Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Hande Birkalan-Gedik
(Goethe Universität)
Gabriele Orlandi (Ca' Foscari - University of Venice)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Panel+Roundtable
Short Abstract:
This panel aims to un/write traditional disciplinary histories by critically re-assessing how ethnology, folklore, and related disciplines have been shaped by shifting power dynamics, transnational connections, cultural transfers, and various encounters among scholars and collaborators.
Long Abstract:
Most histories of ethnology, folklore, anthropology and related disciplines have traditionally been framed within national and academic perspectives. However, a closer look at the “lives” of scholars, institutions, journals, and associations as well as written oeuvres reveals that ethnology and folklore often developed in multifaceted transnational, transcultural, and transdisciplinary contexts, illuminating on the complex border-crossing dynamics of folklore knowledge. We believe that one of the nuanced aspects of un/writing is a call to action for reflecting on how these disciplinary histories have been construed and how they might be reimagined today. Thus, we invite scholars interested in challenging traditional disciplinary frameworks to critically re-situate existing scholarship within broader structures of power and dominance, ideological pressures, practices of invisibility and (self-)censorship, vis-à-vis professional trajectories, cultural institutions, cultural transfer and brokerage, transnational circuits and circulations. Potential avenues for un/writing include examining how expert discourses on folk societies emerged through collaborations; how transnational and transcultural encounters among folklorists, their spouses, amateurs, and other collaborators fostered folklore knowledge production; and how the contributions of the overlooked, marginalized, and migrant interlocutors advanced transcultural understandings in ethnology and folklore. Topics can address power relations, colonialism, globalisation, heteronormativity, and other hegemonic forces and practices that shaped our—at times dark—and often-difficult disciplinary histories. In our un/writing process, we welcome papers offering new insights aligned with recent developments in transnational, global, and transfer history (Transfergeschichte), which have introduced innovative methodological and epistemological approaches such as entangled histories, histoire croisée, and critical folkloristics.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1Contribution short abstract:
This presentation interrogates the influence of European encounters with non-Europeans in informing the ideas at the base of European folklore studies.
Contribution long abstract:
The development of folklore studies is usually explained in terms of the influence of ideas that championed cultural and linguistic difference within Europe. This paper questions the European origin of these ideas. From the ‘noble savage’ to Herder’s ethnographically informed cultural relativism, knowledge of non-European societies helped to shape them. Descriptions of oral societies, especially of indigenous Americans, influenced the debate about Homer’s poetry and set the scene for the positive reception of Ossian (1760). And in the 19th century comparative philology, especially Indo-European and Finno-Ugric, gave a Eurasian dimension to debates about national origins and strongly influenced folklore research.
Contribution short abstract:
Our talk addresses methodological challenges in studying transnational entanglements in folklore studies. We propose ‘transnational constellations’—networks of actors, media, practices, and more— to explore transnational exchanges that shape(d) folkloristic knowledge.
Contribution long abstract:
To this day, the investigation of transnational interconnections in the history of folklore studies during its early institutionalization in the late 19th century remains an unaddressed research gap. This gap stems not only from entrenched disciplinary and national research traditions in the history of social thought but also from the inherent complexities of conducting transnational research. In our presentation, we will discuss how we tackle the methodological and practical challenges associated with investigating the transnational history of entanglements within our discipline, as part of the research project “Actors – Narratives – Strategies: Constellations of Transnational Folklore Research, 1875–1905” (German Research Foundation, 2022–2027). Central to our approach is the concept of the ’transnational constellation.’ We define transnational constellations as networks comprising actors, infrastructures, media, practices, objects, strategies, discursive strands, and positions. Such transnational constellations are ethnographically approached and examined through multi-scalar analyses. To explore them with a focus on transnational knowledge practices, the project employs the concept of ‘shared history’ and integrates it with the conceptual framework of histoire croisée (entangled history). This approach allows us to describe in detail exemplary processes of transnational exchange and their role in shaping folkloristic knowledge and practice. At the same time, it makes it possible to investigate how these exchanges were intertwined with social, political, scientific, and economic conditions that influenced the diverse forms of folklore studies' institutionalization at local and regional levels; being aware of the complex and sometimes unequal nature of transnational interrelation.
