„Zoophilologica” 2/2026 – Call for Papers

Zoofolkloristics

under guest editorship of Mare Kõiva (Estonian Literary Museum), Tõnno Jonuks (Estonian Literary Museum) and Sergey Troitskiy (Estonian Literary Museum)

Folklore Studies have always been attentive to the importance of the animal in human cultures. During the last decades, there has been a novel development within the field (e.g. the works of Aleksander Gura, Irina Vinokurova, Tok Thompson, Marjetka Golež Kaučič, Teya Brooks Pribac and others), which resulted in the emergence of zoofolkloristics.

Zoofolkloristics is a set of traditional concepts and symbols reflected in language, folklore, beliefs, customs, folk art, etc., which form a complex of relevant characteristics of animals as special mythological characters and create a model of a more-or-less complete description of the animal kingdom, including human – non-human relations. In zoofolkloristics, animals are not subjects (as in the "animal turn" in folklore studies) or objects (as in zooanthropology), they are rather a form of human experience or a form of description of human experience.

The characteristic features of the animal in zoofolkloristics are manifested at different levels. At the linguistic level, this includes ordinary and taboo names, proper names, euphemisms and dysphemisms; at the morphological level, special characteristics and changes in appearance (of a whole body or part of it) as well as bodily attributes that show qualitative differences to animals of the group and indicate the special properties of a particular representative of the animal group; at the “social” level, the hierarchical status of the animal, its gender, breed, quantitative characteristics, ties and relationships with other creatures and objects, as well as the peculiarities of origin; at the level of activity, the characteristic actions of the animal, actions aimed at a certain object and their functional orientation, cooperation with other animals, the role of the animal as an object of reproduction, application and communication.

Other characteristics like acoustic and verbal expressions, some physical and psychic features, as well as ways of existing (movement, appearance, disappearance), locative and temporal characteristics are closely related to the characteristics that demonstrate the activity of an animal. Besides, rituals and other activities connected with animals are also an important aspect of the subject.

Such a set of features provides an opportunity to comprehensively build a complete picture of a given worldview, find out the zoological code of the cultural language, its deeper meaning and internal structure, and follow the vernacular religion.

In popular culture, each character of the animal kingdom corresponds to a certain invariant set of characteristics, which correlates with a specific set of features of a given animal character in each local tradition. Correspondingly, in each such separate tradition, the cultural language selects certain characteristics, attributes, predicates, etc., of the animal, endowing them with symbolic meaning, and excludes other characteristics from the framework of culture, not including them in the cultural context. In doing so, the same animal can produce different, often unrelated, symbolic meanings.

Recent decades demonstrate that the duty of zoofolkloristics is to react to the animal turn, climate change, and the challenges of sustainable development to help explain and reinterpret the history of human-animal relations. The perspective of zoofolkloristics can help address the following question: will  the trend of the 1970s continue, with its emphasis on animals as an inseparable part of culture (James Serpell, Boria Sax), or will the opposite trend come to prominence, one captured by Tim Ingold’s dichotomy: the human being belongs to culture and the animal belongs to nature?

We welcome contributions in all the above-mentioned areas. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to the following:

• Folk Studies and animals in material culture
• Folkoristics – animals – art – memes – caricatures
• Linguistic aspects of zoofolkloristics
• Animal myths and legends in folklore
• Etiologies
• Human – non-human relations in folklore
• Zoopoetical studies in folklore
• Zoosemiotic approaches to zoofolkloristics

Deadline for submitting articles for issue 2/2026: January 31, 2025.

Articles can be written in Polish, English or Russian, which shall not exceed 30,000 characters with spaces, should be entered into the OJS:

https://journals.us.edu.pl/index.php/ZOOPHILOLOGICA/about/submissions

Texts should be prepared in accordance with the editorial recommendations, which can be found on the “Zoophilologica” journal website under the link provided above.

Submitted texts must not have been previously published or submitted for publication elsewhere, either as a whole or in significant part.