Sabira Ståhlberg

Independent Scholar

Background Folk biology commonly contains knowledge of many more taxa than those of immediate economic importance. Species with little or no practical use are, however, often overlooked by ethnobiological research. An example are a few Myxomycetes taxa which played an important role in the folk biology and beliefs of pre-industrial Sweden and adjac...

Black elder, Sambucus nigra, is a non-native but now partly naturalized shrub in Sweden; it has been cultivated here at least since the Middle Ages. Previously, this plant was associated with a supernatural being to whom sacrifices were made, and its fruits were used in folk medicine and wood for fuel and crafts. Traditional economic uses vanished...

Background A few Myxomycetes taxa played an important role in the folk biology of pre-industrial Sweden and adjacent Nordic countries (Denmark, Norway, Finland) in northern Europe. Folk biology commonly contains knowledge of far more taxa than those of immediate economic importance. The species of little or no practical use are often overlooked by...

From walks on a beach littered with residue of human activities to disappearing biodiversity in deserts, this artistic-scientific contribution containing polyglot poetry and discussion in multiple languages decodes and deconstructs the Anthropocene both in time and space.

Most fisher-gatherer communities we know of utilized a limited number of natural resources for their livelihood. The Turkic-speaking Loptuq (exonym Loplik, Loplyk) in the Lower Tarim River basin, Taklamakan desert, East- ern Turkestan (Xinjiang), were no exception. Their habitat, the Lop Nor marsh and lake area, was surrounded by desert and very po...

The peasant diet during the Little Ice Age in Sweden was mainly grain-based (bread, gruel, and porridge), and the country was heavily dependent on grain imports to meet the population's needs for food. During the eighteenth century in particular, when famines were frequent following failed harvests, Swedish peasants utilized a range of locally avai...

Finland Tatar language documentation and linguistic analysis of written article by Sadri Hamid from 1969 with two different readings.

A small bone was found in 2003 during archaeological excavations near Old Uppsala church in Uppland province, central Sweden. It was identified as a quadrate, part of the lower jaw of a Little Owl, Athene noctua (Scopoli, 1769). This unexpected find was dated back to the Pre-Roman Iron Age, and it is globally the northernmost documented occurrence...

Creative multilingual contribution about languages and empires: A polyglot poem about languages, our ancestors, empires, multilingualism and multiculturalism: Balalar of imperier - Children of Empires is a creative contribution with more than 40 languages and language variations. This multilingual creative contribution in poetic form uses an innova...

Artistic and scientific reflection about ancient and modern languages and writing systems in Eurasia.

One of the most famous Swedish-language poets, Edith Sodergran (1892-1923), was also one of the most multilingual writers in Northern Europe. She had knowledge of at least seven languages and wrote in five, yet published only in Swedish. Sodergran’s childhood in multilingual Saint Petersburg, her education in the German-language school St. Petrisch...

Wild edible plants, particularly berries, are relevant nutritional elements in the Nordic countries. In contrast to decreasing global trends, approximately 60% of the Finnish population is actively involved in (berry) foraging. We conducted 67 interviews with Finns and Karelians living in Finnish Karelia to: (a) detect the use of wild edible plants...

Multilingual creative writing is a topic which at the first glance looks simple and clear: it means writing fiction or poetry in more than one language. Looking closer at multilengual kreativ riting, however, it is not that easy to define. Multilingual writers produce very different kinds of texts in very diverse ways and with various combinations...

Gathering intelligence is a delicate task: it brings the agent or spy into close contact with local peoples. The agent is exposed to cultures and languages while forming friendships and alliances. These in turn create emotional bonds. A captivating example of such a struggle is the narrative of Otto von Essen (1805– 60) from the Grand Duchy of Finl...

Review of Christian Mauder: In the Sultan’s Salon. Learning, Religion, and Rulership at the Mamluk Court of Qāniṣawh al-Ghawrī (r. 1501–1516). (Islamic History and Civilization. Studies and texts volume 169/1). Leiden: Brill 2021. 2 volumes. ISSN 0929-2403; ISBN 978-90-04-43576-6 (hardback, set); ISBN 978-90-04-47100-9 (hardback, vol. 1); ISBN 978...

The book is available as PDF here: https://aybagar.eu/visible-and-invisible-tatar-women-in-finland/ - - - Mishär Tatar traders migrated to Finland over 150 years ago. Soon they brought also their families from the home villages. Traditionally, women took care of family and home, but many were educated and some created companies of their own. Severa...

Human interest in certain plants can vary considerably over time. At the end of the twentieth century, the orange-yellow fruits of sea buckthorn, Hippophae rhamnoides Linnaeus, became a trendy addition to the diet in some Nordic countries, especially in Sweden and Finland. The soft and juicy fruits are very rich in vitamin B12, C and E, and this fa...

