Mainz Contributions to Cultural Anthropology/European Ethnology

Politics is facing a crisis of legitimacy. In the age of ‘post-democracy’, there is no shortage of critical descriptions of the state of affairs that focus on the increasing alienation of the so-called popular parties from the reality of citizens’ lives. Declining membership numbers, recruitment bottlenecks and falling voter turnout contrast with the public self-dramatisation of parties in election campaigns. However, both say little about the actual state of the parties. How does party life work today? What motivates hundreds of thousands of grassroots members to volunteer in local associations? What is everyday political life like in a local party district?

These are the questions addressed in Jonathan Roth’s study. With the help of a qualitative-ethnographic field approach, he uses the example of an SPD sub-district to examine current forms and meanings of local party work in the age of professionalised media democracy. In this way, an account of local political engagement is sketched, which, in contrast to conventional treatises, is not oriented towards organisational structures but towards the actual everyday actions of party members at the grassroots level of politics.

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The historical turning points of 1945 and 1989/1990 have led to massive upheavals, especially in Eastern Europe – not only in terms of the emergence of specific generations, but above all in relation to migration processes. However, thinking of the two aspects together quickly leads to blanket labelling of the affected social groups, for example as the ‘experience generation’, ‘generation 1.5’ or ‘second generation’. This, however, obscures the view of the actors themselves.

The focus of this volume is therefore the attempt to trace, understand and interpret perspectives on migration and generation close to the people. In addition to biographical experiences and narratives, the focus is also on the respective framework conditions and contexts of potential collective-biographically formative processes of dynamics and change in Eastern Europe and beyond. In the eleven contributions, not only the contingency of dealing with migration experiences by individual generations becomes clear but also the extent to which family, spatial, political and, not least, academic contexts influence them.

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Korean War Memories. Intercultural Perspectives on Dealing with the Past in South Korea

Sandra Keßler

Korea is a divided country whose internal border became fixed with the outcome of the Korean War (1950–1953). Since then, contact and exchange between the people of North and South Korea have been almost impossible. How do Koreans today remember their war deployment in their own country? What do aging war veterans talk about, even in the face of the continuing division of the country, which after all the war sought to overcome? And what effects does intercultural conversation between Korean men, who are about eighty years old, and a significantly younger German researcher have on the linguisticisation of their memory narratives? The volume ‘Korean War Memories’ transfers methods and theories of cultural anthropological narrative and biographical research to the East Asian context. It deals with Korean memory culture as well as with how people deal with war and post-war, and refers to diversity experiences in field research in South Korea.

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This investigation was inspired by the discovery of an extraordinary corpus of manuscripts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was found on an old farm in the northern Black Forest. There, this trove – consisting of recipes, blessings, incantations, amulets as well as magical-sympathetic instructions – had once been carefully hidden. It is known that it originated from the Morlok family, some of whose representatives worked as healers or lay practitioners until the mid-twentieth century. Their work, which was not forgotten locally, was quickly taken up by the media after the discovery of the scripts and soon attracted national attention. The study on ‘The Legacy of the Morloks’ is therefore not only dedicated to the historical papers and their former owners, but also to the current reception of the healers’ past and its staging in the media. The discovered writings are carefully interpreted and contextualised, and their contemporary impact is analysed.

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More and more people in precarious life situations are turning to concepts beyond classical therapy offers. In what way and with what goals are these alternative sensory concepts used? To what extent do they help to restructure everyday life?

Contemporary shamanism, understood as a cultural technique in this sense, is often treated under generic terms such as ‘New Age’ or ‘esotericism’ – though rarely without pejorative intent. The biographies of the people interviewed, accompanied and portrayed in this book show that the ‘on-the-ground reality’ proves to be more ambivalent, more critical of society and sometimes more self-ironic than is generally assumed. In 21 case descriptions, very individual world views and habits are formulated and hopes, but also doubts, are expressed. The latter are not only directed against social imbalances or one’s own path in life but sometimes also against the project of an empirical approach itself. Thus, this volume also wants to contribute to the discussion about the possibilities of ethnographic practice.

