Re-thinking Ethnology
5th and 6th of June 2009
A working conference sponsored by the
Journal of Material
Culture
ABSTRACTS
Martine Segalen
(University of Paris,
Nanterre)
"Material culture and French
ethnology"
The development of a scientific French
ethnology, detaching itself from folklore, was firmly grounded in the study of
technical culture, under various influences including geographers, and
archeologists, the most prominent of which was André Leroi-Gourhan who inspired
a large part of the presentations of the Musée national des arts et traditions
populaires. During a few decades, the interest for material culture was
superseded by others themes even though it never ceased, but it was disconnected
from Museum presentations. Nowadays, the interests range from the focus on
domestic settings, or various social uses of communication tools, as a way to
understand new aspects of modernity. The presentation will run through thèse
historical times, and will be based on concrete examples of research past or
going on.
Orvar Lofgren
(University of
Lund)
"Researching the backyards of modernity. On the
power of the insignificant"
Focusing on everyday life or
the materialities of the mundane has not only been research strategies of much
'anthropology at home', but also rallying cries or positioning symbols in
relations to neighbourhood traditions like cultural sociology or cultural
studies. The result has been an emphasis on certain styles of doing research,
that often are more characterized by an academic habitus than by clear
theoretical profiles. What about this elusive habitus - the unwritten rules
about 'how we do research here'? Drawing on my background in Scandinavian
ethnology I will explore these styles, but also discuss the necessity of a
continuing interests in what is going on in the backyards of modernity (and
post-modernity). So much of cultural research has been focusing on the dramatic
and the eventful, overemphasizing societies in flux, fragmentation and constant
change. We need to focus more on the insignificant, overlooked and seemingly
trivial, the kind of micro-processes that create continuity and stability, but
also sudden surprises.
Vintila
Mihailescu
(University of Bucharest)
"Reinventing
the local and revisiting domestic anthropology"
Mondialization is producing also "re-localization" (Long,
1996). Marketing of traditions, as part of local development and world tourism,
is re-rooting "authenticity" in a kind or another of local specificity. For
different reasons and in different ways, the "local" is thus being reinvented as
social frame and object of anthropological interest. In countries like Romania,
with a long and strong tradition of national ethnology and a still
emerging (westernizing, post-modern) anthropology, the representatives of the
two "disciplines" are competing for expertise and legitimacy concerning the new
challenges of the "local", ignoring in fact each other. The paper is presenting
as a "case study" the eight years long fieldwork trajectory of a PhD
dissertation on the marketing of traditions in Romania, and the way it moved
from a militant deconstruction of the "local myths" to a more tempered approach,
taking in some of the longue durée aspects of this present
marketisation. In doing so, the anthropological approach had to open up to some
kind of dialogue with its "professional other", the domestic ethnologist. The
moral of the story is the scientific and political need of such a critical
dialog for the understanding of the new configurations of local and global and
in order to build a coherent institutional discourse.
Wang Mingming
(Peking University, Central Minzu
University)
"The war between ethnology and
anthropology and its end? Some remarks from a Chinese
anthropologist"
What is to be said? Levi-Strauss once
described anthropology as a science encompassing sciences, a generalizing
anthropology living on the findings of ethnography and comparative ethnology.
For those who intend to "bring ethnology back in", what Levi-Strauss said still
now sounds like a useful perspective. However, to my colleagues in Beijing, what
Levi-Strauss said represents a very disturbing idea. Chinese ethnologists, or
those who call them "minzuxuejia", are those who hate anthropologists.
Three decades ago, they successfully gained the support from the Ministry of
Education and Committee of Ethnic Affairs to designate the interrelationship
between ethnology and anthropology as "ethnology (encompassing cultural
anthropology)". In 1995, a group of anthropologists came together in Beijing and
produced a counter proposal. They produced a "petition" and handed it in to the
Ministry of Education. They argued that anthropology should be an independent
discipline. The person in charge of disciplinary divisions in the Ministry
responded to the anthropologists by saying that anthropology, or
renleixue, sounded strange to the Chinese people, and even to him, and
it seemed to be a useless discipline, being unrelated to "our socialist
modernization". He was not disagreed with the idea of more independence for
anthropology. But he kindly expressed his worries about the future of an
independent but vaguely defined and useless discipline: unlike ethnology which
has lived on funds provided by the Committee of Ethnic Affairs, anthropology has
difficulties in finding resources other than from foreign grants. In the end,
taking the point of Fei Xiaotong, one of the great anthropology disciples of
Bronislaw Malinowski, then, vice-president of the National People's Congress,
the Ministry of Education decided that anthropology should be included in
"greater sociology" (da shehuixue), whereas ethnology should continue
to be a "first rank discipline". Many interrelated lines of disciplinary history
should be examined to interpret the tension between ethnology and anthropology
in China. These lines, once patterned out, will be useful to our anthropological
rethinking of ethnology or ethnological rethinking of anthropology.
