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.
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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.
Livia Jiménez Sedano
structural set of evolutionist representations upon which the ‘world dances’ industries are established and developed in Europe. Their success relies on their echoing of postcolonial stereotypes that still work in the social imaginary of middle
In Anthropological Journal of European Cultures
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2019
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 73–77
Emplacing Smells
Spatialities and Materialities of ‘Gypsiness’
Andreea Racleș and Ana Ivasiuc
ubiquity of the racist stereotype that the ‘Gypsy’ has a particular, unpleasant smell. On one hand, we aim to cover this striking gap in the literature on the racialisation of the Roma and connect with larger debates in sensorial anthropology and material
In Anthropological Journal of European Cultures
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2019
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 25–44
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.
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
“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
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
Making Friends of the Nations
Australian Interwar Magazines and Middlebrow Orientalism in the Pacific
Victoria Kuttainen and Sarah Galletly
taste, “tainted,” as we have argued with Susann Liebich, “by its association with the racial stereotypes it circulated and [placed] outside parameters of high cultural value” ( Kuttainen et al. 2015: 157 ). Dixon contends that The BP Magazine drew on