Contribution short abstract:
The paper examines post-1945 Romanian, Serbian, and Hungarian music historiographies, revealing the construction of separate national narratives. By unwriting these narratives, the new methodological framework transcends both nationalist and Marxist legacies while acknowledging Western influences.
Contribution long abstract:
This presentation examines how Romanian, Serbian, and Hungarian musicological historiography after 1945 constructed distinct national narratives that deliberately obscured shared historical experiences and interconnections. The research reveals that although six key elements of musical culture (education, performances, audience, professional press, business infrastructure, and identity-based legendarium) demonstrate remarkably similar patterns across the region, national music historiographies systematically erased these parallels and interconnections.
It is particularly instructive that all three musical cultures were initially oriented towards Vienna, and subsequently towards German and French centres, which contributed to the lack of inter-regional dialogue. This centre-oriented developmental model paradoxically persisted in both Marxist and nationalist historiographies, even as both approaches explicitly opposed Western cultural dominance.
The presentation performs the operation of 'unwriting' on three levels:
1. It reveals the constructed nature of national narratives and the ambivalence of relationships with Western centres
2. It deconstructs the ideological motivations behind separate historiographies
3. It proposes a transcultural rewriting that does not erase but rather recontextualizes national specificities
Thus, rather than merely comparing the practices of these three countries, the presentation proposes a methodological framework that enables the decolonization of music historiography from both nationalist and Marxist legacies, as well as from the Western centre-periphery model, while preserving valuable insights from these approaches.
Contribution short abstract:
I examine the 1975 and 1981 International Turkish Folklore Congresses as key events transnationalizing folklore studies in Turkey, where the National Folklore Institute, as the state’s central institution, took the lead in collecting, archiving and presenting folklore outside of universities.
Contribution long abstract:
The first and second International Folklore Congresses (1975 and 1981) were pivotal events that established a tradition of congresses and aligned Turkish and foreign folklorists in the following decades. Organized collaboratively by Turkish folklorists and the Turkish state, they served as critical forums to present a national canon of “significant” genres. They connected Turkish scholars with transnational networks and influenced the folklore studies' disciplinary agenda in the next decades. While the content was predominantly national, the conferences were deeply embedded in transnational networks, which expanded folklore research beyond Turkey. Congresses, alternating in different locales and frequencies as obligatory celebrations of a discipline’s raison d'être, structure trajectories of scholarly ideas, confirm certain forms of their governance and long-term impacts (Howard/Mawyer 2020), and transform disciplinary knowledge (Rogan 2015, 2012). Drawing on "epistemic cultures" (Knorr-Cetina, 1999), I analyze how these congresses shaped the production and circulation of folklore knowledge in Turkey. I consider the networks involved and analyze the organizational structures and the roles of diverse actors in shaping the field. My aim is to understand how these encounters helped forming a nationalist canon that prioritized certain folklore genres and how these knowledge practices influenced un-doing folklore in Turkey at large. With a special attention to folklore's engagement with broader society, my analysis contributes to un/re/writing the history of folklore studies in Turkey and to global folklore histories at large, linking greater political and disciplinary developments with insights into the interplay between academic discourse and broader cultural and political forces.
Contribution short abstract:
The paper focuses on the Austrian ethnographer Franz Franzisci (1825-1920), who did research in a transcultural region. He described ‘Slovenian’ and ‘German’ cultural heritage as being of equal value, his studies were later unwritten by ethnologists in a sense of a nationalising (German) ideology.
