The following thesis discusses how bizarre food is conceptualized within the anthropology of food and how it connects to symbolic anthropology. Through the complex description of the individual experience during the process of eating bizarre foods, the perception of the experience and the various motivations behind it will be explained. From an anthropological point of view it will be examined whether bizarre foods are the carriers of cultural significance and how this is further demonstrated within the culture. Through analysis of some specific foods I will also try to reveal their symbolic meaning.

The thesis is based on a field research carried out on Java primarily in communities gathered around the ritual dance called jathilan - an ancient, exorcistic and unique trance dance which operates with a binary opposition of good and bad forces. The aim is to extend the field of knowledge about this ritual and to enrich the existing sources of the insight into the issue of participation in jathilan and related factors. Interviews with research participants bring unique testimonies that are set into the context of the Javanese rural community. The central topic of the study is the motivation and the experience of the participants of jathilan with emphasis on the central motif of jathilan - trance and kesurupan (obsession). Great space is also devoted to the religious dimension of the jatihlan and its reflection by the participants themselves. The thesis approaches this phenomenon from three perspectives: 1) As a way to strengthen local communities, popular culture and regional cultural identity. 2) As a manifestation of religious syncretism on Java and how this syncretism is reflected by the main actors in Jathilan. 3) As a dynamic social, artistic and religious phenomenon under transformative conditions. All these perspectives are examined by the optics of jathilan participants, analyzed and set...

When recruiting new staff, the job interview is the most central and most common selection method, which has traditionally taken place face-to-face with the employer. Video interviews are something that has become more common in recruitment processes as a result of technological development and digitalization but also based on the organization's financial and time rationalization. Previous research in the field indicates that video interviews modify parts of the interaction, and points out that there is a need for further research. The purpose of the study is to investigate how job interviews in video format are experienced by recruiters in terms of social interaction, and what implications there are in assessing the candidate. The results of the study are based on six qualitative interviews with recruiters, where collected data have been analyzed from a social psychological perspective. The results indicate that there is a perceived difference in certain parts of the interaction. Particularly the non-verbal communication and small talk are limited, but the flow and timing are also more difficult in video interviews. The study also shows that the biggest advantage is considered to be that the format is time-saving and provides increased flexibility and the biggest disadvantage is difficulties in connecting with the candidate, which impairs the overall experience. Finally, it emerged that the recruiters consider themselves to have good opportunities to assess candidates in video interviews, but that the data collected indicates an experience of both positive and negative aspects. / Vid rekrytering av ny personal är anställningsintervjun den mest centrala och vanligaste urvalsmetoden, vilken traditionellt ägt rum ansikte-mot-ansikte hos arbetsgivaren. Videointervjuer är något som har kommit att bli mer vanligt i rekryteringsprocesser till följd av den teknologiska utvecklingen och digitaliseringen, men också utifrån organisationens ekonomiska och tidsmässiga rationalisering. Tidigare forskning på området pekar på att videointervjuer modifierar delar av interaktionen, och poängterar att behovet av vidare forskning är stort. Syftet med studien är att undersöka hur anställningsintervjuer i videoformat upplevs av rekryterare i termer av det sociala samspelet, samt vilka implikationer som finns vid bedömning av kandidaten. Studiens resultat baseras på sex kvalitativa intervjuer med rekryterare, där insamlade data analyserats utifrån ett socialpsykologiskt perspektiv. Resultatet tyder på att det finns en upplevd skillnad i vissa delar av interaktionen. Framförallt begränsas icke-verbal kommunikation och småprat, men även flytet och timingen försvåras i videointervjuer. Studien visar även att de största fördelarna anses vara att formatet är tidsbesparande och ger utrymme till ökad flexibilitet och den största nackdelen är svårigheter att känna in kandidaten, vilket försämrar helhetsupplevelsen. Till sist framkom att rekryterare anser sig själva ha goda möjligheter att bedöma kandidater vid videointervjuer, men att insamlade data indikerar på en upplevelse av både positiva och negativa aspekter.

