25 March 2021

The Museum of the Romanian Peasant is seeking contributions for its annual journal MARTOR 27/2022, on the topic of “From Transcribing Orality to Oral Practices of Writing. Rural and Popular Cultures in the Digital Era”. MARTOR is a peer-reviewed academic journal, established in 1996, indexed by EBSCO, Index Copernicus, CEEOL, AIO, MLA International Bibliography, with a focus on cultural and visual anthropology, ethnology and museology.

The special issue to appear in 2022 aims to include texts that propose an investigation of the complex relationship between the written and the oral in the production of meaning that defines “traditions,” community and group relations, in different contexts of change (post-communism, post-colonialism, migration, the use of new hypermedia, storytelling etc.); texts that approaches the new ways orality is found in contemporary societies; but also texts that, responding to the call of ethnologist M. Mesnil, open avenues for methodological discussions in ethnological research regarding the phenomenon of orality in contemporary societies, dominated by history and written texts.

Guest Editors:

Dr. Anamaria Iuga (National Museum of the Romanian Peasant, Romania)
Dr. Krassimira Krastanova (Professor, “Paissi Hilendarski” – University of Plovdiv, Bulgaria)
Dr. Frosa Pejoska-Bouchereau (Professeur des Universités Langue, littérature et civilisation macédoniennes; Director of Doctoral School of INALCO, France)

Deadline for abstract submissions: 2nd of April 2021

Publication date: November 2022

Contributors are invited to send an abstract (300 words) by Friday 2^nd of April 2021. The selected articles will need to be submitted by Monday 1^st of November 2021. Submissions will be in either in English or French.

Proposals, manuscripts, and other editorial correspondence should be sent to the following e-mail: revistamartor@gmail.com

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The discussion about orality and writing, today, inevitably takes two distinct turns: (1) one related to the orality of peasant cultures; and (2) one that emerges from the recent cultural practices of modernity, practices that combine media and the widespread use of information technology, which leads, inescapably, to the transfer of certain important areas of social life into the virtual realm. Thus, both forms of hypothesizing about the junctures between oral cultures and their written expression determine certain unavoidable methodological perspectives in re-evaluating the (dynamic and ever changing) relationship between orality and writing, in the (re)production of culture we continue to call “traditional,” and in the configuration of various local or group cultures that are mediated virtually. It is a seemingly eclectic discussion but for this very reason it offers a range of possible approaches.

Read more: Call for Papers | Martor Journal (muzeultaranuluiroman.ro)