Ethnologia Europaea

In Danish public debates on the integration of immigrants it is often assumed that in order truly to belong to Danish society newcomers need to adopt Danish traditions. This article discusses how Middle Eastern immigrants themselves relate tradition and cultural practice to notions of identity and belonging. Based on a study among Muslim families affiliated with a day-care institution in Copenhagen the article examines how parents through the performance of different traditions related to three Muslim and Christian calendrical rites negotiatenotions of identity and belonging to Danish society. Against the background of two cases it is argued that the participation in different calendrical rites in some ways includes immigrants in local society while simultaneously in other ways excluding them. Therefore, it is necessary to question the assumption that immigrants' performance of either Arab or Danish traditions constitutes an unequivocal expression of their degree of belonging to different places.

Portugal experienced in the last decade the same shift from emigration to immigration country like the other Mediterranean EU-member states. This article looks at the partly gendered character of immigration in Portugal. Nowadays, many women migrate to Portugal alone, without their children, husbands or other family members; some of these women are the main breadwinners for their families in their home countries. On the basis of the experiences of ‘single’ immigrant women, I explore their daily life situation, paying special attention to the aspects of work and interpersonal relationships. After some years of immigration, a basic difference can be identified between women, who are main breadwinner, and those without this duty, regarding the evaluation of their migration and further perspectives they see.

In this text, I will describe relevant negotiations on cultural belonging and national membership with the current situation in the Ukraine and Bukowina. Old and new migration movements have a big impact on these negotiations and I therefore selected them as a central theme. I explain how definitions of "the own" and "the other" function as orientations in the transformation of societies, and a national identity is installed through a mechanism of "rethinking history". Migration in the Ukraine goes two ways these days: the so called "transnational" migration on the one hand, and on the other hand, migration that is influenced by the idea or a historical home. To illustrate these two different structures and what consequences they have on the understandings of identity, I concentrate on the discursive assumptions and contrasting natures of the two forms of migration. My thesis is that the analyzed processof "rethinking identity" can not only be found in the Ukraine, but is a new development Europe-wide, which results in conflicts within one society, not between them.

The paper analyses some aspects of the speeches that Greek teachers give at school on national days. A view of the nation as a "natural unit" becomes the basis for the alleged "national character." The nation's past struggles are presented as the natural consequence of national character. In this way national character becomes destiny. At the same time, though, heroic behaviour may influence fate and succeed inaltering that destiny, when it is felt as unjust. Speeches given on national day commemorations (a) confirm and consecrate a model of the world as consisting of discrete nations, each with a distinctive set of moral qualities constituting its national essence, and (b) urge each individual member to make themselves the embodiment of national character.

Through my deconstructive analysis of the individual case of the Swedish-speaking Finnish solicitor and joint leader of the Aland movement for reunion with Sweden, Carl Bjorkman, I show in this article that the phenomenon of Finland-Swedish nationalism (which began to gain firm ground in the late nineteenth century) was the challenged object of a supplementary national process with utopian characteristics from the very beginning. Bjorkman's personal negotiation of the central Finland-Swedish discursive constituents of coastal-cum-insular imagery led him to distance himself from Finland-Swedish nationalism and ultimately to be successfully engaged with the Aland movement for reunion with Sweden in the years 1917-1921 . In its later inverted variety, however, Bjorkman's vision contributed to his own defeat in 1938, when he had to resign from his long-held position as the first lantråd of the autonomous islands. Bjorkman's personal national performance, with far-reaching political consequences, can nevertheless be said to have dislocated 'the Finland-Swedish nation' by strongly contributing to the– from a Finland-Swedish perspective – ironically tautological establishment of an autonomous Swedish-speaking community on Finnish territory. Since 1922, this community has had remarkably stronger legislative as well as symbolical means of action than the remaining Swedish-speaking population in Finland.

The custom of donating pictures is still alive in the Franciscan abbey and church at Máriaradna (Arad County, Romania). This provides the possibility of examining the relation between the people and pictures, between the people and the picture collection. In the examined multiethnic, multilingual and multicultural region of the Banat this Roman Catholic tradition of donating pictures has particular symbolic meanings of a religious, ethnic and cultural nature and is also related to the tolerance shown by the Franciscans towards manifestations of folk religion. The social and mental processes in the past decades in the Romanian Banat at could be characterised briefly as: flight from uncertainty and the search for security. Religion and the institutions of religion have a major role in this process.

It is well known that universities are male dominated both in history as well as in the dominant discourses. As knowledge producing organizations universities also carries the heritage of defending the scientific ethos of meritocracy and objectivity, these are rules that many researchers still are trained to believe in. This makes often studying of gender inequality in academia a difficult task since it not only reveals the gendered structures of academia but also violates the norms of science implying that science is socially biased. This article explores how gender inequality is produced within the discourse of equality at Swedish universities. The underlying assumption is that gender inequality on the level of the academic departments is produced within the broader discourses of gender, power, science and equality operating in everyday academic working lives and in society in general.