Contribution long abstract:
Franz Franzisci (1825-1920), who contributed to the folkloristic article on Carniola (now Slovenia) and Carinthia (now Austria) in Die österreichisch-ungarische Monarchie in Wort und Bild (1891), made a name for himself as an ethnographer of the cultural heritage in Carinthia and Carniola. At this time, the conflict between the German-speaking majority and the Slovene-speaking population group arose against the background of the idea of homogeneous nation states (Hobsbawm/Ranger 1993). 1826 the philologist and writer Urban Jarnik noted a gradual ‘Germanisation’ of Carinthia, which until then had also been Slovene speaking.
Franzisci described phenomena of the mixed-language population that were connoted as ‘Slovene’ and ‘German’. He did not attempt to portray the cultural heritages of the ‚Slovenes‘ and ‚Germans‘ as mutually exclusive, but rather as equally valuable.
In the reception by the folklore movement after 1900, Franzisci was elevated to the ‘founding father of Carinthian folklore’ - whereby ‘Carinthia’ only meant German-speaking Carinthia. His writings were subsequently referenced in the 20th century and the Slovenian-language cultural heritage was either ignored, integrated, Germanised or constructed as ‘fallen heritage’.
The reception of Franz Franzisci in nationalising folklore shows how the dichotomy analysed in the concept of the Dispositif Carinthia/Koroška (Peball/Schönberger 2021) is constructed in a transcultural region. We dicuss how Franzisci's studies were rewritten in terms of a German national ideology and ask how we can reconstruct Franzisci's transcultural perspective. What hints of practices of in-between (Schemmer/Schönberger 2024) in the (still mixed language) region of Carinthia do we gain from such a unwriting?
Contribution short abstract:
This paper aims to turn the spotlight on the life and selected ethnographies of the geographer and ethnologist Francesco Musoni against the background of the nationalisation process. It argues that his transcultural experience led him to document practices and situations beyond established dualisms.
Contribution long abstract:
In his ethnographic work, Francesco Musoni oscillates between expressing his loyalty as an Italian citizen and advocating the rights of the Slovene-speaking population in Italy. Originating from the plurilingual, transcultural region Slavia Friulana/Benecija, located in todays` border region between Italy and Slovenia, Musoni developed a professional interest in the Slavic world. Musoni published ethnographic, historical, toponymic and folklore research, as well as studies on the peoples of later Yugoslavia. His writings reflect his transdisciplinary involvement and developed through his activities. Musoni was a university lecturer. He held several political positions, both locally and regionally. Besides, he extended a transnational network as a member of the Friulian Alpine Society and as the president of the Friulian Speleological and Hydrological Circle. While he pursued his career in Italy and wrote his publications in Italian, he knew several Slavic languages and promoted Slavic studies in Italy (I nomi locali e l'elemento slavo in Friuli, 1897). However, the ideas he expresses show that he was concerned with documenting practices that lay beyond established dualisms of an Italian or Slovene culture.
Recent research on nationalisation has revealed its transversal dynamics (Feichtinger/Uhl, 2016; Ginderachter/Fox, 2019), detailing the process from the perspective of its ruptures and difficulties. In my talk, I aim to show the ambivalent, sometimes contradictory ways linguistic and cultural diversity is reflected in expert discourses. Examining how Musoni’s activities and his production of ethnographic knowledge on ethnic difference facilitated transcultural understandings is a possible approach to un/writing.
Contribution short abstract:
The folkloristic embedding in the Slovenian musical institutions of the 19th century was discussed exclusively in relation to Slovenian (folk) music. In addition to the public reports, ethnographic vignettes testify to a greater heterogeneity and inbetweeness of the actors, audiences and programs.
Contribution long abstract:
The musical institutions in the towns of the Habsburg lands were closely linked in the late 19th century. Young professionals from different ethnic/national backgrounds were mainly trained at the same institutions, where they formed common social networks that remained influential even when they worked in different towns of the Empire. Migrations between institutions were common, as the structure and mechanisms of action were similar. Small ethnographic vignettes are used to question the hegemonic narrative about the activities of the Philharmonic Society of Ljubljana, the Slovenian Matica and the Ljubljana Music Matica, as well as related institutions in Klagenfurt, Gorizia and Trieste. The functioning of these institutions was largely determined by their leading actors, some of whom are known today as notorious folklorists, such as Karel Štrekelj and others.
