Regina Bendix – författare

At once a slogan and a vision for future scholarship, interdisciplinarity promises to break through barriers to address today's complex challenges. Yet even high-stakes projects often falter, undone by poor communication, strong feelings, bureaucratic frameworks, and contradictory incentives. This new book shows newcomers and veteran researchers how to craft associations that will lead to rich mutual learning under inevitably tricky conditions. Strikingly candid and always grounded, the authors draw a wealth of profound, practical lessons from an in-depth case study of a multiyear funded project on cultural property. Examining the social dynamics of collaboration, they show readers how to anticipate sources of conflict, nurture trust, and jump-start thinking across disciplines. Researchers and institutions alike will learn to plan for each phase of a project life cycle, capturing insights and shepherding involvement along the way.

At once a slogan and a vision for future scholarship, interdisciplinarity promises to break through barriers to address today's complex challenges. Yet even high-stakes projects often falter, undone by poor communication, strong feelings, bureaucratic frameworks, and contradictory incentives. This new book shows newcomers and veteran researchers how to craft associations that will lead to rich mutual learning under inevitably tricky conditions. Strikingly candid and always grounded, the authors draw a wealth of profound, practical lessons from an in-depth case study of a multiyear funded project on cultural property. Examining the social dynamics of collaboration, they show readers how to anticipate sources of conflict, nurture trust, and jump-start thinking across disciplines. Researchers and institutions alike will learn to plan for each phase of a project life cycle, capturing insights and shepherding involvement along the way.

At once a slogan and a vision for future scholarship, interdisciplinarity promises to break through barriers to address today''s complex challenges. Yet even high-stakes projects often falter, undone by poor communication, strong feelings, bureaucratic frameworks, and contradictory incentives. This new book shows newcomers and veteran researchers how to craft associations that will lead to rich mutual learning under inevitably tricky conditions. Strikingly candid and always grounded, the authors draw a wealth of profound, practical lessons from an in-depth case study of a multiyear funded project on cultural property. Examining the social dynamics of collaboration, they show readers how to anticipate sources of conflict, nurture trust, and jump-start thinking across disciplines. Researchers and institutions alike will learn to plan for each phase of a project life cycle, capturing insights and shepherding involvement along the way.

Authenticity is a notion much debated, among discussants as diverse as cultural theorists and art dealers, music critics and tour operators. The desire to find and somehow capture or protect the 'authentic' narrative, art object, or ceremonial dance is hardly new. In this masterful examination of German and American folklore studies from the eighteenth century to the present, Regina Bendix demonstrates that the longing for authenticity remains deeply implicated in scholarly approaches to cultural analysis. Searches for authenticity, Bendix contends, have been a constant companion to the feelings of loss inherent in modernization, forever upholding a belief in a pristine yet endangered cultural essence and fueling cultural nationalism worldwide. Beginning with precursors of Herder and Emerson and the 'discovery' of the authentic in expressive culture and literature, she traces the different, albeit intertwined, histories of German Volkskunde and American folklore studies. A Swiss native educated in American folklore programs, Bendix moves effortlessly between the two traditions, demonstrating how the notion of authenticity was used not only to foster national causes, but also to lay the foundations for categories of documentation and analysis within the nascent field of folklore studies. Bendix shows that, in an increasingly transcultural world, where Zulu singers back up Paul Simon and where indigenous artists seek copyright for their traditional crafts, the politics of authenticity mingles with the forces of the market. Arguing against the dichotomies implied in the very idea of authenticity, she underscores the emptiness of efforts to distinguish between folklore and fakelore, between echt and ersatz.

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?

Articles included: Emotional Geography. Authenticity, Embodiment and Cultural Heritage; Anniversaries and Jubilees. Changing Celebratory Customs in Modern Times; The Meaning of Weaving. Textiles in a Museum Magazine; Contested Modernities. Politics, Culture and Urbanisation in Portugal: A Case Study from the Greater Lisbon Area; The Outsider's Gaze as Part of the Methodological Toolkit?; Reflections on the Research Project the "Musikantenstadl"; The Camino de Santiago. The Interplay of European Heritage and New Traditions.