I
will discuss the following:
1. Brief background:
A brief
introduction to the war between the school of ethnology and the school of
sociology in Chinese "anthropology" between the 1920s and 1940s, to the
unification of ethnology and sociology in the study of ethnic minorities and
"the national question" in the 1950s, and to the new war between ethnology and
anthropology in the past 30 years;
2. Analysis:
1) certain
"Western backgrounds" against which the difference between ethnology and
anthropology became a burning issue in Chinese "anthropology": Chinese
"versions" of Malinowski (Fei), Radcliffe-Brown (Lin), Mauss and Granet (Yang),
Bastian and G.E. Smith (Cai and Ling), Boas (Li and Lin) , and Morgan (all
ethnologists in the 1950s);
2) methodological contraries: "isolates" and
"intercultural relationship"; habitation and movements; sociology and history;
3. Combination
1) Rowlands' critique of the sociologizing of
anthropology;
2) "making peace" between ethnology and anthropology?
3)
an ethnological anthropology tells us many things, including the historical
depth of inter-societal relationship, the importance of studying "intermediate
zones", the re-conceptualization of the concept of alterity, and the limit of
social theory.
Papataxiarchis Evthymios
(University of the Aegean/Greece)
"From
estrangement to rapprochement? Reflections on the current prospects of the
relation between Anthropologia and Laografia in Greece"
In
20th century Greece Anthropologia (anthropology) despite its common
intellectual roots developed quite separately from Laografia (folklore
studies). Modernist Anthropologia emerged in the context of
Malinowskian type ethnography as this was practiced first, by Anglo-american
anthropologists in the post war decades, and latter by their Greek students in
the late 1970s when it academically established itself in the framework of the
inter-disciplinary alliance called 'social science'. Laografia, on the
other hand, became institutionally prominent in the interwar period under the
aegis of German Volkskunde and, together with archaeology and history, remained
at the centre of the so called 'national science' till the 1970s. The two
disciplines developed therefore quite different theoretical profiles and
methodologies and became entrapped in a climate of mutual antipathy and distrust
that was reinforced by the struggles for institutional advantage between the
wider paradigms to which they were committed. In this paper I want to consider
more recent mutations of laografia in dialogue to oral history,
sociology or even social anthropology and in relation to subjects such as memory
or material culture. I am particularly interested in connections between the two
disciplines and attempts to rethink ethnology within the framework of
postcolonial 'world anthropologies'.
Cristina Sanchez-Carretero
(Spanish Council
for Scientific Research/ Madrid)
"A critical approach
to Ethnology: Towards an "Emergency Ethnology"
The main
objective of this presentation is to rethink future possibilities for ethnology,
and rethink the formats in which ethnologists package their research. To do so,
I suggest the need to develop the concept of 'emergency ethnology', that is, the
need to develop tools and theories to enable ethnologists to respond in crisis
or emergency situations. This is necessary in order to avoid reproducing old
models that have long been discarded by ethnologists and which involve
essentializing and fossilizing customs and traditions. We are experts in a field
in which a major objective is the analysis of the processes of
traditionalization in our societies. The role of ethnology as an active social
force cannot be based on dichotomies - and battles - such as public vs. academic
folklore; these do not help our discipline to envision a sustainable future. Our
discipline provides a very open path for exploring new ways of transferring our
research to society, and new possibilities in the "performance" of academics.
There is a demand for researchers to address folk culture, orality and
expressive culture in daily life. However, public institutions, in Spain,
typically develop public folklore programs without the aid of ethnologists or
anthropologists. There is an urgent need to create multidisciplinary teams to
engage in the study of the processes of heritage transformation in a critical
manner, and to incorporate strong theoretical approaches in the process.
Giovanni Kezich
(Museo degli Usi e Costumi
della Gente Trentina, San Michele all'Adige, Italy)
"Carnival King of Europe". Towards a new interpretation of
European winter masquerades.
Extensive fieldwork carried
out in 2007/09 in six European countries (Bulgaria, Macedonia, Croatia, Italy,
France, Spain) by an international team of ethnographic museum curators, and
supported by the EU under the premises of a project called "Carnival King of
Europe", has put in evidence the striking similarities that can be observed in
the winter rituals that are carried out in a number of localized rural
communities across very wide distances at the four corners of the continent.