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The artistic research, Kehrä/ Kehrae is done together with Myrsky Rönkä, with significant ropes, places and spaces, creatures and histories. This paper is subtitled entwining possible worlds. It implies alternative possibilities for prevailing modern western ways to live and die and circus. There are three big questions in the air: What is the meaning of circus? What does it mean to be alive? And how could circus care (the existence of life within the earth)? The starting point was a concern about the troubling state of life and the world how it is today and how the modern western circus felt paradoxical and incapable of responding to the current times in sustainable ways. The initial question was, how to combine circus and other aspects of life into one sustainable, or regenerative and renewable practice. In order to seek other, latent realities this research goes beyond modern western circus history, beyond modern western worldview, and beyond “ordinary” circus practice.  The guiding idea is: life is circus, circus is life. Therefore the practice in this research is a collection of “whatever we were doing”. To mention some with great importance: whirling, meditation, becoming-with rope, making and mapping space with ropes and strings, dwelling with nature, and sauna. The other idea is to go through liminality and evoke communitas, with circus practice, bodies, ropes, and others.  This means abandoning accustomed ways to train and think about circus and life. Because of its nature, this work is also opening up what could spiritual (circus) practice mean as an alternative to a mechanistic way of thinking and making. The ontology of this research is animistic and relational, which suggests care, respect, reciprocity, and response-ability in all of our relations and takes into account the circulative nature of time and life. Animistic ontology takes materiality and skill towards the idea of becoming-with, when becoming into who and what happens in relational material-semiotic worlding. During the process, some specific features, or dwelling places for circus, emerged. Those are circus and play, circus and liminality, circus and shamanism, circus and others. In these dwelling places lies the deep powers of circus to be inversive and subversive, simultaneously transformative and sustaining: the mythical power of circus. Through the final artistic outcome Kehrä/ Kehrae, this paper is entwining the strings of the research together as a temporary gathering to be unraveled and intertwined into one again.

First of all, my research is not only my research but our research. It has been made together with my long-time art companion Marjut Hernesniemi. The starting point for our research was our experience of the western modern circus, what it does, and how it cares for the cosmos. From our experience, the western modern circus is based on techniques, risk, danger, and spectacle. Human is in the center of it, often presented as superhuman controlling and manipulating everything. By looking at the current situation in the world, human domination has caused us problems in a form of climate change and other ecological crises such as mass extinction. However, there are different ways of relating to the world. In this research we have looked beyond the western modern circus, to the roots of circus in China and Japan, and to the archaic rituals, to find other ways of relating to the world through circus and trying to bring them to the present day. This research was set out with the question of trying to combine circus and other aspects of life as one sustainable or regenerative practice. The theoretical framework of the research has been ritual. The thought behind that has been the efficacy of the ritual in contrast to entertainment. That is circus can make a difference. From an animistic perspective, the purpose of the ritual is to sustain and renew, preserve or bring back the balance between the psyche, body, social, cosmic, and circle of life. With this in mind, we have made use of the anti-structure of liminality as a playground while working in the studio. In this playground, we have not been bound by the custom, convention, or ceremonials of the western modern circus. Instead, we’ve had the possibility to play. Use the definition of western modern circus as a launching pad and try to run as far as possible, but still have the connection point as the one that we left from. The rules of the play were simple, such as we don’t climb the rope, you are not allowed to hurt the rope, instead of objects, materials of becoming, instead of human exceptionalism, appreciation of the other, what if there was no human on stage. All these rules created different possibilities.  While in liminality we have been bound by another thing that can appear in a liminal phase, communitas. Communitas as an unstructured communion of equal individuals working towards a collective task with full attention. In our communitas, the task has been a sustainable circus. Moreover, in our communitas, ropes and nature were included as equals. Together we have been imagining and making different kinds of possible futures. These relations between us, nature, and the ropes have been intimate relations. During the process of making, humans have been ”affected” as much as the significant other.  Our task was to combine circus and other aspects of life as one sustainable or regenerative practice. As performances in circus consist of ritualized gestures that show the relationship between us and the cosmos, we need to rethink what we are presenting. To find a more sustainable and regenerative future, we need collective survival skills instead of individual ones. These survival skills should include all life in its diversity. For change to happen liminality, communitas and play are all needed. Liminality to open up a playground outside of the structured society. Play to come up with solutions to challenges. Communitas to form a special bond between the players, speak for the weak, and not forget that we work for the same cause.  Circus can transform, however it requires that the artists are willing to go through the liminal space themselves and take circus with them.

