Ethnologia Europaea

We hope you enjoy this new issue of Ethnologia Europaea, which comes with several changes to the structure and editorship of the journal. It is with poignant memories and happy expectations for Ethnologia Europaea that we write about a new era: to begin, EE has just moved to a new publisher at the start of 2024. Berghahn Journals will now be our home for the foreseeable future, and we are already enjoying the professional atmosphere of this independent, progressive and social science-friendly publishing house. With this switch from OLH, EE now becomes part of Berghahn's OpenAnthro model.¹

This article explores long-standing symbiotic relations between women and microbes in Iceland while analysing the transformation of this relationship in the making of the dairy product skyr during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the past, differences in microbial cultures and production methods meant that the taste and texture of skyr varied greatly. Standardisation and technological innovations have steadily impoverished its microbial diversity over the past 120 years. Starting from a historical account of skyr making, we zoom in on skyr in the twenty-first century, a period in which skyr has had an international breakthrough, captured in branding efforts and advertising campaigns produced in this decade for various types of skyr from producers in Iceland, Europe and the United States.

By applying an empirical, posthumanist and Stimmung-centred approach, I examine Southern Kashubian folklore from the perspective of a mostly overlooked actor: the sand. I first reread Kashubian folktales, lyrics and ethnographic texts focusing on sand motifs, asking what role sand plays in Kashubian narrative culture and what Stimmung (mood, attunement or atmosphere) induced by sand is inscribed in these texts. Based on my empirical material gathered in fieldwork, I then explain where sand is located in everyday knowledge and experience. Finally, I interpret the results by highlighting the correlations between sand and Stimmung, asking to what extent sand is not only a matter of tuning but is also an attuned matter, a concept developed in the course of the investigation.

Given the quasi-colonial entanglements of Russia's peripheral republics, we ask whether and how their statuses influence local COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy. Dagestan, in the North Caucasus, provides an interesting case study: vaccines were readily available and promoted by authorities, yet non-vaccination seemed to be the overwhelmingly popular and commonly accepted practice in the republic. We show that the quasi-colonial status of the republic added to vaccine hesitancy by evoking fears stemming from the colonial past and turbulent present. We conclude that, in studies on vaccination, nation-states should not be treated as uniform entities. Otherwise, researchers risk overlooking local factors behind vaccine hesitancy. We show that in some cultural contexts vaccine hesitancy may stem from a collective understanding of health and the prioritisation of local solidarities.

This article contributes to the development of the concept of “playgrounds”, which has previously been given only sporadic analytical value as a fundamental component of concepts of play. Ethnographic material on the Italian celebration and competition the Palio di Siena is analysed, providing a spatial analysis to support the emotional reading of play. According to this article, the emerging playground of this festivity includes not only local and global public places but also intimate ones. The article investigates how intimacy and publicness are intertwined in specific festive places, and what role global contexts play today in spatial processes of community-building at festivities. Furthermore, festivities are shaped by both participants and outsiders, such as tourists and even “spoilsports”.

My first meeting with Chris was in about 1980 at a Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG) meeting in Cambridge. I was there out of curiosity, to know more about what was buzzing at the time, as a new paradigm emerging from a group of firebrand young archaeologists who had upended the established figures of the scientifically oriented New Archaeology with inspirational references to structuralism and post-structuralism and anthropology as the right source of theoretical analogues.