European Ethnography Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

_The Physiology of Love and Other Writings_ is the first English annotated collection of Mantegazza’s selected works. In my extensive introductory essay, Mantegazza’s hybrid contributions from fiction, travel-writing, and ethnography to physiology, medicine, and politics are reevaluated as instances of a proto-cultural-studies approach attuned to the cross-fertilization of disciplines and the circulation of ideas in a period of European intellectual history that defied the notion of specialization.
Table of contents:
The Physiology of Love
And Selections from:
On The Hygienic and Medicinal Virtues of the Coca Plant and on Nervine Nourishment in General
One Day in Madeira
A Voyage to Lapland with my Friend Stephen Sommier
India
Epicurus: Essay in a Physiology of the Beautiful
The Neurosic Century
The Tartuffe Century
Head: Or, Sowing Ideas to Create New Deeds
Political Memoirs of a Foot Soldier in the Italian Parliament
The Year 3000: A Dream
The Psychology of Translation

- by Béla Vilmos Mihalik
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- Ethnography, European Ethnography, Jesuit history, History of Hungary
- by Anna Damiani
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- Ethnography, Material Culture Studies, Popular Culture, European Ethnography
- by Simon Matzerath
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- History, European Ethnography, European Ethnology, Customs
- by Denis M Sacharnych
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- European Ethnography
- by Péter Illés
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- Ethnography, Social and Cultural Anthropology, European Ethnography, Ethnology

El trabajo que sigue es la primera parte de una investigación dividida en tres tomos dedicada a un análisis de un sistema de medidas poco conocido por los historiadores. Es, no obstante, un sistema que nos deja acceder a un mundo antes de la imposición y difusión de las medidas métrico-decimales, algo que ocurrió solamente a partir del siglo XIX. El abandono de las medidas tradicionales era un proceso paulatino ya que las medidas tradicionales se entroncaban con una gran variedad de actividades. Dado que las medidas estaban tan bien arraigadas en prácticas sociales y apoyadas por estrategias conceptuales aptas para su utilización, la aceptación de las nuevas medidas representaba un cambio significante y por eso era un proceso muy lento y en muchas localidades rurales incompleto como veremos a continuación. Además, hay que recordar que el sistema en cuestión era una herramienta rutinaria. Era por tanto un instrumento conceptual indispensable en la organización de un gran número de quehaceres.
En vista de la complejidad del tema, cada uno de los tres tomos que constituyen la investigación en su totalidad va dirigida a documentar distintos aspectos de las manifestaciones socioculturales que ha tenido el sistema a través de los siglos. Siendo ésta la primera parte, en ella se describirán los elementos básicos que componen el sistema en sí, pero sin desligarlos de los diferentes fines que tenían las medidas en la vida diaria de las colectividades en cuestión, empezando con la colectividad vasca. En otras palabras, el presente trabajo servirá de introducción a lo que viene después. En él se propone aclarar el significado de los términos utilizados en euskera para referirse a las distintas medidas, dejando claro lo que significa cada nombre. A la vez se esbozarán algunas de los usos de las unidades más comunes, por ejemplo, sus aplicaciones en tareas ganaderas y pastoriles y también en ciertas actividades marítimas. Al hacerlo iremos trazando las huellas dejadas por el sistema en el norte de la Península Ibérica y también en Francia y así poner de relieve su difusión geográfica.
Hace más de dos décadas el sistema fue tratado en un detallado estudio publicado en el libro llamado Antzinako Euskal Matematikaz Zenbait Burutazio (Frank, 1999c). Pero aquel trabajo pasó casi desapercibido. No despertó el interés de ningún investigador vasco. Actualmente la información en castellano sobre el sistema, entendido como un conjunto o complejo cultural, es casi nula, fuera de alguna que otra referencia esporádica sobre las medidas septenarias empleadas para medir el tamaño de recintos pastoriles conocidos como sarobe o saroi. Teniendo en cuenta el hecho que la documentación existente en castellano es dispersa, este trabajo será el primero en intentar englobar y definir las diferentes medidas que forman parte del sistema y a la vez enumerar las diversas manifestaciones socioculturales, técnicas y aplicaciones prácticas que ha tenido a través de los siglos. Con esta finalidad, el primer tomo ha sido subdividido en capítulos de manera que cada uno de ellos deja vislumbrar un aspecto diferente del sistema. Poco a poco, a lo largo del trabajo estos hilos irán entretejiéndose para dejar una visión más completa del sistema. Y esto a la vez nos permitirá valorarlo debidamente en su totalidad. En fin. el trabajo ha sido estructurado con el fin de hacer patente la importancia del sistema en la vida diaria de las personas antes de la adaptación del sistema métrico-decimal en el siglo XIX.