Such rituals, most often classified as "Carnivals" within the available
Christian calendrical vocabulary, entail standard characters and standard acts,
performed within a very similar basic structure. Among these, we find the sudden
appearance of stocky masked mummers girdled by cowbells, often wearing tall
conical caps adorned with ribbons; the representation of a mock nuptial cortege
in conjunction with the ritual ploughing of the village square; the subsequent
invasion of a crowd of specific burlesque characters, and finally, the trial and
sentencing to death of a pivotal figure, which is often identified with
"Carnival" itself. Such a widespread occurrence of what can be clearly defined
as a single, culturally discrete pattern of ritual behaviour, naturally begs the
question related to the time and modalities of its original diffusion. In this
particular perspective, which is the same pursued by Sir J. G. Frazer one
hundred years ago, some interesting progress can be made by making usage of
modern audiovisual recording devices, whilst some new inferences can be captured
as to the original link of such rituals with some aspects of the initiatory
agrarian cults of the ancient world, so as to be able to consider once again, at
least tentatively, some fundamental aspects of European culture within the terms
of a broad ethnological synthesis.
Mihaly
Hoppal
(Institute of Ethnology, Budapest)
"To be
or not to be...Perspectives in/for Ethnology"
Re-Thinking
has become recently an anthropological pastime among the scholars of ethnology.
I shall discuss which intellectual endeavors of ethnology provide further
results in the future. First of all ethnosemiotic has to be mentioned. After the
post-modern turn in anthropology some outgoing themes will vanish (like
'invented tradition') but in a globalized world the importance of local cultural
tradition will become the centre of interests. In the form of eco-ethnology,
anthropology of balance (in ethnomedicine, shamanism) will be studied by the
help of visual anthropology. At the same time new techniques of fieldwork also
will be introduced (world wide web as a field, etc.)
Frederic Damon
(University of
Virginia)
"HOUNDED BY CULTURE. What We Know…And What
Is To Be Done"
Predicated on the unlikely fact that our
current financial crisis brings us to a turning point rather than a recurring
episode in capitalist culture, this paper takes off from the ruins of the
Post-Modernist critique, argues for what we have done, and contemplates what the
role of ethnology should be as the world attempts to re-arrange its conditions
of existence. I begin with the problem of 'arbitrariness.' From de Saussure to
Langer this became the 20th century's problem of meaning. I then argue for the
situated constructions that came into existence from roughly 6000 years ago to
the expansion of Western Europe beyond its geographical confines. I conclude by
suggesting what ethnology must contribute to our new future.
Chris Wingfield
(Pitt Rivers Museum,
Oxford)
"Ethnology, Folklore and Anthropology in
England: A View from Oxford"
The Pitt Rivers Museum,
founded at the University of Oxford in 1884, and once referred to as the
museum's Department of Ethnology now bills itself as a museum of Anthropology
and World Archaeology. The museum's unusual typological mode of display, as well
as some of its more exotic contents, such as visually prominent totem pole and
the peculiar shrunken heads have often dominated critical attention. However,
recent research has suggested that 13% of the objects listed in the museum
database come from England, accounting for half of the European holdings. Recent
research addressed at understanding the role of this English material has meant
considering aspects of the museum's history in which ethnology and folklore
played significant parts. This paper will consider mid-nineteenth century
debates, in which ethnology was a prominent discipline, and from which the Pitt
Rivers Museum was born. It will also consider some of the ways in which people
employed by the museum sought to situate their work in relation to ethnology
during the mid-twentieth century. By the year 2000 the museum had ceased to use
"ethnology" to refer either to itself or its degree titles. Whether the Pitt
Rivers Museum will once again need the term ethnology in the twenty first
century remains to be seen.
Pieter Ter
Keurs
(National Museum of Antiquities, Leiden,
Netherlands)
Facing Frontiers
Anthropology and
Museums in the Netherlands
As in many other European
countries, 19th century discussions on disciplinary boundaries have until now
determined to a large extent the intellectual landscape in the Netherlands. In
the beginning of the twentieth century the conclusions of these discussions were
firmly established in institutions. Many of these institutions still exist and
flourish, although more and more doubts are raised about the validity of these
often rigid disciplinary and institutional boundaries. I will briefly sketch the
situation in the Netherlands in the field of anthropology and museums at the end
of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. In this period the
Dutch colonial empire was at its height and the National Museums (such as the
ones of Ethnology, Antiquities and Natural History in Leiden) served their
purpose as agents of national ‘greatness’. Focusing on Indonesia, Dutch
anthropology played an important role in academic discussions as well as in
politically sensitive issues. Nowadays the disciplines and the institutions are
still there, but the social-political situation has changed dramatically.
Anthropology developed towards globally embedded positions in the dominant
Anglo-Saxon academic world and museums have been modernized, particularly in the
1990s. How can we characterize this new situation and how far are we in
overcoming the fixed positions of the 19th century discussions? How do Dutch
anthropologists deal with the postcolonial situation and what is the role of
museums in this process? Do 19th century boundaries between disciplines and
institutions help us to face new developments in the field of culture, museums
and politics? Or do they block us? And finally, in what way can material culture
studies and museums help us to bridge the gap between dominant Anglo-Saxon
academic discussions and cultural issues in the traditional ‘target’ countries
of anthropological research?
