Ethnologia Europaea

In a world increasingly haunted by fake news, email scams and trolls on the internet deliberately emotionalizing debate and making unfounded attacks, trust is perhaps more endangered than ever. Trust is an essential feeling in social life. Without it, relations towards anyone, from our politicians to our teachers and doctors, not to mention among longtime neighbours as well as new arrivals in town, cannot work. This is also true for academia, where a certain amount of control for safeguarding scientific reliability and rigor is the mechanism for establishing trust in the quality of data. The humanities and social sciences have long relied on source criticism and methodological reflexivity in order to ensure transparency and scientific reliability. These research ethics still count, and were joined some decades ago by the double-blind peer-review system, which today serves as the prime guarantor of research quality. But even this system has its flaws, and so it has recently become common at European universities to provide whistle-blowers with a place to go without fear of being revealed: named persons, ombudspersons and ethics committees

A wolf stands in the middle of the exhibition room. Although the animal’s size is quite intimidating, and the mouth is slightly open, showing its sharp teeth, it looks strangely kind. Facing the showcase that surrounds the animal stands a long-haired girl, probably around six years old. Fascinated by the animal, she comes as close to the showcase as possible, seeming to want to touch the stuffed and musealized animal before her. On the one hand, this incidentally observed performance embodies a reinterpretation of the story of the girl and the wolf that goes beyond the popular version of the Grimm brothers. In a manner exemplified by the intrepid little girl standing in front of the showcase, this new version is told in numerous new books addressed to children and young adults: A tough girl is not afraid of yesterday’s monsters, she is instead curious and open to new challenges, enjoys meeting a wolf, or even a wolf pack. On the other hand, the scene in the exhibition room associates the fact that people today also still seem susceptible to “Little Red Riding Hood syndrome”, as they are faced with news about wolves coming close to kindergartens in urban settings.

In the following article, open-air museums and zoos are examined as enlivened multispecies spaces by connecting two recent threads of research, put in historical context: human–animal studies and exhibition studies, that both put the concept of relationality centre stage. This offers a slightly altered perspective on the history and entanglements of these institutions, exploring the crucial aspect of animating sceneries and enlivening these places. By way of conclusion I will use the multispecies and exhibition context to reflect upon doing and undoing human–animal entanglements in time and space, past and present.

As most open-air museums focus on preindustrial rural living conditions, they exhibit historical farmhouses that are presented in a specific holistic way, including the surroundings and livestock. Although these presentations create the impression of historical authenticity, they must remain incomplete due to missing sources and practical exhibition reasons. This also involves the human–animal relationships. Moreover, most visitors cannot interpret the settings displayed properly due to missing knowledge. After highlighting some historical aspects of human–animal relationships using the example of northwest German farmhouses, the article deals with the limits and opportunities of the open-air museums’ presentation of human–animal relationships based on a survey among German-speaking open-air museums. Finally, it pleads for a transparent approach to sensitize the visitors to humans’ current handling of and attitude towards animals.

A multispecies ethnography of year-round stall-feeding of cattle in byre-houses illuminates problems and opportunities of exhibiting historical human–animal relationships in open-air museums. Although received wisdom claims modernization alienated from nature, agricultural intensification in the Economic Enlightenment increased the intimacy of sociality with livestock. Year-round stall-feeding coexisted with living in byre-houses, and dairymaids began doing almost all of their work close to cows. This complicates straightforward narratives of modernity and animal agency. With byre-houses, open-air museums are uniquely positioned to tell this story of intimate working and living together and help re-center animals in often human-centered cultural history, even though welfare problems of housing in historical byre-houses, the risk of sentimentalizing past husbandry, and echoing the historical absenting of animals can present complications.

Little buildings offering food and places for nesting to oscine birds in the garden or on the balcony are not just decorative architectural elements. They represent ideas of “good” gardening, of ecological behaviour and of nature protection. This contribution is based on a study in the open-air museum in Kommern, Germany. With an ethnographic perspective on space and material culture, and specifically on the birdhouses in the museum, it discusses representations of human–bird-relations in material culture.

