Ethnologia Europaea

Based on ethnographic data gathered through observations made as a tour guide in the Indian Ocean island of La Réunion, I explore “what it feels like to be a tourist”. My aim is to articulate observations of subjective tourist experience with theory about the structural frames of tourism culture and the touristic realms these have brought about. I argue that the individual experience of sites evolves within broadly shared aesthetic cultures, but that the emotions generated by the encounter of such sites are negotiated through highly personalised stories. Tourism attractions in this tropical island indicate the presence of shared aesthetic dispositions and feelings of nationalbelonging among the German tourists observed there, while tourists struggle for words to affirm the individuality, authenticity and magic of their experiences.

The socio-cultural network and strategies of Hungarian villages and towns in the sub-Carpathian region are characterized by an increasing tension between the political reinforcement of cultural boundaries with other regional groups and the growing economic importance of informal interethnic relations. The articulation of contrastive political ethnicity with the local social sphere lies in the local memory of collective deportation of Hungarian speakers in 1945 by the Soviet regime that is ritualized by commemorative monuments and events. Yet the diverse forms of inter-ethnic solidarity and co-operation are interwoven with and simultaneously effective in the fields of trade, exchange, smuggling, and temporary migrations across the border. Thus the ethnography of multiethnic regions on the margins of diverse national spaces susceptible to international dispute calls attention to the paradoxical inter-dependence between the durability of political ethnicities relying on the permanence of inter-ethnic solidarities and co-operation.

Drawing on narrative interviews and ethnographic research in French and Portuguese settings, we examine a contemporary form of vaccine acceptability as it emerges in routine vaccination. Against a backdrop of manifestations that are circumscribed to particular cultural scenes or bounded systems of ideas, we focus on a diffuse tendency which resonates with wider contemporary transformations. Its analysis cannot be framed within the narrow limits of health and risk management. Health and the body are but one of the domains in which a same pattern of production of dissent arises. It is by exploring the political dimensions of such pattern that the production of consent and that of dissent stand in relation to one another as two sides of the same coin.

The aim of this article is to perform a cultural analysis of the effects and implications of predictive genetic testing for individuals who have undergone predictive genetic testing for Huntington’s disease (HD). Moreover, the analysis aims to relate these effects and the implications of these tests to current initiatives that advocate a large-scale incorporation of genetics and genomics into mainstream health care. The abstract and elusive character of our genes is found to generate a liminal space wherein the affected individuals are situated between normality and abnormality. This juxtaposition of cultural classifications is in turn found to constitute a cultural paradox thatmight create disagreement in the relations between medical expertise and lay people as genetics and genomics is put to use within mainstream health care.

The article discusses the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism in the world of work and at the same time pleads for a critical reflection on the use of these concepts. It presents three German case studies conducted under the supervision of the author, which examine how this transition is experienced very differently: by mothers using managerial techniques of parenting, independent financial advisers, and manual workers in a picture-frame factory. The mothers see the changes as a challenge, the financial advisers as an opportunity, and the manual workers as a threat. Thus, ethnographic case studies in this field highlighting the diversity of work in the post-Fordist era enbable us to go beyond discourses that treat Fordism and post-Fordism as clearly separated andholistic entities.

The paper focuses on neo-pagan witches in Berlin and the role of the urban context in forming their identity and a new religion. The interplay between the city and a specific spiritual practice and thinking becomes particularly obvious in moments of public representations and space making. Following this idea, the article’s ethnographic focus lies on the Pope’s visit to Berlin in 2011 and the public protest neo-pagan witches organized in the heart of Berlin-Kreuzberg. The analysis reveals how religious imaginations and experiences were recast and how the urban imaginary of Berlin came into play and was thus reproduced.