The Department of Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology
What we do
Our research and teaching at the Department of Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology is dedicated to the lived-in cultures of the everyday.
We are interested in ways of life and practices in everyday communication, urban spaces, media and digital environments. We ask about the whole person in their social, cultural and historical contexts. We follow relationships, narratives, life stories and collective memories. We explore world-views and self-understandingsf in language and imagerie, objects and materialities, corporeality and emotions.
As a curious discipline and university department, we are concerned with the "how" of reflexive ethnography and cultural analysis. Based on empirical experience in changing fields of research, we follow dialogical processes of questioning and understanding. We explore cultural meaning-making in everyday life with approaches from visual anthropology, phenomenology, ethno-psychoanalysis and cultural semiotics. Historical-archival methods of historical anthropology shed light on the becoming of the present. The transfer of culture and knowledge in museums, exhibitions, media and many other fields of practice and professions is of particular importance.
Since the 1980s, the Department has made its voice heard with approaches and projects of socially committed cultural studies, in the City of Graz, in science-to-public collaborations and in international and interdisciplinary research landscapes. A continuous political-anthropological perspective lies on the power relations in human coexistence and in changing societies: be it in topics of migration, work and precarity, in research approaches of decolonial and governmentality studies, through perspectives on class and gender , or in deciphering internalized constraints and ideologies.
As a further focus, we reflect on how the history of knowledge and science shapes our research and thinking and follow which path our discipline is taking and has taken.
Where we come from
In the German-speaking world and in various European countries, our discipline today goes by the names European ethnology, empirical cultural studies and cultural anthropology, among others, as well as, especially in non-university contexts, the previous name of folklore studies (“Volkskunde”).
From the middle of the 19th century, German-speaking Volkskunde established itself as a bourgeois science of the culture of the 'common people', characterized by romanticizing idealism and criticism of modernity in the course of industrialization. Parallel to non-European ethnologies (today known as social and
cultural anthropology as a science of the colonial foreign and exotic, the discipline directed a canonical view onto the peasant 'others' of their own culture.
In contrast to German and Swiss regions, under the multilingual and multicultural conditions of Habsburg Austria, folklore studies also developed in the direction of an ethnologia europaea. Until the 1930s, it shared with its anthropological sister discipline the opposing tendencies towards a cultural universalismon the one hand, and an ethnic nationalism on the other.
The discipline's active contribution to National Socialist blood and soil ideology was followed in the post-war years by a retreat to historical methods and descriptive-documentary collecting and preservation.
The upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s brought a reorientation and opening of Volkskunde towards everyday mass cultures in an industrialized society. This paradigm shift meant, firstly, the definition of a 'broad concept of culture' and the abandonment of the humanities' prioritization of high cultural, artistic and literary forms of expression. Secondly, Volkskunde, for example in the field of working-class culture research, continued to develop its scientific shift of perspective towards marginalized lower classes who were considered 'cultureless'. Culture was and is understood as the 'other side of the social' in its dependence on economic conditions. Thirdly, the discipline entered into an intensive examination of fascist and National Socialist folk ideology, which has taken on new explosive force in the present.
Naming issues
The opening up of the discipline towards a contemporary study of everyday culture was accompanied by name changes of previous Departments of Folklore Studies. Today's Graz department is well established under the name of cultural anthropology, which emphasizes the affiliation to a broad international research community for the study of humans as cultural beings.
The name European Ethnology, which has been applied to the studies at the Department since 2008, emphasizes an ethnographic perspective in the sense of a relationally contextualizing and intersubjectively reflected production of knowledge. The name also expresses a European perspective on 'our own' everyday live modes as well as a critical problematization of ethnocentric and culturalist premises. Simultaneously it also stands for research focuses in (South) Eastern Europe, the UK and the Mediterranean.
The starting point for the name discussions in the discipline was the renaming of the former Volkskunde department at the University of Tübingen in 1971. The new disciplinary name "empirical cultural ctudies", which together with the specialization "political anthropology" will be the title of the Master's studies from the winter semester 2024/25, emphasizes the empirical-ethnographic orientation of a cross-sectional discipline with references to historical, Germanic, media studies and cultural sociology.
The desire for standardization and better recognizability as a discipline led to the renaming of the previous national umbrella organizations of folklore studies from 2022. They are now called the "Austrian Society for Empirical Cultural Studies and Folklore" (ÖGEKW), "Empirical Cultural Studies Switzerland" (EKWS) and the " German Society for Cultural Analysis | European Ethnology" (DGEKW).