The Concept of Family in Traditional Narratives of Tale Type ATU 1343* “The Children Play at Hog-Killing”

The article is devoted to the study of the problem of verbal representation of the real experience of family tragedies in the cultural baggage of European oral and handwritten traditions, which is becoming particularly relevant in modern conditions of the growth of information flows, a change in communicative paradigms and the transformation of social roles and value hierarchies. The object of study is the popular tales of the plot ATU 1343* “The Children Play at Hog-Killing”, considered in terms of motive structure, genesis, as well as genre forms of its implementation (rumor, short story, ballad, life of the saint, novel, urban legend). The study shows that for the traditional minds the depiction of bloody details and the elaboration of an atmosphere of horror aims not to entertain the audience, but to form a collective psychological response to such a powerful existential challenge as a bloody family tragedy. In turn, for a researcher folk narratives about fatal events breaking the structure of everyday life is a way to get out the traditional point of view on the subject and at the same time is a chance to give a correct typological scale and historical perspective for these acutely relevant and socially significant narratives.

The manipulations of time: On the temporal embeddedness of urban insecurity

Turning the table on Henri Lefebvre’s argument that the structure of everyday life is closely associated with the non-accumulative routing of cyclical or immanent time whereas it lags behind the forward-moving linear or transcendent time, I argue that cyclical and linear time are in fact intertwined in lived reality and popular imagination. This suggests that the ebb and flow of time cannot be grasped in rigidly binary terms such as the opposition of cyclical and linear time. Interrogating popular arts like the entextualised slogans painted on the mobile bodies of commercial minibus-taxis ( danfos) and tricycles ( keke napeps) in Nigeria’s – and in fact, sub-Saharan Africa’s – most populous city, I argue that the interaction of these seemingly conflicting representations of time affects and ultimately shapes the grounds of our meaning(lessness), (in)security and being-in-the-city. At these interfaces and interstices of conflicting notions of time, and in the interchange between familiar and unfamiliar termini, a powerful sense of unknown (or future) time can emerge, which in turn reinforces the need for a more experimental re-positioning and re-orientation in everyday urban life.

City as Lens

In recent years, a paradox has emerged in the study of youth. On the one hand, in the context of the processes of globalization, neoliberalism and precarity, the patterning of leisure and work for young people is becoming increasingly convergent across time and space. On the other hand, it is clear that young people’s habits and dispositions remain deeply tied to local places, with global processes filtered and refracted through specific cultural contexts. Against this backdrop, drawing on an Economic and Social Research Council/Research Grants Council (ESRC/RGC)-funded study of contemporary youth in Glasgow and Hong Kong, this article seeks to explore the role of the city as a mediating lens between global forces and local impacts. Utilizing both historical and contemporary data, the article argues that despite parallels in the impact of global forces on the structure of everyday life and work, young people’s leisure habits remain rooted in the fates and fortunes of their respective cities.