Thank you for joining us at the 17th Biennial congress of SIEF2025 - Unwriting

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SIEF statement on ongoing assaults on academic freedom in the US

The International Society for Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF) expresses its solidarity with colleagues, students, and friends, who represent our scholarly fields of Ethnology and Folklore at US academic institutions.

SIEF is deeply concerned with recent initiatives and executive orders by the US government aimed at cutting back funding for research and higher education, banning key words relating to diversity, equity and inclusion, and defunding scholars and academic programmes. It is troubling to see visas being revoked and colleagues being threatened with deportation from the US, simply for exercising their right to free speech.

SIEF promotes academic and personal freedoms and advocates for the critical role that scholarship can play in society. Important conversations in research and higher education must be carried out in a climate of collegiality and respect without fear of repercussion, even if they are sometimes not politically convenient.

Independent research and international collaborations must continue freely. We therefore call for an immediate halt to intimidation, de-funding, and the ongoing delegitimization of vast areas of research based on political ideologies and expediency.

At the upcoming SIEF2025 Congress in Aberdeen we cordially invite delegates to participate in our Academic Freedom Sanctuary:

Academic Freedom Sanctuary
Moderators: Hande Birkalan-Gedik and Dani Schrire
Date & Time: Wednesday June 4, 19:45 - 21:00

On behalf of SIEF
Marie Sandberg, President, Sophie Elpers, Executive Vice-President, Thomas McKean, Vice-president

The 15th Conference of the SIEF Ritual Year Working Group: Food, Feasts, Festivities, & Folklore

The theme revolves around the importance and meaning of food. The conference aims to highlight the centrality of gustatory experiences and gastronomical practices in various ethnolinguistic groups around the world. Read more here >>

New issue of Ethnologia Europaea, Vol. 55, no. 1

The current issue of Ethnologia Europaea, volume 55, no. 1, features three articles, an ethnographic snapshot and two in memoriam appreciations. It is not a special issue, but readers will quickly identify the strong Nordic content within these pages. Thematically, some readers might feel that hybridity is equally back in the centre ring as a significant conceptual harmoniser.

Hence, it is perhaps fitting to lead with a piece on the state of affairs within academia. Tiina Suopajärvi writes about the neoliberal affects/effects on the senses of optimism and pessimism within the Finnish higher education scene. Her article, nonetheless calling for solidarity, offers methodological experimentation in the post-COVID-19 era of hybrid scholastic encounters, revealing how feelings of alienation and exploitation often run rife.

Then we have a ritualised duo-autoethnography of sorts by Anna Storm and Florence Fröhlig. Their article explores the safety protocols performed during visits through the liminal spaces of nuclear power stations in Sweden, the USA and across other northern European countries.

Helena Laukkoski's article provides a kind of comparison of the collections collaboration between the Finnish National Museum and the “now closed” Fame Music Museum. Her framework explicitly addresses ideas of hybridity.

This issue also features an ethnographic snapshot by Carin Graminius and Simon Halberg on small-hold farming in the world of agribusiness. Here we get a glimpse into the hybrid amalgamations of how human labour can become intertwined with AI and other big machine technologies.

Both as a celebration and with regrets, this issue includes two appreciation pieces of the lifework of a pair of notable anthropologists who were based in Oslo – Professors Signe Howell and Thomas Hylland Eriksen. These include commentaries by friends, students and colleagues whose lives they touched, and whose research paths were heavily impacted by their guidance.

By publishing these extensive collaborative praise pieces (subsequently to a recent tribute to Chris Tilley), it is not our intention to turn EE into the obituary pages for the cognate fields of cultural analysis, ethnology, folklore, and socio-cultural anthropology. Yet these recent deaths of significant contributors to cultural theory in various European contexts have deserved special acknowledgements. And even though it is not new to have jointly written praise for the influence of our mentors, we feel that this is a fitting format for EE.

This is reminiscent of the Anthropology Today commemorative appreciation for Raymond Firth nearly a quarter of a century ago (Macdonald et al. 2002). With such a precedent, Sharam Alghasi's comments on the career of his close friend Thomas Hylland Eriksen are an apt preface to both appreciations, since he points to the idea of We vs Others. “We” thus encourage additional group commemoration commentaries in the future. This seems to be a fitting way to celebrate the diversity of influence from those who have helped shape current generations of ethnologists into navigating the complexities of archival research, fieldwork and social theory in the twenty-first century.

New Issue of Cultural Analysis, 23:1 (2025)

Encountering Uncertainties in Ethnology and Folklore
Guest Editors: Hande Birkalan-Gedik, Katre Kikas, Konrad J. Kuhn

This special issue, Encountering Uncertainties in Ethnology and Folklore: Actors – Milieus – Strategies, presents papers dealing with uncertainties in fieldwork and archives. The issue explores lessons to take from our disciplinary pasts dealing with different uncertainties and their implications for our disciplinary futures. The contributors aim to look at the notion of “uncertainties” from the perspectives of involved actors, exploring the social, political, and disciplinary milieus in which they worked or operated, and presenting their strategies to overcome or navigate the problems they faced. This issue takes up our collegial conversations, having taken place at the SIEF 2023 Conference in Brno, Czech Republic, at the panel organized in the context of the Working Group “Historical Approaches to Cultural Analysis,” which explored different contexts of uncertainties in the disciplinary pasts of ethnology and folklore and their implications for disciplinary futures.

New Issue of Cultural Analysis, 23:2 (2025)

The Power of Examples
Guest Editors: Anne Eriksen, Kyrre Kverndokk

The special issue presents a collection of articles that bring the study of examples into the fields of cultural analysis, ethnology, and folklore studies. Concentrating on the three aspects performativity, epistemology, and narrative, as well as the relations between them, the texts explore the function, power, and rationality of examples and exemplarity. They demonstrate how examples are put to work in different cultural contexts, how their authority and cultural power are established, and how examples may be challenged, changed and renegotiated.