Ethnologia Europaea

This article, emerging from a study of mobile Polish physicians currently working in Sweden, explores the doctors’ ethnography-like descriptions applying the categories of knowledge usually employed by the researchers. The primary material consists of 21 interviews. The term mobile everyday ethnography points out the particular epistemological condition induced by occupational mobility: a tendency to explore and describe settings and behaviours in cultural terms, oscillating between an insider’s knowledge and an outsider’s estrangement. Some recurrent themes in the interviews concerning cultural frictions are presented, followed by a discussion of the specificity of mobile everyday ethnography: its basis in the pragmatics of everyday life, the predominant usage of the popular notion of “culture” and the professional self being the focal point.

Overweight and obesity among children has gained increased attention as one of the most unequally distributed health problems. This article draws on interviews with school nurses, who in their daily work handle this problem. Their responses articulate a discrepancy between the general view on overweight and obesity as a “disaster” for the afflicted children and the practice of turning “a blind eye” to specific cases. The aim is to examine how the school nurses in their dealing with the problem handle this discrepancy and make it logical. It is argued that a distinction between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” is apparent in the school nurses’ understanding of overweight and obesity. This distinction depends on how they, in moral terms, categorize foods and habits, children and parents.

The article discusses memory of the Jewish and the Holocaust past of Warsaw as it has been practiced in two districts of the city of Warsaw comprising the territory of the World War II ghetto. To contextualize the case studies described in the text, a discussion of the politics of the Polish memory of World War II in the context of the city of Warsaw has been provided, together with a brief discussion of research methods, which made use of the author’s familiarity with the place as an inhabitant, a tourist guide and a visitor. The article describes the spatial context of commemorations, and presents interpretations for their perception and reception both by the inhabitants and the visitors.

This paper examines the epistemological and institutional activities in the field of Volkskunde/folklore studies in Switzerland leading to the discipline’s reformation as “European ethnology”. Drawing on archival materials, the article takes Arnold Niederer (1914–1998) as a starting point by showing how Niederer, his networks and research contexts were involved in the formation of the loose alliance of interests that were subsequently institutionalized. This paper traces the new perception of the discipline “European ethnology” as it draws on early transnational contacts of Swiss Folklore Studies in order to overcome the crisis in which Volkskunde found itself in the 1960s. Europeanization and an orientation toward the present were strategies to stabilize the academicdiscipline but also to establish the discipline in the public sphere.

This article examines the intra-European mobility of contemporary artists by scrutinizing the experiences of visual artists from Finland who have been living in Berlin for at least one year. Based on data that were gathered via ethnographic fieldwork including interviews with 15 artists, the paper sheds light on the role that economic and career factors, images and dreams, social networks, and the prospect of working in an inspirational urban context play in influencing the decisions of Finnish artists to move to Berlin. Further, and more significantly, this study illuminates the reasons that encourage Berlin-based Finnish artists to maintain a transnational lifestyle through which they produce a “transnational flow of creativity.”

This article examines how members of a Christian youth organization in Sweden relate to and reflect upon emotional aspects of their involvement, looking at how they describe the emotional atmosphere within the groups they belong to and their role in creating and sustaining this, but also their experiences of not feeling comfortable in certain situations. The empirical material consists of interviews with youths aged 15–23, and the theoretical framework is centred on emotion work and feeling rules. The findings show how the emotional expectations tend to be communicated not only implicitly, but also explicitly, and how an emotional atmosphere and emotion work that can be expected to create affective bonds between the members and strengthen group cohesion, in somecases might have rather the opposite effect.