Cultural Spaces and Practices: Ethnology and Folklore Studies

The central concepts of the previous research program were cultural spaces and practices, concepts linked to topology and agency. We critically engaged established categories linked to culture –including “folk” and cultural heritage – and rendered more clear the discipline’s history. We also collaborated on joint reflections as well as new theoretical and empirical research with colleagues across Europe.
In the proposed project, we will further develop this basic framework of operation, which enables us to optimally link the diverse academic backgrounds in ethnology, folkloristics, cultural anthropologyas well as research interests of individual team members. The conceptual lynchpins of cultural spaces and practices are reframed and will be based on a more dynamic understanding of space as the material, social and symbolic site of all cultural practice, livelihood strategies, forms of reciprocity, creativity (including aesthetic), reproduction of tradition and contemporary innovation. The processual nature of cultural practice here refers to processes of socialisation or enculturation as well as the intergenerational transfer of knowledge, skills and cultural heritage, taking into account the role of the nation-state and the EU and the consequent dynamic between the local and the global. All these processes unfold in the manner of a cultural chronotope in which are captured the historical and spatial dimension of each individual, phenomenon or practice.
Livelihood strategies and practices are introduced as one of the proposed new research interests, which will entail focusing on the factors (material and otherwise) that inform changes in everyday practice and identity construction. In addition, we will explore the emergence of new forms of reciprocity in social groups resulting from their creatively capitalizing on tradition and living spaces as a response to events such as crisis, war, or natural disasters. Finally, cultural heritage is redefined as a research interest common to the studies of the material, social and aesthetically creative worlds.