One of South America’s cradles of civilization is the Río Santa Valley lying in the northern part of the Peruvian Andes.  It is an alpine area with settlements located at altitudes from 3000 to 5000 meters above sea level, and its boundaries between the Cordillera Blanca and Cordillera Negra mountain ranges delineate the territory of a specific ethnic group of people who maintain rich historical and ethnographic traditions. Moreover, the great seismic activity to be encountered in this geographical zone plays an important part in shaping their culture. From the dawn of time, the inhabitants of this valley have lived with a constant threat of danger, often perishing as a result of earthquakes, great avalanches, and floods.  On May 31, 1970, a gigantic avalanche came down from the highest peak of Peru, Huascarán, and completely buried two cities, causing the deaths of many thousands of people.  These cities of Yungay remain unearthed, and the entire region has been recognized as a national sanctuary.  Subsequently, among the chapels and crosses erected on the site of the disaster, there appeared a colorful, more than a two-meter-high replica of a quero cup – a sacred libation vessel used for millennia in the Andes, and much favored by the Incas. Tracing the history of this surprising monument, the authors of this article encountered witnesses to an ephemeral indigenous mix between performance and spectacle, which was twice celebrated in the valley – in 1999 and 2001 – and during which the world’s largest raspadilla (or snow cone) was prepared, the oversized quero cup being filled with the resultant mixture of crushed ice and fruit syrups. The performance was thus an unprecedented amalgam of an indigenous „invented tradition” combined with an already long-established celebration of All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days.  An anthropological analysis of the ritualized behavior of the participants of the fiesta points to the durability of certain archetypal elements such as a joint feasting with ancestors, ritual sacrifices, and the „eating or consuming a deity”.  It also reveals the esoterically localized (or time-space specific) nature of the event encompassing as it does the psychological mechanisms required for the revitalization of a socio-cultural system when coming to terms with a deep, collective trauma.  The example of the Yungay fiesta thus testifies to, if not proves, the morphological durability of a holy phenomenon, changing historical circumstances notwithstanding.

The article presents the corpus of texts and recordings from Poland’s Spisz region as a source of material for the study of culture and history of this historical, geographical and ethnographic land located in the Western Carpathians. The paper deals with electronic database of dialectal transcripts and recordings collected during research within the project The language of the Spisz region inhabitants. The corpus of texts and dialect recordings carried out by The Institute of the Polish Language at the Polish Academy of Sciences. The main aims of the research project is to document spoken language of inhabitants Spisz region and to develop an electronic corpus of dialect texts. Nevertheless rich and various material could be useful not only in language studies, but also in historical, ethnographic and folklore studies. Therefore the article contains the general information about the project such as exploratory research or transcribing texts and examples of informants’ statements.

The aim of the article is to analyze the practices that Polish patients (suffering from anxiety disorders) can perform with the pills, prescribed by psychiatrists. There are three main practices which are highlighted in the article: manipulating the dosage and frequency of consumed drugs, deciding which medicines will be consumed and keeping the drugs at home without consumption. In a broader sense, they can be understood as a form of resistance against biomedicine (Clarke et al. 2010: 14) and form of Robert Merton’s self-fullfilling prophecy. The mentioned practices are connected with the opinions about pharmacotherapy shared by my interlocutors. 

In the past few years, the transport infrastructure of Sudan radically changed.  New roads, transport hubs, or means of transport have a significant imprint on the culture of travelling, and many of the older institutions connected with the phenomenon, are being placed in the past. One of those dying out phenomena is ferry crossing on the Nile. It wasn’t long time ago that ferry was the basic mean of transport throughout riverine area of Sudan. It was the way of transporting people and goods, both along the river and across it. Today, because of the new era of modern motorways and bridges, its time is coming to the end. This is, of course, a pity, since its function was going way beyond its basic transport meaning. What can we learn about Sudan culture from the perspective of Nile ferry – is the fundamental question I shall give the answer to. In the presentation, I’m referring to the field observations made in Northern Sudan in a village of ed Ghaddar in 2013.

In the article I consider contemporary social and political protests from the perspective of anthropology of sound and/or sound studies. I do not focus on any series of specific protests or any single demonstration. I refer to these phenomena in a global perspective rather due to the universal specifics of their sound dimension. The soundness of contemporary protests is more than a matter of noisiness and in my opinion it undergoes significant global changes which can be link with changes in the technology of protesting. What I propose it is the anthropological reflection that goes beyond regular interpretations of protests, resistance or demonstrations. 

The article is the presentation of selected concepts in the field of anthropology of sound, ethnomusicology, acoustic ecology, cultural poetics and theory of voice. Also I examine such categories as noise, voice, democratic soundscape, protest song, human microphone, wave of emotions, sophrosyne or social physics.