Introduction Modern sports equipment is nowadays manufactured industrially according to globally accepted and standardized models, but traditionally tools for play and games were prepared from materials found in the local environment. The objective of this article is to investigate various aspects of Sámi local knowledge about organisms used for th...

Artikel i Dragomanen 2021: Fredrik Hasselquist (1722–1752) var en av flera begåvade Uppsalastudenter som läromästaren Linné sände ut från Sverige i vetenskapligt syfte. Hasselquists uppgift var att kartlägga, beskriva och namnge hela världens växt- och djurarter, men också att notera geologisk, hydrologisk, geografisk, etnografisk, demografisk och...

A Barbary lion lived in the University of Uppsala Botanical Garden, administered by Carl Peter Thunberg, at the beginning of the 1800s. Barbary lions are now extinct. “Thunberg’s” lion was stuffed and is today found in the Museum of Evolution collections in Uppsala.

The 13th volume of The Romanian Journal for Baltic and Nordic Studies reflects some of the research presented at the 12th International conference on Baltic and Nordic studies titled "Rethinking multiculturalism, multilingualism, and cultural diplomacy in Scandinavia and The Baltic Sea Region," which will be held on May 27-28, 2021, under the auspi...

European dewberry, Rubus caesius L. (fam. Rosaceae), played an insignificant role as local food in Sweden before the twentieth century. It is known as salmbär 'Solomon berries' in the severely endangered regional language Gutnish, spoken in the Baltic Sea islands Gotland and Fårö. From a largely ignored food product with limited regional use, Euro-...

The southern Siberian Turkic groups were mostly unknown to outsiders when the Swedish scientist Johan Peter Falck (1732–1774) visited their settlements in the early 1770s. Falck led one of the expeditions dispatched between 1768 and 1774 by the Russian Academy of Sciences to different parts of the Russian Empire. As a botanist, zoologist, ethnograp...

International traveller and acclaimed Swedish-language author Göran Schildt sailed in the Black Sea in the summer of 1963. He was a well-read scholar with a deep interest in the Antiquity and a seasoned traveller with a vast experience of multilingual and multicultural situations. This was the first and last visit of his yacht Daphne to the Black S...

To discover the essential differences in cultural and linguistic patterns of a certain society, we need to look no further than to the most common relations of all – those between family members. When studying, working and living in, or for instance marrying into another culture, we must not only learn, but also acquire and utilise a whole new set...

This special thematic issue of the Journal of Endangered Languages presents Tatar language preservation strategies and innovative practices from the Baltic Sea region to Australia, and it also includes new projects involving Noghay, Karaim and Karachay-Balkar. More than a dozen articles explore and describe different approaches to the languages fro...

The Tatar community in Finland has for more than a century organised regular activities and education in Tatar language. These activities support and encourage the Tatar speakers from early childhood to old age to learn, use and transmit their language. Today the Islamic congregations in Helsinki and Tampere and the cultural and sports associations...

The use of Easy Language and Easy to Read books is growing in several countries. In some states there are already laws aiming at making information and culture available for all through Easy Language. Easy to Read texts also support the inclusion of minorities, migrants and multilinguals, less skilled or unfamiliar readers and people with dyslexia...

Haiku is originally a Japanese short form of poetry with three lines and seventeen syllables. It is a momentary poem containing nature allusions or depictions of the environment, impressions and emotions and also an element of insight or surprise. In recent years, Tatar language haiku poetry has become an integral part of multilingual haiku activit...

This article introduces different types of presently available internet resources and online possibilities which can be helpful for minority and endangered languages and support their maintenance, survival, transmission and revitalisation. Furthermore, the author argues that everyone can acquire at least some technical skills and adapt Information...

Active citizen diplomacy and cultural connections between the Nordic countries and the Balkans date their beginnings to the eighteenth century. The contacts between ordinary people in Finland and Bulgaria, Sweden and Serbia are a little researched but important aspect of the common history of Europe, created not by states or officials, but by indiv...

A postcard, showing a parakeet in Uppsala from 1750, is a watercolour pencil drawing by Otto Fredric Richman. The article discusses the painting and exotic birds, especially parakeets, in Sweden and Europe since the 1500s.

The second issue of volume 12 of The Romanian Journal for Baltic and Nordic Studies continues to reflect the academic discussions occasioned by the Eleventh Conference on Baltic and Nordic Studies of May 2020. Prof. Radu Carp was one of the keynote speakers of the conference and his address on Combining soft power with the geopolitical approach - h...

Linnean disciple Frederick Hasselquist's journey to the Ottoman Empire around 170. The richly illustrated essays in Turcologica Upsaliensia tell the stories of scholars, travellers, diplomats and collectors who made discoveries in the Turkic-speaking world while affiliated with Sweden’s oldest university, at Uppsala.