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Press release, 16 March 2017

In his academic work, Michael Simon has, among other things, always been intensively concerned with the history of the subject of cultural anthropology/ethnology and has consistently pursued a self-reflexive ethnological approach. For all his critical distance, he has always been keen to arrive at constructive results that are capable of discourse. On the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, we are now taking the opportunity to present a bouquet of topics from the research fields on which he has offered discussion in the most diverse ways in the course of his academic career: interculturality, namology, history of disciplines and methods, medical culture research, visual anthropology, migration, war and everyday life, regional research, biographical research – to name the most important. Many of the authors of this celebratory volume take up the suggestions for academic exchange in their contributions while others point to thematic intersections between the fields of work of the person being honoured and their own academic interests – showing common ground and transcending disciplinary boundaries.

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‘About 2000 people came together, countless sledges. [...] The jumps of the Norwegians were great. The feast was very animated.’

These were the words used by Freiburg professor August Gruber to describe the tenth snowshoe races of the Black Forest Ski Club on the Feldberg on 4 February 1906. As his detailed notes prove, he and many of his contemporaries were fascinated by a new sport that had just found its way from Norway to the Upper Black Forest: skiing. On the basis of a broad collection of sources with many hitherto unknown testimonies, the present study attempts to trace the emergence of skiing for a clearly defined area of investigation and to show its development into a veritable mass phenomenon. The focus of interest is on ethnographic and everyday science, cultural and sports history, as well as economic and social science.

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Several book series make the Eugen Diederichs Verlag interesting for folkloristic narrative research: ‘Die Märchen der Weltliteratur’, the ‘Deutsche Sagenschatz’, ‘Die deutschen Volksbücher’, ‘Atlantis. Volksmärchen und Volksdichtungen Afrikas’ and other thematic fields of the publishing programme lead to the question of the significance of publisher and publishing house for the history of folklore. The period between the founding of the publishing house in 1896 and Eugen Diederichs’ death in 1930 coincides with the institutionalisation of the discipline of folklore, in which the cultural publisher explicitly expressed interest and which he sought to promote. In addition to publishing books and series, which offered numerous folklorists forums for publication, Diederichs took other promotional measures, such as financially supporting a folkloristic lectureship at the University of Jena, which was held by Hans Naumann. This volume contributes to the history of folklore studies by pointing out contacts and cooperations between publishers and folklorists and by elaborating the intentions of the actors, especially in the field of folklore studies, as a contribution to ‘cultural development’.

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For many people, precarious life situations such as mental suffering, physical illness or confrontation with death promote a critical examination of socially prescribed interpretations and lead them to search for alternative concepts of meaning. Especially in the field of modern medicine, such confrontations between academic knowledge, traditional orders and individual approaches to solutions can be perceived with great clarity. They were the focus of interest at an interdisciplinary conference at the University of Mainz in September 2013, which centred around the human search for healing and cure. The aim of these selected contributions was to understand how, from the perspective of those affected and actors in crisis situations of human existence, meaningful plans of action emerge, are negotiated in a socially conditioned way and are implemented. This volume documents the results of the research efforts with essays from cultural anthropology, ethnology, medical history as well as psychotherapy, history, cultural studies and literature.

With contributions by Mita Banerjee, Dagmar Hänel, Christoph Leder, Johanne Lefeldt, Anne-Christin Lux, Florian G. Mildenberger, Martina R. Mühlbauer, Oliver Müller, Johannes Müske, Bernd Rieken, Uwe Schellinger, Michael Simon and Mirko Uhlig.

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On the occasion of its twenty-fifth anniversary, the Society for Folklore in Rhineland-Palatinate/Gesellschaft für Volkskunde in Rheinland-Pfalz organised a conference on the history of science in the Museum of the City of Alzey, the results of which are summarised in this volume. The contributions focus on a renewed examination of the Romantic era, which was of great importance for the development of folklore and whose after-effects can be traced to the present day at the level of society as a whole. The location of the event promoted the idea of looking for regional starting points for further research in addition to general papers – for example, on the society of the time, individual scholars and the reception of Romantic ideas. It made sense to focus in particular on the often glorified world of legends around the Rhine and its former inhabitants, the Romans, the Germanic tribes and especially the Nibelungen.

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In the southern Hessian town of Bensheim an der Bergstraße, a Passion play has taken place on Good Friday since 1983, in which costumed amateur actors re-enact the Passion of Jesus in the form of a procession. The idea came from immigrant Italians who, inspired by memories of the Good Friday events in their southern Italian home towns, persuaded people from their circle of friends and acquaintances – Italians and Germans – to take part. Over the years, the Good Friday play has become a tradition and attraction in the town of Bensheim. The aim of this study is to analyse the development, meaning and functions of this ‘young’ custom, especially with regard to the Italian-German cultural transfer that took place. Of particular interest is the extent to which the event, which is seen from the outside as being motivated by Christianity, functions as an integration factor for the immigrant Italian population. The results of comparative field research on Good Friday in the area of origin of the Italian bearers of the Passion play complete the analysis.

