</link>
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            <pubDate>Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
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            <title><![CDATA[“Now It Got a New Life”: On Reuse as a Technology of Transformation]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/jef-2026-0004</link>
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            <pubDate>Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[This article sets out to explore how reuse is enacted in a Swedish-language Face-book group called Reuse More. In this forum, people are encouraged to post photos and descriptions of what they have reused and how, share with and inspire others to be creative, and act sustainably. By viewing reuse as a technology of transformation that involves valuation, moves and movements, assembly and disassembly, I will, through empirical examples from the forum, discuss how people relate to, work and negotiate with, things and materials in their homes that are in the process of disposal, redirecting them to a ‘new life’.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
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            <title><![CDATA[Domestic Building Repair as a Learning Process]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/jef-2026-0007</link>
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            <pubDate>Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[This article examines how domestic building repair is represented as a site of experiential learning in Finnish interior design magazines. Situated within heritage studies, the analysis explores how lifestyle media portray the relationships between people, material traces of the past, and the everyday practices of maintaining buildings. The research material consists of interviews with home renovators published in widely circulated home decoration magazines in 2022–2023. As mediated accounts rather than direct testimonies, these narratives reveal how learning through repair is constructed and communicated to the public. Thematic content analysis identifies three recurring representations of learning: learning from the building, learning through constraints and contingencies, and learning through hands-on engagement and care. Across the material, repair is depicted as a transformative process that not only restores physical structures but also reshapes the repairers’ skills, attitudes, values and sense of home. Renovators describe acquiring technical knowledge, developing patience and flexibility, and cultivating dedication through embodied, hands-on work. The magazines function as cultural texts that articulate aspirational lifestyles and ethical orientations toward older buildings. Their repair narratives promote appreciation of material heritage, highlight forms of domestic care, and frame repair as an everyday practice through which individuals negotiate identity, continuity and belonging.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
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            <title><![CDATA[The Revitalisation of Cultural Heritage and Traditional Crafts : Lessons Learned from a Master Thatcher]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/jef-2026-0009</link>
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            <pubDate>Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Gamlegård farm at the Kulturens Östarp open-air museum, the von Echstedtska Manor farm at Värmland’s Museum, and Oktorpsgården farm at the Skansen open-air museum are three disparate farmhouses scattered across southern Sweden whose histories have very different trajectories. What unites them are their roofs, a craft, and a man. They are all buildings considered essential expressions of Swedish cultural heritage, with thatched roofs laid by the same thatcher. For museum visitors, thatched roofs represent a picturesque, somewhat romanticised image of the Swedish past. For the thatcher, roofs mean a livelihood and a crafting process dating back thousands of years. The authors argue that the relationship between the individual craftsperson, the material, and the crafting of traditional knowledge is central to the dynamics of intangible cultural heritage. This paper focuses on a thatcher and his role in engaging a broader public in a ‘fading’ craft and in creating renewed interest among people interested in sustainable living.]]></description>
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            <title><![CDATA[Matters of Time and Space : Towards Sustainability in Everyday Life]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/jef-2026-0003</link>
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            <pubDate>Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[This article critically examines dominant sustainability narratives that prioritise technological innovation, market-based solutions and individual behaviour while often neglecting the socio-economic structures driving overconsumption. Drawing on qualitative research conducted in urban and rural Chile over the past decade, it explores how practices of care, repair and material creativity emerge in contexts marked by isolation, scarcity or exclusion. Far from advocating a return to pre-industrial simplicity, the text challenges the binary between modernity and tradition, suggesting that autonomy and material endurance are not incompatible with technological advancement. Through cases ranging from rural repurposing to urban protest adaptations, the article highlights how creative responses to material constraints reveal pathways to rethinking sustainability. It calls for a reimagining of our relationship with objects and consumption, fostering alternatives to the linear logic of production and disposal.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
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            <title><![CDATA[Mending Knowledge: Community Transmission and Its Challenges in Formal Education]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/jef-2026-0006</link>
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            <pubDate>Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[This paper examines how community-driven mending knowledge travels across time and into contemporary schooling, and what conditions allow it to persist. We pair a concise historical backdrop through a timeline called “How Mending Survives”, with a practice-led, design-ethnographic case study in a New York City public high school titled the ReGenerational Repair Program. Using a Value-Sensitive Design lens, we compare a spring after-school class series and autumn in-class intensive study and find that transmission flourishes where learners share time, table, tools and conversation, and falters where those conditions are scarce. Rather than adding a repair unit, we argue for designing classrooms as sociotechnical environments that provide the temporal, spatial and relational fabrics that mending requires, positioning schools as credible co-sites of transmission alongside community venues. The paper clarifies how historical dynamics are re-enacted in the present and why community remains not a supplement to education but a reciprocal site of transmission.]]></description>
