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Journal of Contemporary European Studies,

Vol. 11, No. 1, 2003


EuroVisions: Journeys to the Heart of a
Lost Continent
ULLRICH KOCKEL
Once upon a time as the ancestors of one tradition in European ethnology
would transcribe the opening term allegedly used by their sources once upon
a time, there was a place called Europe. It was a beautiful place to behold, and
indeed to live in. That does not mean it was Paradise, or even only near-perfect.
Like everywhere else, it had its faults and problems in generous quantities, but
many people were more than happy to live there. Even today, large numbers of
people from other parts of the world are eager to live in Europe, although there
may be no such place any more. In the past, it used to be clear where and what
Europe was. To the Danes, it was the stretch of the earths surface between their
own southern border and the Dolomite mountains (Kockel 1999), the English
saw it as the mystical, mythical frontier of civilisation beyond the trans-Channel
homeland of their one-time colonisers, and the Russians knew that it was what
they would see if they looked, metaphorically speaking, over one of their
cultural shoulders. To the Germans and the French after centuries of bloody
conict, Europe could be just about anywhere they could live peacefully
alongside one another, while Austria-Hungary was perceived by some as the
European prototype.
The Discursive Loss of Europe
Then along came the deconstructionists and constructivists, and it did not take
long for Europe to be lost in discourse. Following the unmasking by the
deconstructionists of most of the ideas and philosophical systems we had grown
up with as despicably Eurocentric, the process of Eurobashing entered a second
phase with the arrival on the scene of the constructivists, to whom nothing was
real, everything was just invented, usually by some powerful interests or our
own misguided little mind, and our familiar Europe was turned into a non-place.
Little indeed did these critics appreciate that they were merely reinventing, with
different labels, a philosophical wheel that had already spun in Athens in the
centuries BC, in ancient India and China, as well as probably many other places,
and that their themes were as deeply rooted in the much-maligned European
tradition as in any other. Since 1945, publications in languages other than
English have been increasingly regarded as parochial (even, I am told, for
European Studies RAE purposes), and hence largely ignored by these critics
1478-2804 print/1478-2790 online/03/010053-14 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/1460846032000088064
54 Ullrich Kockel
who, consequently, did not realise that European scholars in the 50s and 60s
(e.g., Bausinger 1961) had anticipated their grand debates by a generation or
more. However, one must note, in fairness, that they were not the only ones who
contributed to the loss of Europe as a dened arena for empirical cultural studies.
There are other factors, which may be a great deal more signicant than any
constructivist theorising at a safe distance without much recourse to material
history.
Geographically, Europe is easily lost a fairly tiny pattern of peninsulas and
sub-peninsulas dangling off the northwest corner of the Afro-Asian landmass.
Blink and you miss it, as the globe rotates. In another sense, as a result of its
role as global coloniser, a certain Europe is everywhere. I say a certain Europe
here because the world wants to speak one formerly European language more
than any other what irony that this language derives from an island population
that, by and large, does not even think of itself as particularly European! The
colonial past is, of course, one major reason why Europe has been receiving such
a bad academic press in recent decades. And yet, one persons colonial lord can
be another persons entrepreneur (or vice versa, as many peripheral regions
internal colonies know only too well). A history of colonisation and migration
makes Europe, invented or otherwise, a difcult entity to delineate which must
leave any Professor of European Studies in a quandary: Where and what is the
subject of study? If you ask a biologist to dene life, at least the answer,
however evasive, is unlikely to be that life is a ction invented primarily for
power-political purposes.
The American anthropologist Carol Rogers (1997: 719) suggested not long ago
that
[i]t is safe to say that European studies is in a state of considerable disarray.
No one is quite sure even where the boundaries of Europe now lie; recent
developments within and among the European Union, the old East Bloc, and
the former Soviet Union have all shaken to the core well-established
paradigms and the condence of experts in their ability even to understand
current situations, much less to predict even short-term likelihoods.
Some Europeanists now see culture and related forms of irrationality as
providing some kind of black-box explanation for everyday patterns and
practices that seem to make little or no sense otherwise (Rogers 1997: 719). Just
as archaeologists allegedly label any material item they cannot explain as
religious object, so Europeanists across the disciplines declare as cultural
anything they can neither understand nor approve of otherwise (especially
if it happens in Central and Eastern Europe).
