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.

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