Ethnologia Europaea

After years of languishing on the edges, the study of landscape and the interpretation of place and space have returned to centre stage in the curriculum of the social and human sciences. The new cultural history, the new cultural anthropology, and the new cultural geography have many common interests in these fields, like European ethnology which is traditionally affiliated to these questions as well. This article draws its material from a hunting-case on the shooting grounds of the dukes of Augustenborg (in the present-day Danish-German border region) around 1780 and its finale in a down-right massacre of ducal deer.Through analysing this case, the article shows some of the possibilities for landscape interpretation in cultural analysis in general and contributes to the knowledge of how power and authority both created and (in part) were created through different landscape use and interpretation.

From the 19th century onwards, Western travelers paid full attention to the custom of cutting-off human heads in the Balkans which they perceived as a clear-cut line between civilised and barbarian forms of existence. The image of the Balkans and its people in these travel reports was seasoned with a liberal measure of partiality and biases, for it was not unimportant at all who did it. Montenegrins head-cutters were heroes, “Turkish” head-cutters were the barbarians. On the other hand, the vivid interest by Westerners showed for the “barbarous custom” in the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries indicate that in the West the barbarian “Other” had been but repressed rather than completely eliminated.

The point of departure is a case study of a French collecting couple, with a focus on their very different ways of collecting stamps. I shall then go back to mid-19th century and follow the different modes of collecting postal history up to our time. These collecting modes depend on societal norms for gender patterns as well as on dominant scientific paradigms. The aim is twofold; I want to point out the impact of scientific thought on everyday life, even on leisure activities like collecting, and I want to trace some lines of development in the history of gender and material culture. Much literature on collecting has been published during the last decade, but next to nothing on its most widespread branch, that of stamps and postal history, a hobby with hundreds of millions of adherents in the 1990s and an annual economic turnover of around ten billion US dollars. Collecting habits reflect ideologies of order and discipline, of knowledge and methodology, and of gender. A longitudinal study of the history of postal history collecting may shed some light on these issues.1

National stereotyping has applications in international politics as well as in business contacts between countries. This case study of stereotypes about Finns and Swedes illuminates the varying extents to which national character traits are ascribed to any particular group. A total of 187 retired Finns living in Sweden were presented with a list of national character traits and then asked which ones they thought were more appropriate for Finns than for Swedes – or the opposite. The answers to each question have been elaborated with reference to other studies of the two national groups. Stereotyping is finally discussed in general terms. It is suggested that national stereotypes are based on (I) generalisations of the individuals own impressions, (II) hearsay i.e. stereotypes presented by others, including media, and (III) individually held values and cultural norms.

A collective panic, which spread in Poland during the flood of July 1997, revealed off-stage properties of state-citizens relationships, i.e. the inability to trust, as an important aspect of post-communist societies. In this article the city of Wroclaw is a local string point for a study of citizenship-relations in post-communist Poland which are related to specific hidden histories – the communist heritage as well as the repressed German past of the region. Both factors, by producing overcentralization and unaccountability of state structures, deep rivalry among political actors, disrespect and distrust among citizens and between citizens and states, as well as collective amnesia, explain the incapacity of Wroclaw’s citizens to keep control over their city, the Odra river, the state organizations and their imagination.

What is the process when historically obviously neutral things are becoming loaded with mental meanings, associations and qualities, getting a new turn of expression? The article deals with the changing of men’s underwear from garments of pure utility to high fashionable, visible things. The context in which the change has taken place, the language which supports the new meanings, the forms, colours and use of the “unmentionable” are studied from an ethnological viewpoint. The author emphasises the aspects of new adaptations of the meaning of fashion in relation to changing gender roles, new ideals of the body and new mechanisms in consumer culture.