There are many who claim that, historically, Europe died long ago. Whether this
alleged death of Europe is linked to the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire
or to the Holocaust, it is a diagnosis often heard, not surprisingly, with reference
to Central European culture, which in the Irish translation of a famous essay by
Milan Kundera is described as Cro na hEorpa, the heart of Europe. Whatever
it is about the Habsburg monarchy, the legacy of the Holocaust certainly is
EuroVisions: Journeys to the Heart of a Lost Continent 55
something anyone grappling with European culture, past or present, has to
engage with and face up to, not so much as the death of Europe that might
have come, had the Nazis won the race for the nuclear bomb but as the darkest
side of European history. To pronounce Europe dead, however, is to avoid this
issue. On the other hand, the reality of the Holocaust is terrible proof that, in
spite of the intellectual somersaults of the constructivists, Europe is denitely no
invention.
There is a Europe, even if the postmodernist onslaught has left us knowing next
to nothing about this non-place. But one should not be too harsh on the poor
postmodernists. Perhaps they have done us a favour, clearing the stage for a
cheerful rediscovery of Europe Europe is dead, long live Europe! But how best
to approach this non-place, to explore different visions and versions of this
? Fieldwork has long been a dening characteristic of European ethnology.
The best-known early advocate of the practice in European ethnology was
Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, a professor in Munich in the mid-nineteenth century,
long before Malinoswki and Boas, two exiles from Central Europe, introduced
the same practice to (British) social and (American) cultural anthropology,
respectively. Riehls approach was that of Erwanderung, of getting to know the
eld by rambling and roaming. Please bear with me as, following good European
ethnological tradition, I ramble and roam around this rather nebulous eld,
pausing here and there to listen to the heart of Europe beating through the mists
of discourse.
First Journey: Ulster
First Vision: Voices from the Past
Miroslav Holub, in his introduction to Ivan Olbrachts novel The Sorrowful Eyes
of Hannah Karajich, tells a story about a Hasidic Jew who was asked how many
countries he had seen.
Well, he says, I was born in Austria-Hungary, I was married in Czechoslo-
vakia, I was widowed in Hungary, and now Im trying to make ends meet in
the Soviet Union. Been quite a traveller then, havent you? Not at all. I never
moved a step from Mukachevo. (Olbracht 1999: vii)
Mukachevo lies in Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia, where Olbrachts novel is set, and
which nowadays is part of Ukraine. What this story highlights is that you do not
need to migrate to nd yourself on the other side of a national border, whether
you like it or not.
The end of the old European order has been brought about by a combination of
large-scale population movements and a resurgence of ethnic nationalisms, and
European ethnologists are beginning to ponder the idea of a virtual ethnicity:
If history lls our memory, a virtual identity based on expert stories will be
thinkable (Kostlin 1996: 178). But is this really such a new phenomenon? Is it
not what happened throughout the history of nationalism? Is not national identity
the virtual identity par excellence?
56 Ullrich Kockel
The late Frank Wright (1987) applied the notion of frontier in his analysis of
Ulster, juxtaposing it to the metropolis in what is essentially a modied
core-periphery perspective. His view of the frontier was similar to the vision
of the American historian Frederick Turner, who characterised it as a region of
opportunity (Hannerz 1997: 538). In late twentieth-century terms, the frontier
is an open eld where identities can be de- and reconstructed. Ethnic frontiers
are characterised by two or more separate and competing claims which are
made simultaneously on the loyalty of all the people on the territory (Morrow
1994: 341). Where rival groups have achieved a critical mass, parallel ethnic
institutions have developed. Even as the groups became more and more alike,
the remaining differences were the focus of attention (343). In many cases,
differences were maintained through segregated labour markets, but as these
were eroded by equal opportunities policies and the free movement of labour,
territorialism gathered new strength (346). In Northern Ireland, for example, the
promotion of equality in the workplace has been accompanied by increased
residential segregation. Across Europe different interpretations of nationhood
exist within the same state territory, and there are many regions where national-
ists lay claim to a larger area than that inhabited by their respective ethnic group.
Where such a claim is resisted by another, dominant group sharing the same
space, a satisfactory settlement appears often impossible.
In these allegedly postmodern times, we hear much about the de-territorialisation
of identities through increasing interdependence, globalisation and migration as
well as the much-discussed end of the nation-state. But as Orvar Lofgren has
pointed out, instead of facing a future of intense de-territorialization, we may
simply be failing to observe the different ways in which people and identities
take place on new arenas and in novel forms (Lofgren 1996: 166). If that is
indeed so, then European ethnologists, specialists in what makes people different
as well as in what makes them equal, may have much to contribute not just to
the debate, but to the practical working out of questions of citizenship, national-
ity and identity.
