Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I re-visit the theme of peasants and the view of peasant society on the pages of Ethnologia Scandinavica. Once the main core of ethnological research, it highlights changing attitudes to research and stuby objects.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I re-visit the theme of peasants and the view of peasant society on the pages of Ethnologia Scandinavica. Once the main core of ethnological research, it highlights changing attitudes to research and stuby objects. I shall follow ethnological development in the context of the object of study that in itself came to influence the shape and character of Nordic ethnology as a discipline. It is no mystery nor surprise that the roots of ethnology, which were in the study and collection of material from dwindling pre-industrial society, were acknowledged and cherished as peasant society and their complex struggles were at the core of many initial papers published in Ethnologia Scandinavica. I also include anglers’ communities in that category, as they formed a part of the changing landscape of progressing industrialism. My aim, thus, is to trace the change from the archive-based peasant society studies, to other forms and focuses of studying the society, illustrated by papers published in Ethnologia Scandinavica.

Paper short abstract:

Based on a sample from fifty years of evidence in Ethnologia Scandinavica, this paper will investigate how participant observation has been used and debated in Nordic Ethnology and Folklore Studies. Next, it will reflect upon the future of the method, in the wake of GDPR and other legal frameworks.

Paper long abstract:

Participant observation is a method for understanding cultural processes. Focusing on what is evolving between people, whether it be planned or unplanned, smooth, cumbersome, delightful, or deeply distressing, it provides us with perhaps the most close-to-lived-lives data that the ethnographic toolkit can deliver. This paper will trace the trajectory of the method and its implementation in Nordic Ethnology and Folklore Studies, based on a sample from five decades of printed evidence in the Nordic journal Ethnologia Scandinavica. Ranging from the 1970s to the early 2020s, this period should allow us to revisit something at least rather close to the method’s pioneering phase in our disciplines and follow it up to the present - where participant observation is at one and the same time part and parcel of our trade and, because of current rules and regulations of research ethics, increasingly difficult to perform.

The questions to be addressed are the following: To what extent, and how, has participant observation been used in our disciplines? What results have been yielded by the method? How has it been discussed, criticized, or challenged, in book reviews as well as, potentially, in more comprehensive reflections? And what are the prospects for its future use, in the wake of legal frameworks where social and interactional data are transformed into private property? What are the odds of reconciling GDPR and participant observation, and what can be gained and lost in that process?

Paper short abstract:

This paper brings forward the development of environmental ethnology over the last 50 years and discusses the current status and future challenges for environmental ethnologists.

Paper long abstract:

This proposed paper examines the last 50 years of Ethnologia Scandinavica through environmental framework. How has Scandinavian environmental ethnology developed over the last five decades as it can be interpreted from the articles published in Ethnologia Scandinavica, and how do these developments reflect the more general and global flows of theory building, concept development and societal discussions. What are the current issues ethnologists are dealing with, and what are the future challenges Scandinavian ethnologists should address and how?

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the discipline of ethnology as this has been represented in ES. I will focus upon (i) how some salient contributors have investigated cultural borders, and (ii) upon inter-disciplinary relations to adjacent disciplines like anthropology and history.

Paper long abstract:

In Cultural Hybridity, the cultural historian Peter Burke associates the Swedish folklorist C. W. von Sydow’s concept of oicotype with the more fashionable concept of “hybridity”, explicitly referencing Edward Said and Homi Bhabha (Burke 2009: 51). Folklorists who follow the debate about cultural globalization, glocalization – and hybridity, Burke asserted in 2009, “must have a sense of déjà vu, since we are witnessing the return of the oicotype” (ibid: 52). Although “less known today”, the notion of the oicotype is thus “equally illuminating […] in the study of cultural change” (ibid). Burke’s analogy between “oicotype” and “hybridity” assumes the continued value of old approaches and “paradigms” from Nordic folklore and ethnology to new cultural context (like globalization and its concomitant cultural hybridity). In this paper, I will echo Burke’s approach. I will probe the archives of Ethnologia Scandinavica assuming the continued value and relevance of past intellectual paradigms. My aim, then, is to examine the discipline of ethnology as this has been represented in ES. Evidently, I cannot here cover the recent intellectual history of ethnology in a comprehensive manner, nor the complete intellectual output presented in the journal. Hence, I will focus upon (i) how some salient contributors have investigated cultural borders, and (ii) upon inter-disciplinary relations to adjacent disciplines like anthropology and history. My method will be a close reading of a few, selected texts, and I will refrain from making global assertions about the journal – or ethnology in the period.