- by Roslyn Frank
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- Cartography, Anthropology, Anthropological Linguistics, Basque Studies

This paper will focus on analyzing how cultural revitalization movements function. By adopting three distinct theoretical vantage points, namely those of cultural analysis, anthropological semiotics and systems theory the semantically overburdened term 'culture' will be deconstructed. Culture is presented as a network of meanings from which people, based on the structural opportunities available to them in the context of their lives appropriate symbolic devices in order to construct "strategies of action". The capacity of these strategies to shape appropriate behavior in relation to the threats of a constantly shifting environment determines social stability. During unsettled periods individuals experience increased levels of psychosomatic stress which leads to the discontinuation of patterned behavior and can lead to complete societal implosion. It is during such periods that people are more willing to transfer the responsibility for their actions to agents who offer them the chance to participate in uniform processes of symbolic communication and strictly patterned behavior as long as it reinforces their perceived personal or collective identity. Recent years saw a cultural boom in Romania centered around the rediscovery of traditional textile crafts. Urban women across the nation mobilized in a unified movement to express their creativity but also their common identity by learning to create the Ia, the historic Romanian rural clothing, according to what they believe are the authentic historic rules. Promoting the appreciation for handmade crafts and a do-it-yourself lifestyle that the traditional Ia represents, they seek to solve the problems post-socialist Romanian society is facing and thus successfully engage in the process of cultural revitalization.

The overarching question of this article is how can we develop a critical understanding of the social place of highways and automobility in the case of a non-capitalist European context such as socialist Albania? Socialism was a period of modernisation for Albania. Part of this modernisation project was the production of a modern built environment, especially infrastructures and urban spaces. Within this context during socialism thousands of miles of new roads were constructed in the country. The remarkably limited use of roads, combined with their systematic building and maintenance, kept this infrastructure’s materiality in a relatively good condition for many decades. Since the early 1990s, though, the end of the regime has signiﬁed a period of booming mobility and automobility. Postsocialism and the wider context of neoliberalism have been marked by state withdrawal from many of its previous roles, and the maintenance of basic infrastructures has become increasingly dependent on international aid. Nevertheless, the roads are currently being socially reappropriated and reconﬁgured, as people embrace automobility, which was a very limited practice during socialism. This article explores the kind of socio-material relationships that road construction and the roads themselves generated in socialist Albania and how these
are linked to postsocialist spatial practices.

- by Dimitris Dalakoglou
- •
- Real Estate, History, European History, Sociology

Throughout most of the Latin middle ages, “Saracen” (Saracenus, Sarracenus, Sarrasin, etc.) is the standard term used by most Latin authors to refer to Muslims. By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, it has clearly religious overtones: Islam is referred to as “lex Sarraceni” or “lex Mahometi”, terms which are used more or less interchangeably. Yet “Saracenus” was originally a term used by Greek and Roman geographical/ethnographical writers to refer to certain peoples of the Arabian peninsula. The medieval image of “Saracens” in fact is a fusion of two traditions: biblical discourse on the “Ishmaelites”, descendants of Abraham’s illegitimate eldest son, and Roman discourse on marauding “Scenitae” or “Sarraceni” of the Arabian peninsula. This fusion is made well before the rise of Islam: we find it in Jerome. This talk will concentrate on the image of the Saracen/Ishmaelite in three Latin authors: Jerome, Isidore and Bede. We will see that the image of fierce Saracens found in Jerome is still quite operative in Bede and that the rise of Islam has not fundamentally altered it.