Hippophagy is still unthinkable in many European countries, but in the Mishär Tatar culinary tradition, horsemeat products play an important role. Part of the Mishär Tatars, originally from Nizhny Novgorod province (Russia), migrated to the eastern Baltic Sea region in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. They continued to slaughter horses a...

Toponyms and hydronyms encode important information about human perceptions of the environment in a specific context. This article discusses the Loptuq, a group of Turkic-speakers, who until the 1950s lived as fishers-foragers at the Lower Tarim River, Eastern Turkestan (contemporary Xinjiang, China), and their use of common reed (Phragmites austra...

Review of Danielle Ross, Tatar Empire. Kazan’s Muslims and the Making of Imperial Russia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020. ISBN 978-0-253-04570-6 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-253-04571-3 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-253-04572-0 (E-book). 288 pages.

The Tatar diaspora in Finland has attracted researchers for over a century, but studies traditionally focus on topics such as origins and general Tatar history, religion, identity or language. One of the most important aspects of research on Tatars both historically and today, however, is the transnational context. Migrating from villages in Nizhny...

This interdisciplinary study discusses the vernacular phytonyms and other ethnobiological aspects of vegetation in the Loptuq (Loplik) habitat on the Lower Tarim River. This small Turkic-speaking group lived as fisher-foragers in the Lopnor (Lop Lake) area in East Turkestan, now the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China. Information about this...

This article is a review of the historical use of the wolf lichen, Letharia vulpina (L.) Hue, in the Scandinavian Peninsula. Although it is well known in the lichenological literature as a poision for killing wolves and foxes, few ethnographic data are available. However, thanks to Linnaeus's very brief description from 1755, based on data from Nor...

Bird-keeping as pest control, chiefly in Siberia and Central Asia. Volume edited by Ingvar Svanberg and Daniel Möller.

Foraging is regarded as the most ancient human way of living, but it is hardly believable that all contemporary groups identified as hunter-gatherers possess a continuous history as foragers. Cases of former foraging societies who have been forced into marginalized castes or become integrated into the majority population are widely known, yet only...

Sverige och Finland har en lång gemensam historia med Bulgarien. Från väringarna på medeltiden till dagens turister har det gått tusen år. Svenska och finländska diplomater, militärer och författare har rest i Bulgarien och beskrivit sina upplevelser. Här presenteras deras skildringar för första gången. Bland resenärerna finns riksrådet Claes Rålam...

Central Asian wildmen traditions can be divided into two main lines: Mongolia, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, which as well as Chinese Central Asia seem to belong to the same tradition. This line is close to Tibetan and Chinese wildmen beliefs. Tajikistan and the Pamir Mountains belong to another cultural area, which is connected to Iranian and Indian...

Tatar history and current situation in the Baltic Sea region. Full text in Baltic Rim Economies: https://sites.utu.fi/bre/wp-content/uploads/sites/227/2019/04/BRE_2_2017.pdf

This article discusses animals as royal gifts on the basis of an example of a polar bear Swedish King Karl XI received in 1685, which reflected the diplomatic changes in the Swedish-Russian relationship. Polar bears have been used as diplomatic gifts since Medieval times and wild animals in general much longer. Nowadays practices changed and more e...

I över tvåhundra år har finländare besökt Bulgarien och Rumänien. Bland dem finns många kända personer, som Finska Gardets officerare och soldater eller C.G. Mannerheim. Andra är mindre kända eller bortglömda, som Otto von Essen och Claes Rålamb. Boken beskriver deras resor och diskuterar deras upplevelser och observationer.

History of the Finnish Guard in the Balkans during the Russian-Ottoman war 1877-1878 (English, Swedish, Finnish and Bulgarian)

Finska Gardets befälhavare och Semjonovska regementets chef George Ramsay tillbringade ett år under rysk-osmanska kriget 1877–1878 på Balkan. Hans brev från fronten berättar om förhållandena officerarna levde i under kampanjen. Hustrun Lillys och barnens brev från Finland beskriver livet hemma och kvinnornas arbete för att stöda de närstående som v...

Tatars in Saint Petersburg. Series: Muslim Minorities, Volume: 20. Volume Editors: Ingvar Svanberg and David Westerlund In Muslim Tatar Minorities in the Baltic Sea Region, edited by Ingvar Svanberg and David Westerlund, the contributors introduce the history and contemporary situation of these little known groups of people that for centuries have...

Tatar diaspora in Sweden. Series: Muslim Minorities, Volume: 20. Volume Editors: Ingvar Svanberg and David Westerlund In Muslim Tatar Minorities in the Baltic Sea Region, edited by Ingvar Svanberg and David Westerlund, the contributors introduce the history and contemporary situation of these little known groups of people that for centuries have be...

