Ethnologia Europaea

“Tradition” has been a key concept and object of European ethnology from the foundation of the discipline all the way to intangible cultural heritage policies today. A focus has been given to the cultural and social circulations and permutations affecting traditional facts and has shown the plasticity of “traditions” to (ever-)changing social conditions. Understood as “uses of the past”, these mainly political and sociological understandings of what “tradition” means today need to be complemented with a view on the emotional aspects of this peculiarly human way of imagining and experiencing the world. This text introduces three notions which highlight the experiential dimension of tradition: re-enchantment, ritualization, and heritage-making. We hope to forge new paths towards the exploration of all things “traditional” and their cultural dynamics.

This article explores the three main concepts and experiential aspects at the centre of this special issue (re-enchantment, ritualization, and heritage-making), on the empirical grounds of three different ethnographic cases from Italy, the Czech Republic, and Catalonia (Spain). The text attempts to demonstrate how re-enchantment, ritualization, and cultural heritage-making can co-exist and interact within or around the same traditional facts as complementary (or at least not mutually exclusive) processes, and also in what sense their correlation and interaction can be thought of in terms of “tradition reconfiguration”. This is also done by discussing the concepts of “(re)traditionalization” and “past-presencing”, and related ones, such as symbolization, mythopoiesis, popular Frazerism, and (pseudo-)religious heritage.

This article addresses the combined dynamics between traditional religious manifestations and cultural heritage processes in order to better understand the reconfiguration of certain religious rituals, sometimes coined as local religion. After examining the entanglements of cultural heritage and religions in southern Europe, often silenced or minimized, I present recent case studies demonstrating that uses of religious traditions as cultural heritage are not uncommon and that the theoretical framework of secularization needs to be nuanced. At state or community level, religious practices seem to be enchanted, and at the same time enchant the region in which they take place. This analysis helps to understand the processes of contemporary social and cultural reconfiguration of the ways people think and what they make of their religious “traditions”.

The reasons why a secular society bothers to rebuild a burnt church seem complex. Starting out from two case studies of burnt and reconstructed churches in Sweden, Skaga chapel and the church of Södra Råda, this article examines the perspective from which the process and result of material reconstruction may be understood as enchantment strategies. According to Weber’s disenchantment thesis and the contemporary concept of heritagization, the significance of today’s church buildings, as well as the decision to reconstruct, may be based on historical narratives and local self-images rather than religious worship. Without univocally contradicting this perception, however, the study shows that the reconstructions, as carefully staged situations, represent acts of faith and provide the actors with a sense of shared participation and new meaning. 

Focusing on the ritual of the Commending of the Souls in Penha Garcia (Portugal), this article analyzes how its recasting as heritage is re-inventing a declining rurality and aiding an uncertain future. A renewed vernacular engagement with the ritual, along with the local use of heritage policy to render it intangible heritage is 1) generating a vernacularization of Portuguese Catholicism (analogous to “religious pluralization”), and 2) construing heritage-making as an efficacious technique of religious belief. This article argues that the collective engagement of local actors in the processes of vernacularization and transforming of this ritual into heritage is (re-)enchanting the virtuosity of their local religiosity, which embodies and suspends a structural uncertainty.

After the publication of Hobsbawm and Ranger’s groundbreaking The Invention of Tradition and ten years after Noyes’ essay, Tradition: Three Traditions, what do we, as specialists of European cultures, have to say about “tradition”? This forum invites a selection of scholars coming from various thematic fields and countries to think about the concept of tradition, considered as one of our first conceptual tools and ethnographic objects of investigation. The authors reflexively discuss in which ways their research experiences challenge their own perceptions, understanding, and reframing of tradition. More than mapping new and allegedly new – or better “recycled” – ways in which social, ethnic, religious, or political groups use and manipulate traditions, the authors also address their perplexities with the notion of tradition. They thus add a specific layer of reflection, touching on temporality, methodology, and theoretical frames, to their practices of folklore and ethnology today.

Since 1932, Poland has had a progressive law regarding rape, according to which rape is defined regardless of the relationship between the rapist and the victim or their gender. However, this law has not been fully executed because of widespread stereotypes concerning rape. This paper draws on multiple ethnographic and archival sources and focuses on the changes in discourses on rape and court practices in rape cases that have occurred since the 1970s. It shows that feminists have been instrumental in shifting discourses of sexual violence and court practices in rape cases by bringing women’s/victims’ voices into the public sphere. This paper also unveils mechanisms of emancipation that were not possible without local developments in expert knowledge and local feminist activity.

By looking at the bodily performances of Polish EU civil servants in Brussels, I aim to show the colonial and racial legacy of Europe. I trace this legacy in struggles over an implicit and dominant European style that emerges in distinctions governing bodily performances in Brussels. This “Eurostyle” is firm but variable; it reflects national specificities and the modernity of Europe. Europe’s colonial power also comes into view through challenges to the Eurostyle, in performances of a resistant and more “religious” Polish body reflecting a self-imposed mission to re-Christianize Europe. Building on observations and interviews, my ethnography shows that a focus on Polishness in Brussels may explain ideological tensions in Poland stipulated by nationalistic and moralistic rhetoric as opposed to that of liberal and secular Europe. 

This article examines the rhetorical figuration of “our children” in climate change discourse. Based on an analysis of James Hansen’s book, Storms of my Grandchildren (2009), Barack Obama’s speech at the COP21 meeting in Paris in 2015, and a newspaper article about the Norwegian environmental organization, The Grandparents’ Climate Campaign, it argues that the uses of “our children” reflect a notion of a family-timed future. The trope implies a “we” working as the active subject in the texts, while “our children” simply represents a future to be saved. This structure also authorizes “the parent” as a position of enunciation in climate change discourse. The article argues that the authority of this position is based on a heteronormative reproductive futurism.

Research on skilled migrants often focuses on the negative effects of migration on sending countries. Discussions of positive results are limited to monetary remittances. Using ethnographic data, we explore the impact of mobility on the creation of new opportunities in Poland. We argue that Polish women bring back, not only financial resources, but also socio-cultural remittances that allow them to establish new businesses, pursue novel employment opportunities, and gain new perceptions of gender roles and equality. We depart from the conceptualization of labor migration, which emphasizes the dichotomy between sending and receiving countries, the pervasive nature of national borders that separate labor migrants from origin countries, and the ubiquitous financial gains. Instead, we focus on socio-cultural remittances that are deployed in transnational spaces.