Volume 38 • Issue 2 • 2008 • 2008

Identity politics have been a focus of academic research over the last years, but they have also entered public and popular discourses and thus continue to fuel changing intellectual perspectives as much as everyday life. The present issue of Ethnologia Europaea assembles a number of papers that examine identity work in different settings. What are the lasting assets and the changing risks of this concept, in both social life and ethnological analysis? Søren Christensen discusses ways in which the global and the national are linked in Danish politics and in the nation-branding of Danishness as a global export commodity. Rob van Ginkel looks at the identity politics of folk dancing and debates of authenticity versus cosmopolitanism in the Netherlands since the Second World War. Sofi Gerber follows how East and West have been renegotiated in Germany after 1989. The changing stereotypical polarizations, in which the question of ‘the authentic’ becomes a weapon, show – in a different time and place – similarities to the battle over folk dancing. Kira Kosnick takes the question of identity politics to a club scene in Berlin. She discusses the ways in which identity labeling of minorities may produce a very one-dimensional understanding of the workings of urban social life. The politics of ageing is the theme for Lars-Eric Jönsson’s contribution. How were labels of old age or childishness handled in psychiatric institutions of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries?


Open section

World-Class Danishness.

Søren Christensen

2008-06-30 Volume 38 • Issue 2 • 2008 • 2008 • 5-18

Out on the Scene.

Kira Kosnick

2016-12-31 Volume 38 • Issue 2 • 2008 • 2008 • 19-30

Children in Old Bodies

Lars-Eric Jönsson

2008-06-30 Volume 38 • Issue 2 • 2008 • 2008 • 31-44

The Dangers of Dancing.

Rob van Ginkel

2008-06-30 Volume 38 • Issue 2 • 2008 • 2008 • 45-65

Is East Going West – or Is the West Moving East?

Sofi Gerber

2008-06-30 Volume 38 • Issue 2 • 2008 • 2008 • 66-83

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