Ethnologia Europaea

INNOVATION, RESISTANCE OR TINKERING

This paper revisits the cartography of material folk culture from the point of view of a current cartographic project in science and technology studies (STS) known as controversy mapping. Considering the mutual learning that has already taken place between ethnological engagements with material culture and material semiotic strands of STS, we ask, what kind of cross-fruition could be gained from expanding the dialogue to cartography and mapmaking? We suggest that a shared focus on open-ended assemblages of cultural elements, rather thanfunctional cultural wholes, provides a good basis for such a conversation. We argue that the capacity of the atlases of material folk culture to draw their own theoretical assumptions into doubt could serve as a useful prototype for controversy mappers. Vice versa we suggest that recent innovations in controversy mapping might overcome some of the problems that have troubled earlier ethnological mapmaking projects.

This article explores ethnographic work as an inventive conversational practice, through which fieldworker and interlocutors continuously process the world. Rather than a summary description, ethnography emerges as an analytical product by which people generate a world to live in, think and write about. Ethnography, then, is not about representation of an empirical setting, but a generative practice of analytically relating some features of the world to others. My ambition is to suggest the notion of analogue analysis to articulate this relational and inventive nature of ethnography, and further to explore the implications of this for revisits to work of founding figures in ethnology. As a way of engaging ethnography in analogue terms, the article combines work of EilertSundt with contemporary material from south India.

This article concerns itself with the early twentieth-century documentation of different phenomena in the Swedish countryside considered crucial to an understanding of rural lifestyle in the past. This research was motivated out of a concern for a vanishing peasant culture. Vast quantities of photographs, drawings and descriptions of houses and settlements were compiled into archives and later on, this material was used as the base for the Atlas of Swedish folk culture published in 1957. Inspired by Fleck’s notion of “thought collective” and Latour’s ideas of “craftsmanship”, the article returns to the archives in order to examine the everyday practices of the fieldworkers and the different tools and techniques used to document the vanishing peasant material culture.

Understanding borders from different perspectives has been important to ethnological research since the beginning of the twentieth century. This article will revisit early discussions on borders as well as the more elaborated ethnological border studies of the end of the twentieth century. As some principal themes of these ethnological border studies are brought forward, the article demonstrates how a focus on speed informs contemporary border studies with insights regarding borders and border zones. The illegal liquor trade in the Baltic Sea during the 1920s will serve as the case being discussed, thus establishing analytical distance to contemporary European border processes.

In this article, Professor Emeritus Bjarne Stoklund’s research spanning more than sixty years is revisited. Trained in the historical-geographical method, Stoklund saw it as his task to mediate between this approach and new trends after 1971. The article pursues three lines: 1) the change of focus from relatively isolated cultural traits to a broader cultural history, 2) the introduction of an ecological perspective focused on functioning totalities, and 3) the transformation of “relic areas” to areas seen within a world system. The revisit to Bjarne Stoklund’s publications also addresses his revisit and revitalisation of his own earlier research. His efforts to address the question of continuity and transformation have made lasting impressions in Danish ethnology in terms of an interest in cultural history and long term processes.

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