Ethnologia Europaea

An American folklorist reading the first issue of Ethnologia Europaea finds it natural to draw a transatlantic comparison. In 1971, the long-established Journal of American Folklore published a special issue, “Toward New Perspectives in Folklore.”1 This collection of articles marked a social and intellectual watershed in U.S. folklore studies: influence shifted to a new generation of researchers and to the emerging paradigm of “verbal art as performance” within a larger ethnography of communication. The immediate “new perspectives” were heterogeneous, however, drawing on a range of disciplines and theories for inspiration. In part this resulted from the different backgrounds and empirical foci of the contributors; in part it was a sending out of trial balloons to see which might float. The common impulse was to build a science from the precarious institutional base of a field generally considered to be residual.

This opening essay of the then newly founded journal Ethnologia Europaea surveys the heterogeneous disciplinary landscape of the field which constitutes its target audience. Situating the field within anthropology, it argues for tolerance of the various kinds of ethnology being pursued in different institutions in Europe, from universities to museums, in order to be able to join forces. All are engaged in folklife research (folklife being equivalent to social life), whose task is to elucidate culture and its role in life as well as the influence of life on the development of culture. The article closes with remarks on method. [Abstract and keywords added by the editors 2017]

Although nationalism is an example of a cultural force which in many cases has overruled other, traditional identities and loyalties in nineteenth- and twentieth-century society, the study of nationalism has not been focused very much on the cultural praxis of national identity formation and sharing. As a result, the ideology and politics of nationalism are far better understood than the creation of Hungarianness and Swedishness. This paper1 discusses some approaches in the national culture-building of everyday life, using mainly Swedish examples. The focus is also on national culture as a battle arena, where different interest groups use arguments about national unity or heritage in hegemonic struggles. Different types of “nationalization processes” are discussed, as for example ways in which certain cultural domains come to be defined as national, how national space is transformed into cultural space, or the way in which every new generation not only is nationalized into a given heritage but also creates its own version of a common, national frame of reference.

The article analyses some emerging new functions of “local cultures” and new meanings of socalled “national cultures” in contemporary public discourses. In recent years, we have witnessed the disappearance of old certainties, as the previously-fixed boundaries defining nations and states have become more ambiguous; meanwhile, new cultural frontiers have been erected around other territorial spaces. The argument advanced in this paper mainly in relation to spatiality and local cultures could be extended to values, morals, religion, etc. This is not the return of romantic nineteenth-century ideas; rather, it is suggested here that this phenomenon draws upon the work of folklorists and ethnologists, whose descriptions and mapping of folk cultures is taken as scientific evidence of distinctive local and regional differences.

Reprinted from Ethnologia Europaea 38:2, 2008. This article develops a critique of identity-focused approaches to ethno-cultural diversity in urban settings by shifting attention from categorical identities to the question of socialities. Taking the example of a queer migrant club night as its point of departure, it shows how a focus on the forms of social engagement that are particular to migrant club scenes can contextualize identity claims but also go beyond them by highlighting the complexity of shifting affiliations and interactions that makes for the appeal of such scenes. Rather than seeing queer migrant club scenes as a protected refuge for a doubly discriminated minority, the consideration of socialities allows to reveal their functioning as semi-public urban formations.

Reprinted from Ethnologia Europaea 16:2, 1986 During the last hundred years, the original low technology agriculture of rural Norway has developed into highly specialized commercial farming. This transformation has been vividly discussed both by historians and ethnologists. A main theme in the debate has been as to which degree new technology and integration of agriculture in market economy have brought about a dissolution of the traditional peasant culture. In the present study of women’s work on farms in Central Norway, it is argued that although the material structures of the farms have been subject to important transformations, essential structures such as the sexual division of labour and the ideas constituting the peasant ideal of femininity, hardly changed before the 1960s.

HOUSEHOLD STUDIES “À LA MODE”?

ETHNOLOGIA NATIONUM