- by John Tolan
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- Islamic Law, Arabic Literature, Ethnography, Medieval Studies

Vertiginous Life provides a theory of the intense temporal disorientation brought about by life in crisis. In the whirlpool of unforeseen social change, people experience confusion as to where and when they belong on timelines of previously unquestioned pasts and futures. Through individual stories from crisis Greece, this book explores the everyday affects of vertigo: nausea, dizziness, breathlessness, the sense of falling, and unknowingness of Self. Being lost in time, caught in the spin-cycle of crisis, people reflect on belonging to modern Europe, neoliberal promises of accumulation, defeated futures, and the existential dilemmas of life held captive in the uncanny elsewhen.

- by Daniel M. Knight
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- Cultural Studies, European Studies, Anthropology, Historical Anthropology

Until now, the pre-decimal metric units of linear measure employed traditionally in the Basque Country have not been compared to similar ones documented for Celtic-speaking zones of the Atlantic façade. These base units are distinctive in that they are septenary in nature, consisting of units of seven and its multiples. In this study, the remarkable similarities that characterize these traditional linear measures are analyzed and subjected to scrutiny. The investigation also examines the mathematical strategies that were involved in laying out land holdings. The measuring devices traditionally employed are also discussed, as well as the ways in which the septenary units acted to structure sociocultural, political and administrative practices. The implications that can be drawn from the wide geographical reach of the system are explored, along with the time-depth that should be assigned to the system as a whole.

- by Roslyn Frank
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- Anthropology, Folklore, Languages and Linguistics, Historical Linguistics

Ironic slogans voice opposition to neoliberal
austerity measures as people in western Thessaly,
Greece, strive to account for dramatically increasing
poverty and cultivate a sense of collective suffering
in an era of economic crisis. The slogans are pinned
to moments of socioeconomic turmoil in recent
Greek history, such as the 1941–43 famine and the
1973 polytechnic uprising against military
dictatorship. Through satire, they capture local and
national attitudes toward the government’s current
austerity policy and neoliberalism more generally.
Drawing on powerful tropes of food, the slogans
critique the experiences of neoliberal reform,
becoming sites of resistance and solidarity that
reframe relations between local people, their
government, and international creditors. [Greek
economic crisis, slogans, irony and satire,
neoliberalism, food, temporality]

Quali visioni del mondo sono in gioco quando si parla di populismo? La tesi di questo volume è che i suoi significati sono solo parzialmente universali e che bisognerebbe riconoscere una coesistenza di populismi:
uno centrale e uno locale, quest’ultimo legato alla storia sociale dei luoghi.
A partire dal caso di Messina e del suo sindaco Cateno De Luca, il testo indaga gli elementi generalizzabili e quelli specifici di un’azione di governo fatta, oltre che di misure amministrative, anche di politiche simboliche iscritte nella località e tese a ordinare – e quindi a dividere – la città
secondo coordinate di classe e cultura. Se questa attitudine disgregante è in fondo il tratto generale di ogni populismo, ad apparire specifici sono invece gli elementi intimi che producono la divisione. La capacità di
riattivare sentimenti sopiti rende il populismo un mero contenitore che può essere riempito di contenuti diversi e che andrebbe pertanto compreso a partire da storie, vissuti e scale territoriali.

- by Pietro Saitta
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- Sociology, Political Sociology, Ethnography, Political Anthropology

This talk is called “A multidisciplinary approach to modeling expansions from the Franco-Cantabrian refugium”. It is an invited presentation given at the Session “Beyond Simplistic Narratives: Can Archaeology, Linguistics and Genetics Go Together?” at the European Archaeologists Association (EAA) 23rd Meeting held in Maastricht, The Netherlands, 30 August – 3 September, 2017.
I highly recommend that this Power Point be viewed in conjunction with another presentation from 2019 that is also available on my Academia page, namely, the plenary talk I gave at the ProtoLang 6 Conference in Lisbon, Portugal, 9-13 September, 2019. That presentation is called “A New Strategy for Modeling Feature Lineages in Indo-European Languages”. In it I assess the value of the Basque language as a tool for interpreting European prehistory.

