Ethnologia Europaea

Development of genetics research has contributed to the detection of genetic diseases. One of them is the LCHAD enzyme deficiency, relatively common in the Kashubian population, and therefore by the media called the “Kashubian gene”. This article is a case study in which the social and cultural consequences of labelling a disease and problematising the ethnic nature of an illness are demonstrated. It is argued that a genetic disease can become a kind of stigma and spoiled identity, and that the collective identity created by biomedicalisation and geneticisation is either accepted, negotiated, or ignored because of its stigmatising properties. The biosociality built around the disease affects not only the carriers and their families, but also a wide range of people, who oppose the ethnic labelling of illness and the process of stigmatisation.

How can we understand and analytically grasp the practices that “run the state”? Departing from a contemporary focus on co-production in governance regimes, such as New Public Management and New Public Governance, this article argues that the Althusserian concept of interpellation contemplates a focus on a necessary connection between a superior Subject (often understood as the state) and dependent subjects – generally absent in governance studies. Drawing on Hegel’s concept of the universal class (der allgemeine Stand) and deploying the ethnologically-based state and life-mode theory, it is concluded that a state-subject can constitute a coherent and resilient whole only by encompassing a viable civil servant life-mode, and that the concepts policy-developing, operationalizing, and policy-implementing, together specify three different but interdependent and necessary dimensions of civil servant practice. A presentation of an empirical case of contemporary co-productive governance applies the developed concepts.

Recently food waste has been raised as a major sustainability problem: roughly one third of the food produced globally ends up lost or wasted. This article investigates how people attach meaning to food waste reduction, based on eight individual interviews conducted with people met at a consumer education event in Helsinki in 2017. It is shown how the traditional cultural norm of not wasting food is reproduced in discourse on thrift and frugality and renewed by research-based arguments from circular economy discourse and environmental and sustainability discourse. It is proposed that the interplay of discourses merge into what Lars Kaijser calls banal sustainability: the complicated issue of food waste is translated into everyday practises, and traditional practises are reframed as tools for making a better future.

People that are released from prison experience life outside of prison as unpredictable and insecure. They are faced with stigmatization, poverty, and feelings of alienation from the “world outside”, which limit formerly incarcerated men’s opportunities for positive participation in social life. Based on research in the field of post-prison life, this paper asks how formerly incarcerated men act and position themselves – the techniques they use to navigate – within and around uncertain sociocultural circumstances that characterize post-prison life. The article argues that formerly incarcerated men are active agents who seek to escape their insecure, marginal social position by deploying techniques of social navigation.

For a few months in the summer and autumn of 2021, the eastern EU border became the focus of international media attention due to the political events accompanying the presence of refugees from the Middle East and Northern Africa. This ethnographic snapshot shows the idiosyncrasy of this migration route and reflects on the situation where people tried to help the refugees, despite the criminalisation of help by the Polish state. The reaction of the European Union (or rather a lack thereof) is also thematised. It is too early to expect thorough analyses of these processes, but it is important to document them. What is happening, although ephemeral and changing, is of crucial significance for our understanding of the everyday workings of EU bordering regimes.