Full Description
What is Europe? Where is Europe? And what is Europe in the discipline of European ethnology? This issue of Ethnologic Europaea celebrates the journal's 40th birthday by looking at future paths for research on Europe. For a long time the disciplines grouped under the label of European ethnology were mainly national ethnologies. The need for European com-parisons lived more in the Sunday rhetoric of the discipline than in actual research, but with a new interest in transnational processes the perspectives have widened. The processes of economic unification also gave rise to research on facets of a Euro-pean culture, conditioned, for instance, by the administrative implementation of European economic and, increasingly, cultural policies. Local, regional and national cultural dimen-sions do not vanish in this development, of course, and neither do borders and boundaries, physical and mental. Processes of EU integration as well as globalisation may both weaken and strengthen national and regional borders, as we have seen during the last decades, but such developments call for a rethinking of Europe as a research field and also a questioning of ideas about Europe or European cultural homogeneity. The EU rhetoric about unity hides a more complex picture, where European integration and disintegration emerges in often surprising settings and forms.
Contents
Rethinking Europe as a Field for European Ethnology. Editors Introduction 5; Liberating the Ethnological Imagination; Beyond Culture and Identity. Places, Practices, Experiences; Rethinking Ethnology in the Spanish Context; The Tragedy of Enclosure. The Battle for Maritime Resources and Life-Modes in Europe; Comparing Comparisons in Europeanist Anthropologies -- Towards a New Effectiveness in Europeanism; Grand Questions and Small-Scale Ethnographies. The Usefulness of Kinship Studies in Contemporary Europe; The Sound of Citizenship; The Troubled Past of European Ethnology. SIEF and International Co-operation from Prague to Derry.
