Guest Editors:
Dr. Theresa Buckland (Emeritus Professor, University of Roehampton, London, Fellow of the British Academy, Great Britain).
Dr. habil. János Fügedi (Hungarian Dance University, Hungary).
Dr. habil. Sándor Varga (Szeged University, Hungary).
Dr. habil. Corina Iosif (National Museum of the Romanian Peasant, Romania).
Deadline for abstract submissions: 26th of February 2024.
Publication date: November 2025
The Museum of the Romanian Peasant is seeking contributions for its annual journal Martor 30/2025, on the topic of Bodies in Motion: Gesture, Movement, Dance in Cultural/Ethnic/Virtual Communities. Martor is a peer-reviewed academic journal, established in 1996, indexed by EBSCO, Index Copernicus, CEEOL, DOAJ, AIO, MLA International Bibliography, ERIHPLUS, SCOPUS, with a focus on cultural and visual anthropology, ethnology and museology.
In light of the global cultural impact of the 21st century, local inspiration, local knowledge, and cultural heritage are increasingly valued. People living together within globalisation and local cultural influences, in virtual and physical reality, are searching for answers to social and cultural questions that define their identity, both spiritual and physical. The undeniable positive effect of the Covid pandemic has been to reinforce cultural and artistic phenomena placed in online environments, while at the same time the demand for living, person-to-person, ‘offline’ encounters has increased significantly. In this respect, dance culture is considered a priority field. Traditional dances are significantly represented in the global and local cultural scene: traditional movements, gestures and dances associated with ethnic groups are circulated on the web and take on new meanings in new contexts. At the same time, traditional dance culture is also important in the construction and re-shaping of regional, local and national identities. In addition, dance can also be linked to our personal lives, social gender roles, political and power issues.
Approaches previously considered as typically cultural anthropological began to make their impact felt in “classical” circles of dance folklore in the 1980s. Alongside the earlier geographic-historical and the related structural approaches of European dance studies, the questions above have now become important fields of investigation for ethnochoreology.
In the Martor issue that we will edit, we intend to publish a diverse yet coherent body of knowledge related to traditional dance, which, at the same time, is able to respond to the social, cultural, and artistic issues of our time. However, we intend to preserve our specific scientific image, established by our predecessors and matured in the European scientific and social context: we also want to present our approach based on evidence from analysis of social context, functions, and dance movements. We hope that we will contribute to developing a sensitive scholarly approach to the problems of dance, which is capable of interpreting contemporary cultural processes without losing sight of historical explanations, and which draws its conclusions from analyses based on a thorough knowledge of the material. We want to make it possible for ethnochoreology with a focus on historical and formal issues and for the dynamically transforming dance anthropology to meet in a way that allows them to maintain their specific identities, to avoid falling into the traps of fashionable populism, while respecting precise scientific criteria, and to be able to provide important impulses for each other and other disciplines. Preference will be given to proposals that consider traditional dance practices in or from rural communities.
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Please follow the guidelines for authors of the Martor journal: http://martor.muzeultaranuluiroman.ro/for-authors/.
Martor is a journal where authors are encouraged to publish experimental ethnographic research and accompany their text with high standard visual material, thus, all contributors are encouraged to use ample images to accompany their texts.
We invite contributors to send an abstract (300 words) by Monday 26th of February 2024. Final texts will be submitted on 1st of November 2024. 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