Ethnologia Europaea

This paper examines the movements and transformations embodied in an African bull elephant on display in the Gothenburg Museum of Natural History, Sweden. The elephant was collected and mounted by taxidermist, photographer and naturalist David Sjölander (1886–1953). The elephant mount is considered to be one of the best in the world. A plethora of meaning usually disappears when an animal is inserted in a natural history collection. Presenting and ordering of nature sets the embedding of the natural history museum in culture and society away. However, the motives and actions that killed the old bull elephant and moved it from West Africa to Gothenburg were deeply embedded in the collecting tradition of the natural history museum, in the professionalclimate in the museum and in the spirit of the taxidermist.

Eastern enlargement of the EU and NATO was not only a technical but also a highly emotional matter. The image of the “East” as untrustworthy, threatening and fundamentally different from an imagined “Western” community is strongly rooted. Drawing upon interviews in Austrian state institutions, this paper argues that the end of the Cold War made it necessary for Austria to redefine its identity as a neutral bridge builder. Using the example of security and police cooperation, it illustrates how Austria’s “return to Mitteleuropa” by consequence may be interpreted as a postcolonial project to recover imperial greatness in a contemporary shape. However, this one-sided movedid not yield the expected results in the former crown lands, which preferred to treat this endeavor instrumentally.1

This paper deconstructs certain colloquial terms, objects and physical actions to reveal their importance in the cultural construction of landscape metaphor. Vernacular uses of language and displacement allow long-term inhabitants of Britain’s southwestern Cornish peninsula to assimilate environments and localities into a particular ontological framework of orientation. While exploring the directional nature of certain linguistic and embodied spatial idioms as elements of cultural identity, I consider direction of movement and location in both space/time. By guiding verbal, visual and visceral metaphors through Cornwall’s landscapes, residents intertwine a world view with a “word view”. This concerns the movements between locations figuratively fixed in local biographies, vernacular codes of difference and materialised space. The directionality of the body, toponyms and colloquialisms thus highlight a fluid form of distinction.

In this paper, fashion is analyzed as a complex system that synthesizes the provision of clothes with the production of symbolic value. Through a case study of Denmark, I question contemporary links between fashion, museum and nation, and introduce the concepts of “fashion nation” and “fashion museology”. I argue that the museum’s and nation’s longing for newness, appeal to attention, and adaptation to the commercial market do not merely constitute a shallow quick-fix; rather, deeper ramifications and potentials arise as fashion promotes cosmopolitan nationalism, one in which cultural heritage and national values are not reduced to defensive strongholds in the face of globalization, but cultivated as renewable resources that can be reinvented in interaction with global society.

The topic of this article is intimately connected to the Bulgarian urbanization processes that intensified after the Second World War, and again after 1989, which have not resulted in separation between urban and rural residents of the same kin. Migration between towns and villages does create a space between relatives, but they remain connected through various commitments. The research focuses on family networks that operate between the countryside and the city, and the kind of social and economic strategies that can be observed. A person has a different range and degree of embeddedness with respect to kinship and descent. What do family members exchange (in a sense of economic, social, and cultural capital) in times of transition and insecurity in orderto keep their social status?