Ethnologia Europaea

As opposed to the history of thought which has been awarded thorough attention by intellectual historians in the Collingwoodian tradition, the history of thinking has hardly attracted scholarly interest within the context of European culture. The following essay traces two paradigmatic changes in history of European thinking between the early Middle Ages and the end of the 18th century. The first of these changes concerns the transformation of thinking in totalities into thinking in specificities during the high Middle Ages, and the second refers to the emergence of thinking as a ordering activity during the 17th and 18th centuries. It will be argued that changes in the history of thinking are part and parcel of wider changes affecting language and religious as well as scientific views of the world.

As the audience, we have a propensity to seek the “truth” about stars and heroes. We want to know “how they really are” and see the reality “behind” the public performance. Thus, heroes and celebrities are increasingly depicted as common people in the media, which in turn indicates a revaluation of ordinariness. Since the Great Men therefore belong to the past, classical expressions of heroism are antiquated while new forms emerge. These new forms are required by the modern search for identification that presupposes a “bringing down” of the hero to the level of ordinary people. The transformation of heroism results in hybrids that blur the boundaries between the star’s role as a hero and average person, due to the fact that the ordinary becomes a constitutive element in the charisma. Hence, the medialization of celebrities tends to expose formerly hidden roles and spheres. Especially television has increased the focus on emotional expressions and private life. This eager attention to the hidden indicates that we live in an age of curiosity. Secret affairs ought to be discovered, fishy stories should be revealed. This tendency is explained in the light of the fragmentation and mobility of everyday life that create numerous stashes in every personality, to which importance and truth can be ascribed and which thereby can be transformed into desirable secrets. Thus, information about these hidden recesses becomes indispensable to stipulate identities.

In recent years, there has been a great public interest in health and healt himprovements. This article deals with some of the problems which today’s health information confronts. By throwing a glance back into some of these problems and likewise into some cultural phenomena of our time. Health literature specifies “the good life” – and as often before, “the natural” is invoked to define the healthy and to prescribe rules of living for us. In the article it is pointed out that health literature is indeed the formulation of a broad cosmology.

In modern society, history and memory are ascribed very different spheres: While history is an academic discipline with its method, its sources and its whole academic apparatus, memory is regarded as individual, emotional and unstable. History plays a part in public and political life, its scene is museums, books, academia. Memory is a matter of the subject, it belongs to the private sphere and the close relations. History is held as an important value in our societies, it gives roots, identity and belonging. But how can an academic discipline function like that? Because, under its scholarly cover, history silently borrows the disrupted qualities of memory. It is only by being spoken of as memory and by being transformed into memory that history fulfills its tasks, builds national identities, gives roots, tells us who we are and where we come from.

Can a person simultaneously identify him- or herself with two or more individual ethnic semantics? Can, in this sense, a person have several ethnic identities? And how is this dealt with in theory? What kind of concepts do we have about such double lives and such hybrid identities? Why is ethnicity often defended as virtually the last bastion of unambiguity? Who is interested in this?The article centers around these questions. The empirical argumentation is based primarily on the example of the Sorbs – a Slavic minority in Germany. The theoretical argumentation tries to open out the ethnological cultural studies for some of the considerations of the system theory and the modern constructivism. The article is a plea for the hybridity of cultures, ideas, politics, and for an ethnology which takes part in this construction.

The article seeks to contribute to the ethnological debate in the meaning of space and place by analyzing the processes of identity formation in the context of violence. The personal narratives on the lived experience of war in Croatia 1991 – 92 point to the prevalent tendency of situating identity in spatial terms: the dwelling place has been perceived as the basic identity category by civilians under siege. Such a tendency is highly liable to be used for nationalist causes, but here its pre-political character is pointed out. The examples of everyday interactions and communications either radically reduced or newly introduced due to the siege and shelling, outline a wartime politics of identity based not on choice, but on absence of choice, not on strategies of negotiation, but on strategies of survival.