- by Roslyn Frank
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- Mythology And Folklore, Genetics, Archaeology, Prehistoric Archaeology
- by Cristian Micu
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- European History, Archaeology, Medieval History, Ethnography

"Abstract: Over the past decade the Basque philologist Joseba Lakarra has published a series of articles in which he puts forward his reconstruction of an entity he calls Pre-Proto-Basque, whose exact referential time frame is still... more

- by Roslyn Frank
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- Marketing, Discourse Analysis, Ethnohistory, Botany

This article examines the material culture of migration, focusing on migrants’ house-making projects in their countries of birth. In particular, it examines the houses built or refurbished by Albanians in their home-country, which is no longer their place of permanent residence. This is a widespread phenomenon in Albania, but it is also a frequently appearing practice amongst other international migrants. Why do migrants living outside their home-countries build houses there even though they do not plan to return? I seek to answer this question in the case of Albania by focusing empirically on the process of constructing these houses, rather than merely on the material entity of the house
as such. I propose that such ‘house-making’ by Albanian migrants is not only a simple house-building process; it also ensures a constant dwelling and dynamic ‘proxy’ presence for
migrants in their community of origin. These ethnographic observations have further significance for the anthropological study of both houses and international migration.

- by Dimitris Dalakoglou
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- Cultural History, Bioinformatics, Sociology, Cultural Studies
- by Simon Matzerath
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- History, European Ethnography, European Ethnology, Customs
- by M L
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- History, Anthropology, Folklore, Ethnography

The ruins of global financial collapse, millions displaced by armed conflict, the resurgence of right-wing populism, and imminent ecological disaster. The future is emphatically at the heart of anthropological critique. No longer a "displaced," "poorly tended" topic, "absent from its homeland in the past-present-future relation" as Nancy Munn (1992, 115-116) once put it, anthropologists have recently posed fundamental questions about displaced, reimagined, or precarious futures which have led to people reassessing their expectations, reorienting themselves to the yet-to-come. Anthropology is particularly well placed to study how we orient to the future in everyday life as we are pulled by the future in numerous affective ways-by hope and great expectations, through anticipation or fantastical speculation, or by acts of faith or believing in fate. We constantly prepare the groundwork for the future through thoughts and desires that leap ahead of the possible, plausible, and potential of the present. Our future-oriented actions shape our relationships in the present and how we choose to selectively archive our past.

- by Daniel M. Knight
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- Future Studies, European Studies, Historical Anthropology, Philosophy of Science

Dramatic changes in the energy landscape provide a lens through which to understand local perceptions of temporality, modernity, and belonging in austerity Greece. Re-launched in 2011, the European Union-supported solar energy initiative encourages installation of futuristic, high-tech photo-voltaic panels on fertile agricultural land. However, winter 2012–2013 and 2013–2014 witnessed a return en-masse to open-fires and wood-burning stoves as a means for people to heat their homes, something locals associate with material poverty, pre-modernity, and pre-Europeanization. Drawing on ethnographic research in the town of Trikala, central Greece, this article demonstrates how "energy talk" provides a prism through which locals discuss the past, the future, and increasing poverty, and reassess their belonging in a modern Europe.

- by Daniel M. Knight
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- Sociology, Historical Anthropology, Social Anthropology, Renewable Energy

The article offers an overview of the history of Estonian ethnology in juxtaposition with simultaneous developments in anthropology, a discipline recently established on the Estonian academic scene. The article explores the context and implications of early differences, as well as the recent rapprochement of the two disciplines, and the institutional collisions of the two disciplines in Eastern Europe. This collaborative issue of Estonian ethnologists and anthropologists studying their compatriots is offered as a reflection of a more harmonious relationship between the two disciplines. It is nevertheless discussed in light of the remaining methodological dissimilarities, fieldwork in particular.