Observers of Northern Ireland often represent what is happening there as a relic
from a dark European past. This perspective may be rather misdirected (Kockel
1994). While one could say, following Lenin, that history is opium for the
common people, and the voices from the past can often shout louder than those
from the present, it is not good enough simply to label what has been going on
in Northern Ireland, Kosovo, the Basque country and other parts of Europe as
atavistic. It may be just that, but what is the cultural background against which
we judge the events and their perpetrators? In other words, what do such
apparent atavisms tell us about our very own modernity in which they rear their
ugly heads?
I am not talking here about the big acts of politically motivated terrorism, but
about everyday expressions of conict in Drumcree, Ardoyne and all those other
contested places and spaces, which offer to the ethnologist a possible window
into the future of more than Northern Ireland. We are witnessing there the slow,
painful negotiation of nationality, citizenship and identity in their territorial
EuroVisions: Journeys to the Heart of a Lost Continent 57
context as part of a deliberate political process involving an entire regional
society at the level of everyday experience. The success or failure of this process
will have signicant implications beyond the territorial limits of that particular
conict, wherever ethnic frontiers have been emerging in Europe (Kockel 1999).
Either way, the outcome is difcult to predict, but I share Konrad Kostlins
(1999: 13) concern that all our academic rationalisations cannot gloss over the
increasing likelihood that, in the light of an ever-growing fear of globalisation,
the real career of ethnographic knowledge is only just beginning.
Second Journey: Munich
Second Vision: The New Europeans
Much of the current debate on migration and culture contact revolves, perhaps
understandably, around immigrant groups whose culture is, or is perceived as
markedly different from that of the host society. But problems of culture contact
and conict are not conned to these groups. Internal migration and the
immigration of people from apparently quite similar cultures can prove equally
problematic. Migration studies in Europe from the 1970s onwards, strongly
inuenced by North American theories, have tended to emphasise adjustment
and integration. However, this perspective has been recognised as problematic in
the context of increasing ethnic mobilisation and a growing emphasis on
community and identity.
There are many invisible minorities in Europe. Irish migrants in Britain and
other English-speaking countries have been described as invisible or hidden
minority for more than ten years (e.g. Grimes 1988). Through multi-sited
eldwork among Irish migrants in Britain and Germany over some two decades,
I have had the opportunity to study the transformation of identities and the
meaning of community in relation to culture and place among such invisible
migrants.
Irish migration to Britain has long ceased to be the extension of an Irish nation
as it is widely perceived, and has instead developed a distinctive culture of its
own. There are, as yet, no hyphenated civic identities like that of the Irish-
Americans, and this may not be a bad thing, considering Byrons (1998) analysis
of such hybrid identities. The identities of Irish people in Britain are instead
place-bound, in terms of either residence (e.g. Liverpool Irish) or origin (e.g.
Limerick). Unlike earlier emigrants to Britain and the USA, the new Europeans
in places like Munich are perceived as temporary migrants whose mobility is
less damaging to, and indeed enhancing the socio-cultural fabric of their home
communities. Contrary to the stereotype, this mobility is now redening the
concept of community to a point where, analytically, it describes little more
than a disparate group of people who happen to be engaged in similar spatial
behaviour.
The situation of the new Irish emigrants in Continental European countries is
rather different from that of their counterparts in Britain, partly because their
numbers remain small by comparison. The social and cultural institutions
58 Ullrich Kockel
frequented by the migrants have been created mostly by the host society, or by
a major, well-known brewery. Where larger concentrations of migrants have
evolved, as in Munich, traditions like Gaelic sports, the Irish language, and Irish
music in particular are cultivated, often supported by Germans without any Irish
connections whatsoever. Migrants and their German friends in Munich used to
joke about the day in the foreseeable future when a Bavarian team would contest
the All-Ireland Championships in hurling, the Irish national sport.
