The Experience of Culture: Approaches to an Ethnography of the Immediate in Complex Relations

Abstract

“Utopias, Realities, Heritages. Ethnographies for the 21st century” the theme of the 2015 SIEF conference calls for questions: Do any new challenges for ethnography even exist in the 21st century? Has ethnography not always had to overcome contradictions between a utopian character of culture and the everyday? Beginning with a brief glance at the changes in European ethnology’s conceptions of culture, this paper discusses themes and ways of studying corporeal and sensory practices in everyday culture. Studies from sport, tourism, and spatially connoted heritage commodities thereby function as examples for the discussion of approaches beyond an essentialization of the elementary.

Ključne riječi
European ethnology, sensuous ethnography, body, heritage, knowledge