The Yam Festival in contemporary Ghana : tradition beyond religious boundaries

This article is based on ethnographic field research conducted in the central part of Ghana, in the Brong Ahafo region. It gives a description of two yam festivals performed in 2010 in the small town of Jema and the nearby village of Kokuma. The author depicts the meanings associated with yams in traditional indigenous cultures and vernacular religions in Ghana as well as within the broader region of the Gulf of Guinea. Contemporary yam festivals are interpreted in relation to the old symbolic and sacred meanings of the yam as “the king of crops” as well as in relation to the contemporary circumstances of African societies which are becoming modernised and less dependent on traditional agriculture. A special focus is placed on the position of chiefs, royal attributes (stools) and involvement of people from different religious backgrounds (Christians, Muslims, “traditionalists”). The concept of “sensational forms” proposed by Birgit Meyer is discussed in relation to yam festivals, which are treated here as performances generating a specific religious “style” shared by contemporary Ghanaians irrespective of their religious affiliations

The use of books in 16th-century Vilnius

The main goal of the paper is to answer the question of what was unique about the use of books in Vilnius between 1522 and 1610. The reason to take a closer look at the capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania is the fact that it has always been a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and multi-religious city. This observation allows the author to assume that the use of books there could have been different than in other European cities of the time. To find possible answers to the question posed, the author traces the changes in production, distribution and reading of books in the city. The research is based on several sorts of sources, such as printed books, manuscripts and documents from Vilnius archives (mainly the municipal archive, the Catholic chapter, the castle court etc.). He was supported by contemporary studies about early modern Vilnius scriptoria and printing houses (Kawecka-Gryczowa, Topolska, Nikalaieu), bookbinders (Laucevičius), book writing (Ulčinaitė, Narbutienė, Narbutas) and the history of the city (Frick). At the beginning of the paper the author recalls the main facts about Vilnius in the 16th century. The city had increasingly grown in importance as a political, economical and cultural centre of the Jagiellonian monarchy.The central part, divided in four chronologically arranged chapters, focuses on several problems, among them: the beginnings of Cyrillic prints and Skaryna’s printing house, languages and alphabets of books (Latin, Ruthenian, Polish, Lithuanian, German, Hebrew, Yiddish and Arabic), book production, dissemination, storage and reading. The author notices that a significant contributing factor to the spreading book culture in Vilnius was the royal court and chancery. He puts emphasis on the significance of humanistic schools that were established in Vilnius in the 2nd half of the 16th century by four different Christian confessions (Calvinist, Catholic, Lutheran and Orthodox). The most influential one was the Jesuit Academy of Vilnius. This process was accompanied by the establishment of no less than 11 printing houses. Having said that, the author argues that books printed in Vilnius, imported to the city and held in its libraries reflect a fruitful competition between main religious communities. At the end, the author reaches the conclusion that the use of books in Vilnius was similar to other European cities of the time, yet the capital of Lithuania still seems to be a good deal more complex a case. He ventures a hypothesis that the book can be deemed as one of the tools or factors by which religious or ethnic identity in Vilnius was defined

Challenging or confirming the national sacred? : managing the power place at Wawel Hill in Kraków

This chapter focusses on the case of Wawel Hill in Kraków to reveal how bottom-up alternative spirituality influences perceptions of this national heritage site. The presence of people who draw energy at Wawel (and who believe in the Wawel chakra – an energy spot) seems to challenge dominant national and Catholic oriented heritage regime and institutional managerial strategies. Drawing on ethnographic material, the chapter discusses how heritage is being conceptualized by various social actors present at Wawel. The strategies of the Wawel museum and the Wawel cathedral are confronted by the bottom-up perspectives of tour guides and energy pilgrims

Poetic mapping of the Polish crown at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries and its relation to cartographic imitation in Renaissance poetry

The paper is devoted to the problem of imitation of maps in the late Renaissance Polish poetry (between 1580 and 1630). At the beginning of the paper, the author writes about the unprecedented growth of Polish lyric poetry at the time. He reminds that in that period the Polish elite - among the poets - was especially interested in cartography. In the next paragraphs, he reveals his sources and methodological approach. The main thesis of the paper is that the poets widely used map-based technics in constructing their poems. Imitation (Latin: imitatio) played a crucial role in this process. To illustrate the ways of map imitation, works of six poets were chosen: S.F. Klonowic, J. Kochanowski, K. Miaskowski, S. Petrycy, M.K. Sarbiewski and Sz. Szymonowic. The paper consists of three parts. In the first, a similarity between cartographical representation of a river in poetry and on a map is shown. On this example, the author shows the topoi used both in poems and maps. In the second part, the concept of imitation of a map is discussed. In the third part of the paper, the author shows how the late Renaissance poets described the territory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The author argues they tried to render the polycentric character of their vast country. In conclusion, he draws a similarity between controlling space in poetry and maps. He suggests that the idea of ruling over space might be related to the 16th-century idea of a God-like poet