In the 1980s, the Industrial Development Authority (IDA) Ireland ran an
advertisement for overseas investors showing a group of young university
students at Trinity College, Dublin, with the caption Were the young Eu-
ropeans. Most of the students pictured in the advertisement have since emi-
grated. To the extent that these new migrants are highly mobile, as required by
the Common Market, they are indeed young Europeans, and this identity may
well be less problematic than that of former migrants in Britain, partly because
it remains so vague and ill dened. On the other hand, what we might be
witnessing in Munich, and in a growing number of other places, is the
emergence of a new form of Irishness. Familiar expressions of Irishness in
Britain, conditioned to some extent by political circumstances, have been
backward-looking, motivated by the (perceived) need to differentiate oneself
from the Other. The Irishness of the migrants in Germany is more a forward
ethnicity, and as such more self-condent and emancipated.
Changing migration patterns have been analysed for many peripheral regions of
Europe, and comparing the experience of these to that of Ireland could yield
valuable insights. The Finnish case in particular would seem to offer a good
basis for such a comparison. Both countries were underdeveloped at the turn
of the twentieth century, and have suffered large-scale emigration over the past
two centuries. Given such an obvious case for comparison, it is rather surprising
that little work of this nature has been done to-date. Persistent emigration from
Ireland is often explained in terms of cultural peripherality, that is, the more
or less ready submission to unquestioned exogenous imperatives a pattern of
behaviour said to be the result of colonisation. A migration culture within a
wider, largely settled, industrial society is in some sense socially deviant,
however economically useful it might be. Herein lies only one of a number of
cultural contradictions that an analysis in terms of colonial relationships, with its
simple stimulus-response framework, fails to resolve. People act and react, not
to objective stimuli such as economic imperatives, but to what they subjectively
perceive these stimuli to be. To understand better why some cultures become
peripheralised, and why they deal with this process in the way they do, more
grass-roots studies of migration, addressing qualitative issues, are therefore
needed.
Third Journey: Eastward to the West
Third Vision: The New Economy
Since the recent discovery of Europe as a research eld for American cultural
EuroVisions: Journeys to the Heart of a Lost Continent 59
anthropology, Eastern Europe in particular has taken over the place of the exotic
Other region within or at home. In a way, this reects the view expressed in the
Financial Times (May 8, 1993: 9), of Eastern Europe as a distant part of the
world ruled by medieval passions, which are the antithesis of everything modern
man stands for. However, it is not so much the medieval passions that have
attracted the interest of anthropologists, but rather the process of transition
towards a capitalist system. At the very heart of the capitalist system is the
concept of the economy as an unconstrained sphere, an invisible actor working
in accordance with its own rules. Verdery (1997: 716) observes that the
restoration of private property in Eastern Europe brings the complexity of the
very idea and possible forms of property more fully into view. This raises the
question of how this notion of possessing an exclusive right that is so central
to Western selves and Western capitalist forms is actually culturally constituted.
The reintroduction of private property, together with the renewed com-
modication of land and labour, mark fundamental departure points for theoreti-
cal critiques of commodication and its place in social science theory.
European ethnologists should be able to make a signicant contribution to this
critique, both in the East and in the West, and this not just because their
discipline has some signicant roots in political economy (Kockel 2002).
The New Economy has become something of a grand narrative, surrounded
by buzzwords like the network society, globalization, or the knowledge
society (Lofgren 2001: 155). Orvar Lofgren (159) argues that
the social and cultural organization of imagination, dreams and fantasies is a
very underdeveloped eld in the European ethnology. A historical per-
spective could show us how the New Economy differs from earlier
dreamworlds. What happens, when you try to institutionalise, standardize or
commoditize fantasies and other products of the imagination?
He suggests a return to the classic tradition of the folklorist interest in the
world of fantasies and dreamworlds, its genres, imaginary and social contexts,
starting with what he calls an archaeology of the rhetoric of a New Economy
with its extremely ahistorical understanding of the world.
Such a return to the origins of our eld should also include a critical engagement
with the disciplinary past that European ethnology has not yet had, by turning
the spotlight onto its roots in Gesamte Staatswissenschaften, where it once
evolved in close proximity to the Historical School of economic thought.
Political expediency pushed the discipline in a different direction during the
nineteenth and much of the twentieth century. The Historical School matured
into the concept of a social market economy, which offered a genuine Third
Way, not just a thinly veiled attempt to introduce neo-liberalism by the back
door. Conscious of its common roots with a historically thinking political
economy, European ethnology as an empirical approach to the study of everyday
culture could, and should start to ask some politically inconvenient questions.
The hectic frenzy surrounding life in the New Economy calls for a critical,
historical and reective perspective, says Lofgren (2001: 162), and wonders
60 Ullrich Kockel
whether the important social and cultural changes are occurring on other levels
or in different areas from those which the media and much of the current
research are focusing on.
