Ethnologia Europaea

Disorder and order are among the principles through which the articles in this issue are connected. Peter Jan Margry grasps the exuberant excesses surrounding the Dutch monarch’s birthday with the term “mobocracy” and sees in the suspension of rules a means to reconcile Dutch republicanism with the anachronism of a monarchical system. Ongoing disorder of a rather different nature is experienced by migrant workers from Poland in Denmark. Niels Jul Nielsen and Marie Sandberg accompany them at work and in their different home settings and analyse the divergent interplay of the Polish labour niche and family dynamics on different constructions of “orderly work conditions”. Stefan Groth uncovers the structuring power of new tools and events to measure performance in recreational cycling; competitive norms are shown to permeate a leisure activity. Old age, too, is not free from the structuring arm of social and health regimes. Through his analysis of billiards – a game favoured by the older men he studies – Aske Juul Lassen critiques aging policies striving to “activate” the elderly and overlooking the rhythms inherent to a traditional game – and activity. The issue concludes with Tuuli Lähdesmäki’s comparison of how local heritage actors choose to narrate the transnationally launched European Heritage Label. Within an initiative to foster Europeanization, she finds actors formulating European identities in different moulds.

This volume starts out with two contrasting studies of monuments. How does the seemingly stability of stone and bronze hide a constantly changing cultural use? Anne Eriksen looks at the history of ruins in Norway. The murmur of ruins turns out to be a speech of modernity, a way of emotionalising place and history. Viktoriya Hryaban discusses the fate of socialist monuments in Ukraine and shows how the attempts to create alternative post-socialist memorials reproduce a traditional Soviet cultural grammar. Lace is a dominating decorative element in many Turkish Dutch homes. It has become a sign of "Turkishness" but as Hilje van der Horst points out, people's relations to this mundane domestic element mirror some important conflicts and ideas about modernity and ethnicity. From the cultural media of monuments and lace, the discussion moves on to two more classic mass media and their role in identity politics. Stijn Reijnders explores a popular Dutch game show that has managed to survive for decades, becoming something of a national institution for some, an example of an outmoded genre for others. How does the involvement mirror ideas of an imagined national community? Finally, Silke Meyer looks at an 18th century national stereotype of "The German quack" in English popular debate and mass media. How did this caricature of Germanness become an alter ego of the English?

Ethnologia Europaea is an interdisciplinary, peer reviewed journal with a focus on European cultures and societies. It carries material of great interests not only for European ethnologists and anthropologists but also sociologists, social historians and scholars involved in cultural studies. The journal was started in 1967 and since then it has acquired a central position in the international and interdisciplinary cooperation between scholars inside and outside Europe. Ethnologia Europaea is an A ranked journal according to the European Science Foundation journal evaluation (European Reference Index for the Humanities initial list).

Since its start in 1967 Ethnologia Europaea has acquired a central position in the international cooperation between ethnologists in the different European countries. It is, however, a journal of topical interest not only for ethnologists but also for anthropologists, social historians and others studying the social and cultural forms of everyday life in recent and historical European societies. This journal appears twice a year, sometimes as a thematic issue.

This issue opens with Katarzyna Wolanik Boström and Magnus Öhlander's inquiry into mobile physicians and their pragmatic use of proto-ethnographic insights so as to facilitate their day to day work with culturally diverse patients. Gabriella Nilsson uncovers how school nurses, too, habitually draw on their knowledge of class and family background while implementing normative medical guidelines on childhood obesity. Maria Zackariasson seeks to show how members in a faith-based youth organization experience and handle the pull and push of faith and peer group sociability. Ewa Klekot examines different traces and registers of memorialization of recent Polish history in two districts of Warsaw. Disciplinary memory is augmented through Konrad J. Kuhn's analysis of Swiss scholars' participation in the Europeanization of Volkskunde. With Laura Hirvi's observations among young Finnish artists in Berlin, the issue concludes with another set of transnationally mobile actors.

Since its start in 1967 Ethnologia Europaea has acquired a central position in the international cooperation between ethnologists in the different European countries. It is, however, a journal of topical interest not only for ethnologists but also for anthropologists, social historians and others studying the social and cultural forms of everyday life in recent and historical European societies. This journal appears twice a year, sometimes as a thematic issue.

The leitmotif of this special issue is "revisiting": Swedish and Danish scholars pay a visit to concepts and approaches of the field of European ethnology. In re-examining, revising, reawakening and relaunching concepts and approaches that might have otherwise been overlooked, worn out or rejected, they explore and explicate new dimensions of research that have remained tacit knowledge. In engaging with past knowledge claims, concepts and research endeavours, the volume offers original reworkings of the role of everyday life in user-driven innovation projects (Tine Damsholt and Astrid P. Jespersen), on the possible links between the historic-geographic atlas works and controversy mapping (Anders K. Munk and Torben Elgaard Jensen), understanding the meaning and creation of archival knowledge (Karin Gustavsson), and of fieldwork engagements (Frida Hastrup). Discussing the role of continuity and rupture in past and present analyses (Signe Mellemgaard) and rethinking borders (Fredrik Nilsson) are further avenues explored. Four main themes forge the connections of this volume: reworking everyday life, fieldwork as craftsmanship, mapping connections and conversing with the past create a dynamic matrix of novel takes on ethnologies for the future. The six contributions are supplemented with four comments; in commenting on the revisits, they contribute their own reflections on revisiting European ethnology.