- by Maarja Kaaristo and +1
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- Eastern European Studies, Gender Studies, Anthropology, Folklore

Qui était vraiment Arnold Van Gennep, l'auteur des Rites de passage ? Père fondateur de l'ethnographie française, il oeuvra d'abord dans le champ de l'anthropologie "exotique" et religieuse, s'inscrivant dans les grands débats internationaux de son temps.
Pourtant, ses travaux, esquissant une définition de la sociologie et de l'ethnographie nourrie d'une conception politique du monde, furent ostracisés de l'école sociologique française dans les années 1910.
Cette biographie collective explore la riche personnalité de Van Gennep dans le contexte anthropologie française de la première moitié du XXe siècle. Pour rendre raison de son parcours scientifique, les auteurs mettent en évidence les rapports de force disciplinaires, théoriques, idéologiques, institutionnels et personnels dans lesquels il évolua, dessinant dans le même temps une épistémologie de l'ethnologie française.

- by Fran Markowitz
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- Eastern European Studies, Anthropology, Eastern Europe, Ethnography

In early 1950s Calabria, South Italy, thousands of children were displaced as a consequence of severe flooding. Under the banner of humanitarianism, children were relocated by the political left and center-right to live with communist families in the north of Italy or to reside in summer camps and Church institutions. For the left, the humanitarian initiative was framed in terms of solidarity and a vision of the future based on close-knit family and party ties. For the centre-right, the humanitarian effort demonstrated “the caring state” and Catholic charity in action. Today, the events of the 1950s are shrouded in an interwoven veil of structural and embodied silence. From national historiography, through societal absence, to personal struggles with the traumatic past, the displaced children inhabit silence as a space in the world. This silence must be analyzed within the context of Cold War politics, the sedimenting of post-war collective consciousness, and the race between the left and center-right to claim the future generation of Italian citizens. [Keywords: Silence, Cold War, displacement, children, humanitarianism, Italy]

- by Stavroula Pipyrou
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- History, European History, Anthropology, Historical Anthropology

1. Getting to the Other Ride 2. Dividually Driven 3. Carporeality/Carhesia: the Road to Erewhon 4. Motorised Flânerism 5. Guides to the Uncanny-Scapes 6. Thumbbuddies on the Auto Ban 7. The ‘Carthulucene’ at the End of the Road 8. Fine:... more

1. Getting to the Other Ride
2. Dividually Driven
3. Carporeality/Carhesia: the Road to Erewhon
4. Motorised Flânerism
5. Guides to the Uncanny-Scapes
6. Thumbbuddies on the Auto Ban
7. The ‘Carthulucene’ at the End of the Road
8. Fine: Waiting for Volvo

The article undertakes a genealogy of conceptual definitions of the ‘lore of law’ as a subject of study before the formation of both European legal ethnology and the anthropology of law, mainly within the Historical School of Law in the first half of the nineteenth century. By tracing the way in which the subject ‘lore of law’ has been categorised, the article follows the evolution of its definitions from 18th-century antiquarian legal research, Herder’s view on the law’s orality in original biblical sources, to Jacob Grimm’s understanding of ancient legal customs as part of folk poetry. Grimm’s romantic approach is used to illuminate the distinction of other contemporary approaches, especially the fundamentally opposite pragmatic study of contemporary constitution which has been developed by Joseph Anthon Rieger and Joseph Mader. The ‘lore of law’ seem to have acquired a newfound importance in the period after the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire (1806). Particularly its conceptual definitions such as “customary law” and “folk law” are explored as being moulded by new nationalist and universalist patterns of scholarly thought. To conclude, the article foregrounds the expansion of legal horizons traced in this pre-evolution of the ethnological study of law

- by Tomáš Ledvinka
- •
- Legal Anthropology, Legal History, European Ethnography, Archaeology of Law

History, Time, and Economic Crisis in Central Greece examines a period when nearly three decades of Greek economic prosperity were suddenly replaced by austerity, crisis, and destitution. Through detailed ethnographic and historical data collected over a decade of fieldwork in the central Greek town of Trikala, Knight paints a vivid picture of a landmark event in modern European socio-political history. Living with the consequences of internationally-imposed austerity measures that have seen unemployment soar and suicide become part of daily discourse, Trikalinoi believe they are re-living the era of the Ottoman landlords, the Great Famine, and wartime occupation. Embodying moments of the past, locals discuss their fears of returning to years of hunger and colonization whilst drawing courage that even the worst crises can be overcome.

- by Daniel M. Knight
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- European Studies, Anthropology, Historical Anthropology, Social Anthropology