The Werewolf as a Religious and Ethnic Other in a Herzegovinian Legend

Abstract

The paper focuses on a particular legend about a wrestling match between a human and a dead werewolf, which I recorded during my fieldwork in the Croat (i.e. Catholic) community in Herzegovina in 2017. Based on the analysis of a legend about a wrestling match between a human of Catholic faith and a Muslim werewolf, I aim to show how latent inter-ethnic and inter-religious tensions in multi-ethnic and multi-religious Bosnia and Herzegovina are reflected in this legend about the restless dead. I pay particular attention to how the ethnic and religious Other is constructed in the legend, and demonstrate the prejudices against the religious and ethnic Others that are reflected in it. I argue that its main function was, and still is, first and foremost to emphasise the superiority of the narrator's religion, i.e. Catholicism, over Islam, and to serve as a warning to Catholics against abandoning their faith and converting to another religion.

Therianthropes in a Cartesian and an Animistic Cosmology: Beyond-the-Pale Monsters versus Being-in-the World Others

“…Its roots are in ancient Greece and subsequent intellectual, religious and scientific developments led to its anthropocentric crystallization in the Enlightenment, especially through some of the writings of René Descartes, one of the founders of the Age of Reason and arguably that age's most influential spiritus rector. While not unopposed by contrarian "theriophilic" (Preece 2005: 233-70) views from philosophical, literary and theo-MATHIAS GUENTHER ---------Therianthropes in a Cartesian and an Animistic Cosmology logical quarters 1 -and without impact on the popular imagination throughout the ages in different regions of Europe that retained animistic and shamanistic elements from the hoary pagan past (Ginzburg, Lincoln 2020;Mencej 2019) -"Cartesianism" fueled Western scholarly thought during the four subsequent centuries. Throughout these centuries of burgeoning Modernism, this ontological and epistemological worldview, notes Descola (2013: 87), "played a directive role in the organization of the sciences", implanting itself, with deep roots and pervasive rhizomes, within Western cosmology.…”