Future events

The 15th Conference of the SIEF Ritual Year Working Group: Food, Feasts, Festivities, & Folklore

The 15th Conference of the Société Internationale d´Ethnologie et de Folklore (SIEF) Ritual Year Working Group (RYWG) will be held at the University of the Philippines in Diliman, Quezon City, the Philippines from December 11-13, 2024. The RYWG was established in 2004 at the 8th Société Internationale d’Ethnologue et de Folklore Congress and aims to investigate and surface the intricate connections between the life cycle and the year cycle.

For its 15th Conference, RYWG partners with the Folklore Studies Program of the College of Social Sciences & Philosophy of the University of the Philippines Diliman.

The theme for the 15th SIEF Ritual Year Working Group Conference revolves around the importance and meaning of food. The conference aims to highlight the centrality of gustatory experiences and gastronomical practices in various ethnolinguistic groups around the world. Papers that relate to food production, food preparation, food consumption, and their connection to feasts, festivities, folklore, taboos, rituals, deities, legends, magic, homeopathy, heritage, and religion, among other things are welcome at the conference. The target date of the conference is on December 11-13, 2024. The conference will be composed of paper presentations, exhibits of heritage food items, demonstrations, and kwentuhan with food culture bearers.

Call for Abstracts
We invite scholars, researchers, educators, students, and other interested parties to submit an abstract for the conference. Considerations are open to topics that revolve around the theme, “Food, Feasts, Festivities, & Folklore,” under (but not limited to) the following domains: anthropology & human society studies, folklore & cultural studies, indigenous foodways, and tourism & heritage studies. As the theme for the 15th SIEF Ritual Year Working Group Conference aims to highlight the meanings ascribed and values attributed to food, the conference welcomes presentations and panel proposals that relate to food production, food preparation, food consumption, and their connections to feasts, festivities, folklore, taboos, rituals, deities, legends, magic, homeopathy, heritage, religion, and other related fields.

Submission Instructions

• Abstracts should be submitted in English
• Should not exceed 300 words (excluding the title and list of references)
• The name of the author/s must not appear on the abstract
• Include 3-5 keywords
• A maximum of 3 abstracts may be submitted per person, whether as a sole author or co-author

 

Past events

The Ritual Year WG Seasonal Webinars, see here for the past webinars.

Working Group conferences:

1-4 June 2022 | Fourteenth Conference of the Ritual Year SIEF Working Group "Commerce and Traditions". National Library of Latvia, Riga.

7-9 November 2018 | Thirteenth Conference of the Ritual Year SIEF Working Group “City Rituals”. Institute of Sociology, Romanian Academy. Bucharest, Romania.

8-12 January 2016 | Twelfth annual conference of the SIEF working group on the ritual year“Regulating customs”. Elphinstone Institute, University of Aberdeen. Findhorn, Scotland, UK

4–7 June 2015 | Eleventh Annual Conference of the SIEF Working Group on the Ritual Year“Traditions and Transformation”. Kazan (Volga Region) Federal University. Kazan, Russia.

25-28 September 2014 | Tenth Annual Conference of the SIEF Working Group on the Ritual Year“Magic in Rituals and Rituals in Magic”. Institute for History and European Ethnology of the University of Innsbruck. Innsbruck, Austria.

14-16 March 2013 | Ninth International Conference of the SIEF Working Group on the Ritual Year “Politics, Feasts, Festivals”. Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Szeged, the Bálint Sándor Institute for the Study of Religion. Szeged, Hungary. Programme

26–29 June 2012 | Eighth International Conference of the SIEF Working Group on the Ritual Year “Migrations”. The Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Studies with Ethnographic Museum (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences) & Paisii Hilendarski University of Plovdiv. Plovdiv, Bulgaria.

10–13 November 2011 | Seventh International Conference of the SIEF Working Group on the Ritual Year “Researchers, Performance, Researcher. Co-Designing Heritage, Co-Designing Performance”. Institute of Slovenian Ethnology SRC SASA Ljubljana, Slovenia. Programme

4–7 June 2010 | Sixth International Conference of the SIEF Working Group on the Ritual Year “The Inner and the Outer”, Estonian Literary Museum, Folklore Archive, Tallinn, Estonia.

2–6 July 2009 | Fifth International Conference of the SIEF Working Group on the Ritual Year “The Power of the Mask”, Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania.

22–26 June 2008 | Fourth International Conference of the SIEF Working Group on the Ritual Year “Ritual Year and Gender”. Folklore and Ethnology Department, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland.

25–29 May 2007 | Third International Conference of the SIEF Working Group on the Ritual Year “Ritual Year and History”. Narodni ustav lidove kultury, Strážnice, Czech Republic.

7–11 June 2006 | Second Conference of the SIEF Working Group on The Ritual Year “The Ritual Year and Ritual Diversity”. Institute for Dialectology, Onomastics and Folklore Research. Gothenburg, Sweden.

20–24 March 2005 | First International Conference of the SIEF Working Group on the Ritual Year in Association with the Department of Maltese University of Malta, Junior College Msida, Malta.

The inaugural meeting, Edinburgh 2004.

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Panels at SIEF congresses:

Panel at SIEF2019 14th Congress, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, 14-17 April 2019
Tracking the ritual year on the move in different cultural settings and systems of values; convenors Irina Sedakova and Laurent Fournier

The Ritual Year Working Group panels “Statics vs. Dynamics, Nature vs. Culture in the Dwelling-Connected Practices of the Ritual Year” and “Dwelling in the festive city” at the 13th Congress of the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF) “Ways of Dwelling: Crisis – Craft – Creativity”. 26–30 March 2017. Göttingen, Germany.

The Ritual Year Working Group panels “The transformation of traditional rituals: imposed change or natural evolution?” and “Folk costume in the ritual year and beyond: heritage, identity marker & symbolic object” at the 12th Congress of the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF) “Utopias, Realities, Heritages. Ethnographies for the 21st century”.  21-25 June 2015. Zagreb, Croatia.

The Ritual Year Working Group panel “Differentiation of the ritual year(s) through time and space: selectivity and its reasons” at the 11th Congress of the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF) “Circulation”. 30 June - 4 July 2013. Tartu, Estonia.

The Ritual Year Working Group panels “Ritual places through the ritual year (1)” and “Ritual places through the ritual year (2)” at the 10the Congress of the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF) “People Make Places – ways of feeling the world". 17-21 April 2011. Lisbon, Portugal.

The Ritual Year Working Group panel “The Ritual Year and Folk Religion” (1) and “The Ritual Year and Folk Religion” (2) and “Masks and Mumming in the Nordic Area” at the 9th Congress of the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF) “Liberating the Ethnological Imagination”. 16-20 June 2008. Derry / Londonderry. UK.