A rapidly growing number of double homes connect different parts of Europe in new ways. The second home can be a cottage in the woods, an apartment in the Costa del Sol or a restored farm house in Tuscany. However, other forms of double homes must be added to these landscapes of leisure. There are long distance commuters who spend most of their week in an overnight flat, in a caravan on a dreary parking lot or at a construction site. Economic migrants dream of a house 'back home' for vacations or retirement. Dual homes come in all shapes and sizes -- from the caravans of touring circus artists to people turning sailboats into a different kind of domestic space. This special issue of "Ethnologic Europaea" captures some dimensions of lives that are anchored in two different homes. How are such lives organised in time and space in terms of identification, belonging and emotion? How do they, in very concrete terms, render material transnational lives? The next issue of the journal (2008:1) will take such a comparative perspective into another direction as the authors will consider different kinds of research strategies to achieve European comparisons and to gain new cultural perspectives on European societies and everyday life.

What is Europe? Where is Europe? And what is Europe in the discipline of European ethnology? This issue of Ethnologic Europaea celebrates the journal's 40th birthday by looking at future paths for research on Europe. For a long time the disciplines grouped under the label of European ethnology were mainly national ethnologies. The need for European com-parisons lived more in the Sunday rhetoric of the discipline than in actual research, but with a new interest in transnational processes the perspectives have widened. The processes of economic unification also gave rise to research on facets of a Euro-pean culture, conditioned, for instance, by the administrative implementation of European economic and, increasingly, cultural policies. Local, regional and national cultural dimen-sions do not vanish in this development, of course, and neither do borders and boundaries, physical and mental. Processes of EU integration as well as globalisation may both weaken and strengthen national and regional borders, as we have seen during the last decades, but such developments call for a rethinking of Europe as a research field and also a questioning of ideas about Europe or European cultural homogeneity. The EU rhetoric about unity hides a more complex picture, where European integration and disintegration emerges in often surprising settings and forms.

Shifts, both visible and imperceptible, are a common denominator of the papers gathered in this issue of Ethnologia Europaea. The increasing diversification of religious manifestations in civil society is analysed by Peter Jan Margry, while Mats Lindqvist traces the impact of transnational business practices in the Baltic forest. Luís Silva questions the effect of the heritage regime on individuals working with and living in Portuguese dwellings turned patrimony. The adjustments to life that an individual body and mind must undergo following an organ transplantation are documented by a team led by Katrin Amelang. Each of these papers profits from emerging or recently established analytic interests and topoi in cultural research. The final paper in this issue turns to shifts and reactions within scholarship itself, as Anna Malewska-Szalygin uses her fieldwork in Poland to question some anthropological tenets current in work on post-socialist societies.

In everyday life, emotions like rage, anger or frustration are not, generally, condoned. Indeed, a good part of the work of enculturation is devoted to managing social conduct so as to avoid or suppress emotions considered negative or unproductive. In the ethnographic literature, scrutiny of these kinds of emotional states and their expression is rare, not least because they reside somewhere between the individual and his or her cultural surrounds and are hard to pinpoint. The authors of the present issue Rage, Anger and other Donts: Cultural Expression and Suppression of the Undesirable and Unbearable in Everyday Life invite readers to explore practices and discourses within which these kinds of emotions or, more prominently, their disciplining can be grasped ethnologically. Alongside four scholarly articles, four essays encircle the theme in a more literary vein, albeit grounded in careful observation and recollection. The introduction and two final comments seek to frame topics ranging from road rage and the controlling of prisoners anger to a menopausal kitchen outburst, and to point the way toward further possible research in this largely unexplored realm of culturally shaped practice.