SIEF Journals

SIEF Journals

Published: Cultural Analysis 22.2 (2024).
Forthcoming: Ethnologia Europaea 54.2 (2024)
Announcement: Ethnologia Europaea will include book reviews.

Volume 22.2 (2024): Special Issue “In relation to microbes”

SIEF Journals

Cultural Analysis 2024 (berkeley.edu)

Special issue editors: Valdimar Tr. Hafstein, Áki G. Karlsson, and Veera Kinnunen

This special issue explores various aspects of multispecies symbiotic practices where humans and microbes relate to each other. Whether making and digesting food, composting and caring for soils, or managing waste, some of these practices have been actively cultivated for millennia, others recently glimpsed through advances in microbiology, while others await discovery, but may prove vital for the future shape of life on Earth.

Scientific knowledge, popular interest and commercial investment in intimate relationships between humans and microbes has grown exponentially in the first decades of the 21st century. Known as the “microbial turn”, this explosion of interest has brought forward new questions and challenges to scientific research. The papers in this issue address the symbiotic living of humans and microbes and how their coexistence is shaped through everyday cultural practices. The studies shed light on the creative agency of microbes in vernacular food practices – from growing, baking, brewing, pickling and dairy making, through the digestive system and back to the soil through composting – and their implications for the physical, mental, and social wellbeing of humans.

The special issue brings together folklorists, ethnologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and nutrition scientists to examine such living cultures of living cultures through multispecies and multidisciplinary research. It provides new insights into the complex interactions of human and non-human agencies and their conjoined impact on the physical world, including human bodies, through research on joint cultural practices of humans and microbes. The study of these symbiotic practices offers an important vantage point on human health, foodways, sociality, and interaction with the environment, and may suggest viable pathways towards a more sustainable future.

Contents:

In Relation to Microbes: Fermenting Cultures from Food to Soil.

Valdimar Tr. Hafstein, Áki G. Karlsson, and Veera Kinnunen

Compostories: Exploring Narratives of More-than-Human Relations in Soil Communities.

Helga Ögmundardóttir and Eysteinn Ari Bragason

Setting the Table for Relatedness. Fermentation in Designing Permaculture Projects in Sardinia.

Maria Giovanna Cassa

Speaking with Microbes. Smell as Transspecial Conversation.

Veera Kinnunen

In the Company of Bread: Sourdough Baking as Symbiotic Care.

Ragnheiður Maísól Sturludóttir and Jón Þór Pétursson

Microbial Entanglements in the Bulgarian Cellar: Control, Collaboration, and Quiet Food Sovereignty.

Lindsey Foltz

Fermented Living: Challenges in Adopting a Fermented Dietary Regime and the Role of Food Memories in Acquiring New Tastes

Bryndís Eva Birgisdóttir, Áki Guðni Karlsson, and Jón Þór Pétursson

Response articles by Salla Sariola, Amber Benezra, Bernard Tschofen, and Daniel Münster

About the Journal

Cultural Analysis is an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed, open-access journal dedicated to investigating expressive and everyday culture. The journal features analytical research ar ticles, reviews, and cross-disciplinary responses. Established in 2000 in the Berkeley Folk lore Archives, Cultural Analysis has published 22 volumes and hosts a global editorial board and collective.

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Dear SIEF colleagues and other readers,

we are pleased to announce the completion of the 2nd issue of Ethnologia Europaea’s 54th Volume. As most of you know, normally we inter-change between publishing an Open Issue and a Special Issue which focuses on a specific theme. This year, however, both issues have featured stand alone articles. The wide range of topics that have been given voice certainly celebrates the growing diversity of research within European ethnological and folklore studies.

We kick start this issue with the ever so thought provoking reflections of Marilyn Strathern, this time from the Keynote Lecture that she delivered at the 2023 SIEF Congress. Her paper explores the idea of uncertainty via the well established anthropological concept of relations. She asks whether considering relations as uncertain in their capacities and effects can help us uncover what is asked from knowledge practices in order to enlarge and/or shrink our physical and social worlds. We hope that the publication of this essay will launch a new tradition for EE of publishing other keynote addresses from major conferences and events.

Heidi Henriikka Mäkelä then examines the Finnish tradition of metered oral poetry, often referred to as “Kalevalaic” poetry or “runo” singing. Her angle is to analyse the re-heritagisation of such contemporary poems. She situates these sexualised poems within a feminist discourse as well as a context of transnational body politics such as the #MeToo movement.

For their part, Francisco Martínez & Patrick Laviolette offer a thought-piece on the relationship between the concept of hacking and the practice of hitchhiking. Their analysis, based largely on multi-sited findings from Eastern Europe, also plays with such notions as passenger ethnography and the hospitality that can take place in the enclosed confines of a four-wheeled, mobile space.

With fieldwork amongst Italian and Polish informants, Aga Pasieka’s article provides an ethnography into far-right activism. Her material is timely in terms of the current political landscape since it at once transgresses the national context and yet remains firmly embedded within various populist constructions of nation-state identities.

This issue also features a short ethnographic snapshot by Mira Menzfeld who presents some field data that examines how the conversion to Salafism by the controversial figure Andrew Tate is being discussed in parts of the Germanophone salafiyya.

https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/ethnologia-europaea/ethnologia-europaea-overview.xml

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Now given our new publishing relationship with Berghahn’s Open Anthro series, as well as with recent changes in the academic community of folklore/ethnological scholarship more generally, we put it to our Editorial Board that they should vote on whether the journal should amend its long held tradition (since Volume 1) of never having published Book Reviews. The result was unanimously conclusive. And three things emerged from the support for this move: i) yes, we should publish reviews, but not too many in each issue; ii) we should make sure to solicit reviews of books that are not just published in English (the review itself will have to be written in – or translated into – English, however); iii) when possible, reviews following thematic / geographical / fieldsite related groupings would be valuable. So, with this very issue, we move forward towards including book reviews (and longer review essays) in the forthcoming pages of EE. The British sociologist Jonathan Purkis has the honour of being the first such reviewer and he has commented on a monograph that is thematically related to the third article in this issue.

So with this in mind, please send us your suggestions for books to be reviewed (by email), as well of course, as your reviews (through the journal’s OJS submission platform). Aga Pasieka, our snapshot editor, has agreed to be in change this new book review section. Should this job become too burdensome, we will look to allocating someone from our Editorial Board specifically for this task.

In the meantime, happy reading.

Best wishes from EE’s Chief Editors

A. Schwell & P. Laviolette