Ethnology/Folklore Studies

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 meant a focus on the ways in which consumption is embedded in material contexts, daily routines and rituals, and emotionalities and sensibilities. The focus is on situated practices, and this also means that there is a constant attempt to bring theoretical perspectives into dialogue with concrete empirical materials. The phenomenological tradition is strong, as well as the use of actor-network theory. In terms of methods, there is a constant experimentation with different ethnographic techniques and, in the case of folklore, studies of narrativity and genre analysis.

Three main ethnological perspectives are presented: first, a strategy that uses a historical and contrastive perspective to problematize current notions of consumption; second, an interest in the materialities of consumption and the ways in which all senses are involved in consumer activities, from do-it-yourself (DIY) projects to the ways people experiment with their wardrobe in front of the mirror; and finally, an interest in detailed ethnographies of aspects of consumer life that may at first sight seem too trivial or mundane to merit attention, like everyday skills and routines.