The Directory of Open Access Journals makes it fairly easy to find articles on many subjects published in smaller journals around the world. My guess is that many of these papers go quite overlooked in North America-centric anthropology, and so I spent a little time digging through articles that had been published this past year in anthropology to see if anything caught my interest. A few did. I’m going to post short blurbs on each of them; they might catch your interest too.
“The Ritual Aspects of Ukrainian Beekeeping.” in EtnoAntropologia, a journal of the Società Italiana de Antropologia Culturale. Written by Uliana Movna of the Ethnology Institute of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.
Why I clicked: Bees. I had no idea that bees, their honey, and wax had such cultural importance in the Ukraine.
Excerpt: “As universal ritual symbols, the main products of the life of bees are honey and wax, which, over a long historical period, have “grown into” calendar and family rituals of Ukrainians. During the research, it was revealed the main ritual purpose of honey as a mediator between the bee and man, with other world and souls of the ancestors, the conductor and the amplifier of the processes of transition at the moment of passing by the human the corresponding stages of age and social hierarchy.”