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Accepted Paper:
Paper short abstract:
There's a remarkable long history of Austrian researchers being fascinated by the north and the artic. One of the first was the Austro-Hungarian ethnograpy-enthusiast Rudolf Trebitsch. He visited the „land of his longing“ Greenland in 1906 and brought home rich harvest of knowledge and materials.
Paper long abstract:
Shortly after the death of the Viennese ethnologist Rudolf Trebitsch (1876-1918) more than 500 photographic images came into the collections of the "Museum of Austrian Folklore" in Vienna. In a mixture of adventurousness and scientific curiosity, Trebitsch had devoted himself to various remote European regions where ethnological and primitive archetypes were suspected to exist and supposed to be documented and saved.
Mentioned photographic objects are but one outcome of this expedition to Greenland in 1906 that brought the arctic and the nordic to the capital of the Habsburg Monarchy and its diverse institutions. Others were the (now) oldest preserved Inuit language recordings, noteworthy numerous ethnographic-anthropological objects and especially Trebitschs most famous publication, the book " With the Eskimos in West Greenland“.
The paper reflects on scientific and societal processes and contexts that motivated and favoured Austrian and Central European interests in the arctic and northern territories. It alsoasks about narratives and imaginaries of (arctic) primitivism or „norientalism“ and their connections to Vienna´s Zeitgeist. Trebitschs expedition as well as the objects he brought to Vienna are material and immaterial nodes that connect the nordic fascination of these years with patriotic duties and objectives of the young discipline of ethnography in the Habsburg Monarchy. The paper links the images associated with the north/arctic to later ideologised intellectual and popular trends like the germanic „Nordforschung“, the Viennese School of Mythology or the „World Ice Theory“ that all became important and promoted by the Nazi SS Ancestral Heritage.
Re-reading "politics" in the disciplinary history of ethnology and folklore studies II
Session 1 Tuesday 14 June, 2022, -