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            <title><![CDATA[#Byggnadsvård : Mobilising Alternative Narratives of Building Care]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/jef-2026-0008</link>
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            <pubDate>Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Old buildings are imbued with problems and possibilities shaped by their material condition. This article unfolds around material stories circulating on Insta-gram with the hashtag #byggnadsvård, using the Swedish concept byggnadsvård (‘building care’) as a lens to investigate material-discursive entanglements of heritage, sustainability and material care. Drawing on ethnographic and diffractive approaches, the article explores how conservation principles and sustainability are articulated in vernacular accounts of building care and how materials participate in the renegotiation of old buildings and maintenance and repair practices. The analysis shows how conservation ethics and environmental concerns are worked out through ordinary repair decisions and material encounters in a highly mediated social media setting. In this context, building care emerges as a regime of care that rethinks material relations and buildings as sustainable.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
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            <title><![CDATA[The Changing Meanings of Repair in Post-Soviet Estonia : From Necessity to Resistance]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/jef-2026-0005</link>
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            <pubDate>Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Repair in the post-Soviet context shows a specific historicity, linked with Soviet consumer culture, that has caused the Soviet socioeconomic system be characterised as a ‘repair society’. People’s experiences and their narratives of the lively repair culture in the Soviet era are a vivid part of Estonian cultural memory. This article analyses how repair in Estonia has shifted from being an economic necessity to a form of resistance both to consumer society and the capitalist socioeconomic system. Criticism of consumer society has ecological and material foundations arising from experiences of the poor repairability of contemporary commodities. This article proposes that the changing materiality of commodities has political significance, shaping evaluations of the socioeconomic system and facilitating resistance to it. This resistance, including recently emerged repair movements, can be culturally informed, inspired and empowered by local cultural memory and legacies, as well as presenting more sustainable ways of managing.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
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            <title><![CDATA[Editorial Impressions: Rural Rebellion and Reclaiming Dreams]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/jef-2025-0014</link>
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            <pubDate>Thu, 18 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[‘More Inclined to Pity than Love’: Matthias Alexander Castrén’s Published Letters about the Nenets]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/jef-2025-0015</link>
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            <pubDate>Thu, 18 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[This article reads Finnish linguist and ethnographer Matthias Alexander Castrén’s published letters as travel writing influenced both by imperialist discourses and the tradition of Finnish travel writing. The article examines the letter formulae and the creation of a readership community, explores the ways in which Castrén builds involved and informative and emotional stances vis-à-vis the Nenets, and discusses the ways in which the imperial and nationalistic currents come together in the emotional economy of Castrén’s travel writing.The article argues that the role of emotion is vital in order to understand how Castrén persuades his readers to see his point of view, and to see how he seeks to expand his readership. Castrén produces emotional stances in alignment with conventions that make the genre and its nationalist meanings readily apparent to his readers. Finally, the way Castrén’s travel writing produces a gaze that legitimates the process of othering is discussed. Concentrating on descriptions of the Nenets, the article argues that these accounts create an emotional relationship that indexes imperialism.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Deconstructing Narratives of Belonging and Otherness Among Steppe Ukraine Villagers: Place, Space, Language, and Historical Consciousness]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/jef-2025-0016</link>
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            <pubDate>Thu, 18 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[The image of Steppe Ukraine as a historical region has mainly been constructed based on narratives originating from urban centres that are often perceived as alien to this territory and people. Being one of the most industrial and urbanised parts of Ukraine during the period of the Soviet Union, the region witnessed a significant alteration in its peasant culture. Collectivisation, Holodomor, and the Second World War are the leading causes of the alteration in the social composition of Steppe Ukraine’s rural populations. The article deals with the complex question of identity formation among the villagers of Steppe Ukraine. There is particularly focus on the strategies of narrating feelings of belonging and otherness used by local villagers based on their understanding of the history of the places they inhabit. The article also looks at the inhabitants’ relationships with the people with whom they used to coexist in the same space, although these peoples were often wiped out amid the changing circumstances of the region.]]></description>
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            <title><![CDATA[Beyond Coming of Age: The Genderless Hero in Ukrainian Wonder Tale ATU 312D]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/jef-2025-0017</link>
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            <pubDate>Thu, 18 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[The article aims to unsettle the meaning of gender assignment for Ukrainian variants of the dragonslayer wonder tale of ATU 312D, “Kotyhoroshko”, which is represented by a child hero through a post-structural deconstruction on four levels: language, job, body, and belief, of which the last level, belief, is crucial for folklore studies and definitive for my understanding of gender in folk narratives. Drawing on the interpretative framework, the article explores customary law and belief from Ukrainian ethnographic collections of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The article hypothesises that the child hero in fairy tales is genderless since the non-modern ethnographic evidence of customary law, belief narrative, and historical material on childhood in the early modern and modern eras suggest that children up to seven years old are beyond the gendered system as it is irrelevant for them, and, consequently, the fairy tale hero Kotyhoroshko is genderless.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
