What kinds of contributions have European ethnology and folklore made to the general study of consumption? European ethnology is a branch of general anthropology that developed in Europe during the end of the nineteenth century. While many European nations with strong colonial traditions or imperial ambitions created a global kind of anthropology, small nations like the Scandinavian ones turned to discover “their primitives within,” either in the form of peasant folklore studies or as a more general ethnology of the nation. During the twentieth century, the discipline became more focused on studying contemporary everyday life within a mainly national or European framework. Today, departments of European ethnology combine a fieldwork-oriented tradition with links both to cultural history and cultural studies.

The strong ethnographic tradition has often ...