As in other countries in Central and Western Europe, the return of wolves to Switzerland since the mid-1990s has generated intense debates and has taken place in various fields in which material and immaterial entities come together in new multispecies networks. This paper focuses on one of those fields: wolf taxidermy. Based on interviews and fieldwork in taxidermy workshops and Swiss nature museums, the main question here is whether there are moments of wolfish agency in this unquestionably human-dominated process of taxidermy. A praxeological, performative and relational understanding of agency is laid out to explore this question. The selective and restricted agentic capacities wolves perform – mostly as a sort of offstage agents absent from the workshop itself – within the sociomaterial networks of wolf taxidermy is captured with the term interference.

This reflection piece interrogates what a focus on movement can bring to understanding more-than-human relationality in a museum space. It does so by zooming in on choreography and taxidermy as practices that both enable movement and kinesthetic becoming. It focusses on “Send out a Pulse!”, an artistic intervention for the Australian Museum in Sydney. Said piece is a nontraditional, choreographic audio walk made by the author as part of “How to Not be a Stuffed Animal”, an interdisciplinary, artistic-scholarly duo. Following a flightway of birds’ extinction stories, ways to activate response-ability through multispecies movement will be explored.

Heritage is often seen as a symptom of a temporally disjointed and all-pervasive present which shapes the pasts it requires to make up for the failures of linear, modern and progressive history. As a consequence, the pasts in heritage are often regarded as the result of unidirectional processes of attributing value to largely compliant materials. This article explores the constitutive role of materials in different stages of heritage-making and stress the specific material memory of buildings as central in the negotiation of temporalities in conservation practice. The notion of material memory allows for a closer consideration of both the unsolicited material effects of past events that is part of the historical fabric of buildings, as well as their ongoing transformation exceeding any one unitary and neatly contained historical present.

This article deals with the scholarly misconduct committed by the former Amsterdam Free University (VU) cultural anthropologist, Professor Mart Bax, who received international acclaim during the last three decades of the twentieth century for his fieldwork and research in Ireland, the Netherlands, and Bosnia-Herzegovina, and for applying his “theory” of competing religious regimes. Despite earlier suspicions, it was only a decade after his retirement in 2002 that a university commission reached the conclusion that more or less his whole oeuvre was built on quicksand: fraudulent, fake, or non-existent source material. The incredible and appalling Bax case is described and assessed here by a Dutch ethnologist who was confronted with Bax’s deception through his own work. This experience also raises questions about how to deal with what happened and what lessons can be learned from it.

On 9 September 2013 a commission consisting of Prof. Michiel Baud (University of Amsterdam), Prof. Susan Legêne (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) and Prof. Peter Pels (Leiden University) presented the report “Circumventing Reality: Report on the Anthropological Work of Professor Emeritus M.M.G. Bax”, which they had drafted at the request of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (from now on: VU) in the Netherlands. The anthropologist Mart Bax, who as professor of anthropology at the VU had practically retired in 2001 and formally in 2002,1 was shown to be a fraud, who made up numerous (non-existing) publications, and who had published about events (in Medjugorje, Bosnia) that never happened, and about places (in the province of Noord-Brabant, the Netherlands) that did not exist. This non-existing “empirical” material formed the basis for Bax’s theory of “religious regimes” and his academic career. Given Bax’s refusal to share information and sources about these events and places with the commission, they could not, however, positively prove that these events and places were invented. Yet, given the absence of historical evidence that a violent conflict had occurred between different Catholic groups in Medjugorje, Bax went down in the report and in history as a scientific confabulator and fraud.

A short comment is actually not sufficient to react to all the implications and assumptions brought up in the extensive follow-up by Salemink and Verrips. However, I think I should respond to the central issues to which they object. Hence, I will focus on the mentioned imprecisions and the issue of citation, on the reframing by both authors of my text as an intentional divisive narrative between disciplines, and on the suggestion of blurring and anachronizing the idea of a joint publication.

As joint editors-in-chief of Ethnologia Europaea we would like to conclude this exchange between Jojada Verrips, Oscar Salemink and Peter Jan Margry concerning the publication of Margry’s article “On Scholarly Misconduct and Fraud, and What We Can Learn from It” published in Ethnologia Europaea vol. 49(2), 2019, with a brief statement from our point of view. We do this not only to bring closure to a heated debate but also to direct attention to a very important lesson we think we can all learn as scholars of the fields of anthropology and ethnology: that scholarly misconduct is one of the hardest issues to deal with, not only on an administrative level but especially among peers.