Etnologins ouppackade ryggsäck

Abstract

The – Yet to be Unpacked – Backpack of Ethnology

Many ethnologists today share experiences of finding themselves on fertile grounds, off established disciplinary borders. Some representatives of the discipline have expressed their concern about this mobility. But what are the multidisciplinary engaged ethnologists actually leaving, intellectual traditions or physical academic environments? The motion away from the latter may at times, paradoxically, represent a closing up to the first. Ongoing scientific currents have increased the interest in phenomena and fields where ethnologists have established tools, for instance in the crossroad between history, culture and aesthetics, in the socio-material nature of culture and in ethnography as a research method. While such development may threat our characteristics it also equips us with historical advantages.

In comparison with the creative self-criticism of anthropology, the ethnological dialogue with the scientific past has only started recently. A crucial element in the revolutionary “abandonment” of traditional folk life research concerns the relation to materiality (including the museum collections that were crucial to the discipline’s establishment). As the long dominant dualisms of surface and content, materiality and sociality seems about to dissolve, the road is cleared for new ways of (re)approaching lost fields and legacies. However, importantly, such reunions are not to be seen (only) as ways to seek threatened identity but also as tools to criticize more consciously. Heritages that rest untroubled continue to work in peace, also in problematical ways. The post national situation today challenges us to question inherited narrow frames of our scientific identity