One of the most prominent features of the Irish landscape is the great multitude of megalithic sites which date back to the Neolithic. In this paper, I will attempt to demonstrate that the understanding of these sites in Ireland can be enhanced by referencing the native tradition, including the Irish word for the sites, sí, and the sí's powerful cultural tradition attested to throughout native Irish folklore, literature, onomastics, and traditional knowledge. In doing so, I will explore the difficulties and the potentials of interdisciplinary communication between archaeology and folkloristics, and the related issues regarding communication between official and unofficial discourses.
Posthuman Folklore explores how our human condition is increasingly thought of, and performed, in posthuman terms. Insights from animal studies have triggered the “animal turn” in scholarship, while the increasing digitization of human culture and the newly emerging roles of androids and artificial intelligences provide yet another crux for reconsidering what it means to be a person. Taken together, such outlooks cast in doubt the previous assurances of human ontology which were lodged in Western discourse. This book explores not only the scholarship behind such moves, but also, and perhaps more importantly, the ways in which everyday people are increasingly enacting posthumanism in their everyday lives. The book follows a narrative thread of various case studies ranging from the pre-hominid to the cyborg, and ends with a futurist appraisal of current trajectories.
This article discusses two new artistic musical traditions, beat-boxing and mashups, in terms of their communal, changeable forms as displaying hallmarks often associated with folk music. Investigating the relationship between aesthetic choices and identity concerns highlights the central theme of the man-and-the-machine, the cyborg, and the inter-connected cognitive functioning of man and machine—all increasingly a part of reality at the beginning of the 21st century.
Recent advances in animal studies have established the widespread use of learned, symbolic communication in the animal kingdom (and hence, of some variety of "language"). Meanwhile, Mechling (1989), has argued that folklore, as shared learned traditions, also exists in non-human animals. Considering that many scholars believe that humans are unique in our ability to tell stories, this schism between human and animal, the story and other folklore, has a great deal to tell us about the outlines and origins of humanity. This chapter seeks to integrate arguments from linguistics, archaeology, folklore, and cognitive science from evolutionary perspectives.
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