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.