Ethnologia Europaea

This contribution demonstrates that in relation to societal crises and personal existential anxieties new varieties of religious practice and experience have gained importance in Europe. Based on the analysis of two recent rituals of movement and contemplation – the Dutch silent march and pilgrim treks in Europe – I have sought to uncover manifestations of civil religion. Arising in societies under threat, both ritual forms represent in their mediatized expression alternative public theologies centered around an ideal of a society at peace and possessing moral unity. It is this mediatization of these crisis rituals that gives them a meaning beyond itself, offering a moral and spiritual frame of reference for both European society as a whole and for its citizens individually.

This article investigates the ways in which Latvian sawmill workers understand the effects of global capitalism in postsocialist Latvia, here represented by the establishment of a Swedish industry in the forest-rich region of Talsi. Technology, organization, language, culture, as well as “masters”, are imported specially from Sweden, and all are deemed necessary in order to make the plant competitive. The article is concluded with a discussion of how we shall understand this kind of colonization project with stability as an inbuilt goal in relation to a world economy that all the more builds on transitory relationships to places, as well as rapid movements across state borders. The article also problematizes the conceptualizations of postsocialist studies in relation to concepts such as postcolonialism, neocolonialism and neocapitalism.

This article focuses on the construction of heritage in rural Portugal. Drawing on anthropological fieldwork in the village of Castelo Rodrigo, it analyses the extensive protection and exhibition of domestic architecture in the framework of a State-led local development programme. By bringing in the messiness of daily practices, the article goes beyond neat theoretical formulations in the study of heritage such as Foucault’s theory of “governmentality” and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s notion of “second life as heritage”. It argues that the “conduct of conduct” is actually nowhere near as effective as its theoretical formulation might have us believe, and the second life as heritage suffocates the first life of houses as social habitats for the village population.

This article addresses everyday strategies of coming to terms with organ transplantation that we term normalization practices. The analysis is based on focus group discussions and ethnographic interviews with transplant recipients, their relatives and waiting list patients in Sweden, Cyprus and Germany. Exploring our respondents’ narratives we analytically differentiate between three levels of practices normalizing the post-transplantation experience: (1) a personal level, (2) a level of the intimate, and (3) a level of anonymous sociality. Our comparative perspective shows that sociocultural differences play a much greater role in interactive normalization practices (levels 2 and 3) than on the personal level (1), where universalized medical knowledge provides a framework that supersedes the role of cultural or social differences.

Are the common-sense concepts of power and state, used in the rural regions of Poland, manifestations of postcommunist or postsocialist mentality? Several fieldwork seasons spent in the Polish countryside let me to conclude that local concepts of power and authority used by my local informants should rather be called “postpeasant” or “posttraditional” than “postsocialist”. The opinions concerning different forms of authority, as well as the state itself, shaped within the local discourse and shared by the contemporary inhabitants of rural areas of Poland, proved difficult to follow without profound understanding of traditional peasant culture, mentality and value system. Therefore, I suggest the term “postpeasant” to be applied in reference to rural communities of contemporary Poland as more accurate than the widely used term “postsocialist”.