Paper short abstract:

Ethnographic questionnaires are knowledge instruments that can be used to tell a bottom-up disciplinary history. Whereas EQs prescribed a host of data collection practices with a hope of comparing findings, this poster addresses questions that visitors are invited to engage with.

Paper long abstract:

'Do you know of any customs of tipping off the last wagon load of grain at the end of the harvest?' 'What are the songs or formulas chanted in rope skipping?' 'What is said when a child yawns?' 'How early do people get up in the morning in spring time?' Such questions are real examples taken from ethnographic questionnaires (EQs) that are more than a hundred years old. In my poster I wish to address EQs as a way of engaging the values promoted by folklorists and ethnologists from the vantage point of the present.

EQs were a unique participatory knowledge format, activating many people in the folklore project, shifting awareness to specific cultural expressions and habits. Rather than viewing EQs as a methodology that merely prescribes the collection of data, I examine them as vehicles for transforming knowledge and cultural hierarchies, which eventually had a lasting impact on the relation between local cultures and value (Bendix 2018).

In my poster I wish to present some questions and some examples of EQs with the aim of reflecting on matters that were of much concern in the history of our disciplines. EQs were about finding answers, but they differed from one another in the type of questions asked and the way these were organized. In what ways do these questions matter today? What can they tell us about our present-day concerns? We will find out…