Ethnologia Europaea

The first great collector in Scandinavia and a phenomenal figure in North European intellectual history, Ole Worm (1588-1654) has been claimed as a local founding father for several modern disciplines, including archeology, museology, philology, ethnology, and folklore. A professor of medicine at the University of Copenhagen, he set up a famous museum that came to form the basis for Denmark’s National Museum, he engineered pioneering ethnological questionnaire surveys of the Danish kingdom, he wrote a monumental work on runes, and collected and published medieval folklore and literature. This article analyzes the life and work of Ole Worm in order to clarify the emergence of the scholar as a third power in Europe, alongside the clergy and the nobility, and to shed light on notions of virtue and virtuosity in the late Renaissance.

The historical museums are creations of 19th century Europe and closely related to the nation states, then under establishment. However, such museums do not constitute a constant entity; they are changing throughout the century. In the first half of the century, their focus was on prehistory and the Middle Ages in order to document the deep national roots. Interest in the Renaissance and the succeeding periods belongs to the second half of the century, which is also characterized by the founding of new kinds of museums. These newcomers are all connected to another important feature of this period: the great exhibitions. This is obvious with regard to the museums of applied art, but also to the so-called folk museums that from their Swedish conception spread to other countries in Northern and Central Europe.The article tries to analyze the early folk museums and their objectives, partly by looking at four very different pioneers in this field: the Swede Artur Hazelius – the real inventor of the institution, the Dane Bernhard Olsen and the Germans Rudolf Virchow and Ulrich Jahn. They are all experimenting with new forms of communicating, drawing upon inspiration from the great exhibitions and the new wax museums, with the aim to evoke a national consciousness among common people. However, at the same time, they are aware that they are laying the foundation for a new ethnographical study of European peasantries.

Museums belong to what we are used to thinking of as enduring institutions in European national cultures, resistant to change. Or in metaphorical language, as sanctuaries for material and immaterial reminiscences of own or distant cultures. Their status as safe sanctuaries is not so evident any longer. In Paris two renowned and venerable anthropological museums close their doors in 2003, to combine and reinvent themselves in the form of one transformed institution, a museum of art and civilisations. Another metamorphosis is the closing of the national museum for French popular culture (in Paris) and the subsequent birth (in Marseille) of a museum for European and Mediterranean civilisations. A third significant change is the (politically enforced) introduction of primitive art from the Third World in the Louvre, the bulwark of Western art. This article describes these transformations and the associated debates, and discusses the factors behind: paradigmatic changes and intrascientific developments within ethnology and anthropology, new ways of representing the nation, the European and the Other, as well as political power and public taste.

Museums of cultural history have been regarded as effective instruments of national identity-building, as well as powerful symbols of nationhood. Nineteenth and early twentieth century Europe abounded with examples of museums that fulfilled this function. At the turn of the millenium, however, we are seeing the beginnings of a new trend in European museology: the creation of transnational, pan-European cultural history museums. Museum Europäischer Kulturen (MEK) was established in Berlin in 1999, and le Musée de l’Europe (MDE) in Brussels opened a prefigurative exhibition in2001. Le Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée (MCEM) has a pilot team in place in Marseille and plans to open its doors in 2008.Further, Torino has for some timebeen planning to establish a similar institution. This phenomenon raises some questions. What are the motives behind these new cultural constructions? Do they spring from the same needs and do they have similar aims? As they are all situated in EU countries, one might ask: Are there political motives? Do they aim to break down national identities and to support trans-and post-national identity-building? If so, will a breaking-down of national identities necessarily mean a European identity, or will they perhaps supportregional movements and regional identities? Or are the new museums mainly a corollary of an intrascientific development, of new trends in ethnology and adjacent fields?A closer look at these institutions – real or planned – reveals both similarities and differences in background, in ideologies, and in museological programmes.

The article explores the increasing gap between the cultural dynamics of transnationalisation in Germany and the national self-perception of the German society. While concepts of “in-migration” (Zuwanderung) and “integration” still stick to notions of the nation-state as being a “container” embracing and controlling a population and a culture of its own, the various processes of material and imaginary mobility across the national borders contradict and challenge this notion as well as its political implications. By drawing on the transnational lifeworlds and the cultural productivity of migrants, anthropological research has made important contributions to render visible this challenge. It is argued, however, that an all too exclusive focus on migration may, in fact, rather conceal the wider effects of transnationalisation and cultural globalisation on the society and its cultural fabric as a whole.

Focusing on general patterns revealed in everyday experiences, the paper examines reciprocal exchange in Poland, and considers the continuities and changes in the uses of gifts, favors, and recommendations as state socialism is replaced by market capitalism. I show how, on one hand, particularistic relationships have utilitarian and moral value, and provide individuals with some degree of control over their lives. On the other hand, continued reliance on connections helps to increase material and social inequalities in Poland, especially when used in conjunction with market reforms. The paper emphasizes the centrality of social networks in market economies generally while also highlighting the particular historic forces that shape reciprocal exchange networks in contemporary Poland.