Places
What a heritage listing does to a place
International recognition brings visitors, funding and constraints, and the effect on the people living inside the designated area is not consistently positive.
Anahera Wetere
33 articles by Wetere
Folklore
Lullabies are frequently not comforting
Songs sung to get children to sleep share musical features across the world and, in their words, cover subjects a great deal darker than the tune suggests.
Places
When one employer is the whole town
Settlements built around a single mine, mill or plant have a recognisable life cycle, and the ending is the part that has been studied least and experienced most.
Festivals & Ritual
The gift that has to be returned
Gift exchange looks generous and functions as an obligation system, and the anthropology of it explains a good deal of behaviour that otherwise seems irrational.
Folklore
Riddles: the oldest game with words
Riddling appears across an extraordinary range of societies, frequently in formal settings, and it does considerably more than entertain children.
Folklore
Weather lore: what the sayings actually predict
Traditional weather sayings range from reliable short-range indicators to complete nonsense, and the distinction is fairly easy to draw.
Places
Mountains that are not for climbing
A number of prominent peaks around the world are treated by the people who live beneath them as places where you do not go, and the resulting disputes with visitors have been long-running.
Festivals & Ritual
The obligations of a host
Hospitality customs across many societies impose duties on the host that are far more demanding than politeness, and the reasons are practical.
Festivals & Ritual
Fire festivals: the ones that survived everything
Communal fires at fixed points in the year persist in places where nearly every other traditional observance has lapsed, and the reasons appear to be practical as much as symbolic.
Places
Moving with the season: transhumance and the routes it wore into the land
Seasonal movement of livestock between lowland and upland pasture shaped landscapes, legal systems and settlement patterns across an enormous area, and it is disappearing quickly.
Folklore
Place names are the oldest documents in the landscape
Names attached to hills, rivers and fields frequently outlast the languages that produced them, and they preserve information about vegetation, ownership and events that no record survives for.
Festivals & Ritual
Music that is not for listening to
A great deal of the world’s music exists to accompany work, ritual or dance, and treating it as concert material misses what it is doing.
Folklore
The wise fool: the character who is right for the wrong reasons
A figure who appears foolish and turns out to have made a point runs through folk traditions across a very wide area, and the stories are frequently sharper than they look.
Places
Passes: the few places you can get through a mountain range
A mountain range is a wall with a small number of doors, and everything — trade, armies, languages, disease — has had to go through them.
Festivals & Ritual
Weddings: the negotiation, the display and the transfer
Wedding ceremonies across the world contain the same handful of elements because they are solving the same handful of problems, most of which are about property and kinship rather than romance.
Places
Border towns: places that exist because of a line
A frontier creates its own economy, its own vocabulary and its own kind of settlement, and moving the line rarely removes what grew along it.
Festivals & Ritual
The mask is not a disguise
In masquerade traditions across the world, the masked figure is generally not understood as a person pretending. Something else is present, and the distinction matters.
Festivals & Ritual
Walking somewhere on purpose: what pilgrimage does
Journeys undertaken as an end in themselves appear in most religious traditions, and the routes have shaped economies, languages and landscapes along their length.
Places
Delta cities: built on ground that is still arriving
A large share of the world’s biggest cities sit on river deltas, which are the most fertile, most connected and least stable ground available.
Places
Where water decides everything: settlement in dry country
Desert towns exist where the water is, and the engineering that brought water to them is among the most sophisticated infrastructure any pre-industrial society built.
Festivals & Ritual
Days for the dead: how communities keep the calendar with them
Annual observances for the dead exist in most societies, and they cluster in the same parts of the year for reasons that are partly agricultural and partly about what a community needs.
Folklore
People who become animals: transformation stories and what they carry
Seal-wives, bear-husbands, fox-spirits and shape-changers appear across unconnected traditions, and the stories are usually about the boundary between the household and everything outside it.
Folklore
The otherworld had an address, and it was usually the field you did not plough
Beliefs about places belonging to something other than people had a consistent effect: certain ground was left alone, sometimes for centuries.
Places
Islands make different rules
Isolation does specific things to language, biology and social organisation, and island communities across the world have arrived at similar solutions to similar constraints.
Festivals & Ritual
Coming of age: the rituals that make an adult
Initiation ceremonies share a structure that a Belgian anthropologist described a century ago, and the structure turns out to hold across an enormous range of societies.
Folklore
Haunted geography: why ghost stories attach to specific places
The distribution of ghost stories across a landscape is not random. They cluster on boundaries, crossings, and places where something happened that a community needed to keep talking about.
Places
The weekly market and the town it built
A great many towns exist because someone was granted the right to hold a market there, and the physical shape of those places still shows it.
Festivals & Ritual
Carnival: the season when the rules are formally suspended
Inversion festivals — where servants command, fools are crowned and authority is mocked — appear across many societies, and the arguments about what they are for have run for a century.
Folklore
Changeling stories and what they were really about
Tales of a child swapped for something else appear across northern Europe and beyond. Reading them as explanations rather than as fantasy makes them considerably darker and more useful.
Folklore
The trickster: the figure who turns up everywhere and breaks the rules
Spider, coyote, hare, raven, fox, a wandering fool. Traditions with no contact produced characters who share a job, and the job tells you something about what stories are for.
Folklore
The flood story is everywhere, and the reasons are not what you think
Deluge narratives appear on every inhabited continent. Explaining that requires being careful about what counts as the same story.
Places
Why old towns are built high, and what happens when the reason goes
Hilltop settlements across the Mediterranean, the Andes and the Himalaya share a logic that stopped applying about two centuries ago. The buildings did not move.
Festivals & Ritual
Why harvest festivals cluster, and what they were actually for
Across unrelated cultures, the biggest celebrations of the year fall at roughly the same agricultural moments. The reasons are practical before they are spiritual.