Fourth Journey: The European Grand Tour
Fourth Vision: From Tradition to Heritage (and Back?)
As Europe especially, but not only its peripheral regions is being turned into
a theme park for globalised tourists, the question frequently arises and is hotly
debated, on the ground as much as in academic discourse is it authentic? The
pragmatic response would probably be: who cares, as long as it sells. This makes
some sense. Whether Chicken Tikka Masala is an authentic Indian dish or a
concoction for the British palate is possibly irrelevant for the owner of an Indian
restaurant as long as it keeps the punters happy. But, quite apart from any
romantic metaphysics of authenticity, there is a practical, legal aspect to the
current vogue for authentic cultural products, be they food items, ne art, or
literature in whatever language. Under the Trade Descriptions Act, product
labelling must not be misleading. It could be argued that anything offered as
authentic something must satisfy recognised criteria of authenticity unless, of
course, authentic is not an objective quality, but rather, like scrumptious, a
matter of subjective taste.
For much of its disciplinary history, one of the key objectives of European
ethnology was to establish the authenticity (or otherwise) of its objects of study
whether a particular practice, belief or material item was genuinely German,
Rhenish, Transylvanian or whatever was of the utmost importance. Following
the incisive critique by the Frankfurt School and the Abschied vom Volksleben
(Farewell to Folk Life) proclaimed by the Tubingen School of empirical
cultural studies, this concern with authentication was more or less abandoned. It
appeared to suit the spirit of the times in the nal decades of the twentieth
century to turn attention to the alleged inauthenticity of virtually everything
cultural, epitomised by the invention of tradition debate and the rediscovery of
Max Webers geglaubte Gemeinschaft in the guise of Benedict Andersons
imagined communities. At the same time, away from our desks, PCs, libraries
and seminar rooms, authenticity became a major social and political issue with
economic implications, while social scientists across all disciplines peddled
explanations that smacked of the false consciousness accusations issued by an
earlier generation of historical materialists.
Rather than being an expression of the false or distorted consciousness of
people who do not quite know how to live their lives unless instructed by a
social theorist, the recent resurgence of popular concern with cultural identity
and the authenticity of cultural products can be interpreted in several ways. It
may be seen as an attempt to redress the historical injustice of state internal
colonialism felt by many people in marginal areas. This is a point certainly
worth following up. However, there are other explanations. Modernity was
initially perceived by many not as a threat to culture, but as a liberating force.
EuroVisions: Journeys to the Heart of a Lost Continent 61
Nowadays, few cultural regions in Europe can claim to be homogenous
entities, and in each local population there are some people from whose
personal perspective what is called indigenous culture may appear alien (Ray
1998: 16). Can the different issues be reconciled in any way? Perhaps the
analysis should not ask whether an identity is authentic, but to what extent a
locality or region has control over its identity and the formation of local/regional
economic activity, and to what extent it may be able to deploy its identity for
its own needs. As Ray (1998: 16) suggests, we ought to examine closely the
processes whereby territorial/cultural identities are constructed, promoted and
protected, to nd out more about the specic relationships between place,
history and the on-going process of symbolic construction.
Once we acknowledge that authenticity is a matter not of true or false
consciousness, but rather of the historical legitimacy of the associated identity
claim, we can revisit the issue of an invention of tradition and recognise
heritage as a xation of tradition. This enables us to recognise that it is not
tradition that has been invented, but rather heritage. Culture becomes heritage
only when it is no longer current, that is, when it is no longer actively used. In
other words, heritage is culture that has dropped out of the process of tradition.
The term tradition, literally, refers to cultural patterns, practices and objects
that are handed down to a later generation, for use according to their purposes,
as appropriate to their context. Heritage, on the other hand, refers to cultural
patterns, practices and objects that are either no longer handed down in everyday
life (and therefore left to the curators), or handed down for a use signicantly
removed from their historical purpose and appropriate context. Tradition as a
process involving cultural actors includes the possibility of modifying what is
being handed down between generations, to appropriate it to a changed historical
context. Only when it becomes xated as heritage does tradition cease to imply
process and change. From this perspective, the use of the label traditional does
no longer imply something immutable and eternal, but refers to legitimacy
derived from everyday historicity. Given increasing emphasis on cultural re-
sources as a means of socio-economic development, we need to re-evaluate the
use of tradition, understood as a creative process of intergenerational cultural
appropriation, in regional policy, to avoid its instrumentalisation in stale com-
modity versions of heritage. This can help to empower localities and regions,
and at least obstruct the transfer of established patterns of exploitation from the
old industrial to the new post-industrial economy.