To date, previous discussions of the practise of ”weapon deposition” in prehistoric Scandinavia have focused primarily on the Roman Iron Age. The focus of these investigations have been the large offerings of weapons in bogs, which were presumably taken from enemies defeated in battle. Until recently, these particular kind of ritual practises were thought to have ceased in the middle of the 6th century. It is now widely acknowledged, however, that this sort of ritual practises did not simply dissappear, but instead re-emerged during the Vendel- and Viking age in a changed state. These rites, which are frequently associated with elite groups and so called ”central places” are embodied, for example, in the weapons and other valuable objects deposited in the lake adjacent to the Late Iron Age magnate site at Tissø, Denmark. Similar finds have been recovered in Scania and Gotland, but these practises have not received enough attention compared to other ritual aspects of the Viking Age. This essay therefore aims to investigate the ideologies and motivations underpinning these rites, and provide a reassessment of their possible connection to elites, political and religious centralization, and central places/manorial sites.

The aim of this thesis is to expand the understanding of horses from ritual and everyday contexts, respectively, by investigating their diet and mobility. In this thesis, teeth of domestic horse Equus ferus caballus from the wetland Bokaren and central place Gamla Uppsala in Uppland during the late Iron Age (550-1050 A.D) are analyzed. The material consists of 44 teeth from 23 distinct horses from wetlands, wells, postholes, and settlement that were compared against each other, to discover diet and mobility similarities, differences, variations, and life history changes between different ritual and everyday contexts. It was conducted through a multi-isotope (δ13C, δ15N, δ34S and 87Sr/86Sr) analysis of equine cheek teeth in EA-IRMS and LA-MC-ICP-MS. The results indicate that the horses from ritual and everyday context were adapted to different livestock practices, according to their mobility, function, and priority. Horses used for transport were prioritized with nutritious and protein-rich feeding. In contrast to work- and multifunctional horses from Gamla Uppsala that show signs of prolonged nutritional stress caused by the fact that they did not meet their protein intake. A majority of the horses were non-local, they consumed food from the same region, and they may have come from more northern regions in Sweden and/or Finland. / Tidens Vatten

The use of music for healing is ubiquitous in every human community. Music Therapy, however, as the clinical and evidence-based use of music interventions to accomplish individualized goals within a therapeutic relationship by a credentialed professional, may not share the same pervasive prevalence in human society. This study explored how a culturally-sensitive music therapy process may be designed among baTonga of Mazabuka, particularly in relation to the participants’ existing understandings of masabe (musical healing ritual) Participants' perceptions of musical healing rituals of masabe were explored through focus groups, as well as, if the participants were amenable, to the use of musical healing rituals. We then designed a music therapy session together. The participants expressed delight at their involvement in the study as it communicated interest in their lives. The study affirmed their worldview and how that could be incorporated into wellness responses associated with their community. The study found that baTonga rely on musical healing rituals as they are aligned to their relational cosmology and accommodates their perceptions of wellbeing. BaTonga ritual music is rich in symbolism and imagery. Because buTonga personhood might be experienced at the intersection of the individual and the community, and at the intersection of the individual, the community and the natural environment, this study found that music therapy here would benefit from drawing on ecologically-informed community music therapy approaches. A music therapist’s role in buTonga may be seen similarly to how the role of a mun’ganga (an afflicted shamanic healer) is perceived in the community. The study argues that there is indeed a place for culture-centred, culturally sensitive and inclusive anti-oppressive music therapy among BuTonga. This research study contributes to the ongoing conversation about evolving meanings, theories, approaches and practices of music therapy. / Dissertation (MMus)--University of Pretoria, 2019. / Music / MMus / Unrestricted

Anenský dvůr used to be a farm surrounded by fields just a few dozen meters from the Austrian border. It worked even during the fifties before the creation of the Iron Curtain. Agricultural activity slowly subsided, people disappeared. Nature began quietly but ceaselessly, in small portions, getting on its side after the interval division. Buildings and their surroundings started to change. Nature has changed in fifty years place unrecognizable. Clearly defined boundaries are erased, flash greenery spread to the surrounding area and has created a specific single entity defining the surrounding chaos. Such a situation is the basis for the layout of the new cemetery. Current enhanced peripheral borders are strengthened by planting oaks, while the interior is modified. Most of invasive acacia and other shrubs are removed. The original character of the place, floodplain meadow is reinforced by planting new trees, such as birch or cherry.  The new cemetery consists of two main areas - internal groomed lawn under clearly defined square walls, which leads to deposition of ash and vice versa in the outer belt informal grown meadows are individual pavilions cemetery.