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Numerous forms of recreation can be found in contemporary society in Germany, including the fighting methods of Japanese origin known under the term budō. Disciplines such as jūdō (wrestling), kendō (fencing) and kyūdō (shooting) can look back on a long history in Germany, during which various adaptations have developed. This study provides insights into the everyday life of practitioners. In addition to the theory and practice of budō, the function and sociocultural significance for the actors are empirically illuminated: What motivates individuals to engage with budō? What role does the training ritual play? How is the body treated? To what extent do exotic models influence the recipients’ lifeworld? With the help of ethnographic-qualitative methods, the author provides answers to these and other questions.

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2009 was the year of an unusual anniversary: the 2000th anniversary of the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest was commemorated nationwide with prominent participation. This event, whose historical traces have largely been lost, nevertheless acquired ‘mythical’ significance in the process of Germany becoming a nation, which was also the focus of public debate in the anniversary year. Based on the concept of commemorative culture, the author examines numerous activities that took place in 2009 around the theme of the Battle. Cultural events, museum exhibitions as well as products of a multimedia history market are analysed with regard to their mnemo-cultural symbolism and thus questions about dealing with history in everyday life are addressed.

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This volume summarises the results of a lecture series held in the 2010 summer semester at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. Representatives from various disciplines of cultural studies, linguistics and literary studies spoke about the state of research on interculturality in their field with the help of illustrative examples and pointed out the references of the concept to modern everyday culture research. A special feature of this lecture series was its conception and organisation by students of cultural anthropology/ethnology, who were interested in using the offer to shed more light on a current topic area of interdisciplinary research. The selection of texts is thus of a fundamental, introductory character for the examination of this complex of questions.

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Michael Simon, Thomas Hengartner, Timo Heimerdinger, Anne-Christin Lux (eds.)

Media are an integral part of our culture. They represent everyday life, make knowledge available, offer meaning and provide options for action – and not just since the digital age. The interactions between everyday practices and their medial mediation in historical and contemporary perspectives were the topic of the Thirty-Sixth Congress of the German Society for Folklore/Deutsche Gesellschaft für Volkskunde, which took place in Mainz from 23 to 26 September 2007 at the invitation of the German Institute of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Department of Cultural Anthropology/Volkskunde, and the Society for Folklore in Rhineland-Palatinate. This volume provides a comprehensive documentation of the contributions discussed at the congress and takes into account not only the specialist approaches but also interdisciplinary and international approaches. The DVD published with the book also offers an insight into the online presentation accompanying the congress as well as excerpts from supplementary visual and spoken contributions that were produced for the congress.

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Have you ever heard about the Monster of Morbach? This question marks the beginning of an adventurous tale that has been circulating for several years, especially on the Internet. The subject is the alleged last sighting of a werewolf in Germany, which is said to have happened in 1988 in the Hunsrück community of Morbach. The author of this study set out to track down this ominous monster. In doing so, he makes use of the instruments of folkloristic narrative research, investigates the phenomenon of legendary reports in the present and specifically examines the history of werewolves from antiquity to the present day. In the end, The Morbach Monster appears as a modern legend in old garb, whose function and spread are closely related to the presence of American troops in Rhineland-Palatinate.

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With contributions by Klaus Beitl, Thomas K. Schippers, introduction by Bernd Rieken and Michael Simon, editors

The Germanist and folklorist Richard Beitl habilitated at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin in the summer of 1933 with ‘Studies on the Mythology of the Child’. Contrary to what one might think, his work did not fall under the influence of the Nazi ideology that was spreading at the time. Rather, he attempted to give an empirically based overview of the so-called child fright figures in Central Europe and to show what cultural scientists, psychologists, educators and parents can learn from each other in dealing with children’s fear. His explanations of the figures of lower mythology such as the Bumann, the bogeyman or the rye-mouse address not only linguistic-historical findings but also socio-cultural change from the middle of the nineteenth century to the end of the Weimar Republic and are still a remarkable historical document from the early academic phase of folklore studies. In addition to the historical aspect, the book also provides information on the question of the ethnopsychological significance of fear and magic in the child’s world view and is therefore also of general interest. After more than 70 years, it appears here in print for the first time.

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