Bjarne Stoklund

Ethnologia Europaea

Peter Niedermuller

Ethnologia Europaea 31 : 1

Péter Niedermüller

At the beginning of a new millennium a new Europe is emerging, but behind this imagination we have to face old problems and unsolved conflicts of our historical past. The collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe led to decline and fall of the conceptual geography which was based on East vs. West and has shown political, social and cultural implications for both parts of the continent. Political borders and blocks have disappeared, but national ethnic, cultural and social differences are all still at work. In this book a number of leading European ethnologist investigates the complex process of the social, cultural and symbolic constructions of Europe's new geography, and shows how old lines of demarcation are revitalised, how different cultural imaginations of Europe are politically instrumentalised, and how political conflicts are being culturalised.

Cultural Construction and Reality

Europe

The symposium 'Sleepers, Moles, and Martyrs: Secret Identifications, Societal Integration, and the Differing Meanings of Freedom' held in Reinhausen, 2002, formed the basis of this issue of Ethnologia Europaea. Occasioned by the social, political and mass media discourses after the bombings of New York's World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, an interdisciplinary group of scholars came together to explore the connotations and implications of the term 'sleeper'. The biographies of terrorist perpetrators are but one of many permutations of sleeper-like phenomena in late modern polities. Clandestine operatives of the state are sleepers, and both willing and unwilling victims of terrorism are discursively transformed from sleepers into martyrs. Starting with analyses of the discourses about sleepers in Part I-their historical antecedents, narrative emplotment, and semantic differentiation-Part II turns to the hidden or unspoken of aspects of the state, the challenge of fundamentalist terrorism to the modern political project and the tensions between neighbourly discourse, public display and the state. Part III juxtaposes changing depictions of Shiite martyrdom with the violence done to the term 'martyr' within the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In Part IV, cultural secrets encoded in memorials and public silences in academic discourse are addressed. The different cases assembled offer comparative materials and perspectives from the USA, France, the Netherlands, Pakistan, Spain, Iran, Israel, Istria and Sweden.

Ethnologia Europaea Vol. 33:2

Since its start in 1967 Ethnologia Europaea has acquired a central position in the international cooperation between ethnologists in the different European countries. It is, however, a journal of topical interest not only for ethnologists but also for anthropologists, social historians and others studying the social and cultural forms of everyday life in recent and historical European societies. This journal appears twice a year, sometimes as a thematic issue.

Bjarne Stoklund

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