Ethnologia Europaea

Smell works in many contexts as a trigger for fantasies: a scent reaches your nose surprisingly or familiarly and evokes memories and daydreams. Although associations with scents are extremely personal, they are also subject to conditioning factors that may be cultural, temporal or contextual. This paper traces conditioning factors and fantasies connected with smells by analysing the creations and marketing strategies of the Library of Fragrance, a company that commodifies the close relationship of smelling and daydreaming. What associations and atmospheres are chosen to be turned into perfume and how do perfumers find them? Which culturally constructed smell associations are profitable? How do individuals resist commodified scent-associations and where are the limits of instrumentalisation? Furthermore, what can we glean from smell regarding the practice of daydreaming?

In this article we argue that rushhours, hot spots and experiences of time squeeze are temporal manifestations of relations between practices. In describing these relations we explore the relevance of a range of metaphors, including those of organic, self-sustaining networks. In contrast to time use studies, which suggest that social rhythms follow from interaction between individuals, we argue that temporal rhythms are usefully characterised as outcomes of processes in which practices figure as “living” rather than asstable entities. Although illustrated with reference to empirical studies of daily life in Finland, this is in essence a speculative paper designed to provoke debate about how webs of social practice constitute the temporalities of contemporary society.

The article explores the idea and practice of rhythm as a subject as well as a perspective of cultural analysis that points to the physical dimension of culture, the social effects of bodily movements. Against holistic (and essentialist) conceptualisations of rhythm, the paper argues for a more detailed, multi-perspective approach, facing concrete phenomena in their specific and larger contexts, their functions and content and not least their interrelations and cross-references. The focus here is on a popular as well as questionable theoretical and practical model in a key area of rhythmic expressions: the model of rhythm as a (musical) “world language”. It can be shown how different, even (supposedly) competing concepts of rhythm are affiliated, how explicit and subliminalmodels and practices are adjoined by further meaning, and, finally, how they develop culture constituting qualities.

It is the aim of this article to analyse the worship of the dead in the context of the post-Soviet religious revival in Russia. The paper focuses on certain interrelated manifestations of worshipping the “special dead”, martyrs and heroes, in which both religious and secular institutions are involved. Activities in canonisation of new martyrs who “shone out” during the Soviet period also imply the recovery of graves and the identification of the bodies of the (new) saints. They are similar to another secular form of politics of memory: the reburials of soldiers who perished during the Second World War. The physical remains of the anonymous dead are a cause of frustration and ambiguity. In both cases (the sacred and the secular ones), the aim is to achieve personalisation through theidentification of graves and remains. It includes both a physical process and a symbolic operation through which the bodies obtain the status and the aura of martyrs and heroes. It is a strategy of reconciling irreconcilable historical legacies and also a tool to positively reformulate traumatic experiences of the past. In doing so, the Orthodox project of constructing memory successfully contributes to the larger societal project of elaborating a positive vision of the past.

In rural western Turkey, villagers use cultural and Islamic values of economic egalitarianism and care for the less fortunate to critique exploitation. They argue that cultural Islamic values of community and mutual assistance clash with the monetarization of kin relationships. In considering two ethnographic cases, I show how the community interprets daughters’ struggles at the time of their marriage. When daughters make a move to separate from the natal household, their family’s economic survival is threatened. To contain the loss of income, fathers attempt to delay daughters’ marriages and daughters sometimes elope to solve the problem. This paper is about how the villagers analyze these events via their notions of morally correct behavior.1