Contested Knowledge: Political Dimensions of European Ethnology and Folklore Studies in Post-War Europe
About this ebook
The volume offers a collection of case studies that reveal the mechanisms through which ethnological and folkloristic research was organized, appropriated, resisted, and transformed in shifting academic and political landscapes after the Second World War. It sheds light on the varying ways in which individual ethnologists from the Baltic countries negotiated the restrictions placed upon them by the Soviet Union, with some of them deciding to continue their research in exile, while others stayed and tried to create niches for themselves within the Soviet system. It also explores the roles of different nationalisms within ethological research after the Second World War. This terminology appears in the form of competing nationalisms as a concept of research or in the context of funding for ethnological research. The volume highlights the creation of new perspectives within research and in the context of the discipline’s entanglements with day-to-day politics and history. The book offers historically grounded insights for researchers in European Ethnology, Folklore Studies, and the broader humanities seeking to understand the political uses, limits, and vulnerabilities of contested cultural knowledge.
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About the author
Konrad J. Kuhn is Associate Professor of European Ethnology at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. His research focuses on the history and epistemology of ethnology, with particular attention to the institutional, political, and cultural contexts in which ethnological knowledge has been produced and circulated. His work combines approaches from the history of science, cultural history, and anthropology to examine the dynamics of knowledge production, disciplinary identity, and the societal roles of ethnology in Europe from the late nineteenth century to the present.
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-
Hanna Snellman is Professor of European Ethnology at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Helsinki, Finland. Since 2018, she has been a full-time Vice-Rector at the same university and before that fulltime Dean and Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Humanities. She is the Chair of ESFRI Strategic working group for social sciences and humanities and is in the Board of Directors for Una Europa European University alliance. She has carried out studies on migrant workers in Finland, Sweden and North America, on fieldwork methodology and history of Ethnology in Finland. Her recent publications deal with burial wishes, Finnish American cookbooks and benefits of migration to the sending country.
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-
Lauri Turpeinen is currently working as a Senior Advisor for Doctoral Education at the University of Helsinki. In 2023, he has completed his doctoral dissertation in European Ethnology at the Faculty of Arts of the same university. His PhD research project was a multi-sited ethnography investigating rural-urban migration of young adults from Kainuu in northeastern Finland to the Helsinki metropolitan region.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-
