Ethnologia Europaea

In the end of the sixties a protest movement against the rationalistic rebuilding of the city of Stockholm very rapidly emerged. In the article the short history of this so-called “neighbourhood movement” is described and analysed. According to relevant theories the movement can be seen as one of the “new” social movements of this period. Some of the groups of the movement are presented as well as the structure of the movement and the external and internal work in the groups.This neighbourhood movement came to an end around 1980. However, in the early nineties another protest movement against the new kind of city-planning at that time in Stockholm emerged. The reason for this was the city’s efforts to construct a good infrastructure in order to rebuild Stockholm into a global city incompetition with other big cities. This contemporary protest movement is also shortly described in the article. As it is shown the movement is very different from the earlier neighbourhood movement. It reflects the fragmentation, individualisation and globalisation of today’s post-modern society.

Since the fall of the Wall in 1989, German unification in 1990, and the 1991 decision to move the seat of government from Bonn to Berlin, the city has undertaken a transformation occurring on both a material and a symbolic level. This article explores the specific role of historical argumentation within this process. Considering the specific context of Berlin during the 1990s, the author pleads for a double perspective on the politics of history. On the one hand, it plays an important role in the context of an emerging symbolic economy, which is connected closely to an evermore globalized world. On the other hand, it is a strategy used for the construction and representation of group identities. Referring to specific sites in Berlin, this article attempts to describe the complex and contradictory forces which come to the fore while exploring the very logic that historical argumentation and there construction of old buildings have. The debate on the Schloßplatz in Berlin sheds light on how historical ideas and the construction of commemoration sites enable different social groups to construe a political self, a social and a local identity, and allow the establishment of a sense of being a Berliner and an emotional connection with one’s place of residence. At the same time the debate provides a “symbolic space” in which issues of national identity and concepts of Germanness can be discussed. But the question must be raised as to who takes part in these discussions.

The changes Moscow has been undergoing as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union are dramatic. Social and structural change is accompanied and influenced by architectural and urban change. The tasks of the city planners include reconstruction of the historic fabric of the city as well as providing the basis for a post-modern world city. Although contradictory to an extent, these two aspects drive the discourse of urban development: heritage has become a cultural and economic commodity. As befits a capitalist city, the results of such a development include the creation of winners and losers – gentrifiers moving into restored city centre locations and ordinary citizens leaving for the high-rises on the outskirts.

In Osteuropa zeigen zahlreiche Beispiele, dass unter den Prozessen der Modernisierung die Urbanisierung den größten Einfluss auf die Veränderung des Verhältnisses der ethnischen Gruppen zueinander ausübte. Besonders interessant sind aus dieser Perspektive die multiethnischen Städte, die an der Grenze von zwei – als Nationalstaat konzipierten – Ländern liegen. Cluj (Kolozsvár, Klausenburg) ist ein exemplarischer Fall, der zeigt, wie sich die Nationalisierung in den Grenzregionen Mitteleuropas abgespielt hat. Dieser Artikel handelt von den lokalen Erscheinungsformen des ungarischen und rumänischen Nationalismus, den miteinander rivalisierenden, nationalen Repräsentationen, und von den Eigenarten zweier paralleler, doch immer in Wechselwirkung stehender Prozesse der Nationenbildung. In der Rekonstruktion und Analyse dieser lang dauernden historischen Prozesse werden sowohl der Wandel der Symbole und Argumente der nationalen Diskurse, als auch die wiederkehrenden Elemente ihrer kulturellen Logik hervorgehoben. Der Begriff rivalisierende Nationenbildung oder rivalisierende Nationalismen leite ich von den Beispielen der Aufstellung von öffentlichen Skulpturen in den vergangenen hundertzwanzig Jahren und den begleitenden rituellen und diskursiven Ereignissen ab. Diese Rivalität objektiviert sich in den symbolischen Konflikten, deren gesellschaftliche Antriebskraft der Wettbewerb zwischen den Eliten der zwei ethnischen Gruppen ist.

In spite of, or due to, its centrality to everyday life the car is a much neglected aspect of contemporary material and symbolic culture. Its presence has until very recently manifested itself largely in epic national industrial histories or in overtly critical environmentalist accounts and social histories. The phenomenon of joyriding has received even less academic attention. This may be due to its problematic positioning in the liminal zones of many disciplines, in an epistemological vacuum.This article foregrounds the cultural aspect of joyriding in a particular context. It questions the more obvious interpretative tendencies like “youth culture” or “subculture” as the result of an ageist or sedentary hierarchy articulated from within an exclusionary and normative discourse. It is argued that this is better understood as a variant of a more general protean cultural process through which the very sign of modernity and consumerism (with all its assumptions of alienation and assimilation) becomes part of a forceful vernacular or lived-in urban culture.