Ethnologia Europaea

Why can the anthropologist be a writer but not an author? This essay reflects on the possibility of conveying anthropological knowledge through creative writing while reconsidering ethnographical authorship and its audience. The research material is a fiction written by myself to evoke a particular structure of feeling bound to a specific location, contemporary Berlin. The story is not told, however, from the perspective of an ethnographer who masters expert knowledge, but from the partial view of a protagonist who appears as a lost, hopeless, and vulnerable figure. This anthropological fiction invites us to reconsider the boundary between academic knowledge production and creative writing, rising along questions about evidence, representation and how our research could reach a general audience.

Following the digitization of archival records of ethnographic work conducted among Yemeni Jews in the early 1970s, we presented these findings to the same community at the same location, fifty years later. In this renegotiation, our interlocutors radically undermined the credibility of our archival material. We analyze the audience’s reactions and the way they reflect different ethnographic dynamics, contextualizing their critical position in the tensions between archival knowledge and lived repertoire in general, and specifically in relation to traumatic experiences of Yemenis in Israel. Finally, we discuss how the suspicion toward the archive is embedded in larger current discourses on “truth” and “facts” and how in this context, it can be beneficial to scrutinize tradition archives in a community setting.

This article analyses interviews with descendants of Polish migrants in Sweden using the lens of postmemory. The aim is to show how they narrated growing up with parents and grandparents who recalled traumatic experiences of the occupation of Poland during World War II and of the communist era, and to explore the transgenerational imprints of this recall. A number of less-explored aspects of postmemory are elucidated: postmemory related to less extreme abuse and violence than that experienced by Holocaust survivors; postmemory in both second and third generation; postmemory as narrated by those who grew up in a different country to that in which the trauma of their relatives is rooted; and the lived after-effects of trauma.

This article focuses on sustainability understood as a source of political legitimation. I explore political imaginaries and the future as a cognitive resource among two small farming communities in Northern Italy, discussing what transformation towards sustainability means at a concrete level and how this definition may be used strategically in political negotiations to access resources. Ethnographically rooted, this study uses reflexivity and researcher’s positioning as a tool to better understand the farmer’s social and cultural frameworks, related conflicts, and strategies for surviving. Rhetoric and practices about sustainability establish a symbolic resource that allows gaining new agency spaces. Temporalities regimes are examined here, in order to grasp the identity-making and the self-differentiation processes among the farmers.

This article examines the ways in which various supernatural women who pose threats to men are presented in the Icelandic folk legend collections from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It focuses on narratives dealing with both female trolls and “hidden” women (elves) that appear to present a danger to male hegemony because of how they challenge the ruling ideology of the time with regard to femininity and sexuality. As the article demonstrates, in most cases, the legends show these threats being mitigated. The article therefore argues that these legends can be read as reinforcing the idea that women should not be tempted to violate hegemonic norms regarding femininity. 

This snapshot is a reflection on the nature of mobile ethnographic research where the ethnographer herself is a (hyper)mobile subject, with multiple, at times conflicted, belongings. It explores the role of wavering intimacies in establishing new relationships in the field especially during the early stages of new research, as it emerges from the legacies of previously conducted fieldwork. By introducing the metaphor of the Möbius strip, this snapshot reconsiders the meanings of home and field, and argues for the continuity between fieldwork life and other lives, with the line between them increasingly blurred. The ethnographic material for this piece is the result of research conducted for the past two years among Cuban dancers in Italy and Germany.