Exploring Ethnological Knowledges

The following is an introduction to this special issue on Ethnological Knowledges

(Journal of Folklore Research 47/1–2, 2010).

Whenever ethnologists and folklorists study any aspect of culture, they also participate in defining, presenting, and distributing knowledge. As they collect and publish narratives, document and exhibit material culture, investigate dialects, conduct regional surveys and community studies, design and contribute to encyclopedias, and organize scholarly conferences, scholars employ many genres in order to represent their findings. Choices regarding representational genres and knowledge formats—i.e., the media of transfer—are guided by perceived expectations of target audiences and shaped by the conventions of knowledge venues such as museums, public lectures, or university seminars (Kaschuba et al. 2009). Knowledge formats reflect the rules of knowledge production and knowledge transfer; they exist in various aesthetic forms of material culture. As basic instruments of the sciences, knowledge formats combine different practices of knowledge production, representation, and transfer, such as defining, collecting, arranging, interpreting, and representing. Their form, material, aesthetic culture, content, and performance are all intertwined. Knowledge formats reflect ways of thinking as practices, relationships of power, cultural norms, and ideals (Kaschuba et al. 2009).

Today many folklore scholars engage multiple and varied knowledge formats without apparent difficulty. The range of possible formats results in part from ethnologists’ interaction with different publics, whose constituents are often very interested in the political, social, and economic “surplus” of ethnological knowledges. Because of this special position, ethnology is an excellent field in which to explore questions raised by the new history of knowledge and sociological or anthropological investigation of knowledge production (e.g., Biagioli 1999; Daum 2002; Felt 2000; Felt et al. 1995; Fried 2003; Nowotny et al. 2004). The broad range of ethnological knowledge formats includes documentary films as well as exhibitions, collections, essays, and monographs. Since knowledge formats are not only representations of knowledge, but also tools of ethnological work, there is barely another discipline that produces and uses so many different sources and tools, such as travelogues, fairy tale collections, and community studies.

Between 2006 and 2008, scholars from five Institutes of European Ethnology in Germany¹—guided by Wolfgang Kaschuba of Berlin’s Humboldt University—drew on empirical research in order to conceptualize and theorize how knowledge is organized and transferred. In June 2008, a panel at the Ninth Congress of the Society of Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF) convened in Derry to discuss this work with a broader audience; panel organizers proposed a reflexive examination of ethnological knowledge-making in the twentieth century. What kinds of knowledge have ethnologists valorized, and what questions, methods and theoretical directions have they excluded? Who was successful in giving his or her research an institutional foothold, who was not, and why? How have ethnologists combined local and international systems of knowledge? Which practices and artifacts have they drawn upon? How is ethnological knowledge used, and in which contexts?

The articles and responses in this issue grew out of these questions, presentations, and discussions. In the longer pieces, five researchers from Germany, Israel, Slovenia, and Switzerland offer insights on the construction, representation, and use of ethnological knowledge within specific social and political settings. In the first article, “Raphael Patai, Jewish Folklore, Comparative Folkloristics, and American Anthropology,” Dani Schrire of the Hebrew University explores the experiences of folklorists in Israel during the 1940s and 1950s. The example of Raphael Patai (1910–1996) highlights the impact of institutional and interpersonal contexts on ethnological research and examines the uses of ethnological knowledge by politicians. Schrire argues that Patai’s experiences as a folklorist in Palestine constituted a “habitus of rejection”; the marginalization of folklore studies at the time led Patai to internationalize his research.

In “The Undoing of an Encyclopedia: Knowledge Practices within German Folklore Studies after World War II,” Michaela Fenske (University of Göttingen) reflects on the making of a German legend encyclopedia, the Handwörterbuch der Sage. This case from postwar Germany affirms that encyclopedias are selective cultural snapshots rather than comprehensive compendiums; they are embedded in the culture of scholarship and conditioned by the circumstances of their time. Fenske’s analysis...