Anthropology, ethnology, folklore and social history
In most of these countries (Britain is the main exception) †ethnology is the leading discipline which is concerned with own-society anthropological studies. In general terms, ethnology as a university subject, *museum profession and research field arose in the nineteenth century and is associated with ideologies of nationhood as embodied in cultural history. The focus is upon studies of ‘the folk’. In practice, this has traditionally meant *peasant cultures and rural history. In some countries, ethnology also encompasses *folklore and social history more generally. Each country has a distinctive national style, more or less populist in character, informed by its own charter texts. Rural peasant historical studies continue to be made, but the field is increasingly enlivened by infusions of theoretical ideas drawn from contemporary cultural and social anthropology; and there are new interests in processes of urbanization and *class formation (e.g. studies of ‘working-class culture’), and contemporary popular culture and social movements which borrow from *political economy, historical demography and *sociology. Ethnological work is normally published in the national language in national journals and other local outlets.
While relatively little appears internationally in other languages, this should not be taken as an absence of a substantial corpus of knowledge of a broadly anthropological kind, with which any sociocultural anthropologist proposing to initiate research in a Northern European country will need to become familiar.
Social and cultural anthropology, whose central features are *Malinowskian *fieldwork and a set of (largely Anglo—American) charter texts, is a somewhat later and unevenly-distributed development. Already well established as a field of academic enquiry in Britain by the 1920s, its growth elsewhere in Northern Europe was slower; the establishment of specialized departments of anthropology in Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium and France occurred mainly after 1950; they remain, compared with Britain and the United States, relatively few in number. Some departments had their origins in the colonial encounter and postwar traumas of decolonization, and may include *development studies. Others had their origins in purely scholarly interests in foreign cultures, and may include regional studies. Ethnology and anthropology are related in varied ways. In Germany, for example, social and cultural anthropologists are normally located within departments of comparative ethnology; in France, both within ethnology departments and in specialized departments of anthropology. In Scandinavia and the Netherlands, specialized departments were founded; in places, anthropologists conventionally do not infringe upon the academic territory of their colleagues in ethnology departments: anthropologists work overseas, while fieldwork within the country is usually done by ethnologists or visiting foreign anthropologists. See Boissevain and Verrips (1989) for an account of anthropology in the Netherlands. Gullestad (1989) and Gerholm and Gerholm (1990) describe developments in the anthropology and ethnology of Scandinavia.
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