Ethnologia Europaea

Community-studies have a long tradition within European Ethnology. Almost without exception they have been neglecting the strong presence of public institutions of the welfare state – despite the fact that various social security and insurance systems are such an important factor in local life. These are the offices people turn to when they are ill, require unemployment benefits, social assistance, and early retirement or disability pensions. They often provide the foundations for people to make a go of things where they live. Local communities on the other hand are not passively receiving support, but in a most intricate practice defining the actual outcome of the workings of the institutions. In this essay remuneration for illness in contemporary Sweden is used as an instrument for putting local culture in a new light. In a joint effort the macro-perspectives of political science is combined with the detailed cultural analysis of ethnology.1 Especially the emotional aspects of community-building are brought out.

With the growing interest of anthropologists in transnational processes and spatial mobility, the local community ceased to be an obvious or “natural” site for fieldwork. Yet, also in so-called “multi-sited research”, basic tenets of the ethnographic method continue to be valid. This commentary engages with the methods employed in the project “Sense of Community”, pointing out that in addition to giving the community study approach a fresh lease on life in ethnology, the project also shares some traits with regional surveys in the social sciences. The commentary concludes that by selecting two regions as research settings, the project also contributes to a revitalization of the comparative approach.

In this short comment I relate the core text in this issue of Ethnologia Europaea to some central themes from my own research on everyday experiences of post-Yugoslav transformations of home. Arguing for the need to complement the focus on spatiality in the study of home with an eye on temporality, I offer some thoughts on the interplay of place, hope and the state in a critical anthropology of home-making.

This is a theoretical paper focusing on the mutual interdependence between formal and informal processes in the interface between state apparatus and community in modern capitalistic and democratic societies. Simple and direct hierarchical control is no longer feasible or efficient. This problem is apparently solved by introducing complex and detailed audit systems. The correct way of reporting can become more important than the correct execution of tasks threatening established informal relations of personal judgement and trust. Value rationality can be stifled by instrumental procedures and values and in the end the universal value basis of a welfare society may be weakened.

This paper discusses the implementation of exogenous policy models by nation-states in the light of the domestication framework. It is concluded that a nation-state can be considered as a local place, or even as some kind of machine that produces contexts for people’s activities. With its standardized practices the nation-state tends to homogenise different neighbourhoods and make them translocal. However, the isomorphic development of separate nation-states does not mean that all national features are gradually disappearing from the world. Cultural differences are continuously produced and reproduced in the social processes triggered by individuals and social groups negotiating changing contexts, whether the changes are due to the world market, adaptive policy models or any other intervention.