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            <title><![CDATA[Money and Wealth in Qing Texts on Fox Spirits]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/jef-2025-0018</link>
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            <pubDate>Thu, 18 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[This study analyses the rules of circulation of money (and wealth in general) in Qing-era (1644–1911) Chinese texts on the supernatural. It is based on the popular collections of stories by writers Pu Songling, Ji Yun and Yuan Mei.Ever since the 19th century, when sinologists started field studies on Chinese religions, there was much discussion about the extent to which literary texts can be used as sources on Chinese religions. Indeed, in each instance it is difficult to separate the product of the literary imagination from its possible folklore basis. However, as this study shows, literary texts were usually created within the framework of a certain system of ideas, which determines the nature of the characters and their modes of interaction with each other, including the financial aspects of these relations. Given the large scale of the Chinese pantheon, the object of study was limited to one class of supernatural being, fox spirits.It appears that in Qing texts on supernatural world and associated folk beliefs of that time, silver, which served as currency in China, as well as property, was found, lost, borrowed, stolen, sold and bought by fox-spirits according to a changing system of rules inherent in the worldview of the period. Objects (including silver) can have their own predetermined fate which can influence the fate of characters interacting with them. The boundaries of possibilities in such interaction are often set by cultural norms and can’t be broken even by supernatural beings. In many respects tales of the supernatural from the Qing period, despite the specifics of the subject, promote traditional ethics and social order.]]></description>
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            <title><![CDATA[Forest, Folk, and Fiction: Rain-Maiden and the Bear-Man as a Site for Ecoculture among the Nagas]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/jef-2025-0019</link>
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            <pubDate>Thu, 18 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Forests are one of the most commonly recurring settings of folktales and oratures. In the popular imagination, forests are often seen as the site of the unknown, the non-human, enchanting and, mystifying, however, in the northeastern cultures of India, especially in Naga folklore, the forest provides a liminal space to the human and non-human through the confluence of spirits inhabiting all forms of body. Easterine Kire’s collection of short stories The Rain-Maiden and the Bear-Man (2021), essentially dealing with the life and culture of the Nagas, encapsulates a multi-faceted representation of forests, orature and folklore juxtaposed with narratives that broach upon socio-cultural, supernatural, and ecological entanglements. This paper aims to read the representation of the spirits, forest and folk as portrayed in The Rain-Maiden and the Bear-Man as a strategy that blurs the human–nonhuman, human–environment distinctions vis-à-vis socio-ecological representations. Highlighting the prevalence of a sustainable life during the contemporary ecological crisis, this paper will take an ecocultural approach to show how certain traditions interact with their surroundings. Juxtaposing this with lifestyle changes brought about by modernity, this paper will rely extensively on the idea of eco-narrative. The framework of eco-narrative would trace the interaction of humans within the scope of nature thereby negotiating how narratives situate the discourse of folk culture.]]></description>
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            <title><![CDATA[Negotiating with Tides and Tigers: Life on the Boundaries of Bangladesh’s Flooded Forest]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/jef-2025-0020</link>
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            <pubDate>Thu, 18 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[The Sundarbans, which stretches from the Bay of Bengal over parts of India and Bangladesh, is the largest mangrove forest in the world, constantly in flux due to the erosion and cyclones that can drastically reshape the land. This article explores how Muslims, Hindus and the Indigenous Munda must negotiate the precarity of life and work on the forest boundaries, and the constant fluctuation of institutions and geography. These communities depend on the forest, negotiating dangers such as tigers, crocodiles, snakes, cyclones and the strict limitations imposed by the Forest Department. This article will explore boundaries, erosion and forest predators in turn, culminating in the argument that the roots developed by the Sundarbans’ communities incorporate spiritual collaboration as a form of syncretism. This article argues that, like the mangroves that characterise the Sundarbans, the communities that live on its boundaries have developed a distinctive system of roots that negotiates the unique demands of life in the region.]]></description>
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            <title><![CDATA[The Workroom: The Vernacular Practice and Theorising of a Religious Group in Contemporary Northeast China]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/jef-2025-0021</link>
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            <pubDate>Thu, 18 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[This article investigates a religious group in contemporary northeast China. The group is formed by ritual experts and adherents of a traditional folk belief in animal spirits. The group runs as an institution providing aid to those who need psychological treatment, mainly using unorthodox psychological methods and therapies. Most members of this group identify themselves as devout Buddhists. They have developed a series of innovative rituals and generated syncretic teachings combining folk beliefs, vernacular Buddhism, Chinese traditional medicine, and unorthodox psychology.Based on primary fieldwork materials, this research regards this group as a unique religious phenomenon rooted in the particular sociocultural context of contemporary China. The structure and nature of the group is analysed from a folkloristic perspective, according to which the communicative process is highlighted. Two paradigms of the constitution of the group are examined: the network of interaction, and the community of intra-action. This research finds that the group is constituted in the dialogue of the two paradigms, which are unified by the coherence of the vernacular religion experienced by the members in everyday life.]]></description>
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            <title><![CDATA[Book Review: Conspiracy/Theory]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/jef-2025-0025</link>
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            <pubDate>Thu, 18 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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