The article discusses the presence of orangutans in European and Scandinavian captivity. An attempt to import an orangutan to Sweden by Claës Fredrik Hornstedt in 1785 failed – the ape died on the way from Java. Some zoos in Europe kept orangutans in the nineteenth century, but most of them were short-lived in captivity and only during the early tw...

År 1963 gjorde den kända finlandssvenska reseskildraren Göran Schildt en resa i Jasons och argonauternas fotspår. Färden gick till Svarta havet där segelbåten ”Daphne” och hennes besättning upptäckte antiken och nutiden vid ett okänt hav. Vuonna 1963 tunnettu suomenruotsalainen matkakirjailija Göran Schildt teki Mustanmeren matkan Iasonin ja argona...

Sweden has known Tatars since the 16th century, but Tatars immigrated from Finland and Estonia mainly in the second half of the 20th century. The Mishär Tatar group is very small, less than a hundred persons, but it took the initiative to form the first Muslim congregation in Sweden in 1949. Today the Tatars have integrated and there is not much ho...

Linnean disciple Johan Peter Falck's journeys from an ethnobiological perspective. Volume edited by Ingvar Svanberg and Łukasz Łuczaj.

Karl Emil Ståhlberg (1862–1919) var den nya tidens entreprenör i sekelskiftets Finland. Han anammade tidigt nymodigheter som fotografering, film, cyklar, bilar och introducerade dem med entusiasm i hemlandet. Han var själv en skicklig fotograf, men inom sitt företag Atelier Apollo engagerade han också andra nyskapande fotografer som I.K. Inha. Även...

Finlands tatarer - historia, bakgrund, invandring, ekonomi, språk och utbildning, kulturella aktiviteter, religion och traditioner samt utmaningar i modern tid. Full text hos Magma: https://magma.fi/tatarerna-finlands-osynliga-minoritet/

Wild animals, such as mammals, birds and reptiles, have been kept in houses and nomadic tents for various purposes throughout historical times. At the same time, domestic animals such as horses and cattle have roamed freely in the forests and steppes of Russia, Siberia and Central Asia. In the late eighteenth century, European travellers explored t...

Siberian dog’s tooth violet (Erythronium sibiricum􏰒) was utilised as food by several ethnic groups in southern Siberia in the eighteenth century. It was an important vegetable supplement for groups that subsisted on hunting and fishing. E. sibiricum was gathered especially during the spring, but also rodent burrows were plundered by humans during t...

Ide (Leuciscus idus (L.)) gathers in shallow bays in the Baltic archipelagos during warm summer days. Finnish, Estonian and Swedish islanders called this “basking” or “sunbathing.” The phenomenon was previously well known among fishermen, but it is very little researched. Local people caught the basking fish until some decades ago with special tech...

This historical study analyzes the little known practice of gathering food resources from rodent stores in Siberia, with comparative perspectives from northern Europe and North America. Until the 19th century, taking roots, tubers, corms, bulbs, seeds and nuts from rodent food stores was a widespread practice by several ethnic groups in Siberia to...

The Loplyks form a small ethnic group previously settled at the Lop Lake (Lop Nor) in the Tarim Basin. With an economy based on fishing, this semi-nomadic Turkic group adapted to the arid conditions and scarce biological resources at the fringe of the Taklamakan desert. In the late nineteenth century, foreign travellers observed that they could ful...

The campaign of the Finnish Guard is surrounded by several national myths in Finland and Bulgaria, most of them about the hardships the Finnish soldiers had to endure during the war 1877-1878 between the Russian and Ottoman Empires. This article discusses the narratives of the Finnish Guard soldiers, their sources for inspiration and the reality th...

This article tries to identify which species are included under the plant name sarana in northern Eurasia, and to some extent, in northern America. It discusses how the plants have been gathered and used, and the significance of sarana in the nutrition, traditions and economy of peoples in Eurasia and the Pacific area. The article is an ethnobiolog...

Chuvash history, background, language and culture

The process and consequences of salination in deserts in Central Asia

Geography, climate, history, languages, cultures, etc. of Gansu province

Historische Übersicht der verschiedenen mongolischen Schriften

The Gansu Corridor as a space where ethnic groups, cultures and languages met in historical times and presently.

Inhaltlich bezieht sich die Arbeit auf ein hochbrisantes und aktuelles Thema: Der Konflikt zwischen der „Ersten Welt“ und der „Dritten Welt“ am Beispiel Zentralasiens bzw. Chinas. Bisher ist das Thema nur auf die Politik und die Wirtschaft bezogen worden, dieses Buch leistet jedoch viel mehr. Ganz bewusst wurde die Arbeit auf den Gansu-Korridor, ei...