المعتقدات الشعبية في ظل التغيرات الراهنة/ Folk Beliefs in the Context of Contemporary Transformations

The anthropological field in the Arab world is marked by a remarkable richness of folk beliefs, which constitute one of the earliest modes of human thought and represent initial attempts to interpret phenomena that eluded rational comprehension or control. In its formative stages, human knowledge emerged primarily from inquiries into the psychological, social, and sociocultural dimensions that contributed to the production of such beliefs, with their embedded meanings and symbolic structures within the social fabric. Within this framework, folk beliefs may be conceived as a complex and multilayered tapestry in which strata of history and mythology intersect. Mythical thought coexists with religious belief in a dynamic interplay that reflects the depth of human spiritual experience. These beliefs further function as manifestations of collective identity and as mirrors of enduring cultural representations, gradually becoming ingrained within the collective unconscious and serving as interpretive frameworks for the unfamiliar and the ambiguous. Arab travelers and translators have historically endeavored to document aspects of these phenomena in biographical works, historiographical writings, and travel literature. Nevertheless, contemporary academic research remains, to some extent, insufficient in capturing the full extent of this richness, as it continues to lack systematic documentation and objective analysis grounded in modern methodological approaches. From this perspective, the present call for papers seeks to address a range of critical issues related to folk beliefs in the Arab world through a rigorous and critical scholarly lens, aiming to interrogate their multiple dimensions and to reassess them in light of ongoing socio-cultural transformations.