Číslo 4, roč. 109 (2022)

In the paper, we have attempted to show that the First World War brought, in a sense, the "abolition" of childhood and its instrumentalization by the warring state. The main requisite of our analysis was (children's) footwear and the arena was the shoe market. Indeed, as an object of interest for both the military and the civilian sector, stable consumerism and an elastic market, footwear is a particularly suitable research object. Like children, it too has undergone its own paradigmatic reversal thanks to the First World War, when it went from being a luxury item with a distinct symbolic value to a mass-produced consumer good. The child customer did not disappear during the war but changed significantly. Due to pressures from outside the market mechanisms, he became a kind of "quasi-consumer" and at the same time a "quasi-producer", a cog in the war production and also distribution.

The condition of civil society and grass-roots activism in post-socialist countries is often perceived as a distorted mirroring of its Western equivalent, with the implication that it is impaired or even flawed. Particularly in places such as the monotowns of the Donbas region of Ukraine, the symptoms of grass-roots activism and signs of thriving civil society rooted in local modes of understandings are often overlooked when only scrutinized through the lens of Western-based concepts and ideas. This article is based on ethnographical research that was conducted in the Donbas monotown of Kramatorsk and its surroundings over a period of several months. It argues that local notions of activism are fueled by hope and a sense of peripherality that shapes the local dynamics of activism and engagement.

Tohono O’odham (formerly Papago), a Native American language spoken in southern Arizona and northern Mexico, has been frequently reported as endangered. The article aims to present efforts to revitalize and stabilize the language (and its culture), particularly the activities of Ofelia Zepeda, who is a member of the Tohono O’odham Indian Nation. Zepeda is a professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona in Tucson and has been contributing to the revival of her mother tongue, primarily as a linguist, language educator and activist. She is also known for her creative writing and incorporates Tohono O’odham into her poems.

The paper deals with human cultural stereotypes embedded in mythological consciousness, which have influenced the formation of fear of vaccination against COVID-19. The material was collected in Ukraine in the period from September 2021 to January 2022. By analysing oral narratives and comments from social media users, the authors demonstrate the cultural mechanisms of fear of vaccination, specifically fear of death and fear of metamorphosis, and how they can be overcome. The profusion of memes, anecdotes, and jokes that people read and shared on social media or told each other became a way of overcoming collective fear. Nowadays, not only oral tradition but also social media can constitute a source for studying cultural stereotypes. A folkloristic and culturally anthropological perspective on the fear of vaccination allows us to trace folkloristic phenomena back to our everyday lives and to see folklore as a living, dynamic process that has become part of human culture.