Ethnologia Europaea

With the publication of this issue of Ethnologia Europaea, the journal has taken yet another major step on a new trajectory: it has fully entered the digital age and become an online, completely open-access journal. Though access to articles had been made available online before, with an “embargo” period of three years (the “green” model), it is now a “golden” journal – much in tune with its recent 50-year anniversary (see vol. 47:1, 50 Years of Ethnologia Europaea – Readers’ Choices from Half a Century).

This article develops an ethnographic approach for analyzing the entanglements of digital media and emotions in everyday life. Using the practice of taking selfies at the “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe” in Berlin as an example, it engages in a discussion of practice and affordance theories as well as ethnographic approaches to the study of emotions. In three related sections, it offers a particular conceptualization of “media practices” which builds upon the concept of “affordances,” an introduction to the analysis of “emotional practices,” and a section proposing the ethnographic concept of “emotional affordances.” This concept, the article argues, can serve as a key link in understanding doing emotion through digital media.

The so-called Lapland War between Finland and Germany at the end of the Second World War led to a mass-scale destruction of Lapland. Both local Finnish residents and the indigenous Sámi groups lost their homes, and their livelihoods suffered in many ways. The narratives of these deeply traumatic experiences have long been neglected and suppressed in Finland and have been studied only recently by academics and acknowledged in public. In this text, we analyze the interviews with four elders of one Sámi village, Vuotso. We explore their memories, from a child’s perspective, scrutinizing the narration as a multilayered affective process that involves sensual and embodied dimensions of memory.

This article investigates the promotion of environmental awareness in a staged rainforest at a science centre in Sweden. The organizers worked with the agenda to change people’s everyday behaviour and consumer routines and especially targeted the use of palm oil. This mundane way of approaching environmental issues is defined by the author as banal sustainability. The exhibited forest was employed for guided walks, stressing the domestication of the environmental challenges into issues of people’s everyday life practices. The promotion of an awareness rested on the bodily experience of moving in the staged rainforest, emphazising astonishment, adventure, and empathy. It worked as an attachment site, connecting insight to action. As such, it was practice-oriented, simplifying, and empowering.

The article analyzes the logic behind the archival policies concerning language and ethnic minorities in Finland, drawing examples from three minority groups: the Sámi, the Finnish Roma (the Kaale), and the Finland-Swedes. We base our discussion on the documented descriptions, manuscripts, questionnaires, and fieldwork activities dealing with language and ethnic minority groups archived by the Finnish Literature Society (Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, SKS) and the Society of Swedish Literature in Finland (Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, SLS) from the beginning of the nineteenth century until the early twenty-first century. Viewed from a historical perspective, the establishment of archives in Finland was inextricably connected to the societal power enjoyed by certain ethnic and language groups seeking to preserve their heritage.

This article investigates the promotion of environmental awareness in a staged rainforest at a science centre in Sweden. The organizers worked with the agenda to change people’s everyday behaviour and consumer routines and especially targeted the use of palm oil. This mundane way of approaching environmental issues is defined by the author as banal sustainability. The exhibited forest was employed for guided walks, stressing the domestication of the environmental challenges into issues of people’s everyday life practices. The promotion of an awareness rested on the bodily experience of moving in the staged rainforest, emphazising astonishment, adventure, and empathy. It worked as an attachment site, connecting insight to action. As such, it was practice-oriented, simplifying, and empowering.

In Poland, in vitro fertilization (IVF) is often a contested procedure, as it is not accepted by Catholic bioethics. This rejection mobilizes a wide range of views and arguments about IVF, some of which circulate only in the local discourse. A very potent local concept is the “tactile crease” (bruzda dotykowa) that is said to mark the foreheads of children conceived with IVF. This term, coined in 2013 by a priest who is also a professor of law, represents one way in which the political discourse shapes the imagined body of the Other. In this paper, the analysis of the origins and resonance of the “tactile crease” in the Polish public discourse is confronted with the results of anthropological research among children conceived with IVF and their families.