Fifth Journey: Kastalia
Fifth Vision: The Blue Flower
The scholarly province of Kastalia is one of the great non-places in European
literature. Yet the real utopia is the Kastalia that will come after Kastalia. In the
nal scene of The Glass Bead Game, the Magister Ludi, Joseph Knecht, having
left the ivory tower to teach and learn in the everyday world of other provinces,
drowns in a mountain lake where he is swimming with his student Tito.
62 Ullrich Kockel
According to Bill Readings, we are living in an age where the universities are
losing their status as institutions for the education of a society constituted as a
nation state, and are trying to behave more like transnational corporations. In the
USA at least, societal relevance of knowledge production and its contribution to
the education of citizens are making way for a concern with performance
indicators; the conditions of academic work are such that the pressure to produce
undermines or overshadows the dialogue about societal relevance (Bendix 1999:
100). Replacing the Ivory Tower with an Iron Cage, by the sound of it. Well,
that may be in the United States it could surely never happen in Europe?
But let us ask about the specicity of European ethnology, and about the societal
relevance of the knowledge it produces, at this juncture and perhaps beyond.
Ethnology involves translations between different living conditions (Bendix
1999: 105). According to Claude Levi-Strauss, being a non-conformist and
rejecting ones own society are virtual preconditions for a career in ethnology.
Not everybody would go that far. Justin Stagl, for example, sees Georg Simmels
concept of the restlessly wandering stranger, or Robert Parks marginal man as
more accurate representations. The combination of distance and nearness,
indifference and engagement makes the ethnologist exible, and suitable as a
mediator (Burckhardt-Seebass 1999: 121f.). There is hardly another subject
where living and working are as closely connected as in European ethnology
hence the strong reaction against approaches that engage with representations,
but not with primary research or personal experience, where everyday life is only
recognisable in typographic traces (Streng and Bakay 1999: 131). In many
ways, the postmodern debate has been good for us; it challenged our styles of
writing and self-reexivity, demolished some cherished concepts. On the other
hand, the discussion of postmodern identities has placed too much emphasis on
post processes like the disintegration of identities, or the fragmentation of just
about everything from the family to the nation state. The diagnosis depends, of
course, not only on where you are looking, but also where you are looking from
(Lofgren 2001: 153), and how that looking is done.
The subjectivist turn in European ethnology during the seventies may have been
merely a poorly disguised attempt to give in to curiosity and, for example by
using survey techniques, to obtain results quickly and cheaply Fast Food
research, as Martin Scharfe (2001: 68) has called it recently. Instant gratication
is the order of the day. There is nothing new in this. Hermann Bausinger (1961),
in Volkskultur in der technischen Welt, already described instant availability as
a cultural principle of everyday life some forty years ago, in a work that proved
seminal for European ethnology. Quick-x surveys have their uses, but they are
no substitute for direct engagement with lived experience, for intensive and
extensive eldwork as the foundation of ethnographic and ethnological research.
Quantum physicists and European ethnologists know that the researchers
presence in the eld inuences the research process and the ndings. Unlike the
physicist, however, the ethnologist engages in the cultural representation of other
social worlds, and this creates not just abstract epistemological problems, but
concrete political ones, too. How we tell the stories that we actually can tell is
EuroVisions: Journeys to the Heart of a Lost Continent 63
more than a playful question, it is a matter of political responsibility (Nieder-
muller 1999: 64)
Lofgren (2001: 153) identies what he describes as the ve ethnological virtues
what we are good at:
A historical perspective and a comparative approach
An interest in everyday life and its materiality
The ethnographic approach and its moving searchlight
The focus on culture in context (the importance of contextualizing, concretis-
ing)
The role of the bricoleur in search of theory and methods
It is one of the strengths of European ethnology that, due to its diverse
interdisciplinary connections, it is particularly open for multidisciplinary collab-
oration. Stressing the elds characteristic perspective on experience, practice
and everyday culture within the broad framework of historically-oriented cultural
research serves to maintain the interdisciplinary location and distinctive contri-
bution of European ethnology (Hengarten 2001: 46).