The paper examines their transcultural embeddedness and the similarity of their approaches and practices even in their attempts at nationalization. Tiny ethnographic vignettes from newspapers, diaries and other records show their numerous positions of in-betweenness: between the national and the cosmopolitan, between 'folk' and high culture, between the political and the esthetic, i.e. all kinds of inbetween spaces that elude established narratives that disregard the multiple situations and everyday positions of the individual folklorist in a particular temporal and spatial setting.
Contribution short abstract:
This paper proposes to understand, decode and understand the ‘signs and the sacred’ through the intellectual, artistic, and historical trajectory in Pre-modern Assam by scrutinising an extensive body of literary and visual art forms.
Contribution long abstract:
Assam, located in the eastern Himalayan foothills, was described as a hospitable ecology full of ‘good pastures’ and domesticated wilderness by the sixteenth-century British explorer Peter Heyleyn. In contrast, the seventeenth-century Persian chronicler, Shihabuddin Talish found her landscape dangerous and gloomy, with a sky full of clouds. Geopolitically considered as a mediating region between southeast and central Asia, pre-modern Assam’s ecology essentially appeared as grey and unruly for the pre-modern onlookers and writers till the twenty-first century Indian medieval historians from Jadunath Sarkar to Irfan Habib.
From the sixteenth century onwards, the ruling dynasties (especially the Ahoms and the Koches) meticulously documented official records (Buranjis and Vamshavalis) on one hand and the intellectual practices of bhakti tradition (The genre of literature, paintings and other art forms emerged from a spiritual movement in Assam) composed an illustrious archive to understand the history of Assam’s real and imagined ecology. This vast literary archive bearing ‘signs’ from personified demonic grey clouds, speaking cuckoo birds, and swarming locusts to the composite swine human, at times the ecological imaginations navigated the terrestrial, material, cultural, and spiritual understanding of the land. This paper proposes to understand, decode and read these ‘signs, through the intellectual, artistic, and historical trajectory in pre-modern Assam by scrutinising an extensive body of literary and visual art forms.
Keywords: Signs, ecology, pre-modern Assam
Contribution short abstract:
This paper account for the life of an Travelling Chair for Agriculture operating in the Italian Alps between the 19th and the 20th century. In particular, in explores how scientific and folkloric elements were blended in the functioning of this agrarian institution.
Contribution long abstract:
For many decades between the 19th and the 20th century, the Travelling Chairs for Agriculture played a noteworthy role in modernising and transforming agricultural practices in the Italian countryside, as significant historiographical literature has now documented. Such agrarian institutions, created with the support of municipalities and local banks, often represented important spaces of transnational circulation of people and ideas, as shown by the accounts of the lives of agronomists, botanists and animal husbandry experts who animated them. However, less attention seems to have been paid, up until now, to the specific forms of national identity championed by these experts and technicians, as well as to the social representations of rural societies that animated their work. Rudimentary forms of folk-lore seems to have underpinned and legitimated the actions of scientists who passionately devoted themselves to disseminating new agricultural techniques through leaflets, practical demonstrations and rural lectures. It is precisely what I will demonstrate in this paper, based on archival data about the life (1886-1928) of a Travelling Chair for Agriculture operating in the south-Western Alps. In particular, I will examine how the production of knowledge about Alpine societies was instrumental to the politics and functioning of an institution charged with improving agricultural economies. More generally, in considering how non-folklorist actors were close to a folkloric sensibility, I will show how it was the porosity of different social worlds that favoured the circulation of these spontaneous forms of ethnology of Alpine societies.
Contribution short abstract:
The text aims to reflect critically on the Basque research of Eugeniusz Frankowski (1884-1962), carried out in collaboration with a group of researchers from la Sociedad de Eusko-Folklore (especially Jose Miguel de Barandiaran y Telesforo Aranzadi).
