Bear Ceremonialism in relation to three ritual healers: the Basque salutariyua, the French marcou and the Italian maramao

Abstract

Modernism is to us as water to a fish. Spreknak (1999: 217) … the word does not forget where it has been and can never wholly free itself from the dominion of the contexts of which it has been a part.

Looking at Europe through a Basque lens: Ethnolinguistic considerations of two worldviews

“…Moreover, there is reason to believe that the cosmology and ontological foundation discussed in the study are linked to an earlier hunter-gatherer mentality in which humans viewed bears both as kin and ancestors. While such animistic framing is relatively common among indigenous peoples in other parts of the world, in this instance we are talking about an ursine genealogy that arose in the heart of Europe and whose remnants are visible in European languages, folk culture and residual traditional beliefs (Frank 2008a(Frank , 2008c(Frank , 2009(Frank , 2010(Frank , 2015a. And, as has been noted, the ursine cosmology and related conceptual frames rupture the SAE polarity of nature/culture.…”

“…Rather, because it has been classified as a linguistic isolate, for the most part, Euskara has been viewed as the Other, the outsider, and consequently as irrelevant to any attempt to reconstruct the life-ways of Europeans in times past. However, there is increasing evidence, ethnographic and linguistic in nature, that points to the possibility that there was a Basque-like linguacultural substrate operating across much of Europe during the period in which Indo-European languages and their associated conceptual frames were gaining a foothold (Frank 2008a(Frank , 2008c(Frank , 2009(Frank , 2010(Frank , 2015a(Frank , 2017.…”