Ethnologia Europaea

ln the late 1990s holidays close to nature often take people to places that are demarcated as cultural heritage sites. Here people can sample the past in their search for a Iife in harmony with nature. The development of these living museums where visitors can try their hands at old crafts, get a taste of what life was like in the past, and witness people's lives in a local setting, goes hand in hand with ecological perspectives, green tourism, and natural products. The purpose of this article is, first, to present the tendency to use history and culture as a new escapeway to nature, and second, to discuss the nature of cultural heritage politics. In the quest for fixed values, clear identities, and adequate ways torelate to nature, there is a tendency to criticize our own modern society with the aid of history. The critical attitude to modern civilization found among many of the visitors could be an expression of alternatives and resistance and an active way to discuss and test contemporary environmental issues. Cultural heritage sites have a potential as alternative places where lasting values could make them useful for trying out new attitudes to nature and culture in the future.

Hayden White has pointed out that the narrativization of history adds a sense of causality and moral value topast events. Building upon these ideas I will analyze six differing ways to narrate the Danish take-over of Visby in 1361. My main focus is on public dramatizations, enacted during the Medieval Week on the Baltic island of Gotland. The story enacted in this commemorative festival has repeatedly been subjected to reconstructions concerning its story-line, perspective and role characterization.Some changes are initiated by the festival organizers whereas others result from playful and provocative moves that challenge their intention. The different versions evoked by these reconstructions re-evaluate and decenter the focus of preceding representations. Doing so they also turn the public performances of a historical narrative and the play about its plot into a medium in which constructions of contemporary community and identity may be claimed, contestedand negotiated.

This contribution explores the ethnic identity of the contemporary descendants of Irish immigrants who came to America between 1847 and 1854, during and after the Great Famine, who are now of the fifth and sixth generation. Most first-generation Irish-born immigrants were English-speakers, who freely intermarried with other English-speaking immigrants from England, Wales and Scotland, and second-generation Americans whose parents were from other European countries. Generation upon generation of subsequent intermarriage has resulted in individuals with very mixed ancestries. As people have become hybridised through intermarriage, their categorical identities in a society in which everyone is nonetheless assumed to have a distinct ethnic or categorical identity have become increasingly uncertain and ambiguous. For a large number of Americans whose ancestry is complicated or indeterminate, "ethnic identity" is an empty vessel, which can be filled (or not, as the individual wishes) with whatever content he or she likes. In those situations, ironically now more frequent than in the past when individuals are called upon to state or perform "an ethnic identity, "their choices range from the strategic and situational, to the arbitrary and capricious. This contribution thus raises questions about the limits, and future, of concepts such as "roots" and "ethnicity" in polyethnic and multicultural societies where free intermarriage across categorical boundaries over the generations blurs and ultimately dissolves such boundaries.

This article deals with urban youth with immigrant background living in a social housing project in a town in southern Sweden, Malmö. The approaching fin de siècle creates an abundance of contradictory, and often fetishistic representations as these date back to colonial structures of feeling. These kinds of fetishistic responses are now resurfacing in the responses to ethnically segregated housing areas where immigrant youth are perceived as a threat to the surrounding society. This paper suggests possible methodological approaches to this problematic, coupled with examples from previous work in Malmö concerning the housing area Rosegård (the Rosegarden).

„Hier ist es schön, so könnt‘ es sein“, flüstern die Hervorbringungen der Europäischen Ethnologie seit nunmehr gut hundert Jahren. Ihre Bücher haben plausible Geschichten vom Nahen, vom Eigenen und zuletzt vom Alltag erzählt. Ihre Museen haben Welten entworfen, die zu Vorbildern wurden. Daß die Botschaft überhört wurde, denkt nur die Wissenschaft, weil ihre Maßstäbe nicht mehr die einer unterhaltenden Disziplin sind und ihre Fachgeschichtsschreibung die Kulturen ethnographischen Handelns aus den Augenverloren hat.Ausgehend von gegenwärtigen Überlegungen zum „Verhältnis von Alltags-, Medien- und Wissenskultur“ (R. Lindner) und zur Rolle der Ethnologen als Entertainer und „new story-tellers of the modernity“ (K. Köstlin) soll die Geschichte der Binnenethnographie einmal aus der Perspektive ihrer Repräsentationen befragt werden. Das Interesse gilt dabei den Institutionen und Organen als Agenturen des Verwurzelns und Ritualisierens; oder anders formuliert dem weitgehend ästhetisch argumentierten Prozeß der Etablierung einer prospektiven Wissenschaft ethnisch gedeuteter Kultur.

The paper discusses the question of the cultural meaning of work in postindustrial societies and pleads for a wider anthropological perspective on this topic. Based on a critique of postmodern discourses of our society it will be shown that work in our individualistic society still has a central and positive meaning although it underlies the typical ambivalence of modernity between liberty and discipline. Prejudices against the unemployed, just as the memories and experiences of workers in a mining community, show a positive attitude towards work. Even under unfavourable conditions people develop specific and creative ways to organize work that refer to more than just the necessity of subsistence.

Prior to the 1950s, the ethnography of the Netherlands was virtually a terra incognita. Dutch anthropologists usually conducted research in the tropics and foreign ethnographers did not do fieldwork in the country either. It was only in the 1950s and 1960s that native and foreign anthropologists hesitatingly began to carry out research pertaining to Dutch society and culture. The 1970s were a take-off period, in which the number of anthropological publications on the Dutch steadily increased. The present review article describes the rise and growth, the theoretical and methodological approaches, and the themes of this subfield. It also discusses some of the pros and cons of endogenous ethnography.