Ethnologia Europaea

The current issue of Ethnologia Europaea, volume 55, no. 1, features three articles, an ethnographic snapshot and two in memoriam appreciations. It is not a special issue, but readers will quickly identify the strong Nordic content within these pages. Thematically, some readers might feel that hybridity is equally back in the centre ring as a significant conceptual harmoniser.

This article scrutinises how hope becomes expressed and felt in the online encounters of researchers in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) in Finnish universities. Universities are currently driven by a neoliberal ideology that promotes competitiveness, individualism and economies of scale. Academic work is audited in a way that makes academics work more and yet feel unfit for academia. What kinds of changes are scholars hoping for in the current climate of Higher Education, and is hope a way to achieve change? This article shows that hope in academia is attached to sense of community and to broadening the image of the ideal researcher. Hope is in small, good deeds, in accepting mediocrity and all kinds of emotions and in challenging the neoliberal idea of winners and losers. The change is possible, and this article is written for all of us to continue a collective resistance towards the corporate influence upon scholarship.

What is it like to visit the inside of a nuclear power plant? Based on autoethnographic observations at nuclear facilities in seven countries, this article suggests that we as visitors are subject to two parallel rituals: a meta-ritual of security, and a main ritual of performing the nuclear facility as safe. This is done, first, by designating the visitor as unknowing, second, by showcasing the nuclear facility as over-secured, and third, by creating relational trust in the plant staff's expertise. Given the high numbers of visitors to nuclear facilities worldwide and over decades, these visits are not a neutral activity but an arena where persuasive emotional registers are employed to affect individuals and, by extension, influence broader societal formations of nuclear politics.

The Finnish Music Museum Fame (Musiikkimuseo Fame) was a private for-profit music museum in Helsinki, which opened in 2019 and outsourced some of its collection services from the Finnish National Museum. As a result of this collaboration, the National Museum founded a music collection. In this article, I use the concept of hybridisation and qualitative content analysis to examine the practices of this collaboration, presented in nine key informant interviews and document material, including the collections policies of the music collection and Musiikkimuseo Fame. The aim is to evaluate how the collection practices were formed during the public–private collaboration and to show how the collaboration influenced the museal value of the collection as well as the organisational image of both organisations involved. The analysis shows that the benefits of this collaboration go beyond financial interests.

In this snapshot of moonlight farming in Scania, the southernmost province of Sweden, we reflect on moonlighting as a preservation strategy – a particular form of rural life different from the processes of agricultural upscaling and the rhythms and values of large-scale farming. Our immersion in the lives of three moonlight farmers tells a story of resistance, preservation and sense-scapes – a stark contrast to the prevailing economic explanations of moonlight farming as a way to make ends meet.

Remembering Thomas Hylland Eriksen: A Legacy of Intellectual Curiosity

Thomas Hylland Eriksen was a renowned social anthropologist and a formidable public intellectual in Norway and beyond, but above all, he was, he is and he will always remain a very dear friend.

Professor Signe Howell passed away on 25 January, leaving a virtually unfillable void at the University of Oslo's Department of Social Anthropology, where she had been working since 1987. She joined us from the University of Edinburgh, coming as a welcome breath of fresh air with her combination of erudition, theoretical sophistication and a remarkable fascination with all things human. The latter trait had followed her since her childhood in the south of Norway through multiple life-changing events, including widespread travelling and a longer stint with the London experimental street art and performance group The Theatre of Mistakes in the 1960s.