Ethnologia Europaea

Engaging with foreign-sounding personal names is an everyday reality in collegial interactions within contemporary Swedish academia. While encounters with difference are ever-present, dynamics of address often resist straightforward alignment within conventional hierarchies. The interview-based empirical material challenges overly simplistic analytical assumptions that rely on binaries such as native versus non-native or domestic versus international academics. Within this context, the analytical perspective of postmigration enables a closer examination of how the deeply personal character of names affects negotiations of difference, positionings and heritage. Moreover, postmigration highlights the emergence of subtle emotional labour within academic workplaces – grounded in practices that outmanoeuvre binary frameworks of thinking about difference and embrace humility and humour.

This article explores how residents in rural Sweden experienced the 2018 forest wildfires. Using the concepts of dislocatory experiences and relocatory trajectories, it examines how disasters like wildfires disrupt meaning-making and social relations. Based on ethnographic interviews conducted from 2020 to 2021 in two rural communities, the article focuses on directly affected residents of evacuated areas and forest owners. It analyses how the wildfires disrupted their understandings of place, landscape, identity and time. The findings suggest that the wildfire functioned as a dislocatory event unfolding across a temporal dimension. It threatened material structures such as homesteads and forest areas and involved identity losses tied to people's sense of belonging in both spatial and generational terms, disrupting their orientations towards the past, present and future.

In the light of rising concerns regarding biophobia, this article explores how humans articulate and contextualise their fears of wild animals through self-reported narratives preserved in the Estonian Folklore Archives. The article examines which wild animals are most commonly feared, how these fears are explained and transferred to landscapes and how they are embedded in broader cultural genres of threat. The analysis shows that fears of large predators such as bears and wolves persist and that fearfulness is mainly explained by physical traits of the animals. However, local wild animals have largely disappeared as agents of fear in children's threats, reflecting shifts in pedagogy and everyday relations with nature. This article further suggests that the persistence of animal fears reveals a residual awareness of humans as potential prey within the ecological network.

Reconfiguring the food system requires holistic transdisciplinary approaches. This article explores the role of ethnology within such endeavours through discussion of a hands-on experimental cooking session in rural Iceland, which aimed to enhance the transdisciplinary aspects of a research project on sustainable healthy diets and facilitate a more embodied approach to the topic with people in their local communities. The article introduces “collective culinary creativity” as a framework linking community practices with sustainability and ethnological research, creating meaningful connections around food and cooking. Participant observation and in-depth interviews revealed how participants gained awareness of and connection to raw materials, nature and each other during the event. These insights can inform community-based transdisciplinary interventions elsewhere, emphasising the valuable contributions of ethnology in building understanding of sustainability from the bottom up.

This article analyses cake practices in Norwegian confirmation celebrations. I ask how cakes in Norwegian confirmation celebrations contribute to the development of social relationships, networks of support and regional ideals. Over 90 parents answered a qualitative questionnaire, which provided material that is analysed through theories on gifts and social capital. This approach demonstrated how female agency through cake exchange creates and maintains social relations and networks between women across generations, as well as between families. Baking is not necessarily related to the endorsement of traditional and stereotypical roles of caring and nurturing women. Care, support, trust and belonging are, however, empowering social benefits of cake exchange. An abundance of cakes at the celebrations can express and make visible the density of social relations, as well as representing regional ideals.

What happens when centuries-old seasonal transhumance gives way to industrial dairy farming? Through different ethnographic perspectives and multi-sited fieldwork on high-altitude farmsteads on the one hand and Alpine pastures on the other, we elaborate on how diverse “bodies” transform within shifting farmstead (Hof) assemblages, including humans, animals, plants and infrastructures. How can we grasp the gradual separation of these two historically interdependent geographical levels? Our diverging ethnographic perspectives drew our attention to various blind spots related to how intensified dairy operations have contributed to the abandonment of Alpine pastures, now experiencing woody encroachment. What if the Hof's appearance of centuries-old continuity obscures a fundamental transformation in how land, animals and work are coordinated? In this snapshot we show that what is perceived as “traditional” farming represents a novel, fragmented system in which the past unity between high-altitude farmstead and Alpine pasture has gradually but decisively drifted apart.