This is particularly important in teaching. New courses and programmes are
created all the time, often designed these days to cross the disciplinary
boundaries. They can clearly enrich the curriculum for all involved. However,
such multi- and interdisciplinary offerings should not be merely a desk symbio-
sis, or homage to current fashions, and they should most certainly not be
composed according to the supermarket principle. While the exibility of the
new modular schemes is something to be welcomed, these programmes ought to
be placed within a concrete research context where the different perspectives
involved constitute, as Hengarten (2001: 46) suggests, an interdisciplinary
research programme.
At this point it is worth noting that the terms multi- and interdisciplinary are
frequently used as synonymous, and this muddle has seriously clouded the vision
of course directors and RAE assessors alike. Most faculties are multidisciplinary
environments where practitioners of different disciplines may engage in mutually
enriching collaborative research projects or teach joint modules, thus broadening
their students horizon at least as an aspiration. By contrast, genuinely interdis-
ciplinary work is located b e t w e e n the disciplines not as a postmodern
pick-and-mix rag bag or a purely pragmatic combination of useful elements
from different disciplines, but with a philosophically grounded epistemology and
methodology reecting its research foci. On the research side, this means that
genuinely interdisciplinary work is difcult to place in mainstream disciplinary
journals because it does not play to the canon of any one discipline. In teaching,
it similarly challenges student expectations of a straight and narrow path to a
degree, demanding instead engagement with a broader range of theories and
methods than traditional or even multidisciplinary programmes. It also requires
something that has increasingly fallen out of fashion as academic teaching and
research has become more and more instrumentalised a deep engagement with
rst principles of philosophy. Only a solid grounding in logic, argument and
64 Ullrich Kockel
evidence can provide foundations for sound interdisciplinary epistemologies. In
the language of contemporary spin, these concerns may even be marketable as
transferable skills, even if that term nowadays more commonly refers to the
pressing of buttons and the icking of switches.
Homecoming
At the end of our travels, we may return home. Deepest Franconia, Lutheran
heartland: a smallholding basketmakers home in the 1930s. The Sunday treat for
the family of eight: one cured herring, bought from a travelling shmonger, hung
above the table so that potatoes could be wiped on it, for added avour. We do
not need to go back there (or pretend that we could), and we certainly do not
need to romanticise it. But we do need to know about, need to understand it,
because this is what made us who we are the everyday lived experience of the
generation that reared us. Would I be here without that herring (not a red one,
I should add)? There is much emphasis nowadays on applied, policy-oriented
and vocational study, focused squarely on the contemporary. By wrenching the
contemporary from its historical foundations, we are destroying one of the key
functions of the contemporary itself to become the past and the roots of our
future. However, in the age of virtual history, we do well to remind ourselves
that not every past is consistent with every present.
On our journeys, we listened to the Voices from the Past in Ulster and talked to
the New Europeans in Munich. Travelling eastward to arrive in the West, we
glanced at the new economy on and from both sides. During the European Grand
Tour, we learnt about tradition and heritage. And towards the end we joined the
Magister Ludi, Joseph Knecht, for a swim in a cold mountain lake, as did young
Tito, who survived the experience, and the reader is left wondering whether the
boy went on to nd the Blue Flower, his true vocation to humanity.
Reinhard Johler (2001: 172) talks of a contemporary Europeanisation of
Europe. The fall of the Iron Curtain has brought many ethnologies of Europe
on the road to Europe, and the re-emergence of Europe has since become a
much-debated topic. A new continent has been discovered, or perhaps an old
one, long lost to reason and memory. The need to develop European perspectives
for the ethnological and anthropological disciplines is a challenge for the future.
European networks coordinating the strategies for, and the content of, our
research and teaching will be important in meeting it. To participate successfully
in such networking, institutions need a prole that is clearly recognisable across
Europe (Johler 2001: 176).
If we believe the Eurobashers with their hidden agenda, we may think we know
all about bad old Europe, and that we have had enough of it: Globalisation will
surely nish it off anyway, and it is time for us to forget about it, to go beyond
it. Au contraire! We have hardly caught a glimpse of everyday Europe. The
non-place is a terra incognita neither a lost paradise nor a bad dream to be
shaken off on the shrinks couch, but a new-found land, with much to explore.
What we see will be a matter of historical and contextual awareness. We may
EuroVisions: Journeys to the Heart of a Lost Continent 65
have many exciting stories to tell from our different perspectives. What we tell
and how we say it is a matter of political responsibility.
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