Issue 4, Vol. 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 grassroots activism in post-socialist countries are often perceived as a distorted mirroring of the Western equivalent – impaired or even flawed. Especially in places such as monotowns in Donbas region of Ukraine symptoms of grassroots activism and signs of thriving civil society rooted in local modes of understandings are often overlook when only scrutinized with use of Western-based concepts and ideas. In this article based on ethnographical research conducted in span of several months I argue that the big NGO workers’ perception of local notions of activism in Donbas monotown are fueled by hope and sense of peripherity that shapes local dynamics of activism and engagement that forms the idea of civil society.

Tohono O’odham (formerly Papago), a Native American language spoken in southern Arizona and northern Mexico, has been frequently reported as endangered. The contribution aims to present efforts to revitalize and stabilize the language (as well as its culture), particularly the activities conducted by Ofelia Zepeda, an enrolled member of the Tohono O’odham Indian Nation. Zepeda, working as Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona in Tucson, has been contributing to the revival of her mother tongue primarily as a linguist and language educator and activist. She has been also known for her creative writing incorporating 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 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, in particular fear of death and fear of metamorphosis, and the ways to overcome them.
Numerous memes, anecdotes, and jokes that people read and share on social media or tell each other became the way of overcoming collective fear. Not only oral tradition but also social media can be a source for studying cultural stereotypes today. 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.
Keywords: contemporary folklore