Contribution long abstract:
The Basque landscape played a huge symbolic role in the creation of 19th-century Basque nationalism under the sign of Sabino Arana. These ideas turned specifically towards the countryside and emphasised the role of the Basque landscape as an integral part of local identity.
Developing in the 20th century, Basque ethnography met the perspective of a Polish researcher, the young archaeologist and ethnologist Eugeniusz Frankowski, who found himself in the Peninsula in 1914 and, due to the outbreak of the First World War, decided to stay there, in time linking up with Spanish and Basque research institutions.
The confluence of the two perspectives allows for an examination of the process of intermingling influences and an analysis of the collection of photographs of the Basque landscape taken by Frankowski during his field research.
The text intends to answer the following questions:
How do the relationships of ethnology, archaeology and history shaped the image of Basques in scientific texts?
To what extent did Basques become part of the landscape seen/photographed and studied?
What power relations are revealed in the perspective of the ‘scientific’ study of the Basque?
Contribution short abstract:
The paper explores Yemeni Jewish oral culture stored in folklore archives, focusing on the work of four key scholars who studied Yemeni folklore in Israel.
Contribution long abstract:
This paper explores interpretations of Yemeni-Jewish oral culture through the lens of folklore archives, focusing on the work of four key scholars who studied Yemeni-Jewish folklore between the 1930s and 1970s in Palestine-Israel. Yemeni Jews have fascinated European Jewish scholars since the 19th century, and Yemeni Jewish sound, notably language and music, received much ethnographic attention. The orientalist S.D. Goitein conducted linguistic studies of Yemeni proverbs, while Hebrew writer Haim Hazaz produced literary works based on ethnographic interviews with Yemeni immigrants. Ethnomusicologist Edith Gerson-Kiwi conducted recordings aimed at transcribing "oriental melodies," and dance researcher Gurit Kadman worked to revive Yemeni dance traditions.
The four scholar's archives consist of diverse media - from textual mediation of language in the 1940s, text and audio recording of folksongs in the 1950s, to audio recordings and silent films in the 1970s. Moreover, the persons at the heart of this study had different objectives: academic research, literary writing, or reviving traditions. Consequently, their interactions with Yemeni assistants, mediators, and informants were diverse.
Through these cases the paper will discouss how such mediated knowledge was shaped by researcher-interlocutor dynamics and archival processes. It will further consider how these historical materials are renegotiated in processes of re-writing or unwriting Judeo-Arab heritage in 21st-century Israel.
Contribution short abstract:
I invite fellow scholars to follow Alan Dundes's famous "Who are the Folk" to explore conspiracy theories in academia. The talk will concentrate on the Russophone and Estonian conspiratorial discussions following the arrest of Professor of Vyacheslav Morozov for espionage for Russia.
Contribution long abstract:
The folklorist Alan Dundes once posed the question “Who Are the Folk?” and determined that “among others, we are!” (Dundes 1978, 20), meaning that academics also share all sorts of folk narratives, and there is much to learn from analyzing them. This conclusion has been celebrated in theory; however, it rarely has been applied in practice, as scholars of conspiracy theories, rumors, and similar genres tend to gravitate toward studying stories that we know to be untrue. Following conspiracy theories implies being the opposite of an intellectual or an academic. Given that scholars have continuously called for the demarginalization of conspiracy theories and theorists, looking at our own conspiratorial thinking might be the boldest way to begin putting this into practice, to get rid of the “paranoid” labels we have struggled against for so long. For this, I suggest looking at the conspiracy talk that followed the arrest of the University of Tartu Professor Vyacheslav Morozov accused of espionage for Russia. This paper explores conspiracy-based tropes that emerged around this legal case in Russophone, Estonian, and Anglophone academic circles. I explore both (allegedly) left-leaning and conservative discourses as well as the newest themes of conspiracy talk (including the critique of “woke” culture), which sometimes ironically intertwine.