In this article, the style of social interaction known as hygge is analyzed as being related to cultural values that idealize the notion of 'inner space' and to other egalitarian norms of everyday life in Scandinavian societies. While commonly experienced as a pleasurable involvement in a social and spatial interior, hygge is also examined as a mode of withdrawal from alienating conditions of modernity. In spite of its egalitarian features, hygge acts as a vehicle for social control, establishes its own hierarchy of attitudes, and implies a negative stereotyping of social groups who are perceived as unable to create hygge. The idea of hygge as a trait of Scandinavian culture is developed in the course of the interpretation, and its limitations are also discussed against ethnographic evidence that comparable spatial and social dynamics unfold in other cultural contexts.
Search Results
Money Can't Buy Me Hygge
Danish Middle-Class Consumption, Egalitarianism, and the Sanctity of Inner Space
Jeppe Trolle Linnet
Ethnicity without labels?
Ambiguity and excess in “postethnic” Rwanda
Laura Eramian
Following the 1994 genocide, the government of Rwanda embarked on a “deethnicization” campaign to outlaw Tutsi, Hutu, and Twa labels and replace them with a pan-Rwandan national identity. Since then, to use ethnic labels means risking accusations of “divisionism” or perpetuating ethnic schisms. Based on one year of ethnographic fieldwork in the university town of Butare, I argue that the absence of ethnic labels produces practical interpretive problems for Rwandans because of the excess of possible ways of interpreting what people mean when they evaluate each other's conduct in everyday talk. I trace the historical entanglement of ethnicity with class, rural/urban, occupational, and moral distinctions such that the content of ethnic stereotypes can be evoked even without ethnic labels. In so doing, I aim to enrich understandings of both the power and danger inherent in the ambiguous place of ethnicity in Rwanda's “postethnic” moment.
Kathryn Robinson
In imagining Indonesia’s future, its character as a country with the world’s largest Islamic population emerges as a critical issue. In the post-Suharto period, some commentators have seen the emergence of Islamist politics as a threat to newly attained freedoms. No sooner had women been freed from the constraints of ‘state ibuism’, i.e., the official policy promoting the role of wife and mother (ibu) of the New Order (see Suryakusuma 1996), which endorsed patriarchal familism as a cornerstone of authoritarian politics, than they faced a new kind of patriarchal authority in the demands for the enactment of shari’a as state law. For example, during her 2005 visit to Australia, Indonesian feminist commentator Julia Suryakusuma raised the specter of Islam as the greatest current threat to gender equity and to women as social actors in civic life, whose rights in the domestic sphere are now protected by the state. The growing influence of Middle Eastern Islam in Indonesia, evidenced by funding for organizations, translations of publications, and the increase in Islamist rhetoric, has caused alarm among many observers. This apprehension draws on the stereotype of the Middle East as the source of all that is ‘bad’ about Islam, taken as an undifferentiated whole. But this view of Islam fails to acknowledge debates within Islam and diversity in Islamic practice, not the least of which are the varieties of Islam that can be found throughout the Indonesian archipelago. These diverse practices have emerged as local communities and indigenous polities responded in distinctive and often unique ways during the long period of Islamic conversion, beginning from the thirteenth century.
Penny Harvey
• What is the status of anthropology in Britain? • What does the general non-academic public know about anthropology? • What is the ‘stereotype’ of the anthropologist? • Does anthropological knowledge travel beyond academia to broader publics? • What is the status of anthropology within the University?
In Anthropological Journal of European Cultures
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2007
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 1–12
Jane F. Hacking, Jeffrey S. Hardy, and Matthew P. Romaniello
Rebellion and Russo-Japanese War. A point of emphasis for Hoffman is that both conservative and liberal publications employed ethnic stereotypes, and for the Boxer Rebellion they were remarkably consistent. Europeans engaged in repressing the Boxers were
Larisa Carranza
navigating through loopholes, rule bending and paper trails. Similarly, the author engages with academic texts to critique the overarching negative stereotype of brokers, smugglers and/or traffickers as inherently immoral and exploitative (p. 94). Tuckett
Alexandra Schwell
This article explores how the fluctuating cartography of East and West and the varying degrees of perceptive Europeanness influence everyday practices of the people working in Polish state bureaucracies, who professionally advance European integration within a national framework. While an important part of their self-image is formed through the dissociation from cultural 'Eastness' and the backwardness they ascribe to fellow citizens, they still experience negative stereotyping and mistrust from the part of the EU-15 'Westerners'. Consequently, East-Central European state officials oscillate on the continuum between cultural 'East' and 'West' and constantly negotiate distance, relatedness and thus their own liminal position. By scrutinising how Polish state officials aim at positioning themselves on the mental map of Europe, this article shows that they attempt to escape the cultural pattern of negative stereotyping and mistrust by using a functionalist narrative of efficiency. This is a rhetorical strategy employed to cope with existing asymmetries.
In Anthropological Journal of European Cultures
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2015
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 128–149
“We Are a Traveling People”
Tourism, Travel Journalism, and the Construction of a Modern National Identity in Sweden
Emilia Ljungberg
, a national identity and way of being, is a constant topic in travel journalism and is presented not least through well-established stereotypes about, for example, the passionate and corrupt Southern Europeans. In contrast to these the Swede is calm
What Am I StIll Doing Here?
Travel, Travel Writing, and Old Age
Robin Jarvis
of home” ( Chaney 1995: 220 ). Clearly this stereotype of the older traveler has nothing in common with the travel preferences and practices of the writers I am focusing on in this essay and of others like them, but the power of that stereotype may be
Native Marriage “Soviet” and “Russian” Style
The Political Economy of Desire and Competing Matrimonial Emotions
Vera Skvirskaja
Russia’s demographic situation more generally ( Rivkin-Fish 2010 ). Yet if in urban Russia, the unified image of “worker and mother” might not fit some Russian cultural stereotypes of femininity, especially the post-Soviet sexualized images of women