Ethnologia Europaea

Construction and Consumption of the Past

Das gesteigerte Interesse am Menschen, das die Epoche der Aufklärung auszeichnete, drückte sich in der Geographie des 18. Jahrhunderts auf zwei verschiedene Weisen aus. Einmal gab es erste Ansätze zur Erklärung der offensichtlichen Unterschiede zwischen Völkern, zum anderen ist eine inhaltliche Ausrichtung dieser Wissenschaft auf Zwecke der spätabsolutistischen Bürokratie hin zu bemerken. Diese Dualität der Gesichtspunkte hatte in Deutschland eine Dualitãt der Wissenschaftsbezeichnungen zur Folge; aus der Geographie entstanden im 18. Jahrhundert zwei Teilwissenschaften, die sich beide mit den »Leuten« befaßten: Ethnographie und Statistik. In diesem Aufsatz wird die inhaltliche Identität beider Teilbereiche nachgewiesen und daher im weiteren nur die historische Entwicklung der Ethnographie verfolgt. Ausgehend von dem Versuch Montesquieus, die Unterschiede staatlicher Verfassungen durch das jeweilige Klima zu erklären, werden die darauf folgenden Theorien über die Abhängigkeit menschlicher Kultur von der lokalen Natur am Beispiel des »Nationalcharakters« entwickelt, der - in seiner Unterschiedlichkeit der Hauptgegenstand der Ethnographie - von Kant und Herder im 18. wie von Ritter und Riehl im 19. Jahrhundert als Produkt von Natureinflüssen angesehen wurde. An den Veröffentlichungen W. H. Riehls schließlich läßt sich die inhaltlich geringfügige, aber terminologisch bedeutsame Transformation der Ethnographie in »Volkskunde« nachzeichnen.

A manual of magical incantations, which first appeared in Germany nearly 200 years ago, has played an essential role in a tradition of witchcraft belief among Franconian peasants. The use of the grimoire is still wide-spread in Germany today, though its publication was legally disputed in the 1950s. It has even reached the United States, where it is increasingly used in voodoo-like practices.

In the recent past so called 'regional experts' described the inhabitants of Salland, a district in the eastern parts of the Netherlands, as conservative and suspicious. In this article this mentality of Sallanders is discussed in relationship with changing power balances in a community of farmer-tenants. With the replacement of various traditional divisions within the local community old characteristics were replaced by a new outlook on life. By making a connection between mentality and power balances via the process of socialization it becomes clear that the static conclusion of the regional experts can only perform a heuristic function and that the term mentality should be used as a dynamic concept.

Films around the Clock

The rites described here are urban ceremonies in which central importance is assigned to a type of symbols that is characteristic of northern France, i.e. processional giant effigies. These events help to reinstate local collective entity: besides the celebrations are closely linked to municipal authority and to the elite whose relationships they recall and consolidate. In their performance, they emerge as a type of serious parody of the civil ceremonies involved in the life cycle - christenings, marriages and funerals. The importance assigned to the city hall as a republican space, one that is symbolically very marked in the consciousness of the French people should be noted in this context. This reference to the realm of vital records (birth-, marriage and death certificates), which clearly expresses the union between the celebration and the institutions, confers prime importance upon the social actors, in charge of the effigies, as they are often closely connected to the local political power. In addition, the various ritual features (delivering of speeches, signing of certificates, choosing of godparents) reveal the complex pattern of hierarchies within the municipal team.

During the past twenty-five years the courtship period in Maltese villages has lengthened and the engagement and wedding festivities have grown in scale and been gentrified. This ritual escalation seems to form part of a general increase in similar events in Western Europe.

The research on which this paper is based aims at showing, by means of field data, the correlations between the locally dominant land tenure system, mezzadria (sharecropping), and the resulting family structure, size, and lifestyle. The kinship roles in the life cycle of the share-croppers of this area of Tuscany are described and analysed by correlating each kinship theme with the guidelines of the whole research project: 1) relationship between structure and size (i.e.: identification of stages or cycles in the composition of the household units), 2) residential norms and marriage patterns (i.e., as expressed in the possible functions of celibacy), 3) evidence of the correlations between structural and ideological patterns, 4) genealogical knowledge in relationship with residential stability, sex, age, and kinship roles.

Campanilismo is a well-known phenomenon in Italy. An important aspect of this parochialism in a Tuscan mountain village is the idea of being more "civilized" compared with the other surrounding villages, as can be seen in the offensive role of collective nicknames. Campanilismo is a boundary mechanism that is connected with the closeness and commitment between villages. It is not a simple mechanism that makes a distinction between insiders and outsiders but it differentiates them both. Because this closeness and commitment have largely disappeared today, it is logically that a part of its vocabulary, like the collective and personal nicknames, will fade away too.

Laestadianism is an evangelical and fundamentalist movement inside the Lutheran Church, principally in northern FennoScandia and particularly in Saami- and Finnish-speaking communities. This essay considers the historical circumstances in which Laestadian blossomed among the coastal Saami of North Norway. It looks at the changes that were wrought in social relations and value orientations between coastal Saami and the surrounding non-Saami world; in particular, Saami learned to accept (as a measure of grace) their own traditional social arrangements and, compared to non-Saami, their own humble material circumstances. In interpreting the material, recourse is made to the Batesonian distinctions pertaining to processes of schismogenesis and steady state.